columnists and oil explorers, his colleagues craft words that fly on paper from the forest. and translate and politicized, publishing it in academic journals and political tracks. they reject the idea of linear progress from underdeveloped to developed, measured by accumulation of material wealth. good and harmonious life should be the goal and mission of every human effort. such a life emergence from ongoing reciprocity and solidarity in the human community and between the human community and biodiversity experience, western development destroys these relationships imposing itself by blood and fire. the constitution of ecuador gives rivers, and to evolve and explore biological creativity into the future. unprecedented in my knowledge across constitutional law. how that will play out in the struggle over what happens in the amazon, they were politicized and any judges who stand up for the forest and rivers find themselves out of a job soon but legal framework is present. and in the amazon, a fascinating ecological study in the forest but they entered our debates, how to live well on this earth as nations, how to meet our needs for work and fuel and clean water and cultural survival for many of these communities by listening to one another and listening paradoxically and listening to trees and they insist that would be part of the process moving forward. let me move to another part of the world right here in tennessee on the mountain slope. i will do a reading, and ash tree, great big ash tree that fell over and i have been waiting a long time to see one of these right after it fell. i saw this happen and as long as i am on this or if i will keep coming back to that tree again and again to watch it fuse its life into the rest of the forest and it will be around longer than i take to get out of here. of all the trees in this book, this one surprised me the most because it would be very quiet, some observations will show things happening, every time i go there another creature makes use of the great whole torn in the canopy when this tree fell down. this tree is full of food and other creatures once. it is sunlight, how well did and others use it. an incredible hub of life. and over many hundreds, thousands of hours and still blown away, shocked by how much life is around this tree but i will read the introduction to this chapter and give one or two examples and moved to the end here. this is a reflection of the particularity of this tree but also on the process on death and decay, different from animals particularly animals with access to formaldehyde. green ash in tennessee. there is life after death. it is not eternal. the nature of trees, and branches and roots and focal points of thousands of relationships. to find food or home and incumbent parties and fallen trees coming in the tropics, softwood trees pile their bodies in rapid, smokeless glazes of bacteria and fungi, longer than a decade. process of decay takes much longer in the ass and cold of any arctic bog. dairy tree measures the river of its afterlife in spoonfuls, fit to patient bacteria over millennia. between these extremes of the tropics in the mid-latitudes a downed tree in the temperate forest might live in death of long as it stood in life. before it's fall, a tree is being the catalyzer to regulate around the body. death and active management of these connections, root cells no longer send signals to the dna bacteria. and the chemical chatter and fungi, no more messages. but a tree never fully controlled these connections and only one part of the network. it doesn't end it. in tennessee, springtime brings collisions between walls of arctic air and pushy bubbles of moisture from the gulf of mexico, windstorms and shoe, gusts emerge from the sky and roots or trunks and on one such wind bruised day i was wondering across the woody mountainside and came on the giant green ash tree after it fell and the rest of the chapter relates particular instances over several years of observation, a whole load of insights showed up in the first few minutes. there every footfall was a dry splinter of sound, 6000 titans feet raised a shutter of air, scrabble of bark, slaps, punctuate their writing has clumps drop to the leaflet and they break apart and fly back to the tree, wings going, in black and yellow with tendril us antennae and their feelers as i approach, dissembling countenance protects even though these insects, the color of their bodies, their confident behavior and the sound of their wings are hornets like. they have been here only one day. they made and they tell their eggs into the ashes. this morning even this doll human could find the wind field tree. it loses the sense of tannic acids, salad and opaque is oak with with of brown sugar. hours after the fall only that -- this freak of would freshly down - trees are there nursery. the larvae all spring and summer with their mouth & sawdust populated by symbiotic microbes. without these would digesting opinions, beetles cannot feed. and then i hear clicks under the sponge. what continues his stories of rattlesnakes and shrubs size as other beetles move in, special packets of fungi they put inside the log and farm the log for food and take off to find the next log and bobcats and foxes use it as a walkway and deposit little seeds. i took some of those seeds, a reminder of passenger pigeons that used to be all over and are gone so foxes do the work of billions of birds and every case those creatures have their lives only through relationship and if a particular relationship is broken life is ended for them. this is the other thing this tree taught me. the motion of relationship and life through living networks is not the metaphor. a pretty way of describing oneness and benevolent oneness in the universe. is a lived reality. is what the tree experienced and what forest is made from. they are very physical earthy grounded reality so a couple reviewers looked at the sense that it is mysticism. no. this is ecology. this is how the soil works. you can impose spirituality on this, but this -- these are descriptions of plants and animals in physical, biological realm and lives made from relationships. you can spin stories out of that and layers of interpretation and some are probably true and others are not. all these descriptions are rooted in studies of the forest. when a being, a person, tree, chickadee, being full of memory, conversation and connection, a network of life loses a hub of intelligence. for those closely linked, the loss is acute. ecological analog of grief unfolds in the forest so the creature that depend on living trees, death ends the relationship, living trees, partners and foes must fin ren composition by living communities. smelters for new life. deadwood would is tightly tied up with the central notion of a fracture at the same moment. the enlightenment to wake up to wind and living community gained through a lifetime of interaction in one location in the forest, all that knowledge dissolves. but catalyzing new life around their bodies trees bring about new connections and new life, creative process is not perceptive. and re-creating a new version of itself, inside the tree, death brings about thousands of interactions, with psychological opportunity. and an uncontrolled multiple emerges compose of new knowledge and new relationships. like a lightning rod the dead tree draws into its body the potential that surrounded intensifying what was something else but unlike lightning the surge doesn't flow into the ground and disappear. life feed on the closeness of connections in the dead tree with vigor and diversity of expression. our human language does a poor job recognizing the afterlife of trees. and deadwood. these are slack words for so vital a process. the composition is renewed composition by living communities. smelters for new life. deadwood is effervescence creativity, regenerating as itself, degenerating into the network. even in death these trees reveal something about their processes of network connection, what life is made from and we see ourselves in these decomposing trees even on a mountainside in tennessee. i will conclude here with an assignment to pick a tree in your neighborhood, some place you visit regularly and conduct an experiment, show up to that tree again and again over the next few weeks with nothing but an enthusiastic openness of the senses. bring a notebook and attend, what is the quality of light, house light different, what is the soundscape telling me about this place? what does the tree feel like? what is the texture of the soil, leaving behind any presuppositions, i am going to find an environment here or sacraments or some interesting tension to weave into a short story. no. just show up and pay attention to the tree, listen and follow the stories outwards and the last part of the assignment if you tell the stories back into the human community weaving that awareness of trees, the reality that is our ecological world back through the propaganda and layers of electronic manipulation and interpretation we are surrounded with and buried under, we need to penetrate that and the indian system is composed of sensory awareness awakened to the lives of other teachers in the present moment. i will close with that assignment and thank you for your attention. [applause] >> shout the question and i will repeat it or there is a microphone, use the microphone here and on tv. so viewers on tv, the question you are posing. >> i would prefer not to be on tv but when you mentioned 3 and enlightenment i thought about the bogey tree in india. and achieve the experience of enlightenment, and what the idea was about enlightenment. >> sitting on the trees, have yet to find that. and trees -- what scientists are learning late in the game which is an extraordinarily complex - multiple layers and humans are tied into those. and philosophical traditions and literature going back thousands of years i'm not aware of a major tradition did not have a tree at the center. the tree of knowledge of good and evil country of enlightenment, and all three of the abraham of religions, and christ means anointed come you don't get anointed with canola oil. it is not a symbol or metaphor because without the olive tree there could be no life in that part of the world at least for several thousands of years and people were living only because this tree was nutrient rich from the land and these symbols in many ways i pointing us to truths but also getting in the way. it is the symbol of peace, the temple and so forth, not seeing the tree for what it is, complex being with its own story with pigeons of the mediterranean. and link our lives to. think about them but listen for the story of ecological reality. the story of enlightenment under the tree. there is the cross, the other part of the story and culture. and that becomes a symbol -- would is tightly tied up with the central notion of a fracture at the same moment. the enlightenment to wake up to the fact the desires and suffering are part of the community. rambling on. >> with global warming in mind, you talked about interconnectedness. do you think one of the main problems of the human race is we have shut ourselves off from nature, and that could solve the problem? >> we have in many ways forgotten the nature of those connections so we are still deeply connected but we have lost in many ways awareness of that partly because the structure of our society hides from that so as author of this book, can i find out which forests produced this paper even though i know my editor? i cannot reach as a consumer of a book when we go to the market or we buy a house constructing complex materials can we see the consequences of those actions and on the other side of the world, it is not so much cutting ourselves off from that is from awareness of how interconnected we are and this is one of the things that crises show us so when things go wrong, the water supply fails or fire or drought where hurricanes hit a particular area we are reminded it is not just about us and our relationship with other creatures including physical systems of the earth are what we need to move forward. one of my regrets about the present political moment is some of these questions have become politicized where they should not be. we should agree we need to be a good relationship with others, other humans and other species. there are all sorts of philosophies how to pull that off, some we would label conservative, some liberal and we should have a healthy debate rather than debating are we in relationship? are there physical patterns that are changing in the world? to those questions the time has passed for many of those questions and we are at a time we should be engaging vigorous debate, hearing different solutions and visions for what the future might hold and that debate has narrowed, some portions of the political spectrum are represented and that is a loss for everybody, we are missing political wisdom and ecological. >> in a book called been sweetgrass the author talks about the relationship between trees via their roots which i never heard of anything like that. can you comment on that? >> a magnificent book, he also wrote gathering mosque, fabulous right i recommend to you all, she writes about the relationships of people to roots and people to each other and her life and work as a scientist. we see the above ground part of the 3, most of the tree is above ground. the above ground part of a small little feeding appendage collecting sunlight and most of the action is below ground and those roots, a root in my mind is not a plant structure. it is a community structure because the root tip is so filled with funds he said go out to the rest of the soil and increase the surface area hundreds or thousands of times, there are bacteria communicating at the genetic level in the cells in the root. to understand the tree we need to go belowground to understand the relationship between roots and other species. we are the earliest stages of scientific investigation because it is such a hard place to study, take the route out of its native and assignment it stops functioning because these are often happening at the micro level, tiny chemical defusing over the width of the bacterial cell, hard for lumbering creatures like us to get into the lab and study little and synthesize that knowledge and come up with more comprehensive vision but our language recognizes this rootedness, groundedness, these are symbols of truth. it is true for trees as well. we need to literally get our heads, putting her head in the stands, putting her head in the sand is a way of seeing further than looking above ground. that is a way of scratching. take this time for one more question and i will be delighted to move on. >> in your years studying composition of trees or the life of these trees have you noticed a change in those processes to to pesticides for things we are doing? >> briefly the ash tree, the main influence is the effect of plastics or invasive species in the arboreal forest, one of the largest forests in the world the whole nutrient process has changed, we changed the nature of rainfall over that forest. i describe that in the second chapter but the process of decomposition has changed on a global scale with consequences for all of us. thank you for your attention. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> in just a few minutes we will be back with the final offer talk of the day from the southern festival of books. he will hear from criminal justice professor carter smith who looks at why some veterans join gangs and extremist groups and how their military training poses an increased threat. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> here is a look at some of the books being published this week. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many auditors in the near future on booktv on c-span. >> how you might wonder, there are all these other communities too? i didn't know this community, i had never been here, didn't have any friends here but i had heard, in 2009, looking for a setting for one of the stories for the washington post. someone mentioned there was a community in wisconsin that lost a big old general motors plant. that was interesting but didn't come here at the time because this just happened. a lot of people were still getting sub pay. the economic pain hadn't begun to see thin. but it lingered in my mind. getting started after i did this scary thing of taking time off from my job and kept thinking of various places i could go and something inside me kept telling me this might be the place. why was that? one reason was i needed to find a place that lost a lot of jobs and you definitely qualified. i don't have to tell you thousands of jobs left from around here. there are different figures you can see but looking at the bureau of labor statistics figures, in 2008-2009, 9000 jobs left this county. a lot of jobs. if you look what happened to the unemployment rate at that time, in june 2008 when the announcement was made the general motors would shut down production the unemployment rate was 5.4%. in march of 2009, a few months after the last of these jobs disappeared, and employment shot up 13%. on the job loss front, you were a winner or a loser. beyond that i had the sense i wanted to tell the story of what this recession had done. it was important to find a place that was not part of the rest else. i didn't want to write about an accumulated of economic decay. i wanted to show what bad economic time did. flint michigan was an old story and i wanted to find a place where economic trouble was new and obviously general motors assembly plant was shrinking a little bit and a little bit more over a couple decades but always got a new product. this clothing was a different things that nobody had experienced and that was very appealing to me, not that i was happy but very appealing to me as a place to do this writing and talking to people about what happened in their community. i had the sense there places like everyplace but as much as possible i thought it would be interesting to find a community where the pattern of job losses matched the national pattern of jobs that went away in the great recession. think about what happened nationally, the proportion of jobs the disappeared in the manufacturing sector, that was true, a lot of the jobs that were lost paid pretty well but had not required higher education to get. more men than women lost jobs in this recession. i thought that this was a community that had a number of qualities in lost jobs that other people around the country would understand and identify with. i also had the sense jamesville might fit into the sweep of history. i remember the first time i found the youtube video for speech barack obama gave at the assembly plant in february 2008. i don't know if you remember him coming. i remember the first time i listened to the video saying the promise of jamesville is in the part of the domestic war effort in world war ii and the plant stopped making vehicles and started turning out artillery shells. it have its own big moments. i just like that part of history. and before i knew anything about this community or have met anyone here i have a sense that i might find some interesting politics. the state was led by scott walker. and beginning and now live from the southern festival of books is author carter smith and his book gangs in the military. -- gangs in the military. [indiscernible] good afternoon and welcome to the last session of the day for this room. we are pleased to have you here. i am professor of criminal justice administration and militant -- middle tennessee state university. were glad to have you here at the southern festival of books. we will do this in a format that is familiar to dr. smith and i. we like a lot of audience participation. so as you listen to the presentation here for a few minutes we will invite you at the end to come to the microphone and ask any questions that you may have. that we can help you understand the book and the material and the topics. so he will speak in just a few moments about his book and give you a broad summary of some of the things he has done, how it is impactful to all different aspects of the u.s. and then we will have a question answer session. i would like to introduce dr. carter smith. he teaches criminal justice administration and middle tennessee state university. he was there for over 20 years. fifteen he sent in fort campbell kentucky. the first gang and extremist investigation team. he has the interview about gangs by several news new sources has appeared twice on the popular history channel and has co-authored three books and many other articles addressing the subjects of gangs. he is still an active member for the board member of the tennessee gangs. a three-time recipient of the federal militant award. his new book that we are here to discuss today gangs in the military gangsters, bikers and terrorists with military training crosses nonfiction writing genres. with memoir and american and military history a true crime threat. the gang experts described it as a must read of anyone concerned with the gang problem in america. and evidence of the infiltration of the gangster mentality within our nation's military branches. and is well researched and very comprehensive and well proven. another book on gangs. the effects of social media and the way and that that we have interacted with each other. please welcome dr. carter smith. thank you for being here. as a professional academic now no longer a practitioner this is a very large audience. we get large classes and we teach with many dozens and sometimes a little bit more than a hundred students. right, i don't know why we go. we do. one of the things that people ask a lot is how i got interested in the topics before i respond i have to think the organizers and volunteers of the southern book festival. the middle tennessee state university. the book was about 25 years in the making. it was not necessary a labor of love but it was an adventure. i got interested in the topic beginning in the early 1990s. it began seen in indicators that groups of individuals were engaging in correlated criminal gang activity. we have not seen anything like that before. having learned to maintain relationships with police officers and other locations and having kept up with current events we knew what we have discovered. the problem as we thought was that gangs had infiltrated our small military committee. on one occasion i was working with mpi investigator on multiple car break-ins in some parking lots on the installation. the sheer number of incidents indicated that there were multiple correlated offenders. they told us they were members of the local gang. not long after we encountered several male military members. we just started looking for indicators and as we learned what they were. the more you get out and talk to people in the community the more you see them we realize if we out there. they would call us and say remember what we were looking for. it is what we found. it was like a hide and seek contest. they ask how many gang members there are in the military and i have to start the question by telling you how me gang making members there are in america. roughly 4 million. there are parameters. there is about one and ten of them has military training. making them what i called military trained gang members. there are between two and 6 million gang members in the united states today there is not been in this official count in over five years and when there was there was no agreement between organizations that we were counting if we take the numbers that were last tallied and factor in the modification. combined with more recent research that shows we were under estimated the number of juvenile gang members this is what we end up with. the research has shown between five and 10% of street gang members had military training. roughly 300,000 or 7.5% which is a conservative estimate of the 4 million gang members had military training in this country. that is a decent size for a city. research by and noted gang scholar shows that 20% of what i call domestic terrorist extremists have that. the same research shows about 5% of the gang researchers are counted. they have military training. i was getting my information from police officers. they tend to stand in the way of more advanced gang members. in the estimations indicate that many jurisdictions have up to 10% of that training. unless you were joking about question and answer session. that's all i have. >> i will ask the first question and while i oppose that and carter response if you are interested in a question we have a microphone over to your right. if you will make your way there i will recognize you in just a moment so that everyone can hear your question. one of the first questions and you kind of hinted at that was how did you get interested in this topic. i got interested because it was part of my job. i have no interest. in the 70s in south florida in a suburban location we didn't have those at the 70s in florida. i think that as a lower level of it at some level. but when i got into the military i realize that the only way that we can investigate groups or individuals is to try to think like they think. the best way to do that for me as a population i was unfamiliar with is to ask questions. anybody wants to know why people do things you just ask and a lot of times as long as you are not asking any threatening manner. they will tell you and if they ask you in the right way they will tell you honestly. that was kind of fun. not only was that there. i love interviews. we also were one of the first in america to have the problem and was able to acknowledge it because we didn't have anybody shutting us down at that point. if anyone would like to ask a question you can make your way to the microphone they described how you got into it that you a that you just like talking to people. it's always surprising that people will just tell you all kinds of things that you don't expect. it's quite remarkable. ultimately you had worked in this field in many years. what drove you to drive and to write the book. what was the idea behind it. it was a combination of having to get another degree as you know and having to head something to write about for several years. i retired from the army in 1999 in law school. i spent three years in law school. that was never going to be practicing law. there was never a question. my wonderful wife who is here today bought me a book that i subtitled 101 things to do with the lot agree besides practice law. sales in teaching were on the list. they said hey i want you to come work as a civilian. prior to that though we had been investigating things. i became one of the people who knew a lot about gangs in the military and there was a case in 98 in clarksville where they thought it was a gang member or a military guy. he'd killed four people at a taco bell. things like that. when you learn about things and people realize you know about them they call you. years of experience with this thing that i just happen to know a lot about and that was dissertation time. that's when they ask you what you love enough to write about in your sleep. as you will wake up in the middle of the night you will have to go write it down and never remember it again. i kicked around a lot of really great ideas. this would've made a good one. the chair of my committee asked me what you know the most about. that was about writing them there is no way that they are going to give me access. for the gang association here in tennessee. take that a couple steps further. i had written the other books that you mentioned. i have no interest in writing this. at least a dozen people want to come talk about it. in my editor for the publisher that i work with she sent a random e-mail out. catherine said hi dr. smith i see that you go to these conferences and you present on gangs in the military. i've got to be honest with you. remember i told you about the people that listen to us. that same number of people read the book. i'll care if i make any money selling the book. i don't need to write it to read it. this was icing on the cake. she said nobody else has written one and i was not going to make it academic book unless you needed to. what she meant by that is you are not going to be falling asleep while you're reading it unless you make it that way. i ask or asked her to me still have a peer review. she said why would you want a peer review. we will sell it and all of the bookstores that i just mentioned is probably not a good idea. why would you want a peer review. i want the liberty that comes with me saying to a regular don't care what you say this is quite conversational. i call that a win no academic books get that commentary. it was just one step after another alignment. it was already written a peer. just a matter of putting it on paper thankfully my wife encouraged me to block out this time and it came out. there it is. i just want to clarify for everyone who is listening. this is an educational book. it is an engaging book. you wrote it that way on purpose. here it for the audience of a wide group to have access to it. we both teach students who well fall asleep at the drop of a hat. so our goal is to make sure that they don't do that until halfway through class. and i try to do that with the book as often as possible. the legal section in chapter four. i cushioned it with a lot more interesting stuff than the law. questions are. i can only imagine a lot of time to handle stuff in house. with the projectors up there. just so there is no mistake. that said on their dime. they shipped me and my teammate all over the nation until an event called 911. for all intensive purposes shutdown gang shut down gang investigations for at least five years. i understand. i will make any notes on that. but with that said i had approached several people that had decision-making power and had conversed with one of them and i will tell you how i did it. there are couple things in the book. i like to give life ideas in addition to teaching in class. one of our former chief of police here in nashville gave me some good ideas. but when i was going through writing the book i compiled information that i got from freedom of information act request and i started going to the places where i was normally talking and i would survey them when you finish that survey path forward and then i start talking that way i'm not please me your opinion. that was based on the presence of military gang members in their communities i'm starting to send those reports to the pentagon. and i sent my third in my fourth and i got a phone call number five. an intel analyst and said i was just wondering if you were sending me those so we would have them would you want to start a conversation. i said i'm not the enemy. i will be a collaborator if you let me. there's a lot of stuff here that i've been studied for all of these years whether i want to or not but i would love to give you some ideas everything i know about them is in the book. i'm not been told that anybody is annoyed by it i was told just today that there will be a lot of people watching on c-span i do not white -- write the book to embarrass them. at least that was my goal. we've another question. yes there. dr. smith was one of my undergraduate professors. i was trying to get my degree i was in iraq. as you finish my coursework. and he was allow me to submit paperwork or coursework little bit late. hopefully i get my doctorate which i also was recommended for. recently the army times quoted command saying that there are 33.6 million eight in the 224 euros that are eligible to join the military. when you wheeled down for a standard quality and interest only a hundred 36,000 are left. that's interesting because that's the same demographic that gangs are looking for for recruiting. it looks like you can't win here because of the same one they are looking forward to join. they are linked to some kind of gain. what do you think about that. the demographic you're talking about what he have a couple is the one that we are looking at as universities. they target that same demographic. we've another population called adult learners and as a theme demographic. and what i will tell you is that i understand that if it is intentional you can get somebody who has been on the other side and you can mentor them and you can help them. i will tell you this. the vast majority in my opinion of people who left the streets and left the gang to join the military did so with the complete attention to getting out of the gang lifestyle and getting into a life they can sustain. that they could continue forward with. and all of the good things that you and i thought about. when we first joined. with that said for that population and a group of people that joins with the intention of getting out they may not get out right away because i think culturally our military they think the military brainwash his people. i gotta tell you when i joined the military back in the 70s it was right after vietnam right after a lot of challenges in our country i did not get brainwashed. i went in to get military training i think everybody goes through that. but did it change my mindset completely. absolutely not. only it's more dangerous when they do. with that same population you can have a small fraction of a percentage. you only have a hundred thousand to qualify. any presence you've ever heard say we need more in our military that proceeds a alexi of the standards. this is not a trade secret denial of anything here's at they don't tell you we are lowering them today and in four or five years they are going to raise them again. and anybody that came in while the standards were lower. they will be reconsidered. no guarantees. that might provoke me to go back to the gang but you have to have justifiable employment. if all the that time to advance your life. there has been researchers i don't necessarily process that. i'm still working on it. about ten years ago one of the researchers and this is in the book we might as well just walk him then and the criminals that are out there that are doing the things on the street especially if they know how to use a rifle. especially if they know how to work in a group and run the streets. we are not talking that. who was borderline organized crime. it's right close to the mafia imagine bringing them in the military time and time again in our history those people have been used by our government go back to the war of 1812 and research how the pirates helped us. they already knew all of the training that they needed. ever since then. they are people that have acknowledged limits on their ability to stop committing crime let them in. just protect yourself. when i put one of those guys in a secret position no. i want them over here shoveling something. use them for the skills that you know you can. if you want to protect yourself and the government i would do two things. i would hook them up every year and i would probably hook them up at the polygraph every year also. if you have a guy that says i want out of the gang that way you've locked you blocked them in. he's committed. give them a psyche eval. and keep them out. if he shows that he's not getting out out of the gang time to maybe reconsider. does that make sense. we have discussed how some individuals will leave or hopefully leave the life of crime to try to get into the military but one of the questions that come to that how can they even get it if they have a criminal background or something like that while we were in. we were sitting around after work one afternoon we got there has to be a better way. we were identifying tattoos and sharing it with the people people that were seeing them in the military and we're trying to find other ways. we're just telling everybody we like you to look for those. and we figured that if you evaluate what a gang member has to do to join the gang, that's committing a felony, typically. surely the recruiter wouldn't normally let them in with a felony so he must have lied to the recruiter. see where the thought process was? if we identified somebody, and we had guys with front license plate that have gang indicators, stop sitting in their barracks room, some of the sergeants saw in an inspection, all those things that we take those indicators and go to personnel and look at his file, his personnel file and we'd see his enlistment documents and see if he had a felony reported and he didn't and we'd run a background check and lo and behold there was a felony and it wasn't reported to the recruiter. that's one way. the other way is, that's not reporting it to the recruiter is one way. the same researcher said that happened. we had recruiters that had literally said, here we are in davidson county, how many residents of davidson county in the room? how many of you have never been to dickson county? if you came to me as an army recruiter and i thought maybe you had gang activity i would say my friend who's a recruiter in dickson county, my friend and i are going to have a agreement and but you go and enlist their, if you've never been to dickson it's a fair bet you've never committed a crime there. they would run a local background check, just that county. clean bill of health. you would stay out of the crime records when you'd never been in that county . you'd pass easily. so those are some of the tricks. about 2001 we wrote a paper that shut that down for a while and then the waivers went up so you can keep changing things if you want, it doesn't always work.>> you've given us some idea of estimates of gang members who have military training and things like that. you talked about some of the ways they got in.how big of a problem is this really? >> i guess maybe two parts, more the military and the side. >> let me give you a little bit of history. because it is a current problem and there is a threat from people who have military training, our police officers are not trained. you saw the movie demolition man, irwin played by rob schneider, he is one of my favorite quotes on the topic, he said we are police officers and we are not trained or this violence. if you simagine somebody who's been trained to be in the military, if not a pretty sight but it's not a current problem, it's a historical problem. instance, man-made, original gangster from military trained gang members, he was appointed by governor patrick henry in the militia in the revolutionary war. that's the first war this country had, literally. he was often a suspect when crimes occurred, both in his teenage years and in his adult years but he was nonetheless appointed justice of the peace and an associate judge before. >> he turned to his life of crime, after the war he te trained as a counterfeiter and later a river pirate. >> he lived in a place temporarily called red banks kentucky, just off the cumberland, cumberland out our back door, it's on the ohio river, red bank's kentucky. he was there until the tax collectors came from pennsylvania where he had property but didn't pay taxes on it. they sold his farm and didn't have enough to compensate they came looking for him in red banks and he moved to a place called haven rock which is also on the wall or closer to the mississippi and haven rock, it's a beautiful place. i lived in southernillinois for several years and i never knew caven rock was there, it's beautiful. it's a big room, carved outof limestone. if you remember coming into the library, that will be an area, it's twice as long as that . and about as wide as , it's not quite as tall but omimagine all that and imagine a sign over the front and you're coming down in a boat that doesn't have power. >> so you been paddling or pushing or something like this and you come around the corner and you see this big round opening in the limestone and over the top of it it says will wilson's liquor vault. >> and you and a bunch of sailors are ready to park that boat. >> sam mason took his militia skills and started being a river pirate. he stole from a lot of fault, trick him into oucoming in there, given booze, find them company if you know what i mean and while he was doing that, all of his men would loop the boats. and sing or kill the people on them when they came back out or they would just go shopping. he was run out of there not long after and this was the late 1700s, early 1800s. he was run out so he headed to natchez mississippi. natchez mississippi is the beginning of what we in nashville know at the nashville trail, 400 miles of traveling that went what people had to do when they took these unpowered boats, they would go with the current. we went to survey the ohio river a few months ago and i realized there were lots blocking everything. you could do the whole tour in a boat. they didn't have locks back then, if it was just a river, that was all flowing to new orleans. so people would park their boat they are, scrap it, break it up, make firewood and they would hike or horseback or whatever back to their homes in tennessee, kentucky, ohio and indiana he became a land pirate. >> how's that for cross training? so it took some skill. >> shortly after that, that was early 1800s, a group called the house appeared, new york street gang members. i don't know if you study gangs of new york history but there were gangs in new york as early as 1800 and in the 1840s they were popular. if you've seen gangs of new york, they matched up the 1840 gangs with the 1900 gangs but these hounds were new york street gang members who join the army to fight the mexican american war. they were discharged in what was a brand-new united states territory uof california. and they were dropped off in a place called san francisco, the year before it was called jerry going which means good earth, you know what they were doing in san francisco? . >> the goldrush began like the next year and here are these guys call the house to have military training and gangster training and they were the essentially the security force that the shipowners led to when they realized that a bunch of their sailorsthat signed up to help bring stuff to the new place called san francisco with the goldrush was , the sailors would get to the port and get off the boat without helping to unload it. i don't know if you've got kids on a trip but i had to call my and say come get your luggage. come get your, just stop at grandma gave you, take that in your room, they were running to go play. sailors were the same way, hounds were hired by the businessman so they can jump up and get more ships and because there were a lot of people that needed supplies. >> the town got a little carried away when it got to their hand and they would go to the business owners and they order rounds of drinks and food and all this good stuff and say put it on the city's tab, we are not paying. we run this place. crazier than that when they became i would consider domesticterrorist extremists. they were nationalists . it might be understandable when you move from new york to california that you don't know california used to be mexican. but they were chasing after, killing and otherwise assaulting the icmexicans, chileans and other south and central americans there because it's a whole lot faster to get from mexico than it was to new york before we had planes and trains and automobiles. we had jesse and frank james, another historical example, confederate gorillas from missouri. one state over if you go the right way. they spent their time harassing and ambushing union soldiers. they robbed many banks, many stagecoaches and other sources of money opand property for several years after the war. they said they were motivated by their hatred of the union. a set was money, it wasn't business, it was political.co work for them, i'm sure. a few years ago, tj stiles was at this conference and suggested their actions since they were political in nature, they then perished. i could argue that but i'll take it. another confederate, one more local example, nathan bedford forrest, ring a bell? just down the street, he and other veterans from the civil war, they were meeting in what they saw as occupied territory. let's paint the iepicture. they were in occupied territory being led by people that they were against and i say that because that's often how gangs and other ggroups like that, they are being oppressed, marginalized there's a whole lot of sociological theories that explain that. i'm only suggesting this group known now as the clan, they were one of the most long-term domestic terrorists, they formed a similar fashion. nobody liked what they've done since then but that doesn't stop performing from being similar. my favorite, monk eastman. he was a good example of a military training game. if i was giving out awards, he would get the first one. he was a gangsters gangster, successful at everything. he was assisted by crooked politicians, many of them until he crossed paths with h the wrong person.ng some of his guys took out the wrong guy and he was considered persona non grata. in and out of prison until the age of 43 and he lied about his age so he could join the army. and go fight in world war i, where he did very well in the trenches in france. so well that he was well decorated, so well that his criminal history was expunged by the governor of new york when he returned. here's a guideline about his age, what oiwas he doing in the army? he told the recruiter he was 39, he was 43. when he went to get a medical al physical, the doctor said you started down there, walk or have you been fighting? he said i've been fighting the war in new york and he meant it. >> monkeys men after getting his record expunged essentially, went back to new york, revisited his life of crime, didn't give it up but he was nonetheless buried with full military honors because that's what you get when you are honorably discharged. >> we have one more question pending, i hope that you can see that this is a well-written book that includes a lot of interesting history. many of these things we didn't know, reading it i knew about some of these events but never knew how they were connected and that's one of the great values of the book. it's an easy read, approachable but it interweaves the history we have in this country and identifies both how people have left a gang to join the military and vice versa. left with military training to join a gang. one more question. >> this is a different historical era but it's the same general thing since you've gotten post civil war activities. in the middle ages or somewhere, i don't remember all the details but there was a private army that continued to exist after some of the nations had been fighting, the white company? they operated for decades or something like that, along. of time as a private army, i guess the national armies were brought low by the extended warfare or whatever but could you address how that ties in or relates to the sort of thing you are talking about now? >> on the fly, sure. there's a private army so you have private military contractors like we have today and they could be dangerous because they are flying a little bit under the radar of government politics obviously. >> which would be similar to some of the gang members with military training who got out and maybe similar things . but yet not undercover of law , is that what you are talking about? i'm not acquainted with the organization. >> i'm not remembering the details, this may be one reason the hundred years war was 100 years war, not sure what the context is. i just remember the name of the outfit and they operated blatantly without anybody being to take them over power them in their region of operation. >> i will learn all about them this week . >> i have another question but in the meantime if somebody would like to ask, please press the microphone. with a great example here from early history all the way to the present, i think it's a very basic question, what can we do about this? >> i got a couple suggestions il and i will tell you they are in two different places in the book. i fully i brought ghreading glasses. so i will give you two types of suggestions, one that is typical for gang members. which is okay.rry about that. so some prison systems use, and don't be alarmed i'm comparing presence with the military, it's a controlled environment where there's discipline, and yet things happen. some prison systems are using a system of treatment designed to encourage recidivism, what they call high-intensity behavioral programs. if it wwas used in the military they might start with the knowledge and the gang members are seeking to join the military which they are and instead of taking their word for it, by persisting from gang activity, the military could assign counselors to debrief the gang members and then limit their terms of enlistment. and make it a paperiodically qualifying thing about four years ago, i recommended that they take part of their, take the major gang members for the elite gang members, into consideration not only for criminal purposes if they were committing crimes but also for reenlistment purposes because there's no law that says you must reenlist every so many years. every six years or three or four, the commander can decide whether we want to keep that soldier or that airmen and if they are in a gang or hanging out with people in a gang, you could say no. it would affect if i were in charge or , it would also affect whether we give ethem a security clearance because last i checked, every time i got a security clearance, they talk to all my juvenile delinquent friends and said is he still signing around, he's not. they make sure of that and i can't imagine that not happening. >> the other part of that is treating it as a public health issue which many people do. it's typically for youth gangs but applied in the military, it might be a similar process to the high-intensity cognitive behavioral treatment. imagine for with noncriminal doctrines overseeing a gang and extremist related activity supervision. they could categorize, track the progress of gang members in coordination with many other agencies and report them to military leadership who could make their own decision. >> make sense? >> another thought, breed new personnel for gang membership with somebody who knows what they're doing. yesterday's gangs, last year, decades ago. yesterday'sthgangs leaned left and right, they wore red and blue, they were this group or that group . today's gangs are smart enough not to wear those colors because all the cops know they wear colors though they dress like everybody in here does. everybody. they say we could be having a room full of gang members, i'm sure we're not but if we are, we won't know. because they have made the transition into society to where they know how to blend in and they know how to blend in well. they can find somebody who knows what a gang member looks like an easily identified them, examine the activities of all gang members who identify their affiliations and for discharge purposes, make sure you are stop is secure because they love taking vehicles, weapons, gas masks and things of that nature so locked down as if you had people that might rip you k off. >> probably good advice. >> if there's any other questions now at the top to make your way to the microphone. >>. >> i guess i want to give you just an opportunity and to close and i think we have one more question before we try. >> i like a clarification. >>. >> are you saying that the military recruiters are not doing a thorough background check of all recruits? like they do when you are up for employment. >> requested. >> the lawyer in me says i should answer your question no, that's not what i'm saying. but i can tell you that the past several decades, there have been many instances where a, a single recruiter knew there was a gang member and put him in any way. waivers were given when they had a criminal background. maybe they didn't run the background check like they should but let me make this clear, they are the ones that do the security clearance. background checks and security to references are different. the security clearance gives you access to things that might be detrimental to our country should you know and i hold them to somebody else. >> i think a background check. >> i think it's important to the security of the country. >> it's too late if the rent. .>> i agree but i would tell you that regardless, especially since 9/11, it takes a long time to get clearance and maybe even, they have people contracted doing it, they don't have it within a year. >> i'm nottalking about a security clearance, i'm talking about a simple ground check . not me but. >> somebody like you. >> that gone beyond that age but when someone is applying for a job, and they can be a job with the job or and a different state. it can be a teacher. they have to go through a background check. >> the military does that, that level of background check but. >> but this is not limited to tell me you are applying. >> that was pre-2001. today they do a national check that i know of but with that said, there are many, many gang members who committed crimes and didn't get caught. >> and. >> you are looking for the unidentified by the system. >> rights, which is going to be a huge chunk of them. and if they're smart enough not to get caught committing crimes, they're smart enough to go there time in the army and learn military training and to include doing raids which the gangs consider home invasion, to include doing a just ask of moving an entire group of people from one point to the next, to include robbing or taking that. they learn the military skills and they didn't have a background. >> because they're that good. >> another question. >>. >> that okay, it was just another debatable issue. >> i love them. >> ii would like to add to that, i think that is part, it's a good question that adds to the strength of the facts twhich has multiple ways we could try to present because elif we a lot rely on a criminal background check that only catches the people who've been caught, to your point about having someone who can identify gang activity, would only enhance the strength of this. so the solution you've given is a multifaceted solution. we are about out of time, i would like to say i think that you will enjoy this book , that you will find it an easy read, entertaining read. one of the things i think is interesting, you can tell by carter's style of presentation, he's a storyteller. which is what part of makes an excellent ybook. i'm curious with one final thought briefly, whenyou get together with family and friends and they ask you what you are doing when you are out , once a story or just a quick two minute overview of what you do that always seems to capture their attention? >> regarding this book, i assume. i like talking about this because you may not believe this. i'm guessing at least three of you. some people don't believe there are gangs in the military for any number of reasons. i've encountered that, i didn't used to believe it and when something smacks you in and again, you can to believe it. let me put this in context. the book is found in bookstores everywhere in the nonfiction action. there's one indicator. number two, i'm not devoting my life of 25 years, it's not a life's work but i haven't been investigating it this many years because it's something we made up over a beer or cup of coffee but with that said, naysayers, i love having conversations with them. i had book signings and i'll post them on event space and facebook and things and inevitably a friend of a friend will say something along the lines of this sounds like you are knocking the military or like you are slandering the soldiers. it's legit, i get that but the reality is i've been telling the military there's gangs in the military since telling 've been civilians that fence 2007 and nothing has changed.there's been laws that have been enacted, regulations written and i don't see a noticeable change but let me read a second. i like telling the story but i think i wrote it well enough to read it. this is early 90s, we knew we had to get with the gang expert and i don't know if you realize that there are gang experts in three places when it comes to gangs in the 90s. los angeles, chicago and new york. we had crips and bloods, guess where we called? los angeles. la gang, number one, that was literally his name. hello? good afternoon, this is special agent carter smith with four campbell kentucky. may i speak with someone on the gang investigations team ? >> speaking, me. >> great, it's come to our attention that some of the criminals in our jurisdiction are affiliated with the grant gangs in your area, namely the bloods and the crips . is that so? where did you say you are calling from? >> four campbell kentucky, what's that near? just north of nashville tennessee. hang on, let me connect you with the migratory gangs the list. who shouts across the room so i can clearly be part of the handoff, a gym. there's a guy on the phone from kentucky that says he's got some bona fide california gang members in his jurisdiction, you have time to talk to him? >> lothere was a long pause in silence before i heard hello? i tried to mimic noticeable difficulty controlling his laughing, obviously. the conversation went downhill from there but here's how it went. we've got gang members, tell me about that. rattled off a couple of reports i sent to the pentagon a week before. he said sounds like you've got gang problem. there's not a real gang. let me run something by you, i don't think that's what i call him but close. one of my not yet gang members shoots another one of my not yet gang members, did i call gang homicide or should i get you to investigate west and mark we became friends. because i've been told and t look, if my military training members come to la, you will not know how to respond because you don't know how to do reverse training. these guys go in and raid places with a rifle just like this going oerget down on the ground. and your folks are saying they are trained to respond so we should be friends. >> how's that sound? >> sound educational, entertaining, all those wonderful things together. thank you very much for the book and thank you for coming today. [applause] >> there will be a book signing. >>. >> that wraps up today's odlive coverage of the southern festival of books from nashville. we are lot again tomorrow with more authors including creative writing professor jared rates exton, national book award finalist patricia bell scott and best-selling author liza monday. for a complete schedule, visit book tv.org. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. >> one common investment fraud is procurement. which involves promises of profitability and then initially delivering on those promises by seeking the money that later investors put in and usingthat to pay off the dividends to early investors. this can't last forever because eventually you run out ofpeople at the bottom . >> one of the , that's the actual form of that is very consistent but so is the mode of marketing and almost all of these types of teams, the approach is to look for some group or insiders. >> and to have someone in that group almost all of the schemes are perpetrated by individuals who can't expect to have trust because they are selling to people like them or distinct from the rest of society. so the most famous example of this is the ponzi scheme, that's why we call it a ponzi scheme, charles ponzi operated thisin boston . >> and he focused on the italian community is what he came from. >> but the earliest example i know is the scene by a woman, sarah how in the 1870s in boston and she focused on unmarried women. >> bond of trust. i'm unmarried, you're unmarried and there are brokers giving you resources that you will need to make good on my promises of wild investment return. once that then starts going, the chief marketers of the scheme are not advertising they sport them up and that is a pattern that has recurred right up till. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >>. >> hello.

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