David Wood has been a journalist since 1970, a staff correspondent successively for Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service and The Baltimore Sun. A birthright Quaker and former conscientious objector, he covers military issues, foreign affairs and combat operations, and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting.

For four years (1977-1980), he covered guerrilla wars in Africa as Time Magazine's Nairobi bureau chief. A Washington-based correspondent since 1980, Mr. Wood has covered national security issues at the White House, Pentagon and State Department, and has reported on conflict from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

During the Cold War he reported from Russia and China, patrolled the inter-German border with American troops on one side and visited a Soviet motorized rifle regiment across the border in East Germany. He reported from Nicaragua during the Sandinista-Contra conflict, and covered the overthrow of President Marcos in the Philippines and the war in Bosnia before and during the U.S. military intervention in 1995. He has written extensively about international conflict resolution, peacekeeping and the post-war rebuilding of civil societies.

He has accompanied U.S. military units in the field many times, both on domestic and overseas training maneuvers and in Desert Storm, the Persian Gulf tanker war, the interventions in Panama, Somalia and Haiti, peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was embedded with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Somalia, and the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne Division units in Afghanistan in 2002. In four trips to Iraq he has embedded with numerous units including the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment's 2nd Squadron in East Baghdad, the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines in al-Anbar and the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing flying resupply missions across Iraq.

In five trips to Afghanistan since January 2002, he has lived and worked with the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne Divisions, the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, the 82nd Airborne Division’s special troops battalion, the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry, in RC-East and, most recently, with the 10th Mountain Division’s 1st Brigade in Kunduz, Faryab and Kandahar provinces.

He has flown on B-52 and B-1 bombers, slogged through Army Ranger School, accompanied Rangers on night airborne maneuvers and Marines on amphibious and air assault operations, flown off aircraft carriers and sailed on battleships, cruisers, minesweepers and amphibs, and has submerged aboard attack and strategic missile submarines.
He has been scared much of his professional life.

Wood has written widely across the span of national security issues, from nuclear deterrence theory to combat stress, domestic terrorism, military technology and doctrine, and scarce resources and demographic shifts as causes of instability.

In 1992-1993 he spent a year with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, including three months of ground operations in Somalia. His account of that experience, A Sense of Values, was published by Andrews & McMeel in 1994.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Defense Reporting and other national awards. He has appeared on CNN, CSPAN, the PBS News Hour, WUSA , RTV and the BBC, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm Show. He has lectured at the U.S. Army Eisenhower Fellows Conference , the Marine Staff College, the Joint Forces Staff College and Temple University.

Mr. Wood was raised as a pacifist and in 1968 completed two years of civilian service in lieu of military duty. He has three grown children and two stepchildren and lives outside Washington DC. He runs and bicycles for sport and goes to climb high mountains when possible.