“I go to sleep every night knowing I have the blood of so many on my hands and no amount of soap could ever wash these stains away.”

Why is it great? Chivers just won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his magazine profile of Sam Siatta, a Marine suffering from PTSD. How did he make a story that has been told many times before so compelling? One reason is the heartbreaking use of the young man's journal. Sometimes tough-guy but much more often seeming like the diary of a little boy who has been taught to do something unspeakable, Siatta's own words form the spine of the piece. In the sentence above, he is Shakespearean in his pain, a Lady Macbeth of the Afghan war.