Our January Roundtable looks at “After the battle, Mike Sword’s war within,” by Beth Macy. In her story, Macy explores the death of a combat veteran in southern Virginia, tracing the effects of the loss on his family and asking what role PTSD might have played in how his life ended. The story, part of a multimedia project from The Roanoke Times, was edited by Carole Tarrant.
Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune
One of the great challenges of narrative journalism is veracity. As you set the scene and build your character, you must remain absolutely faithful to the facts. What do you do if there are things you don’t know? (There will always be things you don’t know.) What do you do if the main character won’t talk to you – or can’t talk to you?
In Beth Macy’s story, Mike Sword couldn’t talk to her because Mike Sword was dead. And how he died, and why, are the crux of her powerful piece – even though the “why” is never entirely answered.
Macy’s piece is admirable for many reasons. It’s seamlessly written, it’s rich in telling and heartbreaking detail, and it’s well-reported. Most important, she tells only what she knows. The question that drives the piece is stated clearly in the second paragraph:
How did it come to pass that the 24-year-old, an expert marksman and former military cop, opened fire on police from Roanoke and Franklin counties in the early-morning hours of Feb. 29, 2008, provoking a shootout that ended his life?
It is a question that is never entirely answered, and yet the piece remains satisfying because Macy makes the wise decision to turn unanswered questions into a recurring theme. She poses questions, and she lets us know that the answers are a mystery.
But that’s exactly what I found myself doing when I started to read Andrea Curtis’ “
Because of that, after that story came out — and this continues to this day — I get letters and calls literally on a daily basis, usually from inmates but sometimes from attorneys. This is the first time it came from another reporter. People will come to me and say, “There’s this innocence case, and I really wish that you would look into it.” It has gotten somewhat overwhelming, with letters piling up.
We find out that the boy, 
After that scene, in the days and weeks to come, any time Britney Spears’ name came up in conversation, whether you were a fan from the start of her meteoric fame or just someone who tuned in toward
Schiff, when asked what drew her to the art of detection, quoted the adage that “all biography is high-class gossip.” She talked about sneaking from her desk at a publishing house to the New York Public Library on her lunch hour to look at material on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a project she orginally thought she would find someone else to write for the company. She had heard that one of the biographies, perhaps the best one, had been written by his mistress but published under a male pseudonym. Hoping to identify the mistress, she sat at a table with the various accounts piled around her. Eventually it dawned on her that the mystery biographer was the one who had avoided any discussion of his marriage. A lot of biography, concluded Schiff, “is reading the silences.”
Then there are a handful of individual stories I value enough to keep beside my keyboard at all times. When I’m struggling, when writing feels like running in mud, I go to one of these stories, start to read a page or two and then end up reading the whole thing. For some reason, it helps. Amazing work is possible, even if it feels beyond my own grasp.
I got my start in radio in 1995, while pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Doing airshifts at WSUI, the university’s then-analog AM public radio station, was for me just an amusing side trip on the way to a blurry future in magazine writing. But then we started airing a new show, “
