Quil Lawrence
Quil Lawrence is a New York-based correspondent for NPR News, covering veterans' issues nationwide. He won a Robert F. Kennedy Award for his coverage of American veterans and a Gracie Award for coverage of female combat veterans. In 2019 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America honored Quil with its IAVA Salutes Award for Leadership in Journalism.
Lawrence started his career in radio by interviewing con men in Tangier, Morocco. He then moved to Bogota, Colombia, and covered Latin America for NPR, the BBC, and The LA Times.
In the Spring of 2000, a Pew Fellowship sponsored his first trips to Iraq — that reporting experience eventually built the foundation for his first book, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2009).
Lawrence has reported from throughout the Arab world and from Sudan, Cuba, Pakistan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan for twelve years, serving as NPR's Bureau Chief in Baghdad and Kabul. He covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, as well as politics, culture, and war in both countries.
In 2012, Lawrence returned to the U.S. to cover the millions of men and women who have served at war, both recently and in past generations. NPR is possibly unique among major news organizations in dedicating a full-time correspondent to veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
A native of Maine, Lawrence studied history at Brandeis University, with concentrations in the Middle East and Latin America. He is fluent in Spanish and conversant in Arabic.
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The VA is now set to spend $10 billion over the next 10 years adopting the Pentagon's system for electronic health records, but it's not clear who is in charge of the effort.
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Eleven years after Blackwater security guards killed more than a dozen civilians in Iraq, the retrial of one of the defendants ended in a mistrial. A court decides Friday whether he will be retried.
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Former Army Sgt. John Toombs was thrown out of the residential drug treatment program at a Veterans Affairs center and then killed himself.
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During the many years U.S. troops have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, locals have served as interpreters and other capacities at considerable risk to themselves and their families. Many have been allowed to immigrate to the U.S., but the Trump administration has greatly reduced those numbers.
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Nico Walker is currently in federal prison for bank robbery. That's given him plenty of time to write his semi-autobiographical novel Cherry, which has received glowing advance reviews.
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President Trump swore in the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie. The VA has been without a chief executive for four months since the president fired Secretary David Shulkin.
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North Korea turned over 55 boxes containing, in the words of the Pentagon, "possible remains of missing DoD personnel" from the Korean War. The remains will arrive in Hawaii next week for forensic analysis.
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President Trump received an ovation when he told the assembled veterans that remains of U.S. Korean War dead would soon be repatriated from North Korea.
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Robert Wilkie inherits a VA that is undertaking ambitious changes in the next year. The department has been in turmoil since Trump sacked his first VA secretary in March.
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President Trump fired his first VA secretary, and his first nominee withdrew. His next pick, Robert Wilkie, is a veteran and a seasoned Washington official.
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National progressives scored a major coup over the Democratic establishment on Tuesday night in one of several primaries. Also, Liz Sly of The Washington Post discusses the war in Syria.
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The immigrants were brought into the military — which offers a track to citizenship — because they provide hard-to-find skills and languages. A slow-moving vetting program had put their visas at risk.