Made that call, they would show up. And i think that that is one of the true wisdom of the book is that we all have somebody in our lives to discuss a special place in our hearts and we could not say no to. So if you read the book, you will see that she kind of saying stuff to him and so it was a compilation and after everyone has read the book, i will kind of give you a hint as to who are the models for that character. Shes the older and i can put her in the movie and know who it was but i cant put these younger people and the younger people will have to help me do that. If you want . Are we doing okay timewise . Yes. [inaudible question] what future . I believe if she runs that she will be the next president of the united states. Webb hubbell, in your own mind, have you rated the performance of the Obama Administration . [laughter] we are getting a little bit off the books here. But i have been disappointed and first of all, he is up against the stone wall and congress and i blame congress a lot more than i blame him. And i have been disappointed personally. This is my own personal politics into spying on american citizens and the use of drugs to kill americans and that has been very disturbing to me. But that is a personal assessment. The attorney general, eric holder, and supporting those i have been very disappointed. His attorney general and doing some of the other things he has done have been very enthusiastic trying to eliminate mandatory minimum and has not prosecuting lowlevel drug offenses and states that have started to legalize it and thats very progressive. And so foreignpolicy, i have a lot of problems with. Just some of the things that he has done in the area of spying and ive been very disappointed. I dont know that every other president would do the same thing. But i think that this is one that we as the defense have to take charge of because you use the words National Security and everyone runs and they say that you are going to be responsible for the next 9 11 if you dont do that, congress and politicians are all going to run. You have to find a way to work around that. What is your goal for the topics . Millions of copies, that sounds great for me. I dont have a goal but i promise you that my goal was, and i think i left it in the back of the room, i cant tell you what an emotional high that is to work and struggle and edit and head every draft of this book and she gets as much credit for more to actually hold it in her hands. That is the emotional high that you get. But the emotional high comes from just being a part of this. I will sign anybodys book. We are at a Public Library and we have talked about that and they didnt want to do that. If you buy my book i will personalize and sign it and feel free to go onto my website at webb hubbell. Com. If you do so you can order it and i will have it to you personally i cant sell them here, its a Public Library, but i can say go to this and i will personalize it and all you have to do is tell me what to say and i will do so. Its also available at wordsworth . Yes. As well as runs and noble. They are running a little of because we had a couple of good days, but they are both reordering and the reason is i left the people at wordsworth with the books that i bought in the car when i drove over and so that is where they are. But i can personalize them if you go to my website. If there are not any more questions, thank you for visiting the Laman Library and we are so excited that youre here today. Thank you, it has been great. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] tonight on booktvs after words. I thought it would be compelling to tell the story of a white family in a black family with the same name who come from the same place and follow them from slavery through the civil war and reconstruction and jim crow and the Civil Rights Movement up until today and compare and contrast. Chris tomlinson on his family slaveowning history and how the legacy of slavery still affects american society. He talks with the brother of nfl running back tomlinson about their lineage as former slaves from the hills. Tonight on after words. Starting now on booktv, a retired pilot talks about the history of combat aviation in the restive south writer pilots have changed the way we fight wars. This is about 45 minutes. I have been happily a civilian now for six years, i think and dan is fine. Thank you for coming out. This is a nice surprise as i was gone all week and its good to be back in colorado. And its a relief after some of the other places that i get to go. I am pretty informal with these things and what i will do for those of you who may not be acquainted with this book is talk a little bit about it and i always find that most people have a lot more questions than i would like to talk. So we can just talk about that or any other books that you want. You can follow me. Okay. This book was kind of conceived accidentally and i started to do another book that im under contract to do and i realize how many of these stories that we were dealing with and it seems that even i, as a professional Fighter Pilot, i didnt know. So the more that i realized that there is another book in there. Im going to find this interesting, its such a big part of my life and i think that anyone else who has an interest in aviation word as well. So it started off to be a much smaller scale than what it is right now and i think the final verdict came out to 625 pages or Something Like that and it took over a year to write. It wasnt supposed to be that way, but i found that i couldnt do the subject justification by doing this any less. So what i wanted to do is illustrate the last 100 years which the anniversary of the First World War starts tomorrow because that is the hundred year of the assassination in sarajevo. So i want to illustrate each. Matt through the eyes of the public. And so then when i went through that i thought that i couldnt talk just to us about the pilots because without understanding what was going on around and the politics, the geography and even the land battles that were occurring, it did not make a lot of sense. So i started to expand and i learned a lot more about the First World War than i ever thought that i would. Most people of my generation understand that this is ancient history. But i found some good stories and we will talk about some of that. But what interested me is when we progress along and i got into the postworld war ii era. World war ii was kind of the last blackandwhite issue of the last century, at least that i could think of. The ones that came after that, korea and vietnam and the ones i was involved in or a lot fuzzier. And world war ii is the last cut and dried blackandwhite issue that i think that there was. And its interesting that we learned what we learned about korea and vietnam. Always i was too young to participate. Too young to participate in that and i was raised in the 60s and 70s and we were not taught about it. So its really interesting for me to go back that way. But this next book that i need done by december 31 deals with vietnam. So im happy for any help you guys can provide. That i am digressing. The book opens in april of 1915 with a frenchman and most people think of him in tennis because that is where the french open was played and he was a prewar flyer, a lot of those guys were just daredevils and wild men. And mostly they didnt want to sloshed through the trenches. So for this for six months they were flying around an unarmed planes throwing rocks at each other and in a couple of cases they were actually trailing behind the plane and i always wondered what wouldve happened if they caught something because they clearly didnt give it that much thought. So is it really going to withstand this. So anyway he had the bright idea looking around at all the infantry equipment and machine guns and said i should pull one of these things to my airplanes and see how that works. So he could apply and do this with one hand. So he thought i would try a machine gun. So he bolted this machine gun on the top of his engine and then not being mechanically inclined, he didnt bother with the propeller is synchronization and he just put a metal wedge in the hope that if he shot, maybe it would get through. And thats pretty much what happened. A lot of them didnt get through and ricocheted, but enough got through in april 1915 that he found a german observation plane and they were worried about him because they didnt be an observer in the back and they didnt save gone and no one had ever been a propeller light through and so when they cruiser behind them he waved and he went over to looking at the site of the binoculars and he let loose. So that is how it all started. So when i started to get more into world war i, it is intuitively obvious now even though it wasnt then why came about. The army came together in france and the horses they had used for reconnaissance and scouting and breeding, they couldnt use because of the mud and the barb wire and the machine guns and so they took airplanes. So people are looking up and seeing the planes fly over and looking at their positions and in this thing that we have to do something about that. So now they have other airplanes to shoot down the first airplanes and it just sort of steamrolled after that. It was sort of the First Aviation arms race, if you want to call it that. So the book kind of follows that progression through the First World War and i spent a lot of time on that just because that is where it all began. Ive had a couple of friends read the book and they say when you talk more about the american involvement with or this and that, but the americans really want involved until 1917. So three years of that before we got over there. And so most of what i talk about , and i ran across some extremely interesting people and i had never heard of this individual, has anyone heard about him . Okay, good. Hes a canadian. An absolute madman of a canadian who got in the worst five that ive ever heard a, 50 to one to go back to england and he ended up in the middle of a jostle in this huge swelling furball and it turns out that theres three of these things stacked on top of each other and so he shot down six airplanes and then was wounded on both arms and legs and pass out from the lack of large and manage to crash 1 foot across the one on the family side and everything was okay. I had never heard of him. Merion trooper. Marianne cooper i spent some time between the wars because i didnt know much about it. But i think he got there on armistice day. But Marion Cooper ended up fighting to the polls against the russians in the civil war and he survived to come back and write king kong. And so help to find Marion Cooper pictures, called rko. So i put little footnotes where they applied all through the book, these tidbits of information that i found and i hope you guys can enjoy that format because it was interesting. And of course we didnt world war ii and as we go we talked about world war ii basically as a result of what was not finished in world war i and why that mattered. And so i think the historical significance of the discussions in the book are worthwhile. Because like a lot of people i really didnt understand the cognizance of all these complex. When you read it, youre going to ask yourself, why rabies guys there in the first place, and this is what i did, which is why i wrote about it. So theres a lot of very interesting stories. Did anyone know that there was a female Fighter Pilot . No, i did not either. And its one of the things that we were never taught. They called her a white rose of stalingrad. So how can you read that and not find out what it means. So i delve into that purely by accident and i ended up writing has a chapter on it is because of who she was and what she did at the time. So we have firefighters now its really no big deal. But in 1941 in soviet russia, to do what she did, i wasnt impressed. And i got asked the other day who my favorite pilot was that i ran across and it may seem sacrilegious to us as americans, but i think my favorite was actually a german from the second war and he was the epitome of the nonconformist rogue fire pilot and i wont get into his womanizing, but he was the kind of guy that dated someones daughter because he didnt care. He he was the kind of guy that when he was awarded a cross by schiller started playing the piano because he knew that hitler had been dead and he said, what are they going to do is . Sunday back in shock . And when he was on his way back, he took a detour through rome and he didnt show back up for a couple of days and nobody could on him. Well, he met an italian girl and disappeared with her into the country and it turned out that she was mussolinis needs. So everyone was looking for this guy and by the time they caught up with him, he was on a plane crossing back into combat. But those kinds of stories really give the book a lot of life. I couldnt have written a dry history book. I think history when written right or taught right comes alive and people get interested and they realize not only does most of it repeated itself, but we could actually learn quite a bit from it. So after the world war ii section and get a bit more complicated because then we get into korea and like a lot of people, i never understood the cause of that conflict. So i talk about that from the point of view of some of the people who were there. I shouldve pointed this out at the beginning that all the planes that are in there, all of the people that are in there and the quality and the book is all real and nonfiction. I like to write fiction but to the extent that i can or that i could, i flew the airplane mentioned were lee scott to go and sit in one and play with everything so that as a pilot i could put myself into the position so when your hands are moving, its like, this is what you are doing. That is the way that i wrote it and it was easy later on. At the end of the book i was in both of those and i flew both of those airplanes. That went really quickly. But writing about this was a bit of a calendar because i had never done that. And so everything in their, the switches, what the pilot thinks, to the extent that i could talk to the guys who wrote about this, the great help was christina and her father was someone who is very famous. When i was a lieutenant in germany, my first assignment, he came over and we were having a celebration and he was at the bear club drinking with the guy that shot him down. And they were hilarious. They were absolutely hilarious and they outrank everybody there and they played a Fighter Pilot named and they beat us all at cribbage. And then i actually got to meet him. And then when i got to this pub, i wrangled an introduction with his daughter to talk about the accuracy of what i was writing to make sure that it all jelled and she said that is pretty much what he wrote about and sure, go ahead and use it. So part of the world war ii stuff is written through his eyes among which is interesting to me because when i got to the vietnam section, i could use him again because hes one of the guys that fought in more than one war. I found that very thing, the guys that had flown in world war ii and korea and vietnam and any mix of those two because of the experiences and the changes that they sought. So whenever possible i use them. Most of the latter half of the book is part of this because we have been doing the most since the 1950s. There is a section in there about the yom kippur war written from the viewpoint of an israeli pilot and so still alive, wasnt that hard to write because i lived in egypt for a year and had been to israel a couple times. My father said he was able to help me with this guy hawk terminology and he really wanted to put you in the cockpit to make you feel like you are there getting shot at or whatever was going on. So kind of a common use with the airplane that i had flown myself. Vietnam is obviously a complicated section of the book. Many people wanted to see why we were there without getting into the political aspect of things. And beyond the scope of this book. So there are those of you that know that it seems a bit glossy and i just couldnt get too deep into it. There was another book coming out that dealt with it. So i got a lot more detail about that. And then the gulf war was easy for me. So i caught up with this by the time we got into the early 90s and i could talk about the technologies and i have some good friends that are pilots who helped me with this section and one is a former astronaut and another is a marine colonel that i work with on other things. So one thing before i shut up and let you guys ask questions but i forgot to mention is right at the beginning back in 1917, i found a medical study that has the been done by the lancet which is a good publication about what it takes to be a Fighter Pilot and they were trying to figure out what kind of madman they could talk and are doing this job. So they are trying to analyze characteristics of commentaries and whatever that these guys all had. And so when i read that, i sent out a survey to 100 guys that i had flown with an i knew all of these years later, asked the same question and at the end of the book i compared it to say, okay, this is what has changed and this is what has stayed the same and i thought about was pretty interesting. Talk about history repeating itself. Anyway, that is kind of a brief overview of this and with that, who has questions . We can talk about this were any of the other books and i have been talking politics all week. Maybe we could start with the book. Anyone . [inaudible question] there was none in the second gulf war and the first one the iraqis sent out a few bad ones are it wasnt going to end well for them and it didnt. If you picture yourself in a karate fighter squadron. They take off and never come back, you probably wont be too jazzed about this. So the f15 planes were out in front before all this had a chance to our dismay. There was one day in the first war where we managed to pick up some lowflying mid23 that were running like scalded aids for the Iranian Border and taking off with the idea that were getting out of here and were going east and we found them on our radar and the whole bunch of them blew up our tanks and bombs and we had to chase him down. And they made it across the border. All the stuff that i did was either closely supported or a wild eagle. Some of you know what that is and some of you dont. And its a category of pilot an aircraft whose job it is to look for missiles. The russians and others gave it up a long time ago and we realized it was cheaper and more efficient for them to invest in this because they were never going to be in a dogfight thomas and they came up with these radar guided things and these little microchips that will track and kill airplanes. So we created the wild weasels to get them before they got other airplanes. Its a crazy job. So thats a long answer. [inaudible question] i grew up in kansas in the late 30s and my father was an air raid warden in southeast kansas. And they have blackouts and he had to walk around town and tell people to turn off their lights. At another they thought airplanes could get that far. It was very interesting and i think it should be noted. Oh, absolutely. Up upfront in the book i have a disclaimer that i couldnt write about everyone else who made all this possible. As a pilot i am well aware that i wouldnt have gotten anywhere if i had to maintain or if you live or are meant to do Everything Else that i had to do to get there. But there simply wasnt room to put all of that in the book. But i did acknowledge that the best i could. To have the slides that they used. Thats funny. Well, i think that they were trying to make everybody get behind the effort and to be honest on their side, they really didnt know what was possible so they aired in the conservative side. The only way that anyone could find out about this if they had listened to the radio. Very few people had radios and we did. Mom and dad would start listening. There is a chapter in our called meatballs and flattops and it starts out with the guys that got airborne the morning of december 7 and 1 thing that i knew about, i didnt know that they were both dressed in tuxedos because they had been up all night at the club drinking. So they jumped out with a get out of bed by the bombs and they have one i open and then theyre trying to wake up and they go do their thing and when they land, they landed at a different airfield and the first thing that the senior officer did was berate them for the way they were dressed. Can you imagine that . The whole island is on fire, there were plans to thing all over and all he can do is chastise them for wearing these tuxedos and see some things never change. There must be more than that. I would like to ask you about the evolution forward from vietnam to the time you were a pilot. My wifes cousin, all he had was armament that would attack a target. Did the mission of this air controller merge with this or where they separate . That is a good question. What really happened was after vietnam, airplanes got so expensive that bed except for the f22, you couldnt have one airplane in one mission anymore. So if an airplane will cost 100 or 200 million each, i wanted to be more than one thing. And so the f16 was a true fighter. So even though i was a wild weasel on waivers actually trained for that, we did what everyone could do which includes Ground Support staff and part of that was being an air controller. And the mission pretty much went away and it became kind of a subset of what all these guys do. So there are controllers on the ground, if you will and they hate it because they are all pilots, but they can talk to pilots better than i can talk ground. So theres a lot that takes to figure that out, unfortunately. But it is still a very important mission, especially these days when we dont have these will troops in contact. So we do this words very ambiguous and so you really have to have Something Else that theyre up there doing her to put in the wrong place and that is not any way to win it. We dont use rockets anymore, we used lasers. So that was a step in the right direction. [inaudible question] he sat in a chair and you gave me crap about something. [laughter] it was probably justifiable. When you were in the military, youre risking your life almost on a daily basis and now that youre out in the free world, i want to know what its like for you to not have to deal with those risks and whether you take other risks in your life now. Well, i got married and had kids, so, you know. Does anyone here have a question . Okay, it is a good question. For about three years i tried to forget about all of that i went scuba diving and i couldnt take anymore and i then there was still a war on terror going on when i got back into the private military movement and you guys probably know what that is. And anyway, i ended up back in the other things on the ground that i had never done before and so i got my fill of adrenaline like never before and i think because i went into the private military, i had sort of a gradual letdown from one day flying supersonic jet fighters to the next day being civilian and i have some friends who had some difficulty with that and its not posttraumatic stress or anything like that, but its just a completely different lifestyle compared to what youre used to. So i dont regret it. And so i couldve stayed, but i didnt want to go to the pentagon and make coffee for generals. To be honest in todays air force, once you get past the Lieutenant Colonel you dont fly very much anymore. But youre never one of the guys again. Youre never going to go fight against them. This article and be somebody else to do that. And i never really looked at it as a career but as a profession and i did everything i wanted to do. Does that answer questions sufficiently . Yes. I am the son of a navy pilot and he was a marine, semper fi, we rock. [laughter] he can answer that but i remember what he told me that he was really good. Never bounced a basketball off my head or anything like that and he never pushed me one way or the other to get into the military. I started flying when i was in the military, but i went to college to be an architect and i had no intention of being a pilot. I spent two summers in office and im 20 years old and i thought, i want to go do something manly. And so then i got into the military and i told him i wanted to fly. He said of if all you want to do is fico and air force. He can talk about this if he wants to, but during vietnam they were going to pull those guys out of the cockpit and they were going to make them for 2 liters because they had such a high death rate among officers. And not that that bothered him, but i think that in the marines the priority is amphibious. And in the air force, if you take away airplanes, you dont have any reason. Did he take away airplanes coming still have a marine corps. And we also had golf courses on air force bases, so you could live better. [laughter] its not true in afghanistan and iraq, but it is true in america. If you want to go on carriers, you become a navy pilot. But if you want to have this in the club, [inaudible] you end up in some desert somewhere because theres no place to sleep and he was expeditionary. I remember thinking that he lied to me, shivering my butt off and starving because i havent eaten all day and i dont know where i am. And there was no golf course there. [laughter] does that answer your question . Kind of . Sort of . [laughter] do you fly a lot of antique airplanes and things like that, did you do some research domestically . Yeah, it was all domestically. I had to just compile the 109 from research in the really couple of really good books written and i have actually flown and so that wasnt hard. If you flown one russian piece of junk, you phone number. And Everything Else isnt in a language other than aerobatic so there is this over here and that over there and i was lucky to come out alive from that one. Theres an Aircraft Museum and i he was a great help. I expected some hole in the wall garage and he has four world war i airplanes and a magnificent collection of artifacts in the worst world warned that his family collected and i guess his dad was University Professor in munich and he was raised there and they were good friends with the last surviving german flyers in their guys side and most of the women and kids gave the stuff to his data and brought it all back here. It is astonishing and i told us to tony about him. If you ever want to get rid of this, travis because ive never seen anything like it. What else . Yes. Can you tell us about the book you are going to finish this year . Yes. It is about iron hand, which is the codename for that type of mission, going out and dropping bombs in the called an iron hand missions. So i dont know what harpercollins is going to call it. This was supposed to be lords of the air, so i wanted to put Something Else on the cover and write about that as well and thats a great picture. And so this one is about vietnam because you usually find something to spin off on and write about it. So i was so intrigued by the vietnam chapter in this one that i decided to expand it. So it starts from the missiles point of view and so taking you through this, which i think is ty cool and i talk about the history of Southeast Asia into china up until the americans got there. Not the whole history, but six years after world war ii where the french were screwing it up. And then it starts with the american involvement, that is about as far as i have gone, i did get need to get cracking on it. Its going to take a while. But one of the guys who was part of the first Wild Weasel Program was in north carolina. I dont know what im going to write, but thats the intent behind it is to illustrate those times for those of us that came after, because you know we didnt have cable tv like you have got now and ill all he knew was what i learned later. It was kind of sketchy and i think its a very important part of our history to make sure it never gets repeated