Quick Facts
Biography
David Nathaniel Philipps, born in 1977, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author whose work has largely focused on the human impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a national correspondent for the New York Times. Philipps won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2014 for his three-day series "Other Than Honorable" in the The Gazette of Colorado Springs on the treatment of injured American soldiers being discharged without military benefits. He also was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, which cited "his painstaking stories on the spike in violence within the Band of Brothers, a battered combat brigade returning to Fort Carson after bloody deployments to Iraq, leading to increased mental health care for soldiers."
Philipps also won the 2009 Livingston Award for his reporting on violence in infantry troops returning from Iraq. Philipps' book, Lethal Warriors chronicles how the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 12th Infantry Regiment, stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, produced a high number of murders after soldiers returned from unusually violent combat tours. Philipps worked for eight years as an enterprise reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Philipps gained attention in 2012 when U.S. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar threatened to punch him out while Philipps was asking about troubles in the department's wild horse program. Philipps' subsequent reporting led to state and federal investigation of the wild horse program and its largest horse buyer.
Philipps graduated from Middlebury College in 2000 and earned a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2002.
Notable work
"Casualties of War," The Colorado Springs Gazette, July 28, 2009.
"All the missing horses," ProPublica, Sept. 28, 2012
"Other than Honorable," The Colorado Springs Gazette, May 19, 2013
"Honor and Deception," The Colorado Springs Gazette, Dec. 1, 2013
"In unit stalked by suicide, member try to save one another [1]," The New York Times, Sept. 19, 2015
"Wounded Warrior Project Spends Lavishly on Itself " The New York Times, January 27, 2016