Thank you for coming tonight. It is up pleasure i see friends in the audience. Even members of my riding durbin of an amazing author the lives year in and to is and she year . We are friends on the facebook. There is a memoir called a nomans war that came almost at the same time and hers is a memoir of all the deployments as a soldier officer deployed many, many times so im here you are here also. This is my first chance to do a reading and i am excited. I have done a couple talks but this is my inaugural reading. I want to read a couple different packages provide of a paragraph about each of the three main characters. It is new material i have not read from before. Banana wanted to read about time afghanistan and iraq. Then i do questions. The first veteran i would read about this Michelle Fisher that is the main character of this book i met her 2010 she told me a lot about herself introduce me to the other two people that we began an amazing multiyear process of lengthy interviews an
Trip. So we met at a cafe in downtown columbia, and i showed him a few of these images from the oregon coast which was part of his route. And i said heatmoon, my son edgar iv and i would like to retrace your route and do a photographic version of your book because we cant begin to write like you write, but we can take good photographs. His answer, i was very pleased, was very positive. He said, you know, one of the most common questions people ask me is when are you going to take make the trip again, but im never going to take the trip again, have at it. He confided to me about four years later he didnt think my son and i would make that journey and the book. So so our goals were to find the characters still living almost three decades later. We wanted to find the beauty of back roads america that he had so beautifully described in his book. We wanted to find the 5 30 taverns that he frequented. We wanted to find the mom and pop cafes that he always ate at. Ask youll remember one of my
And introduced me to the other two people in the boat and then we begin an amazing multiyear process of lengthy interviews and they gave me a lot of other kinds of material to rely on. Letters and diaries and photographs and medical records of military records in Therapy Notes, facebook posed and all kinds of things like that. So this book is an attempt to reconstruct the last decade in their lives that they were serving in the National Guard. So the three women are really different in age and really different in political is then that is one of the great joys of spending time with them. They are very Close Friends that they dont agree about the essential enterprise they are involved in together. So they have many conversations about what it all means. Michelle, the youngest of the three went in was 18 years old when she enlisted in the spring of 2001. Im going to read a passage from the previous fall. He had just voted for ralph nader. Shes very leftleaning. Im actually going to switc
I was astonished. It wasnt an accident. Its not natural, its not right. Reporter and the most chilling part . Do you think heather would still be alive if she hadnt gone through this transformation . Gosh. Reporter the motive behind it all but first my mother called and said, michelles dead. Reporter how is that possible . A young mother, found brutally murdered. Her little girl left to wander in her mothers blood. Police had a suspect. And, they say, he had a motive. We had an intimate relationship. We ended up having sex. Reporter but could they prove he was a killer . It was a circumstantial case. Reporter except for that witness, the girl who left those footprints. Well never know what cassidy saw and what she didnt see. Reporter maybe she couldnt tell detectives who the killer was. Maybe she didnt have to. The fact that cassidy was spared, would that mean anything to a jury . Reporter the person that had killed the mother cared about cassidy. And now a stunning new twist in the ca
The fact that cassidy was spared would that mean anything to a jury . The person that killed the mother cared about cassidy. And now a stunning new twist in the case im lester holt and this is dateline. Here is Keith Morrison with silent witness. I think i paused for a second and had to take a deep breath. And just the reality of what was going on would sink in. Reporter those who sought footprints will not forget them. They were tiny and they were bloody. I had to get my composure to finish searching this house to make sure there was nobody else in the house. Reporter it was november 3, 2006 early afternoon. Deputy scott earp had been dispatched to a neighborhood Enchanted Oaks the outskirts of ralei raleigh, North Carolina. Here for the 911 call from this place, on birchfield drive. The caller was Meredith Fisher. She had just discovered on the floor of the master bedroom, the savagely beaten body of her elder sister 29yearold Michelle Young, a woman who in death was about to be famo