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Mark Thompson is an American investigative reporter who won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism.
Thompson graduated from Boston University in 1975 and began his career where he grew up, at the Pendulum, in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. After a spell in Pontiac, Michigan, he moved to Washington in 1979, where he joined the Washington bureau of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. There he won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service recognizing a five-part series published in March 1984. Thompson covered, or uncovered, a design flaw in Bell helicopters that went uncorrected for a decade and led to the deaths of 250 U.S. servicemen; in consequence of his work, 600 Huey helicopters were grounded and modified. He joined Knight-Ridder Newspapers in 1986, where he reported extensively on the Persian Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Panama. In 1994, he joined TIME magazine as defense correspondent, where he has written or co-written cover stories on the Army's use of prescription drugs on soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marines' V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, the Army at the breaking point, the wisdom of restarting the military draft, and profiles of then-United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and then-General Tommy Franks.
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