A few years ago, when a low-ranking Air National Guardsman on an obscure base in Cape Cod posted top-secret information about the war in Ukraine in an online chat room, newsrooms scrambled to make sense of the story. At the Wall Street Journal, where I worked until earlier this year, a handful of reporters teamed up to explore why this young man, working so far from the war zone, had access to such sensitive data in the first place.
The task was made easier because the team included a longtime national security reporter who had been covering the Pentagon for decades, plus myself—a military veteran with years of real-world experience and sourcing to help decipher lingo and sort through the broader implications of the leak. We soon wrote an article explaining how that remote Air National Guard base had quietly come to play an outsize role in America’s global drone wars—a story no one else had.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan brought newsrooms a surge of journalists with time spent in combat zones, and a new generation of military veterans taking up jobs in media. Some of them are still working—Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a Marine who served two tours in Afghanistan, covered Ukraine for the New York Times; the Washington Post’s Alex Horton was an Army infantryman in Iraq—but many others have moved on to other careers, or been pushed out of their roles through restructuring or layoffs. Earlier this year, several military-oriented publications under the banner of Military Times laid off half their staff, including a number of veterans. According to the advocacy group Military Veterans in Journalism, veterans make up only about 2 percent of media workers today, despite representing 7 percent of the population.
It won’t be easy to reverse this trend—veterans who transition to journalism are, by definition, embarking on a second career (I was a thirty-three-year-old intern)—but the effort is needed. From a purely practical standpoint, veterans in a newsroom bring firsthand familiarity with the terminology and taxonomy of weapons and equipment. They know the complex structure of the military. It’s valuable to have reporters who can quickly and reliably check a source’s claims of veteran status or experience—particularly at a moment when both vice presidential nominees, Tim Walz and JD Vance, are veterans, and are facing questions over the specifics of their own service records—and whom editors can call at the last minute to make sure another reporter has correctly described a gun or a tank.Â
Having service experience can also make military sources feel more at ease. On more than a few reporting trips, I’ve been able to draw on my background to disarm a potential source’s stereotypical conception of the detached reporter gallivanting into their world. People want someone they feel is responsive to them and understands their lives, and that’s especially true in the armed forces, where people tend to have a sense of proprietary ownership over their military, their bases, their wars, their lives.
The past several years of limited American military operations have lulled some publishers into thinking they don’t need as many people with wartime backgrounds in their newsrooms. But the military doesn’t just get rid of all its troops when wars end, and the value veterans bring to journalism doesn’t wane when conflicts do. Having fewer veterans on hand threatens to leave newsrooms less prepared to intelligently and aggressively push back on official claims when the next conflict breaks out. Veterans know intimately of the effects of war, of what weapons do to the human body—they aren’t easily swayed by civilian politicians who might talk about it in abstract, glorified terms.
Veterans also bring a special sensibility to coverage beyond conflict. They know how to listen to people who have experienced physical and moral damage—however it might come about. During my decade with the Journal, I was often tasked with covering shootings and domestic unrest. I treated sources with empathy, but I didn’t condescend to them or waver under the weight of their trauma. That made them more comfortable speaking honestly with me.
“The thing that veterans bring to the table is the ability to really understand and cover things with nuance,” said Ron Nixon, a vice president and top editor at the Associated Press and a Marine Corps veteran. “The military is such a huge part of our lives in more ways than just folks going off to war. The military’s big on climate change, diplomacy around the world. Then there’s military families and the effect on local economies around bases.… Having veterans in the newsroom helps folks understand that.”
Not long ago I went to Cooper University Health Care’s trauma center in Camden, New Jersey, to write about a special program that rotated active-duty military doctors and nurses through the civilian emergency department. The goal was both to keep the trauma-treatment skills of the military medical staff fresh and to help civilians learn from the unique experiences of those who’d treated wounds in combat.
I found the story through military sourcing and then was welcomed by Cooper in no small part because of my background. The people I met at the hospital spoke with me as someone who would tell their story fairly. That trust was almost immediate, and it was tangible throughout the reporting process.
The article I ended up writing about Cooper wasn’t a war story, it was a medical story. But it was a story suffused with martial themes and characters. I don’t know if I would have found it, or had the tools to tell it, if I hadn’t had the background of a veteran.
Ben Kesling is a writer who focuses on defense and veterans issues. He is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, where he covered the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and was a combat correspondent in Iraq. His book, Bravo Company, is about an Army unit's deployment to Afghanistan and their hard return home. He served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.