Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On War Stories 20170625

Okay. Good morning everybody, im particularly excited to introduce this event. When we first began discussing the programming, this is the first panel that we thought of and weve been looking forward to it ever since. People have been writing about warfare ever since we had the book. And all our panelists write brilliantly on the topic but each brings a very different perspective. We have a slight change to our published program in their moderator will be sky montgomery from the Camden Institute of the university of missouri. Im grateful to her for stepping in on short notice so join me in welcoming sky, ishmael beah, Gregory Fontenot, Candice Millard and Whitney Terrell. [applause] thank you very much for that warm introduction. As long as human beings have been waging war, they been selling bad stories. Whether its to celebrate the heroic or merely make sense out of the chaos of combat, we can conclude something of the universality of war to the Human Experience from the fact that plastic text by son zoo that written longbefore our own time continue to find places on modern military reading list. Yet all armies and by extension i think all wars are reflections of the societies that produced them. To paraphrase tolstoy, they are all unhappy in their own way. Speaking to this diversity of experience, we have a distinguished panel with us here today which i would like to take the opportunity to now introduce. Gregory fontenot served for over 30 years in our assignment in iraq, europe, africa and the United States. He commanded a tank battalion based at fort riley and southwest asia and in harvard brigade in germany and bosnia. Colonel Gregory Fontenot took history at west point and served as director of the school of advanced military studies. Later commanding the armys battle command training program. Following his retirement in 1999, he turned his attention toward training and experimentation for the u. S. Army and later served as director of the university of word military and Cultural Studies with the deputy chief of staff, an assignment that supported assessments in both iraq and afghanistan. Fontenot let service in 2013 to focus on writing and served as a consultant on threat emulation for army experimentation. In addition to numerous papers and presentations hes given around the world, he is the lead officer of on point, the us army iraq Operation Iraqi freedom and most recently he First Infantry Division and u. S. Army transformed, the road to victory in desert storm, 1970 to 1991. Candace millard is a former writer editor at national geographic. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times book review, Washington Post book world and times magazine. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller the river of doubt Theodore Roosevelt darkest journey which was a finalist for the quill awards and won the william Raquel Nelson award. Her second book, destiny of the republic, a tale of madness, medicine and the murder of a president also a bestseller, won the 2011 edgar award for best actor crime. The penn center usa award for research nonfiction, the one book one lincoln award, the ohio and award and the kansas book award. Her most recent work is hero of the empire, the world war, a daring escape in the making of winston churchill. Ishmael beah was born in sierra leone and came to the United States at age 17. His first book along way gone, memoirs of us boys soldier has been published in over 40 languages and was named by Time Magazine as one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2007. His first novel, radiance of tomorrow was published in 2014 and in addition to his writing, he has an impressive record as a human rights activist, serving as unicef ambassador and advocate for children affected by war as well as a member of Human Rights Watch womens rights advisory committee. He cofounded the network of young people affected by war and served as president of the Ishmael Beah Foundation whichhelps children affected by war reintegrated into society by financing educational and vocational opportunities. And last but not least, Whitney Terrell is the officer author of the huntsman. The king of kings county and most recently the good lieutenant which won acclaim for its humane and honest treatment of the experiences of american soldiers in iraq. He is the recipient of the james bay missionary over his Society Award and a harder fellowship from Princeton Universitys Lewis Center for the arts. During the 2006 and 2010, he was an embedded reporter in iraq and cover the war for Washington Post magazine, slate and National Public radio. His nonfiction as additionally appeared in the New York Times, harpers, the new york observer, the Kansas City Star and other publications. He currently teaches creative writing at the university of missouri kansas city. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to all our panelists. [applause] so to be in our conversation today id like to invite all of you to share in the journeys that brought you to your work and at specific topics that you explore theyre in. I think from the biographies that i just read, some of you may seem selfevident but i think Mackenzie Claris has contain terms and i think we would all love to hear more about how your books came to be. Ill start, thank you. Let me correct one thing, i have visited as an afghan soldier and happen to go down to Zambezi River with a marine friend of mine and we looked over the side of the boat and muslims or however multiple hippopotami are called. And were the stream from Victoria Falls so we were helping the boat curve around before we got the falls and a snake rolls over in that water and that snake was bigger around than i was then, probably not now. I need to get off this river in those deep days but we spent three weeks in zimbabwe which was an enlightening. Because theyre struggling and have been for some time. Im a romantic. I think to be a soldier, you have to be a romantic. In my case, the romanticism of soldiering came from watching my father as a soldier. I remember one morning when i was young he was changing and getting ready to go to work and he was sliding his legs through the crisply starched captains fatigues that made this really perfect sound, every time i got to make that sound is a soldier i remember that moment but what got me was i asked my father why there were these black metal buttons on the uniform, each of which had star on them. And what it was was 13 stars configured in five point star and my father who had finished eighth grade was the son of a sharecropper told me that that meant that he was part of the units organizations that defended the United States and it took a minute to tell me about the constitution of the United States, my daddy never read it. I have but i dont think he had. And i was struck then by, this is something bigger than me and i want to be a part of it. I recognize we dont always live up to the ideals of our constitution but i also will tell you that i am ill disposed in the zen view of history that nothing good in america as ever happened. I recognize we may yet not reach our dreams and our potential but im a romantic. I really believe theres a chance that we may someday reach the potential. I take to the darren desert storm primarily as a victim of desert storm, having gone there. And i remember one of my officers wrote in a diary that we kept, he had an official war diary. This book, the germans would say and we had an unofficial war diary and i kept my young lieutenant and he wrote a note i didnt see until afterwards that said he would like to know who those people were in america who would favor the war in iraq because as far as he could tell, no one at task force three new who it was. I too was in the peace party and i tell you nothing concentrates the mind like the potential for a flight, especially one which the prominent pundits promised we would we would die in great numbers. I told my unit i didnt want to belong to an outfit that didnt have enough of this left for our reunion so we were not going to go by the pundits predictions, we were going to find a way to cheat, lie, steal and win. The other reason is ive been back to iraq multiple times, i went in 03 as a leader of a study group to gather information, to write an official quick turn history of what happened in iraq, the invasion. I can tell you with a time there was a lot of celebratory nonsense being by the army, make this a celebration of our excellence. And i said not so fast, its not over. He wrote the last chapter was the conclusion that had implications because of the fact 03, it was perfectly clear that the war was not over. And its still not over as it turns out. The second thing, the reason i came to it is after going back multiple times there and to afghanistan, it really got me that desert storm was a singular war, little understood and largely forgotten and in a burst of insane and dangerous to rest that happened with the end of the cold war and you have the apparenteasy win in iraq. Very little has been written about it other than quick turn histories, the general war, one divisional history written by manning carstairs but i what i wanted to do was correct the record and im going to say a couple other things about it. There are lots of myths about that war. First, it was a fourday war. My brother flew over baghdad the first night, he doesnt think it was a fourday war. Ive been in saudi arabia a couple months, didnt seem like a fourday war then indicated he got there in august in 125 to 130 degrees, they certainly didnt feel like it was a fourday war. Another dame met his low casualties. Low casualties is a matter of opinion in my view and thats of course an opinion to but we had 300 american casualties in four days of the war, 300. 148 killed outright in combat, another hundred 47 killed because when you put the 350,000 people in the desert, people get hurt by accident and there were about 150 nonfatal casualties. There were 467 kids wounded in four days, thats 100 today. Anybody here that yet . Nobody knows those things, 1500 Coalition Casualties and like to mention that there were maybe as many as 50,000 iraqi casualties. The other thing that is compelling to me about that war is on the third day of the war, im leaving my battalion through the detritus and remnants of four units of the iraqi seven core and i remember looking at that thinking oh my god. We are beating the hell out of these people. And my life sucks, what must their lives be like . So that was another compelling thing im going to stop now so others can speak but when i tried to bring to the story is a sense of what was your army like in 1970 when it came home from vietnam understanding in avoiding the patient to blame others for having lost that war. There was a moment where the army thought about blaming lyndon johnson, couldve made a really good case for but the army chose to look inward and conducted a renaissance in the next 20 years. So i wanted to tell people, what did the army look like, what was it like to be there when we integrated women against the will of the Womens Army Corps by the way and have the feminists, every once in a while the army gets it right and that was one of the times we did. The other thing i wanted to talk about was the training revolution where we quit pretending to be training and did train and theres some ironic things about that. I wanted to get a chance to tell a story as much as could be done from the iraqi side. We captured a lot of iraqi documents and made a couple iraqi friends whose names are not in the book because they dont want to be exposed were in the iraqi army at senior levels were beginning to be the possibility to tell the story from the other side. The other thing i want to say is on 27 january, colonel vincent j anchor wrote in his diary, i hope that someone at the National Command Authority Level in the state Department Work state department has thought through what the instate of this war is supposed to be. And i can tell you unreservedly the answer is no. And i can tell you thats been the case ever since. The notion that theres some kind of grand Strategic Vision and respect to how we got in these wars, why were still there is that there was no brand strategy. One of the things we ought to be thinking about rather than claiming if you study war there will be no war is a need to study that business and the folks that lead our country need to study and think about what are the implications, the actions we are taking and what do we want to look this when were finished. A reasonable question, which when anchor had a good sense to write down. [applause]. So as she said, i worked at National Graphics for about six years and it was as you might imagine just an amazing job. Ive worked really hard to get there and every day somebody was coming into the field with some crazy story, some fascinating adventure that they had just been on and my cousin used to tease me because he would say what did you do today and i would say you know, i spent the day with a curator at the smithsonian or i worked on a giant squid and hed say thats not a job. Id say i know. But here i am. So after we got married, my husband had been a war correspondent. He had been the bureau chief in nicaragua and he had covered the sandinista set situation in the late 80s, early 90s, covered all of latin america and then, he had grown up in wichita and had come back into the city and went to law school at harvard and was starting a company in kansas city going back and forth every week and thats when i met him. So when we got married, i was living in washington dc. He was here in kansas. I said we had the least romantic ending to a wedding or a honeymoon since we went to italy and came back and right away was in detroit. So for eight months after we got married, then im pregnant, the facility in washington and i think we should probably live together at some point. I thought i love kansas city, i knew kansas city. I was happy to move back to kansas city but i thought what can i do, ive got this much is this job and its just so unique and extraordinary, and he said you should write, you should write a book and i said thats easier seven done, i have no idea how i would do that but the one thing that i learned is the many things, maybe the most important thing i learned is that absolutely everything is fascinating. If you look closely at anything, its fascinating. And if you know, i have all these stories about things that maybe personally wouldnt interest you and you start to learn about it and youre just over on so i just started looking for ideas and i had been huge in National History for those six years and i was having lunch with a friend who had just written a book called 1912 is about the election in 1912 and got the results, they famously lost as the candidate and he said you know, have you ever heard about this trip that roosevelt did in the amazon after this election and i said no, not really and i had read biographies but i was interested in him. But because of the political career, it was so overlooked and ill never forget, he said the riddle is called the relevant out. And we got back to work and had this Incredible Library and library of congress and we started doing research and im calling my husband every 15 minutes like theres so much ground on this trip. Someone was murdered on this trip. I said i got to get back to work, hes right here writing the proposal and it sold very quickly. Not because of me but because he was in the amazon with these gifts and it was incredible and i went to this river and that was the beginning for me. Good morning everybody. Mind was by accident really and this writing came out of frustration. But also out of the need to bite using words to bring to life the things that survive people physically. I am from west africa, sierra leon. A small country that became a tourism nightmare because of the civil war. I grew up in that war. I was drafted into war when i was 13 and i fought in that war for three years. Guerrilla warfare is very different from professional soldier warfare. You basically train as you fight. And if youre lucky, you will make it like some of us did. But coming out of that war, ive lost a lot including some family members. I was adopted in family in the United States and brought into rehabilitation in new york. And when i started in new york, i realized that this war had been going on for about 8 to 10 years and nobody knew about it. Very little was known about it. And when it began appearing in the news in the United States, it was as if one day we just woke up in sierra leone and started shooting each other, there was no context whatsoever so my desire was to try to change how wars perceive by those who never been in it. Thats other than that in the media sometimes, the trade war, particularly african war that its tense and a couple mornings and also people were thinking about child soldiers in that same thing. That we were this sort of time bomb even though we come out of that war, we would not be able to recover or function because we been exposed to violence at a very young age, that is all we would ever know. And thats how it was walking past those same people drawing those conclusions and if i didnt say anything, they wouldnt know i had been in a war. So my frustration began through that and i wanted to give context from when words are spoken spoke about but also the necessary context, about the soldiers in the war and relationships that are formed that are not there so i wanted to give the necessary human context to the war. I thought about it for a while and really started in preparation for me because i started to lift that writing that i would of course start writing in a political way and in a very philosophical way i realized that wasnt going to give me the human connection, so i was at Oberlin College where i went for my undergraduate and there was a competition, the state writing competition that you would win 3000, i was a student on scholarship, washing dishes in the back and i told myself i want that 300,000. I already calculated what i would do with 3000 which is that i would send some to my grandmother, and i would go to the chinese Food Restaurant on campus and buy a large plate. So i went and decided i need to write something so my first story that ever got published, how i came on this side as a writer, was called at noon. The idea was based on a fact that we fictionalize the events around. And the fact is when i had come out of the war, i was reading the catholic city where the time. At noon, there would be a fighter jet that would come and bombard the strongholds of the rebel group that had come together. It was during that time you had no food, your family with food and you went out to cook that so you could eat it because if you cooked it at any other time, the guys who had the weapons and they saw the smoke rising from your kitchen, they would come and put you or your family gunpoint and kill you after that your food so while they were running, we cannot go there and eat in peace. So that was the fact and so i wrote a story about a family that lived in this over and over again and what did you affect them and i submitted it and i completely forgot about it, two or three months later i called and said there was a check for 3000. It really was then the situation really started for me because what happened, there was another very wellknown novelist, dan shaw who was one of the writers at oberlin started looking for me on campus and made sure that i was going to enter and i said they can take classes with me oneonone and so he made sure every week i would submit five or seven pages to him and said i started writing what became my first book a long wait on in university and by the time i graduated,i already had the manuscript. I didnt want to publish it because it was very personal. And then i was convinced to do so and i remember the day that i signed a book deal and i realized what had happened. And i went back and tried to return the contract because i said i dont want anybody to know. And most of my friends did not know about my background, they always thought i was an unusual guy goes during exams, they would lose their papers on thecomputer, they would shout. [laughter] so i wanted to get it back and then i did. Then i had to make a lot of phone calls, those people who had suspected something they could put their hands on one of them was a group of kids that i played pingpong with when i graduated in the United States. They introduced me to the game in new york and said you knowhow to play pingpong and i said what is this game. And i won every single game. I said no, ive never played pingpong before which was true. And i said, you guys are really great teachers. So i had to go and sign and lastly, i remember when the book came out, there was the next stop in the New York Times magazine and i was living in brooklynand one morning i took the train , literally everybody sitting across from me was reading it with my face on the cover. I said at some point, people would put it down and look. Anyway, this is how i arrived at variety and i went on to write other things but to me it was a way to give context to my country, to my continent, to write my own story but also to record some things that i could not provide anymore. When i came into this country i only have my passport so nobody knew that my life existed. And i had no family, no photo so for me writing really came out of that and i think even to this day as you were saying, people dont really know much about war. They have a lot of generalizations about it. And it is difficult to understand if you havent been there, we tried to make you understand it so that hopefully you will never have to go there. [applause] i very much agree with what youre saying in terms of war writing being something a way of making a record of memory so that we know what not to do. In a certain way. For me i was in college during the gulf war which greg was talking about and i had, i remember when it started. I remember also growing up in a era where i thought we would never again have a war. And it was a clear antiwar sentiment in the culture. I watched that disappear during the gulf war, i had a friend who fought it, a College Friend of mine whose wife was very much changed by the experience and he later committed suicide and i when we were beginning to run up to our invasion of iraq in 2003 was a proponent of the war, i thought you know, this is not going to go as good as everybody thinks its going to go, it didnt even go as good as everybody think it went in 1991 so for me to get involved, i did what ive always done which is ive always used journalism to inform my fiction so i started a report about iraq and as an embedded reporter, and as far as how i came about writing about a female soldier, there were two important characters in my novel, many people in can name like one american female soldier who fought in iraq or afghanistan . Not you, i know you can do it. Anybody . You got somebody . Okay. Good. Thats better than most audiences. Most people will say jessica lynch. But you know, between 2001 and 2013, over 280,000 male soldiers served in iraq and afghanistan revolutionizing the way wethink about women in combat role. They were essentially in combat roles even though they were technically assigned to that so for me, their stories, another woman named Jan Mcdonough in 2006 in a rack, she was at the time the captain of the support company and one of her jobs was to run a Recovery Team which they took a big, huge vehicle called a hercules, kind of like a tank without a gun on the front that could retrieve vehicle that had been blown up in damage and she told about me about a mission lasted for five days that involve going out and trying to toe a thing all about hello out of a muddy field. The axle came off, and then hercules got stuck, she had to get another hercules, that one got stuck and that was a Quick Reaction force, the guys went into safer, they got stuck. Two of her soldiers walked on top of a 500 pound bomb and were blown straight up in the air, miraculously surviving but they had the medevac, one of her home humvees flipped over, the gutter was badly wounded, he had to be that medevac. They started taking fire from groups around who had moved into realized they were all stuck there, called in a bridge. There was a muddy field and a canal and a hardball road, she needed to get all the vehicles to these paved roads. He called in a bridge to get across and the guys who brought abrasion, drove in the, she had to call a second bridge, five day mission. And after she told me that story which we take our entire time, the way she tells it, she said to me the hardest thing about being out here is i feel like im totally alone and what she meant was she didnt have anybody to talk to who was female in her rankandfile. And so its because she felt like when she would go to a male commander, she said, im having a hard time, this is difficult what im seeing happen, they would sayyeah , thats your own problem so she would never gain those kind of relationships with those superior so i felt like that was a story that people didnt know. And also was a story that contradicted more romantic imagery of how we can do in the media and particularly in movies about iraq and afghanistan which i think has been especially poor. Romanticize the soldiers you. Im particularly male soldiers, and american science. I dont think, i think that narrative of the im a man, i threw myself, i amend my being, and everything thats afterward, the narrative that we love in american movies and have loved ever since world war ii. And i think its a narrative that drives a lot of people into the military and its not a narrative that actually reflects the reality of being in combat. So i tried to write a book that would work against that narrative and remind people what it was really like in iraq and afghanistan. So thats why i wrote my book. [applause] i think one of the things that caught my eye as i was looking over this panel is the fact that you had those writing those nonfiction about the war, your experiences in, each of these different genres and i wonder if you could comment on how the constraints or even the advantages of nonfiction or fiction has affected the way in which you engage with these people. Me . Okay. I mean, look. I think its very important to write nonfiction because thats how i learn stuff and the symbols and, it wouldve been very difficult for me to write about soldiers in iraq without having been here personally. So i am betting, in 2006 and 2010, i went on patrol with guys and women, interview soldiers and saw what the landscape look like. Im interpreters, all that stuff is important and the news arriving of the day, i wrote a story about this group of soldiers who were called at that time iron quadrants so their job was basically we drove around and tried to find them. That was an unnerving experience and when we found that we would get as close as possible and see if we could figure out like how to use them. Usually using life a robot arm that then would blow up. So that was important but that didnt last. Overtime. And fiction thing as Salman Rushdie was saying last night that that same thing is true for creative nonfiction. Thats because im the more will last in the same way that a very good one. I wonder what you think about that. I think every writing is created, its always every fundamental and creative writing, every writing i believe has creative aspects to it in my case , i found writing nonfiction, that is an issue you cannotfictionalize on my story for example, i thought about why it is. And why fiction and wife memoir but wouldnt have been effective if i did it that way. In my opinion because theres the story that i was writing about was is something most people have never heard of and i really wanted people to feel it. Personally, so i wanted to stand behind and it was difficult. I needed to stand behind it but the restraint that i had writing nonfiction and common post to james frey and everybody is that people were on this sort of mission and there was a single truth, there was no single truth in any occurrence. But this is maybe a western view. I come from a world where there is no single truth. If you and i experience this moment, if we all go back and write about it, it will all be very different but yet you will be truthful to this moment because we were all here. How we perceive information is based on who we are and what weve experienced, people i grew up knowing that. I was writing my story, i was attending as an editor, i was like, why dont we do the narrative that everybody would agree with it and that in that case you can put your name on it, this book was written by all. So i was writing what i remember, what my memories were. So but with nonfiction i think theres a limitation in terms of how you can play with language and timeline so for me, that was the restriction, with fiction when i went on to fiction, then i would create a world and i would do whatever i wanted. I would make them come back to life if i wanted. But in nonfiction i couldnt play with those things so ice felt it was a little restrictive but at the end of the day i think when you First Published book is a memoir, i went through this and other writers have gone through it. People who read your book and they forget the reason why they like it is because its wellwritten, because you made certain choices in the craft. They just think they like it because the story is amazing. People the Amazing Stories are written badly and people dont like them. So i had to struggle with this and when i would go to speak about my memoir, nobody wants to talk about craft, just about your being a soldier. And its about choices and thats why this tory, for me thats what i found, i dont know if i would come back to nonfiction again, i probably would one more time and then i would wait until maybe when im 90 years old and i will write it. I studied with john the field, one of the first progenitors of creative nonfiction. God was so nonfiction could read like a novel. And when you talk about picking choices, those are the kind of things that create written on fiction. For me, the other thing you say about timeline is it goes backwards in time. It starts with the last scene of the book and every chapter, its a path to explain how this terrible thing happened that happened at the beginning of the book and that would never have been able to be possible writing nonfiction. And it creates a different kind of feeling for the narrative that is totally differentfrom a chronological narrative so that freedom was important. I love to have a conversation and talk about the craft of history, how historical distance. [laughter] for me, its all about the structure and research so i spend a lot of time thinking about the idea. I come across a lot of ideas and some of them i fall in love with, some of them i spend a lot of time researching and most of them i eventually just have to walk away heartbroken because of this story but i finally dont think i have enough primary source material and for narrative nonfiction wishes the type of storytelling i do, you need to be just drowning in it. You need to have so much primary information that you think you will never get through it. Letters and diaries and newspaper articles and everything you can get your hands on. So it takes me 4 to 5 years to write a book and the eight percent of it is doing research and really trying to understand not just the story , not just the event but the people in the story. And not just what they say or what they do but their character. And it is possible if you spend enough time getting to know them and getting to know the people who surround them and then in my office, im often sorting through it and working on an outline, every time i talk to students, they hate to hear it but i say im sorry, you have to outline. Just do. I know its different with fiction but with nonfiction, again, especially with narrative nonfiction you have to kind of know how the story is going to unfold. For you can start to write it, before you can then worry about things like rhythm and pacing and world choice. And you can actually for my first book the river of doubt, it begins with roosevelt in the middle, Theodore Roosevelt in the middle of the amazon, feverish, muttering and about to take his own life and he thinks, how did this happen, how did he get here and i start the story. So you absolutely make those kind of choices and i think that if you read a good book, fiction or nonfiction, it seems like thats the only way this writer couldve told the story, this is the obvious way to do it. The fact is, that writer had to really think about that and probably change his or her mind many times and it does change, even if you have this extensive outline that i work with and when i finally ready to start writing, i pull out a chapter but im still moving things around and still finding holes in my research and going back, is just an everchanging process, even with purely nonfiction and it is right, i like that when people say your book reads like a novel, thats what i want. I want someone to fall into the story and get lost in it. But its also equally important to me that they understand that everything their reading is absolutely true and if they have a question, they can look area there is a lot of narrative nonfiction that its just like a paragraph or two so in general, these are kind of my sources, you can look and say how did she know it was raining that day, how did she know he was making that and you can look it up and you can find out for yourself and that thats really important to me. When you dont have to outline, you have to write 48 times. [laughter] and then you write a 49th time. So i try to outline because if you dont, thats a proper way. I do believe that their rights, i dont know if they say but i think theyre correct, you want to understand what its like to be in a war. Its better to understand it by reading fiction so you may be red badge of courage, in the 19th century, the great stuff ive Stephen Stinson in world war i, go to the library, check out all the cells war and water memory, all about poetry and war and thats a great book. Its a great book. I had the opportunity to have lunch with that guy, hes a great guy to talk to. The readers essay thank god the atom bomb, you want to get their point on the use of news. People forget that the preparation for the plan was to on the beaches and for england. Whats it like to be on the beach after that . That would be such a hot item but the point i wanted to make is fiction really is the best way to communicate on a Sensory Perception of war. And i have a very large collection of those because i really wanted to understand g, what would this be like . Having been there, i can tell you i forget and i think it was Oliver Wendell holmes who said weve experienced the incommunicable experience of war and thats the whole problem. You see something in a combat situation and you say lord, nobody could make this up so the only way to get at it is company has to make this up because the first time you see machinegun rounds coming at you, slow at first and fast at last, you go its an offshore moment. That stays with you. I can remember what was going through my mind and all my text, we thought these guys from 1030 at night till 6 00 nextmorning. And the whole time, two things went through my mind, one it was too dangerous for us to do my fire attacks but it wasnt too dangerous to do it for the very First Time Ever in combat so whats wrong with this picture . The other thing that went through my mind was Salvador Dali spread with the lord watches nothing on the side of the wall and thats that, golly, you could make this stuff up so for me, im writing narratives of history in which the people are still alive. So im having to deal with eyewitnesses and the worst thing in the world is an eyewitness. For all the reasons we said here, everyone in this room will walk out with a different version of what happened and let me tell you, if there alive, they get irritated. One of my best friends that i never want to hear from you again because he didnt like the way i interpreted something that he did and i got, my wife last night, one of my guys a guy named steve sorkin said hes on page 86 and wanted to talk to me about it. Eric [inaudible] wrote two brilliant novels. The first one means in the west nothing new. Well, who the hell made it all quiet on the western front . It sounds better. His second novel, by the way, is when he goes home after the war. The character that was killed, blamers killed. The guys that survive, theyre living in postwar germany. Thats the book you need to read if you want to understand world war i. So i could look at iraqi records, and its fascinating. At one point, maybe the reason the americans are so upsetting with us about invading kuwait had to do with you are our stance on the puerto rican commonwealth and independence. That struck even Saddam Hussein as a little bit off the reservation. [laughter] theyre not thinking like we are. They never read john locke. They didnt grow up with russo. You got the blank slate. Those are alien concepts to them. They dont think in those terms. The way they address each other is fundamentally different than the way we address each other. In bosnia, people would call me mr. Colonel. Hey, you guys trying to piss me off . My mother calls me mister when shes upset with me. It was actually an honorific, but i didnt get that. So culture matters, the point. So the iraqi soldiers saw this thing as a matter of principle differently than we did. Their commanders i saw it differently than we did. Theres a kind of cultural imperative, one anthroposition called it the bed of course rah city. Im not sure i buy all that, but theres a certain view there. Its an honorbased culture, not a guiltbased culture. And in an American Army unit, you tell your soldiers, look, this is what you do when no ones looking. Thats how we function. Its guilt. Even if saw me do if nobody saw me do it, im going to feel guilty about it. Its not bad, its just different. So managing those two things is tough. And the last thing ill say and ill shut up, the United States government, singularly unhelpful in telling the story of the United States army. I submitted a freedom of information act request, and three years later i wrote i got it, and i had wrote it, and and it was unclassified when i wrote it. Im going to write about dead people so that i dont have to argue with them about how the book turned out, and i can find the evidence. [laughter] [applause] well, ive just been informed that we are at the point in our discussion where we would welcome some comments from the floor. So we have a microphone set up down here in front. [inaudible] [laughter] [inaudible] i think they want you to go over to the microphone because of the television. Thank you, sir. This happens to be up my alley. I read a lot of history. The question is, is that when we went to iraq the first time, the operation desert storm, Norman Schwartz schwarzkopf on his desk had hall mary attacks. He learned from history. He read history. He knew history. He used it, rommel also said war in the deserts like war on an ocean, keep moving or you get had. So that was iraq. So we went to afghanistan, and when you read history in afghanistan from 1823 to 1923, the british tried to civilize the place and got continuously murdered on the way out when they were leaving the place saying they were leaving the place, and then theyd come back and try it again. And then the russians tried it. So the question is, in the human condition can we learn from history in and thats your purpose in writing. And i gave you two examples that one guy did and the other, the whole United States didnt know a damn thing about afghanistan. And we still dont. Were trying to civilize the place. It works like north american natives. Its tribal. And we want to make a democracy . So anyway, my question is, do you really believe what you wrote can make a difference to the human condition . Well, thats an easy question. [laughter] i do believe or [laughter] the whole thing is, you know, first of all, i would say its nice to talk about tactics and that kind of thing, but the main problem and im not an, pert on afghanistan, because i did not report there. Dont invade countries when you dont have a good reason to go there. Dont invade on bad intelligence. [applause] i think its important that what happened in afghanistan is related to what what happened in iraq. We invaded iraq on the basis of bad intelligence. There were not weapons of mass destruction, they were not connected to alqaeda, and there was no reason for us to have that war. And that filters down on a daily basis to the soldiers who are fighting the war. Because if you dont have a reason to be doing what youre doing and everyone figures it out eventually, right . It affect it is the way you feel in the field, the clarity of the mission, the people who are executing. All those things matter. And it bothers me that people forget that. I i went to speak to a high school in tennessee, 300 kids, you know . How did the iraq war start . Were going to get we were going to get osama bin laden, the one kid who had the guts to answer said, right . Those kids need to know that that is not why the iraq war started. And we need to remember that. Thats what i would say. [applause] im opt mystic, because optimistic because by nature, not for any compelling reasons. I cant think of a single reason to be optimistic, but i am. [laughter] my view is that if you look at why we did things, and there is a logical explanation for why we went to iraq in the first place. 1979, mr. Carter was hue humili, he wrote in 1980, he issued the Carter Doctrine which protected europes access to oil through the straits of hormuz. That doctrine was reiterated by the succeeding president s, and george h. W. Bush acted on that basis. And he acted on that basis also because the notion that a dictator seeking to be a regional hegemon should be allowed the invade somebody elses country and take it and then slaughter the people there and he did a lot of that, he really did. If you get a chance to go through buildings in i kuwait and see what the guy, what they did, you would be repulsed, you know, appalled and the rest of it. But thats not new in more than history, and its not new in Human History either. When we went the iraq the second time, we did not go into iraq understanding the implications of or we didnt need to do it. I dont know anybody that thought there were nukes there, but we all thought, and i was part of the manning for that, that or there were weapons of mass destruction in the form of chemical weaponnings x. If you read the iraqi documents, they want us to think that. Why would they do that . So they looked like big guys standing up against the gringos. Youve got to look like you have the tools to back it up. How do you learn from that . You only learn if you recognize first and foremost problem was bad war termination decisions made in 91, and no war termination planning done in 2003. We never should have gone x we never should have terminated it by saying, hey, its over, lets let the iraqis rebuild themselves. Excuse me, thats not how it works. And if you take the army out, the only thing that was controlling anything in there, youre probably not going to get a good outcome. Guess what . We havent gotten a good outcome. I believe we could have gone to the taliban and said,ing okay, were knocking them out, but if you i dont think we had any obligation to afghanistan. I dont think Norman Schwarzkopf ever read anything personally. [laughter] its possible, he could have, i just dont believe it. [laughter] i have a question about craft. And it really is my perception as a reader and if it is, in fact, true. My perception sometimes in books about war is that writers want to expose horrors of war so that we dont do it again, but theres also a sense that it is so horrific that sometimes writers are withholding the details of that war and, ishmael, it certainly was true when i was reading your book. There is we do not want to do this. But then theres also a sense of that its too brutal to share fully with the reader. And im just wondering if any of you can speak, was that a struggle in terms of the writing, in terms of craft . I mean, before i answer that question i want to say just briefly on the previous question which is that i think as somebody who is coming from another part of the world and then living in the United States, becoming american and then look back, i think what aye come to see is what ive come to see is i think we need to stop thinking that our way of life in america is what everybody else wants everywhere in the world. I think thats fundamentally [applause] thats a big problem. Because other people want to live differently, and theres nothing wrong with that, and theres nothing bad about it. And we are not in a position to prescribe for them how they should live. And so anyway, i would just stop at that. But to answer the question about when you talk about war, when i was writing my book, i realized that i wanted people to have a stronger context of what a civil of war, guerrilla warfare, the one that i was in, felt like psychologically, physically, emotionally. But i also took care to realize that i dont want to traumatize my readers. I dont want them to [laughter] i want them to learn something from the violence rather than just going at them in a way that is going to damage their psychology, you know . So i had to leave out a lot of things. But secondly, because for me it was a personal book, i really had in the gunning in the beginning i thought about the fact that i wanted to leave some things for myself privately and for my family, for my children so that they dont know everything that Everybody Knows about me, you know . When you write personal nonfiction, its a private life and then you make it public. So i wanted when my daughter would be older or my son would be older to not say, well, i know everything, the kid knows everything about their father. So i deliberately left some things out. And there are also some things that are just too difficult to share even to this day from war that you dont have the language for, you dont have the capacity for. Really processing within yourself to be able to write. Now, when you also write nonfiction, your mission [inaudible] you have this problem the way you portray them. They dont like it. People get upset. You dont become friends with them. But i think what is also shocking is that for the media particularly in my case, the media had a perception that they wanted to keep of a child soldier. And they didnt like that i didnt fit within that mold, so there was a struggle with them, you know . They wanted to put me back in that place, and each time i would go a little farther away, and i learned how i to fight nicely. [laughter] because i was a former child soldier. I was on television and somebody asked a question that really offended me and i shouted or i looked angry, then im the traumatized child soldier who is mad. Not because the person provoked something deep within me. So i think you can relate to me as well. As a soldier, when youre asked questions and youre thinking to yourself maybe i shouldnt say on television what i want to say, you know, and then i shouldnt say that. Because their going to theyre going to play my reaction, not what provoked my reaction. So i learned to navigate. I remember my first interview on cnn. Person asked me, so, mr. Ash mail, how many ishmael, how many people did you kill in the book . I thought to myself, thats not the point of the book. I said, i dont know, because its not like when youre at war, its not a hollywood thing, youre not going around, one [laughter] give me the tally, two. I said i dont know because that was the truth. They said 5, 10, 15, 20 . I said, no, i dont know. And thats not the point. And the next time i was introduced on another news show, i was introduced as ishmael beal, the child soldier, who said he can killed too many people to remember. So i learned to navigate with them to say, you know what . Its not about that. Its not about the bravado of war. I did that already. Its about what its doing to the human spirit during and after, you know . So anyway [applause] im sorry. One of the things that you have to do about those things, i would get my units together and say, look, the one thing were not going to do is were not going to dehumanize the other side. Because this is ugly enough without making it easy to kill. I mean, it ought to always be difficult to kill x. That whole business of body counts and all i can tell you that the night fight i was in, i saw no bodies. It wasnt because there werent any out there. My mind just had had all it could take. I saw, i didnt want hear any sounds i didnt hear any sounds. I could smell everything that was happening, and ill never forget the way it smelled, but my mind made it so that i could function and control the unit, fight the unit without having to see what was happening around me. Now, im not, im not a pacifist even now. There are some things worth fighting for, but you have to recognize there are implications to fighting, and they arent all pretty. I think thats really important, that idea of not dehumanizing. You dont dehumanize the other guy. The other guy, right . For me, that was one reason because the lieutenant i had, my character, emma fowler, kills an iraqi. But he is also in the story as an illustrated consciousness. The storys told probably from his point of view. So you dont just see him as an external, moral choice, but he is being acted on and how he makes his moral choices has got to be part of the narrative. I think too Many American movies, if you look at them, think about, hey, what are the iraqis doing in this movie . Do they have agency . Do they have thought . Or are they just representing some moral choice that the american is going to think about, right . Thats a real problematic setup that we have, and i think we should push for narratives that dont allow that to happen. Thank you. Along this vein, we have a societal expectation, a societal narrative of the soldier, the american soldier and, thus, the veteran. And as a writer and as readers and sharers of literature, whats our societal obligation to humanize the veteran, the soldier and bring about a broader narrative having to do with the veteran . We have this high suicide rate, we have these compartments we put people with ptsd in that limit their societal potential. And im just wondering if you could speak to that as a societal obligation as writers. Im happy to, but does anybody else want to go . I tell people when i, you know, when i go to a store and say i want the disgruntled, pissedoff veterans discount. [laughter] i dont think the country owes veterans anything in particular. What i think would be better for all of us is if we took and this is going to be controversial, but im going to take a chance and say it i think we should do what mr. Wilson advocated when he asked for a draft law which had universality of risk. I suspect that if everybodys kid was truly liable for combat, we would consider more carefully our options. [applause] i did have somebody actually at dinner last night say my brothers a marine, hes a vet. Im worried about him. I dont know how to talk to him about his service. I dont want to ask him what was asked of you on television, how many people did you kill . He doesnt know how to talk to him, and i think a lot of us who are civilians feel that way. My answer to that would be go learn about where he was. Read a book. If he was in fallujah, read about fallujah, learn to ask intelligent questions so that it actually seems like you care instead of some total surface nonsense, sensational question like that. They want some sense that youre going to care. Education makes it seem like you care, and perhaps the effort would make it mean that you do care. I think that matters. [applause] the point that i would like to make comes at the end of this very brief little story x that is that that i had an elderly friend, a survivor of world worr ii, a german. And the level of guilt that she suffered and she was never directly in the war. She lived in a small town in bavaria. It was that she invented the idea that all the bodies that were found at auschwitz was the result of the carpet bombing of munich, and they were all taken there. And the point that i would like to make is that when a nation goes to war, the entire society becomes part of the walking wounded no matter whether you had direct combat experience or not. And thats very clear in the vietnam war when you see, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people protesting against it. It stays with you. And you dont walk away not feeling stressed out and wounded by it. And so i think that there needs to be as much emphasis not only as you have presented, but what happens to society that keeps going to war. Have we ever stopped being at war since world war ii . Weve almost always had a war with going somewhere. A war going somewhere. We are a warmongering nation. How do we step back from that and become a peaceful nation again . Spend more money on the nea. [laughter] couldnt agree with you more. [applause] i want to come back, there was a question out there about whether what we are writing really makes a difference and the things that were writing. Of i dont know if you guys want to jump in on it. I think, i think it does make a difference. Because i think one thing that we all know in Human History, at least from my own tradition, is that the stories outlive us. The stories remain. We will die, but the stories will remain, and other generations will learn about what we didnt do or what we did, what our footsteps. I believe that very strongly. And on a personal level, my when i wrote first about my experience, i think, it really changed how people viewed kids who were coming from war. And the First Experience that i had that you write sometimes and you have no idea what your audience is going to do, and youre surprised at what it does to them. And you think it is, oh, i didnt really write it for that purpose, but im glad it did that. A young fellow was coming from ivory coast which is another african country that had a civil war, and he had landed at jfk enroute to the United States he became 19. And he was a former child soldier. So when he arrived and he said they had been in the war, they put him in adult prison because they wanted to prosecute him as an adult because he had been in the war. For whatever the reason was. There was a law in the United States if you came to the United States as a former child soldier, you could be arrested, but if you came as a warlord, youd be a diplomat. [laughter] through human rights we reversed that. So his case was brought in front of a judge in new york, and a law firm picked up his case. In my book [inaudible] so they looked for me and wanted me as a character witness in the court. And i went. And, of course, the guy from the government said this guys not from ivory coast, hes from sierra lie eurozone. Youre ishmael beam, my wife gave me your book, i want to hear what you have to say. [laughter] so because of that, the judge ruled on the case and the kid went on to become a u. S. Citizen. I didnt plan on that. When you write, when you represent others, you open a little bit of window into the lives of others. You write about women fight being who people dont know about or you write about what actually happened in iraq or in afghanistan, other place like that, what happened in your book, you know, you open a little bit of window into peoples imagination be. And they cannot undo that. And i think thats the magic of what we create. Once somebody learns something, they cannot undo that knowledge anymore, you know . Thats it. And i think thats i would like to think that we make a little bit of difference. All of you are here on saturday morning, so that also is a testament to [laughter] i would just say also i think thats where we understand each other too. Thats how we can connect. I mean, i agree the distance of language or culture, geographical space can sometimes be or time even can sometimes seem incredibly wide and em possible to bridge impossible to bridge. But its through the shared human emotions, you know, fear or joy or desperation or sorrow. Those are weve all experienced those, and you cant understand that in you can understand that in somebody else s and you can connect to them. In my book about winston churchill, its the bor boor war. This is 1899, its in south africa, and general roberts, hes just gotten the appointment. Hes about to head out. And he gets a telegram telling him that his son has been killed, his only son. And you can feel his grief. You know, hes incredibly brave about it, but he is devastated. Its all he can do the person who hands it to him writes about it later in his diary, and again thats the value of those primary source materials saying how he thought he was about to drop to his knees, but he doesnt. And he pulls himself together. In that moment you can understand who he was. You can bridge that distance. And, you know, i think about even my own experiences. I grew up in a small, blue collar town in ohio. And here i am writing about winston churchill, you know . We have absolutely nothing in common. You know, i was thinking about, you know, Football Games and my friends were hoping for a job in a factory. And, you know, hes surrounded by queens and, you know, the royal academy, Royal Military academy, and its just a completely different world. But when hes, so hes taken as a prisoner of war x he escapes by himself. Hes 24 years old. He knows that if they catch him, theres a very real risk that they will can kill him. They will kill him. And hes terrified. And he has no hope can and very little hope x he falls to his knees and he prays x. Hes not a religious man. And in that moment, i can understand him, you know . And i think thats a connection. And i think thats humanizing, and thats what we all need in order to, we hope, not have more war, in order to understand each other. We actually, were all humans, you know . We all want the same things. And its so important to make that connection so you dont dehumanize somebody else x that can be done absolutely across time as well as across geographical distance. [applause] i think that that is an excellent point on which to conclude as im being told were out of time. Id like to remind you all that the books of our panelists are available for sale in the ballroom, and they will be available to sign them according to the schedules that are printed in your booklet. So join me once more in thanking our panelists with a round of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv is on dirt and facebook, and we twitter and facebook. Tweet us, twitter. Com booktv. Or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Good afternoon and welcome to the 33rd annual Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest. I would like to thank our sponsors. This program is being broadcast live on cspan2s booktv. We may have time for questions at the end of the presentation. If thats the case, well ask that you line up at the microphone here to your right so that the home viewing audience can hear the questions