once in a while. >>r] [inaudible] >> okay. >> testing, one, two. >> and he has written several wonderful books. "in harm's way" about the singing of the indianapolis. "horse soldiers," about the first batch of american troops who went into afghanistan after 9/11 on horses. soon to be a motion picture which we might talk about a little later. and his new book, "the odyssey of echo company" which is about a subject that's been part of my life as well, the vietnam war. so i'm delighted to have a conversation about that and also about writing tonight. so doug, why don't we start, just sort of with how this idea sort of washed over you in the first place, for this book. >> thank you for the nice introduction. thank you everyone for being here this evening. the idea for the "the odyssey of echo company" came to me in afghanistan, which would have been our most recent foray into counterinsurgency in the 21st century with vietnam obviously in thevi 20th. i was standing in a a helicopter trying to go to the pakistani border to research for "horse soldiers." the gentleman in the helicopter was still in uniform and nearly 60. he is stanley parker gary, indiana. he read my first book, about the indianapolis which is a surviving story. about young men trying to make existential decisions on backdrop of war and living with the consequence of decisions. he said, would you write about vietnam some day? itt is 2005 we're flying over afghanistan, i said, i don't think, stan. ii don't think america wants to hear this story. and we're in the middle of these other two wars which we're still in the middle of. so, we met again 2011 and i began to write the book. it has been a long time coming. >> what happened in the six years that made you decide it was worth doing? we corresponded briefly. i met in colorado springs when i spoke at the air force academy. we sat at theth kitchen table ad began to tell me the story of his journey from indiana into vietnamfr and home again. of all the things he had done he never squared this circle of this experience. he had been in somalia. he had been in panama. he remained in the military when met him. he hadin taken a hiatus, but tht is where he felt that he had a life. and it just seemed -- my experience with "in harm's way," and world war ii, the american male when they reach 70 they might lighten up and loosen up. women arep way ahead of us. >> in every regard. >> yeah in every regard. world war ii when the thing happened with the great general race. we're at the great inflection point i hope the vietnam veterans, those who served, and who did not want to serve, it is our story and maybe it is time to talk. >> what i discovered researching my own book was when these men reached a certain point of feeling their own mortality is when they were ready to talk. also the modern culture seemed to, in some ways help them connect with each other right. was that an experience with you as well? that the process of doing this brought some of them together in a way that they hadn't before, able to talk? and what role did you play in that in terms of a listener? >> we had two meetings in california with a group of the, it's a platoon within 101st airborne division dispatched to vietnam in '67, fighting in '68. we met a couple times and it was reunion prompted by the book. stanley parker, when somebody would happen to him in vietnam, he would use a c ration box and scribble notes and mail it home. he wondered, this he knew was a story he might have to figure out some day and, when i met him he had had biography and some autobiography and monographs and letters. he had all of his letters. they're actually, some are in the book. this was very rich material. >> he sent those home to whom? to -- >> well, to his parents and to one of his girlfriends. >> was he sort of writing for himself or for history as much as to them? >> he was just writing what happened. >> yeah. >> hey, we're going to win this thing. >> right. >> and then, you know, two months later, you can not believe how bad it is here. so. >> set the stage for tet that is what the set up, the action of the book is. what was going on in vietnam in and out of that recon platoon? >> so the reconnaissance platoon, all of us in this room, we might be almost a platoon and 1/2, our job would be to leave thiss building, go off downtown and report back in to headquarters, hey there, is stuff going on the corner here, this looks all fine here. and if there was any problems the line company was come in to address the issue, whether it would be combat and otherwise and the recon platoon might assist. that is your job. you're kind of the eyes ears of this battalion. they alive on the lz which is a scrub by outpost the day the tet offensive commences january 1968. they'rend 19, 20, highly trained but ill-prepared for this massive attack you know real well. >> then what happens? >> everything. what happens is, this is the odyssey of echo company, because really a journey that began when stan parker enlisted in 1966, and it ended in 2014. but what happened in '68 i just always imagined the boot coming off of the helicopter on to the skidne and then stepping down io the grass, taking that first step. and that first step is for whom? is for president johnson. it is for general westmoreland. it is for everybody. it is for their fathers who fought in world war ii 21 years earlier. i mean, we want to remember these are the sons of world war ii. quickly those steps, i imagine, became the steps back home. every step forward into combat was really a step towards survival and getting back home. so what happened was, they started to fight to stay alive. >> how did you, in the larger scheme of things, where would you place the tet offensive in the vietnam war as a turning point and how does the experience of these men reflect that? >> the moment of the tet are refracted in two ways. both in the psyches of the men we see now in the library or movie ticket line, in the grocery store, it lives among them as a terrifying moment of attack throughout a country which at the same time our president and our generals were telling us we were somewhat winning. so those are disodant. for those around we saw images of the american embassy being attacked. how couldld this brilliantly-planned enemy attack happened while we're being told we're winning the war? so it become as turning point, reflex shun point to distrust even more so what the politicians are telling the soldiers. >> will surprise some people in thear audience and c-span who don't really know what the tet offensive comprised of. it was, how many thousands of north korean troops, i minority vietnamese troops coming in and what were they doing? >> well they were, so, north vietnamvi had been really bombed and suffering heavy casualties and so this had been planned by the north vietnamese leadership to really turn the tide of the war and hopefully foment insurrection among the south vietnamese to rise up and throw off the american aggressor so some 80 to 100,000 north vietnamese or vietcong fighters rise up and attack of 36, of 44 major centers. lots of smaller settlements. it would be as if today we're sitting in every county around us there was suddenly insurrection going on tomorrow morning and, strategically it didn't work. as you know they were pushed back and, excuse me, the vietcong were really seriously hurt. they had never really stood and shrugged it outset piece battle but -- slugged it out. tactically it didn't work. strategically the effect was lbj decides to ultimately not run for re-election in the aftermath and walter cronkite takes his glasses off on the broadcast and says, we may not be winning this thing. this is very shortly after the tet.o >> to write about battle it is utter chaos, right? how did you make sense out of that chaos in a way that you can convey it to readers to understand what was going on? >> i was interested in this book, putting the words, would be like a needle on some graph paper. you could just watch the emotional journey of the members of this platoon. so that doing that meant a lot of interviews. how did this make you feel? what happened next? what did you do? that is backstopped by after-action reports, letters, diaries monographs. but it has to be done on a timeline. >> yes. >> that is the reporter's job to sort that. in "horse soldiers" i had written a larger battle book which jumped around from afghanistan point of view to an american point of view, much wider lens and in this book i was really struck by the intimacy of these stories. as you know, having done these interviews that the terror reflected in so many of the men. by the way, their families and women who lived with them. this is not just about men. this is a book about people, you know who have survived something traumatic. in many ways what we're going to do today about that i think so. >> the wars end but for the soldiers they don't end and for theirth families and that is really sort of one of the major themes of your book. >> it is and i wasn't aware, i was recently speaking publicly and i had a gentleman came up, i was ceo of a big company that you might know and i never said in the boardroom the word vietnam. i heard this around the country and i have realized recently, and i'm sure you knew this before me, but vietnam seems to be our unfinished narrative. gender, race and vietnam are three things we really have trouble talking about. we talk about gender and race much more openly. >> maybe more honestly but right. >> exactly. [inaudible] me. yeah. i need the tutoring. you have it down. >> i have a wife to yell at me. [laughter] >> so, it's sad. why should a generation of men and women walk around pretending something didn't happen to them? you know, we've talked about, we can talk about the spanish civil war, korea, which we call the forgotten war, and world war ii much more easily than we can have a conversation about vietnam. it has been stunning to me. i think it's a national tragedy in a way. think of all the conversations we haven't had because everyone at the family reunion knows, there is uncle ken. wasn't he in vietnam? i don'tha know. we don't talk about that. but think of uncle ken. he is thinking about it every day. if you don't, if you don't think you're living in vietnam just because you're tooy young or yu protested theth war you're livig in vietnam, because everyone, like michael harris says in dispatches, we've all been there and we're still all there. i don't know how to change the that question what happened to us in vietnam, ends with a question mark. it is time to put a period at the end of that sentence but i don't know how to do that. the book is meant to be some typet. of if you -- so if you read this book, you won't hear loud noises like that. [laughter] but you may feel, you don't have to -- you asked me how i wrote the book and what it was like to write? i just tried to witness, just listen. the veteran wants acknowledgement. i don't think they want, i mean i am making a huge generalization, i don't think in my experience which is somewhat limited, they don't want acceptance. they don't want you to say great, you went there. or man, that was really awful you went there. what just struckl me the lack f acknowledgement they felt. that part of their life was even present or it happened. you know. and, so, i guess the book is just, maybe you slide it across the kitchen table andju say, so weren't you there? read it and it prompt as conversation so. >> i tend to agree with that. i take the issue with the notion of healing which is a very noble sentiment but i don't think that is what, i don't think that's possible in most instances but understanding is or listening is and that's, that's what i took out of this book as well, you were really there to listen and hope that the country would listen in the same way. >> uh-huh. >> but when you say the country doesn't talk about vietnam, madison certainly talked aboutdo it, and they didn't like it, right? i meaney so, there is different ways of approaching that thought. there is, what is it that you didn't want to talk about was the experience itself of battle, right? or theid effects of it on the soldiers? >> well we've talked a lot about how we feel about the war but what i tried to ask in this booksi with how the war made these guys feel. >> yeah. >> i tried to flip the mirror. unless you think that all that, what was surprising to me was the degree which we perceived most books are about the american experience in vietnam. at the same time many of the veterans don't perceive it to be that way. when that guy says to me that he can't, he is a ceo of a company and he can't even tell his closest friends he was in vietnam, that means he hasn't been able to tell his story, and if youth can't tell your story t is not your story, you know what i mean? i'm not trying to get healing either. i'm just saying is this an issue that we should deal with? because i'm not talking about -- i try to separate the war from the soldier in this. if you look at the gulf of tonken resolution, say in '64 which was a pretense to escalate the war in vietnam, let's just say we look at colin powell's address to the u.n. in 2003 about weapons of mass destruction in iraq, how are they different? but yet how many in this room have known someone who has come back from iraq and afghanistan and has a tale to telsim lar to those who came back from vietnam. we learned something. we treat those soldiers differently than we did back then. different?the war >> very similar in a lot of ways. i fighting in a place where you don't know the language or culture or don't know who is a friend or enemy. i think that vietnam didn't have any vietnam to learn that. >> right. >> from that lesson of vietnam i think many people learned to dislike a war but not the soldier who fought in the war, the government that is responsible for that. >> uh-huh. >> so stan parker is your main character. i know he is threw the whole book but, could you take the audience sort of through his evolution from gary, indiana, and then forward, how that conveys the themes of the book? >> yeah. and it's, it's almost a spiritual or emotional journey where he, as many of them began to feel when came home in '69 or a year of tour of duty, they immediately missed it. it was worst thing that happened. it was the most intense sense of brotherhood and intimacy that they ever felt. stan's journey to really go back to that feeling. he becomes an iron worker after the war and, had a very perpitetic childhood which prepared him for this life in the field and he ends up back in special forces and in the army again later in life which is when i meet him in afghanistan but he, when i met him he will want to really figure out what had happened. that is why we went back to him.am with his journey was one, he said to me, if, i talk about this and, you, and you write this, i won't be a better person but, maybe i'll understand who i am. it mean i don't expect my lifeo change but i want to know what happened. so when you ask him his journey. his journey is one of clarification. incan't, just imagine something happens to you and you can't remember it, as tim anderson said, one of the people in the book. 1968 was the most important year of my life. i don't remember any of it. >> yeah. >> when many of them came home they were, you know, i called this the forgotten generation. we think of korea as the forgotten war but in some ways vietnam, we did forget it as if this generation starts to get older will they remember g it? i'm not sure. >> going back to vietnam with soldiers is an incredibly powerful experience. tell me about undevelopedded for you and the men you went back with. >> we were -- you asked about stan's journey, when i said it was emotional or spiritual, maps arrived in the mail, grid maps, since he had been in the army he knew how to read coordinates and in march of '68 we moved here and we moved here. the experience was so chaotic i watched him at the kitchen table begin to plot the weeks of those months. oy, man, we went here. at 5:00, at 1700 hours we flew here. we came back here. it was like, watching a birth, this thing swirled in his head was being concrete on the map. >> he had never done that before. >> no. i don't think many people do. >> right. >> who will get the maps from the mapping office in d.c. and after-action report? my point is, vietnam seems to be floating like a fog in the sunstraight story in the american consciousness today. what i was watching was him put some edges around that story. so then we went back. actually knowing very concretely where we were going, needed to be. we had an amazing experience there with stan. would you mind if i read a short chapter? >> yes. please. >> thanks. this takes place in 2014. so the book begins in '66 and goes to 2014. in many ways it's, it's a a buying graph if i i hope stands for the experience after lot of people. we arrived at a small village where plan was pretty sure he february of 1968 and i will just start from there. we're19 standing on the road in front of the van and the sun is out and the air smells fraying grant and humid. it's the right kind of day for a picnic and there is something peaceful and relaxing about this sudden meeting with this man who introduces himself as mr. sin as we prepare to have our picnic. i don't know how to describe this except to say that everything that is happening seems like it is supposed to be happening. at the same time, i realize, and stan parker and tom souls who is his platoon mate, how weird it is to be in this village and meeting this fellow named mr. sin. the words that come out of our trains late tore's mouth next surprise stan parker and tom souls. he says he was here. here, when, stan wants to know. the translator on says a few more words in vietnamese, begins to speak in english and stops and returns to t mr. sin and vietnamese and body language, saying, are you sure? mr. sin nods yes. he was here february 1968 in the big battle with the american soldiers. hold on a minute, stan says. he is saying he was here against us? standpointed to the ground holding the military grid map he is carrying on the trip as we plot our movements. here? yes, says ahn. stan still doesn't believe mr. sin was here. he also looks like he was about toe cry. he looks so happy and sad at the same time. he looks like he doesn't know what to think about himself, his life or anything. he asks if he remembers the shoot-down. ask him if he remember as helicopter getting shot down? mr. sin says yes, vigorously. he adds about 3:00 in the afternoon. s stan, says you're kidding me? that is in fact about the time the helicopter he was in, picking him up after the grenade attack was shot down. it was raining then too, mr. sin adds. stand is getting more excited by moment. have him show me where he says. he hands ahn, the translator a pen who hands it to mr. sin. now the two men are closer, literally standing closer to each other. while stand could have handed mr. sin the pen himself he didn't. i think i know why. it didn't seem appropriate. some rules still needed to be followed. as stan looks on, mr. sin opens his hand, lays the palm flat, pointing up at the sky. the hand is small and calloused. the nails bearing garlands of dirt, the badge of someone who works for a living. i look at the hands. i wonder about all the places they have beened in world since february 18th, 1968. thenc objects they picked you, e things they have done in anger andd friendship. there they are the hands of the enemy, open now just before the gaze of stan parker. mr. sin begins drawing with a ball point pen on his pam. he draw as map of the village, mostly of a paddy, a dike, a water source. before mr. sin gets very far, stan can already see where the map is going. thee palm of the center is the whole map and beyond the hand's edges, beyond the village of kwan, of qang, atlantic ocean, mississippi, colorado, city of colorado springs where stan parker come to rest in his final chapters, he is laying out days, one more day to figure out what happened to him as 21-year-old from gary, indiana. now to mr. sin's hand, foursquare inches of his palm where hen written in ink the se where stan parker's helicopter crashed, all of it right there, literally in the palm of his enemy's hand. it occurs to me mr. sin is maybe only person on the planet who remembers this moment that hadn'teder stan with the -- haunted stan with the same level that stan parker has remembered it. isn't that something? so. >> that's fabulous. [applause] >> oh, thank you. >> i have so many questions on that. as a fellow author -- but what were you, what was going through your mind as you're watching that? that was like you can't ask for a scene like that? >> i was videotaping it as well, and i did make a short trailer for m the book because there was some reporting walking in the ground, walking the hill where the tet happened for them and talking with them. so, it is funny. i had the camera here. i wasn't really, i was in the moment and i was recording everything. my brother-in-law was taking stills. i wrote thatin scene, almost, tt is just the way i wrote it, because in the book, it is in present tense in many ways, it was like i said, it was that birth. it was only after now that the book has come out i realize why that was so compelling to me. if those two guys can feel that way about each other in completely unplanned manner where does that leave us? who are we to sit around and be pissed off at stan parker or mr. sin? we don't have to like it. we don't have to dislike it. they literally embraced and went on. and you're right, there may be no healing but there is just, it is like you nod, and then you keep going. and i'm convinced we'll be happier if we do that. there is too much in the world, there is too much fighting. >> that scene had some echoes what i experienced in vietnam myself. it doubled my emotion reading what you experienced as well. commonality of people trying to kill each other is now sort of embraced. >> how do we get to that moment without the shooting? you know that's, i mean, we can't answer that here but that but, isn't that what the war, i mean, isn't that the moment we're waiting for? you know, that sense of reconciliation and understanding and acceptance and, you know, you know? >> well, unfortunately my feeling is that it comes but in cycles. you can never fully resolve that that. and reach utopia. the other question was more of a writer, youd touched on it, but it takes guts to write in present tense and pull it off in a book like that. was it debate that you had with yourself and why did you decide to do it? >> well, i just heard the story that way, especially that scene. it, it seemed to work, the challenge myself the reader would never know, with horse soldiers, i negative really have been in any of my books or articles. i'm never there. this one seemed important to stan for a certain generation, kind of witnessing this happen. so, and it was kind of liberating. it was interesting for me to actually, in the edit i would have taken myself out and figure ad work around on the point of view because i'm not in it. that is probably why i stayed in the present tense t was easier for me to write that. in the horse soldiers book, it was more omniscient and more points of view. this one was, i was hoping that by getting so close and intense, that it would expand. >> so first person lends to the intimacy of it? >> yeah. it's tough. i don't know if i will do it again.f i almost prefer the third person omniscient past. >> easier. at certain points, but i think this book lended itself to it a lot of times. for those, i, were to go off the book for a minute, you might not know a it but, doug is the realy most interesting man in the world. [laughter]. i didn't know until i started studying this guy he has single best sense wikipedia ever has. you have to go through all four of them for us. is, throughout his career he has nearly drowned in cape horn, survive ad mugging by jungle revolutionaries, played basketball with george clooney, and taken acting lessons from harrison ford. so how did you drown or almost? >> that was on a silly fishing piece for a magazine. i started as a magazine writer and my brother-in-law tony and my photographer assigned to shoot the story -- >> was he your brother-in-law then? >> yeah. he still is. and the last thing i remember looking over at tony we're in a zodiac raft with these huge waves, no radio, and no life preservers and our guide sitting on the out board of the zodiac, the whole thing is filled with water, and the water is up to the spark plug. we're just going straight. and he is just hoping that we're going to hit this beach before we flip over. and i look over at tony, i said i can not, talking about fishing for brown trout, i'm never going to do something this stupid. tony is bail baling with a tee cup. we made it. ernesto beached the craft. he had a lamb under the decking. a dead one. this was the arc and we had one lamb -- ark. we had a huge fire. >> happy ending. >> so i was trying to recreate my great-great-grandfather's trip around the horn in a whaling vessel for magazine piece. that is how we ended up in northern michigan. after you sail around the world of course you want to move to northern michigan. he couldn't have moved to someplace like, wherever, hawaii >> travers city is beautiful. >> we were in the yucatan peninsula with those who were doing fund-raisers, i would call them fund-raisers. they would drag a log on the edge of theth road, stop, pay money to keep going but we wandered into one village of chumalnas, the day, the world was turning upside down. a lot of cultures have these, they're really cleansing in important moments because everything flips. you think of mardi gras and cost assumes people put on. and we happened to attach ourselves with a new zealander who was backpacking through new mexico, rather oblivious, well--meaning also a fire eater in a circus and he thought this is cool. they're drinking. they're dressed in funny costumes that i think are funny. >> you can't make this up. sorry. >> they weren't funny costumes but he was, he thought, i think he was back in the circus. soou he took a sip of his campig fuel and torched up the torch and started doing fire eating, blowing fire. the men of the village, a very conservative place, took real exception to the fact that the women began to really yell diablo, that thinking he was devil and devil's emissaries. they came at us with clucks, you may leave the village and must do so naked and pay us $100. our translator had to talk us to leave clothed. we paid the bribe and we left. so the moral is, you know, if this, young gentleman had just been more socially aware, he would have realized well, fire eating is really cool in new zealand, but don't do it there. >> i love that line about fund-raisers. my wife and i were driving or being driven through western kenya, same thing, they throw the nail boards in the road and stop you, or try to, yes. and does george clooney have a jump shot? >> oh, i beat george clooney like a rented mule. everyone knows that. in the articles you're trying to do something with the actor. >> right. >> and so i went to george's house and played basketball. yeah, i'm not any good at it. i think he let me win. >> if he wanted to play that means he thinks he's good, right? >> yeah, yeah. i did a piece for esquire, yoga with sting at the ritz. >> i missed that one. >> guess what i did? i had an hour. what do you want to do? doug, i do yoga in my hotel. i wrote a whole piece in present tense with sting doing yoga but. >> you're a pretty good actor so is all due to harrison ford? >> i said, tell me, harrison, how do you be angry on film? why would i tell you? [laughter]. and i was, whoa. people don't, actors don't really know how they do what they do but it's fascinating and he, he didn't mean any of it, but suddenly there he was, angry, and that was my lesson, so. then he was happy again and -- >> okay. enough laughter. let's get back -- >> yeah. >> when i went to vietnam we a place called the peace village in hanoi where there were the often granddaughters of north vietnamese soldiers who fought in the war with horrible mutations from agent orange. madison has a special connection to agent orange because dow chemical company came here and there was a major protest that is sort of iconic in the antiwar movement, and i know agent orange plays a role in your story too. >> uh-huh. >> it is sort of one of those lingering effects of war. tell us what happened with your folks. >> so when you go -- we went to the war remnants museum in both saigon and hanoi and so when you confront, especially in the south, are very brutal black and white photos of bombings and the birth defectsts and so on and they're hung on the museum wall. you see the germans and the french all walk through and americans observing this. it tears your heart out and takes your breath away and stan and tom looked at this wreckage. in the north, by the way, we went to that one, sue see -- museum in the toned down and message you in the south fought against us in the north and we'll remind you forever of this. so we sat on the street corner with a bucket of ice and beer and stan,r stan parker and tom souls began to stalk about the effects of agent orange in their life. it had jumped in tom's case, a generation to his grandkids and, and stan's own family there had been some maladies as well. it is lingering not only in vietnam but in america. and, it's, what can we say? i mean, i had a brother-in-law who was in that war too, just remembers being drench from above as he is flying in his helicopter. . . the va is trying to work on this. you know, i mean, i think one thing we can reflect on here is the vietnam war memorial in dc is one of the most visited memorials, i think, in the city. it's the least talked about combat narratives that we have. in the way that we have talked about it, not just geopolitical sense but my take away is we know how to look at the war but we don't have language to talk about it. >> what is the effect that your book has had on the soldiers that you write about and have you seen them since they came out and what that has been liked? >> i have, when i know i interviewed denise on the phone, he was clearly shaken by my phone call, even though he was alerted to it and was in on the fact that parker had gotten guys together and denise was willing to talk to me but it was emotionally difficult for him and he -- i sent him a copy of the book and called up and said, thank you. i've given this to my doctor and my daughters have purchased the book and this way someone will know what happened tond me. i think the message was that -- i can't really say this stuff but by putting -- by having this book, it gives the story, it is my story and it helps me explain myself to other people and i've heard thispe from others as wel, so it was still hard for them to discuss. so that seems to be a really positive outcome, you know, of the book. and finally, i don't know if you found this too, but, again, it's women, the wives or the sisters or the daughters or the granddaughters in a story like this who purchased a book like this to learn by proxy. >> husbands or fathers have not told them about it. >> yes. >> very much so. and they t suffered as much or more in trying to understand why they suffered. i'm actually dealing with that now and another subject that's comparable which is concussions for football players and the wives of those old-football players that suffered from cte and daughter who is try to understand why their loved ones is acting that way. it's a similar search for understanding that women of these men who have been put into those difficult situations are trying to understand. aes little more biography, sortf at least two really famous writers from your part of michigan, ernst and jim harrison. tell me how he inspired you and your relationship with jim. >> so jim -- jim passed away, no longer with us but he was a novelist, poet and inspirational me because as young person in upper midwest there weren't a lot of models to be a writer. i believed in mentorship and tbary snyder, the great poet has this wonderful poem when making an xe handle the form is never far from hand because you're using an axe to making the ax handle. jim became that to me at 14 at our wedding just, you know, gave me a check for 50 bucks and editor's name and i had been a poetry mfa student at the writer's workshop at the university of iowa, never had been written a word. >> how did you meet him in the first place? >> he and my father were in grade school together in michigan. one day we weren having lunch downtown in michigan and jim harrison walked in and i said, is that him, he said, yeah, we went over and talked. i begin to pester him with letters and i said, dear mr. harrison, would you kindly send you a book and when i can, i will pay for you for it. [laughter] >> i get letters like that and i answeran them. >> i'm not an f-in bookstore. >> $500 a year. [laughter] >> yeah, i was teaching which i love to do after graduate school i applied for jobs and got a teaching job in louisiana but i realized i couldn't write and teach so he gave me a break at esquire, but i want to say that i had never written any journalism, you know, i group up reading poems and going to poetry workshop and married to a wonderful person anne who is a reporter and she taught me really how to do an interview and i destructed the story before it was a popular piece. everything i needed to know about journalism is embedded in a piece of writing like that so i tell myself and terry mcdonald, one of the great american editors gave me a shot and i just went out and -- and brought this piece and he liked it, so -- >> what was it on? >> well, there were two. the men's movement and robert. in wisconsin, of course. >> there were drums? >> there were drums. [laughter] >> everyone had on black socks, yeah. [laughter] >> i will go back and read. >> jack and diane are dead. i worked hard on but i taught myself the craft of nonfiction and reporting and i could see the world that way and here we are. the books are really coming out this question of, you know, what happened to you, that's what i'm really trying to figure out. >> how did you start this fabulous writer series up in travis? >> usi finished the soldiers bok tour, it was very successful. it was a lot of fun in my hometown we filled the op air -- opera house with 700 people and a party. wow, this is a lot easier. if i keep doing this i could procrastinate. [laughter] >> you laugh. anne stanton laughed about two minutes. journalism is so much fun because you get questions and pretense so i called up elmore in detroit and he answered the phone, i invited him because i wanted to interview him on the stage ando announced the writer series. [laughter] >> had no planning or anything. >> that's great. and now you're in a new phase where you are walking a red carpet, tell me a little bit about this movie and -- and what that experience has been like in hollywood? >> the movie is called 12 strong. it is based on the book horse soldiers. >> which should be the title war soldiers, better title? in case producers are watching c-span. [laughter] >> 12 strong and away. it's about 12 people, and they are strong, and -- [laughter] >> and it's -- as you know, it takes a long time to make a movie and i'm hopeful that this is accurate, and i believe it is portrayal of what happened after 9/11. it's a story not many of us know. it's a fascinating story because actually it's a war movie but not really a war movie. there's a lot of action. if you know anything about the united states army special forces, their idea would be to walk into this room and get to do something and no one fire a shot because we'd know that cultural sensitivities, not like the new zealand, the exact opposite. this is abinstance -- an instance of tax dollars at work. you know, i k kind of get this. >> we areth just about done, you're such a beautiful writer and reader, is there another section that you would like to end with? >> sure. just -- yeah, great way to end. thank you for the chance. one thing i want to add, i don't have an answer to this question, the book ends with the question who is watching, the book begins with that question, the bookends with that question, that's the ueestion for all of us. i think writing is an act of citizenship, it's an act of moment for us to pause and say who is watching, who is responsible for this, who let this happen, did we, i don't -- and i don't have the bans but it comes in an out of the book and this surely after -- this is when we are talking about agent orange on the street and we are all sitting with our feet out andl there's a bucket of beer d it's really hot and it's been an intense day in the museums. and this is what happened. we can practically reach out and touch the thousands of motor bikes bleeding past us, the commotion is counterintuitive soothing. tom w and stan realized that the vietnamese people, the people of today couldn't be be more gracious, there's a strange disconnect with warmth on the street and horrific war of museum. we hired a tour guide, 24 year's old. for him the war that grandparents fought french and americans, even the old vietnamese forgot the animosities. facebook works time some of the time and bill clinton is an excellent american for open relations with vietnam which kick-started the economy. how are the vietnamese to cheery on the street, we corn-fed americans and feel not the slightest hint of danger, the truth is vietnamese don't seem to care if we are here, they don't seem to care that stan and tom are vietnam war veterans and probably came over here and killed somebody if their day. they don't seem to care that these americans are back. of course, to the victor goes to spoils n this case the spoils are the peace of mind. america pulled out in 1975, the last chopper lifted off in north vietnamese rolled in and the blood bath begin and we americans turned away. i think the vietnamese assimilated the pain of the violence. we go to muse yeem where the truth is hung in black and white and we are in total shock, we sit and drink beer on the street corner and try to piece it together, but maybe there's no piecing to be done. maybe i thinkec there's no sense to be made of this war that the pain that many have felt still feel it's just their problem. it's all in their heads but what nightmare isn't and what does this a make -- does this make te nightmare a fiction? what's to be done? who is watching? she's placed on a metal cart. the bags roland suspended fish grow and shrink in size depending on the movement of the cart, firstin one cold-eye dialates, opening and closing as if trying to speak, i look at it while it looks at stan parker as he sits near the street and cries. who let whatever happened to sam parker, tom and the platoon happen. who is responsible? who could have stopped it? what tfer, who could have, how do you survive something like that, time, does time heal all wounds? [applause] >> thank you. >> thank you, doug. [applause] >> thank you for being here tonight. [inaudible conversations]