All suffered major injuries; Reagan’s left eye hung out of its socket as he ordered troops to take cover, and Alunni “was almost blown up by a car bomb.” Three of the four are portrayed as trying to readjust to civilian life while often feeling that their Ohio neighbors have little idea of what’s going on in the war they fought half a world away.


The Plain Dealer’s Evans said that aside from the unforeseen difficulty he had finding wounded soldiers (the Department of Veterans Affairs will not give out names or information for medical privacy reasons, and Iraq vets, wherever they are going, are not going to VFW halls), it also took some time for his subjects, who he calls “examples of American character that transcends this horrible war,” to open up. At first they would claim “Oh, nothing really happened,” Evans said. “It was weird. I had to seduce them [into talking].”


Last month the Plain Dealer announced that it was closing down its magazine, which ended its 85-year run on Sunday, Dec. 18. “It’s heartbreaking. I was on the magazine for 17 years and it was a great ride,” said Evans, 52, a 20-year Plain Dealer reporter who will probably now move into a general assignment position at the paper. “It was something that set the paper apart. We’re one of the few newspapers to still have a Sunday magazine, and it’s a loss.”


An excerpt from his story:


Clements was unconscious when she arrived at the 31st Combat Support Hospital in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad. Emergency room personnel hooked her up to a ventilator and prepped her for surgery. The shrapnel that ripped into her lower back had chewed up the flesh around her left hip, but, luckily, left the bone intact. It was the shrapnel embedded in Clements’ brain that was killing her.


Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Poffenbarger, a neurosurgeon, performed a craniotomy, slicing a hockey puck-shaped chunk of bone from the right side of her skull, and exposing the traumatized section of the brain. He removed only the largest piece of shrapnel. The smaller shards were too many and too deep to risk extraction. Poffenbarger stopped the bleeding and cleaned the wound. He did not replace the bone from Clements’ skull. Her brain needed room to swell.


Instead, Poffenbarger created a space inside Clements’ lower right abdomen. He implanted the skull fragment there to preserve it and keep it safe. If and when Clements recovered, surgeons could then reattach the bone.


1) Long reporting pays off in Florida


Our top spot goes to a series of stories that represent narrative writing at its best: a special report in the St. Petersburg Times entitled “The Hard Road.”


A long, tragic tale broken into five installments, “The Hard Road” explores what happened after Jennifer Porter, a quiet, unassuming 28-year-old schoolteacher, ran down four of Lisa Wilkins’ children one evening in March 2004. The case transfixed the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, and the Times series takes us through the full arc of the story, from the night of the accident, to the first chaotic days of the investigation, to Porter’s decision to step forward at a press conference, to Wilkins saying goodbye to her two dead children, and on through the intricate legal developments leading up to Porter’s dramatic sentencing last month.


The case, of course, is much more complex than that, and Times reporters Thomas French, Christopher Goffard and Jamie Thompson tell the story with nuance, grace and power. What is most striking about the series — and makes it so riveting for readers — is how it delves with near-omniscient precision into the heads of the major people involved and charts their lives as they become part of the larger story, making them seem as fully realized as characters in a novel.


“It’s one of those few stories that seem to have all of the elements. It speaks to larger human issues and larger human themes than most crime stories do,” said Goffard, 33, adding that the three years he had put in as a Tampa court beat reporter, “getting to know all of the prosecutors and many of the defense attorneys, really paid off, because I had credibility going in. Sources knew they could trust me.”


Building such trust with other sources and gaining the access necessary to write the story as they did was a process that took many months and much effort and patience, Goffard and French said. “The Hard Road” was based on a year of reporting, although its writers did work on other stories during most of that time. “Time really helps to give people a chance to know you, the reporter, and understand why you’re asking these questions,” said French, 47, a 1998 Pulitzer winner who has spent his entire 25-year career at the Times, the last 20 or so as a narrative project writer.


The series’ beginning was enough to get us hooked:


After the accident, the desire for a face grew almost unbearable. People saw the mother cracking with grief on TV, begging someone to come forward, and it became impossible not to wonder who could have driven away from such a thing, who could have felt those impacts and heard those sounds and then kept going, staring ahead through a broken windshield, the night and the future suddenly fragmented.


Finally, a young woman stepped in front of the TV lights. A schoolteacher, so still and muted she almost seemed invisible. Someone who had never before made a mistake, or at least none that mattered. A person who spent her days surrounded by children.


At the jail, Jennifer Porter gave her fingerprints and stood in front of a camera for the image that would follow her forever. Her long brown hair was shown hanging over her shoulders. Her eyes stared slightly downward, big and dark and dead.