David Shuster talks to Mark Benjamin about his series at Salon, Coming Home.
"Coming Home" is a weeklong investigative series on preventable deaths at Fort Carson, a U.S. Army post in Colorado, among troops who have returned from combat tours in Iraq.
Salon national correspondent Mark Benjamin and Colorado-based journalist Michael de Yoanna reviewed more than two dozen incidents of suicide, suicide attempts, prescription drug overdoses and murder involving Fort Carson troops and examined 10 of those cases painstakingly. They interviewed troops, their families and survivors of suicide attempts, studied thousands of pages of medical and Army records and conducted a prison interview with a soldier convicted of being an accessory to the murder of one of his comrades. They learned that much of the violence could have been avoided if the Army did a better job of recognizing and treating the symptoms of PTSD.
