Why is it great? Chivers just won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his magazine profile of Sam Siatta, a Marine suffering from PTSD. How did he make a story that has been told many times before so compelling? One reason is the heartbreaking use of the young man’s journal. Sometimes tough-guy but much more often seeming like the diary of a little boy who has been taught to do something unspeakable, Siatta’s own words form the spine of the piece. In the sentence above, he is Shakespearean in his pain, a Lady Macbeth of the Afghan war.
↧