Journalist and author David Finkel. Photo from nationalwritersseries.org

By Kyle Plaske

Senior Staff Writer

[email protected]

On Oct. 9 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Finkel visited the University at Albany to promote his newest book “Thank You For Your Service,” which chronicles a group of American soldiers suffering from psychological trauma after returning home from combat in Iraq.

   Students, faculty, and members of the public gathered in the Science Library Standish Room, where Finkel led the informal hour-long seminar, organized by the New York State Writer’s Institute. While he responded to audience questions regarding journalism and his writing process, the discussion was largely centered on his experiences reporting from war-torn Kosovo in the late 1990s and, most recently, America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

   During the 2007 surge in Iraq, Finkel was embedded with a battalion of army infantry soldiers to collect research for his first book, “The Good Soldiers”.

   “I was sad and I was scared,” Finkel said. “I’m not a big tough guy, I don’t get an adrenaline rush like some war reporters.”

   In “Thank You For Your Service,” Finkel revisits the same soldiers after returning home to Middle America as they struggle to heal their psychological wounds and mend unstable personal relationships.

   “When these guys came home, it occurred to me that I hadn’t finished the story,” Finkel said. “I felt I had to finish the work.”

   He said his journalistic process begins with asking a question, and then seeking to answer it through reporting. “I come up with a question I’m engaged with, then reporting, then indexing notes and transcribing tapes, and then I write an outline,” he said. “I’m a one sentence at a time kind of guy, if I’m having a hard time writing, it’s probably because I haven’t organized well enough.” He added, “I just don’t like looking at my work.”

   Finkel spent a year writing “Thank You For Your Service”, and said he found it difficult to maintain a close rapport with the soldiers and their spouses while also having to preserve traditional reportorial objectivity and integrity. During the seminar, he refused to answer an audience question as to where he obtained some of the book’s source material.

   “I’m not going to talk about my sources,” he said. “Every sentence in the book is defensible as a piece of reporting. If I’m not there and I’m relying on someone else’s account, it’s not easy to trust their sources as primary information. What I trust is what I see.” He added that some information in the book was obtained using government documents, court records, telephone call transcripts, and personal correspondence.

   Finkel, who leads a team of six journalists as an editor for the Washington Post, also spoke about his distinctive style of long-form reporting, which he calls immersion journalism. “It’s the kind of journalism that moves me, it’s all about learning something more about the world,” he said. “It’s not the only kind I read, but it seems to be the only kind I can write.”

   While he stressed the demanding nature of his work reporting serious, complicated issues, he also remained fixed on his objective as a journalist.

   “Writing these books was unimaginably tough,” he said. “Some days I’m sick of thinking about it, and some days I’m sick of not thinking about it enough.” He continued, “I just want to figure out how I can make people pay attention.”

   When asked by an audience member about the absence of his own politics in his books, Finkel retorted, “Who cares about my views? I’m a narrative journalist.”

   “That’s not what I’m trained to do,” Finkel said. “There’s no ‘me’ in these books at all.”

   “It’s their story, not mine.”