Thank You for Your Service (Finkel)

Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of Florida
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize;
   Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism
• Currently—lives in the Washington, D.C. area


David Louis Finkel is an American journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 as a staff writer at the Washington Post. He wrote The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

Finkel's book The Good Soldiers describes several months he spent in 2007 as an embedded reporter with 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, also known as the "2-16 Rangers," as they worked to stabilize a portion of Baghdad.

The logs of Bradley Manning's IM chats with Adrian Lamo state that Finkel had the video which was released as Collateral Murder by Wikileaks but did not release it. Finkel has never publicly disclosed whether he had the video or not. In a washingtonpost.com webchat, he said, "I based the account in my book The Good Soldiers on multiple sources, all unclassified. Without going into details, I'll say the best source of information was being there [in Iraq]." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/20/2013.)