Mark Thompson (reporter)

Mark Thompson has been a reporter in Washington since 1979, and has played a key role in Time magazine's coverage of national security issues since joining the magazine in 1994. He also serves as deputy of the magazine's Washington bureau.

He has written (or co-written) the magazine's cover stories on the Marines' V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, [1], the Army at the breaking point, a third on the wisdom of restarting the military draft, and profiles of then-United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-General Tommy Franks. He was responsible for explaining the Iraq war, its strategic underpinnings, and its aftermath, to Time's readers. He has hopscotched by helicopter across Afghanistan and Iraq, reporting on the wars' progress and U.S. military's surprising lack of armor. He has written four major pieces on the true costs of the Iraq war -- an early look at the war's wounded, a study of the U.S. troops killed in a single week, the lonely vigil of an Ohio family whose son was the first American soldier in this war to be listed as missing in action(whose remains were ultimately recovered in March, 2008), and the death of a GI at the hands of Army medicine a year after he was slightly wounded in Iraq.

Thompson also has scoured the skies near northern Iraq with the United States Air Force, rolled into Kosovo with the United States Marines and secured the sole interview granted by the first woman to command a U.S. warship, while billeted aboard her vessel in the Pacific. He has taken an F-16 jet fighter for a spin above the Gulf of Mexico and detailed the Air Force's troubled T-3 trainers, scrapped in the wake of Time's story. He reported on the "softening" of boot camp and the rash of domestic violence in military families. He has witnessed U.S. troops at war and work around the world.

Thompson came to Time after covering the military for the late Knight Ridder Newspapers (including the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Jose Mercury-News) for eight years. He served on the Pentagon's first operational press pool in the Persian Gulf in 1987. Prior to joining Knight-Ridder in 1986, Thompson reported from Washington for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for seven years. While at the Star-Telegram, his newspaper and he won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his series of articles on a design flaw aboard Fort Worth-built Bell UH-1 Huey and AH-1 Cobra helicopters. The Army and Bell had allowed the problem to fester for more than a decade,since the Vietnam War, during which it had triggered crashes killing 250 U.S. servicemen. In the wake of his reports, the Army grounded 600 helicopters for immediate repairs and ultimately ordered a more substantial fix that has eliminated such mishaps. Before coming to Washington, Thompson spent a year reporting for the Oakland Press, in Pontiac, Michigan, and three years as editor of the Rhode Island Pendulum, a weekly newspaper in his hometown of East Greenwich, Rhode Island. He is a 1975 graduate of Boston University's School of Public Communication.