David Philipps, a reporter with The Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting Monday for a series on the mistreatment of wounded combat veterans.
His reaction: complete shock.
“I am deeply humbled,” the 36-year-old said Monday after the award presentation. “I didn’t see it coming.”
Philipps received the award for his work “Other Than Honorable,” a three-day series that “examined how soldiers injured during war were being discharged with no benefits,” The Gazette said on its Facebook page.
“The significance was obvious to me,” Philipps said upon learning of the soldiers’ situation.
The 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced Monday at Columbia University. Philipps’ series was published in The Gazette and on gazette.com May 19-21, 2013.
“We’re a little shocked and very happy,” said Joanna Bean, managing editor of The Gazette, who, along with others, worked with Philipps on his award-winning series. “We are really happy to still be doing important journalism on the institutions in our town and on the people who live here.”
Philipps journalism journey began when he was a paperboy as a youth, he said. In 2002, Philipps began an internship at The Gazette, which led to a staff position.
“We write for our neighbors,” he said.
Philipps, who covers the military for The Gazette, was also a Pulitzer finalist in 2010 for a series of “painstaking stories on the spike in violence within a battered combat brigade returning to Fort Carson after bloody deployments to Iraq, leading to increased mental health care for soldiers.”
Philipps negotiates the balance of covering an institution, the U.S. Army, and the soldiers, neighbors and community members, who make up the massive government organization.
“Injured soldiers are the people we go to the grocery store with, we sit in the movie theaters with; they are very much a part of our community,” Bean said. “Their story needs to be told. They are our friends and neighbors and family.”
Philipps’ Pulitzer-winning series has led to congressional hearings on the issues, according to the newspaper.
His series “focused on how the Army was discharging veterans, many of them with traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder, for minor misconduct. The brain injuries made them more likely to get into trouble but the discharges left them without military medical benefits to help them treat their injuries,” The Gazette said on its Facebook page.
