Transcripts For CSPAN2 LIVE From The 2018 Savannah Book Fest

is behind the scenes pictures and videos. @booktv is our handle. we kick off the savanna book festival with retired air force major general robert latiff on the future of technology and war. live coverage on booktv on c-span2. >> good morning. my name is nancy leads. i'm delighted to welcome you to the 11th annual savanna book festival presented by georgia power, david and nancy cintron, that she and family, many thanks to jack and mary, the glorious venue, the trinity united methodist church. and members and individual donors who have made and continue to make saturday's events possible. 90% of revenues come from donors just like you. and and it would be very helpful today. following this presentation, robert latiff will sign festival purchased across the way. and as it empties so ushers can count available seats. please take a moment to turn off your cell phone. and we ask you to not use flash photography. during the question-and-answer portions. i will call on you and one of the ushers will bring a microphone to you. in the interest of time and to be fair to others, limit your self to one question and don't tell a story. robert latiff is with us courtesy of hugh and fran thomas. robert latiff is an adjunct faculty member of the university of notre dame, director of intelligence community programs at george mason university school of engineers, and therefore study board and intelligence community studies board in the national academy of sciences, engineering and medicine. please give a warm welcome to robert latiff. [applause] >> i think the savanna book festival for having me here. this is an awesome event. first of all, appreciate your interest in my work. the savanna morning news, a really nice review, interview she had with. as a retired military person, i have done a speeches standing in front of a group talking about a book is like talking about your kids. this is a really important topic. probably more so than it has ever been, if you read the news you hear this talk, i saw an article yesterday or the day before in one of the publications talking about drifting toward war, very much like we did for world war i. it is a frightening time and a very timely time to talk about my book. i will talk a little bit about why i wrote it, how i came to write it which is a really cool story i always like to tell. and some of the that are in it. if it isn't immediately obvious to you, i grew up in rural southeastern kentucky, never did get rid of the accent. i was a product of the sputnik era. i was all about science and technology, was interested in the space, and, strangely enough, nuclear weapons. somehow or the other, i got into the university of notre dame, never figured that one out. they let me in and it was immediately obvious to me i had no names to pay for it. the center in the army, rotc, i was going to serve my four years to get out and become a nobel prize-winning physicist. that didn't work so i stayed 32 years in the military, 6 in the army, 24 in the air force, strained for infantry, to go to vietnam. and after my phd in notre dame, stood facing 100 divisions of soviet infantry. who we are going to nuke when we come across the border and to that i commanded an army tactical nuclear weapons unit that was going to hand out nukes to the firing battalions, switch to the air force and became involved in research, development, reconnaissance, space, intelligence, nuclear weapons and all very high tech stuff. my career is all about high-tech. why did i write the book? as a young, 26-year-old army captain trying to give nuclear weapons to people caused me to about their role in war. fast-forward 20 or so years, had the opportunity, if you call it that, to be involved in reducing nuclear weapons should that ever happen. and many other things. at the fall of the berlin wall, fall of communism, about that time, we went into kuwait, kicked saddam hussein out of kuwait. you would have thought with that and the fall of communism that we had won world war iii, the way we were acting. after that we were the strongest nation on earth, the only remaining superpower and let everybody know it and that bothered me. fast forward again, 2003. that was the crux of what bothered me, the invasion of iraq. it is public knowledge that i was very concerned about that. i will get to that. i retired from the air force, went to work with the industry, began immediately thinking about all this stuff. called my friends at notre dame and said i have got some issues, can we talk about it? sure, you can develop a course for us, which i did. then now that you developed a course for is would you teach it? still today, ten years later, i am traveling back and forth to notre dame to teach our students about war and ethics and technology. i don't know if anybody watches notre dame football, but if you do through halftime they always highlight student and faculty member and my course was so popular they highlighted me on television which was kind of cool, two minutes, and that got the attention of the new york times. sam friedman, a wonderful editor of the religion section of the new york times, interviewed me. great article. and that caught the attention of random house. if you know anything about the publishing business, jonathan siegel, his authors have 6 or 7 pulitzers to their credit, probably going to disappoint this one. john was a wonderful editor who did marvelous things, was very nice to me and patient. the teams of the book, several themes. number one, war as we knew it, as i knew it, is changing. war and technology have always gone together. it is critical to soldiers. there is a big chasm between the american military and american people. you are saying really? not only that, our political leaders. some of the sub themes, there is unfettered technology innovation, has some downsides, this from a lifelong geek. we were often as i said militaristic, arrogant about our technologies and arms control is hugely important. we are mesmerized by war, we are mesmerized by technology. steel, gunpowder, stealth technology, nuclear weapons, the computer, the internet, it was not al gore who invented the internet, it was the defense advanced projects research agency. all these things encourage technology and technology encourages the military. we are seduced by it. one of my favorite pictures is in new york city when a new iphone comes out. there lines of mile-long, ask people why they are there, there is a new iphone, just because, we are seduced by it. robert oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb basically said we are seduced by it, we worried about it afterwards and marine general james mattis who used to be one of my heroes often said to his soldiers you have got to forget about technology, you have to operate on your own. not saying that anymore. we have the largest defense budget in the world, larger than the next eight countries combined and we are the largest proliferator of weapons in the world, twice as much as russia. war is different, we all know that, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, cyberwarfare, intrusion in our election systems, advanced technology is like cyber and other things, more available to more people all over the world. people worry about cyberattacks on our electric grid. we saw what happened with sony. virus somebody did, war is going to be closer to home as we have seen, others are going to have the same technologies we have. it used to be we were way ahead of people. now it is fairly obvious countries like china are beating us badly in high technology areas. machines in some form will watch for us. i worked in an organization that builds by satellites. they will be watching all the time. that is not it. everything, pretty much everything in the world now is connected to the internet so all you have to do is go on the internet and look at the data. machines are going to for us in the military and the intelligence business machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to give us the answers and it will be up to us to say yes or no. they are going to fight for us. we even today see robots on the battlefield. the robots and drones are controlled by humans now but that won't always be the case. soldiers are going to be different. i will talk a little bit about that. war is going to be vast, maybe subtle. we may not even know it is happening. it may happen in the blink of an eye. it is going to be global. so some of the technology. i actually heard the military described as a giant, armed nervous system. everything is connected to everything else. things like information technology. we are now at a point where we put billions of transistors on a tiny chip, advanced data mining, artificial intelligence, if you have seen the news the dod just asked for another $15 billion to put into things like artificial intelligence. weapons will have decisionmaking capability, we already have weapons with decision-making capability, they are defensive in nature, the patriot system, antimissile systems but more and more, offenses weapons will sneak up on decisionmaking capability. the human will always be in the loop according to the part of the fence or on the loop or watching the loop. war will be so fast that humans will become irrelevant and we may slide into a case of decisions being made by machines and not really even know it was weapons will go to a target area and take action. they might seek permission first and they might not because there is no communication. these things are good, don't get me wrong. drones and all these technologies to make our soldiers better are good. enhancements. there is a yuck factor involved in this. exoskeletons help soldiers lift things more. and airplane pilots drugs to keep them awake, talk about giving soldiers drugs to make more courageous, less fearful, feel less pain. we need to think about that and this whole area of neuroscience. this one is interesting. i talked to the advance research project about some of the women we are doing. mostly for treatment of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries. good stuff, they are able to restore function to soldiers. but you know what? they also learned they can enhance normal soldiers, make soldiers learn faster, and treat -- they have gone to the point they can identify the structure of the brain and what some thoughts our. if you can read a thought, you can write a thought. this is very scary stuff. there is an increasing concern about biological enhancements, biology, synthetic biology. if anybody has read about crisper, probably won a nobel prize. the worry, the director of national intelligence said crisper is a defense threat, and intelligence the rest. the worry is bad people create viruses that are not amenable to treatment so we worry about that. cyberwar, talk about power grids, dams, there was a case in which a man sitting in the back of an airplane was able to hack into the cockpit so hacking into airplanes and weapons is of huge concern and this is another area, the dod will be spending $12 billion next year on cyber. electromagnetic pulse weapons. anybody read the book one second after? and electromagnetic pulse, pretty bad. you can do it without a nuclear bomb. that technology is out there, being developed. hypersonic weapons, weapons at 15 to 20 times the speed of sound, no defense against. technology is moving really really fast. if you look at technology adoption curves becoming more frequently, things getting into the public much faster. even i, phd in engineering, what do you expect of the american public? they look at this technology and go got it. the problem is the us is technologically pretty illiterate when it comes to the rest of the world. this is okay in civilian life. if we don't understand how netflix gave us the recommendation to the next movie it doesn't matter. but it does matter in the military. when we are going to kill people it matters a lot if we understand what is in our weapons. we have to understand the consequences. i dedicated this book to a friend of mine, retired former navy, was in vietnam, exposed multiple times to agent orange and so we have to think before we employ these things what the consequences are. we knew what the long-term consequences were. with the against technology or what? technology is good. healthcare, everything we have done is wonderful, antibiotics. the problem with antibiotics we got used to demand now we are having a hard time trying to find ones that work because we overuse them. the food industry. we have more food than we know what to do with. a lot of drugs in our food. ai. ai is the technology eating the government. we need to understand because we don't actually know how ai works. even specialists don't know. i moved on, talk about technology, that was fun, talk about technology again, that was really fun. i was teaching the course at george mason university to a bunch of master students, one who was a chaplain, an army chaplain just come back from iraq, 16 soldiers in the unit were killed and hundreds were wounded. he talked to me about how difficult it was to treat the wounded souls of soldiers. they are people. when they go out and kill others, maybe even civilians, it bothers them a lot. talked about how important it was for soldiers to understand what is correct and what is not correct in warfare. i talked about armed conflict and he was very interested in that. and that chapter i tried to take those cool technologies we were talking about and bounced them up against the laws of war, the laws of armed conflict and say are these things right? do they satisfy the proportionality and distinction and so on and so forth. that is just so much talk which is actually important, leadership is important. i talk about some of the things we in the united states did in bombing civilian targets and massacres in vietnam and other places, then i talk about the good leadership. for instance robots. the example i use, there is this idea that humans and robots are going to fight together on the battlefield. i am sitting in a foxhole with my robot and somebody throws a grenade in. is my robot going to jump? am i going to jump on the grenade to save the robot? the courage and loyalty and camaraderie and all those things come into question when we talk about machines. enhancements, drugs, neuroscience. is that soldier operating with free will? can it make a moral decision? i don't know. we are trying to make machines more like people, trying to make people more like machines. somewhere in the middle it is going to be a mess. my editor asked me besides you, who cares about this stuff? well, that sends me on a rant in chapter 4 and my answer was unfortunately almost nobody. a few writers like myself and others but not very many people. i go on to this discussion in chapter 4 about how arrogant we are about our technologies. after the fall of the wall we were everywhere. shock and are, remember that in 2003 invasion? that didn't work out very well. the media, by the way i love the media, don't talk about fake news. media gets it wrong. they focus on the wrong things and don't focus on the important things. the internet is an awful place for people to do bad things. we are deliberately ignorant, we don't try to educate ourselves. there is a chasm. the public is just not involved. no knowledge of the military, people ask me did you ever kill anybody? no, not everybody in the military is a killer. out of sight out of mind. leaders actually use the military as a toy, their own it'll private -- back to this education thing, i read an article, remember when russia went into criteria -- crimea and then ukraine? there was a survive by harvard professors. 2000 people, what do you think the united states should do. 60% said we should go in militarily. those same 60%, when asked if they knew who -- where ukraine was, they said no. they knew nothing about the military. i would like to use the phrase the big t. most people don't realize that the us spends 3 quarters of $1 trillion a year on the military. about $250 billion of that on new weapons. they don't realize the impact of all the deployments our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines face, the psychological scars of war. have no idea how the military gets missions and what the threats are. what they do know, what they do, don't get me wrong, i appreciate it, they thank us for our service. we do halftime shows and believe me, that is wonderful but it isn't enough. we allow our politicians to employ our military. congressional research service basically pointed out in the 70 or so years since world war 2 we have deployed our military 60 times, over 60 times, almost once a year. a recent article in time magazine pointed out we have special operations forces, 143 countries. maybe all of those things are legitimate. i question whether they are or we just like to use our military. so i say we kind of disrespect our military. i wrote an article, no one has published it, we disrespect our military. we have halftime shows and other things but i say a sign of disrespect is ignoring somebody and we are ignoring them. that has to change. there has to be a national conversation. i had a novelist friend in silicon valley who actually wrote what i thought was a pretty good description of my book. we ask our fighting men and women to go into battle ever more frequently trusting that the tools we hand them are somehow vetted as the right ones, their orders are honorable and their actions are sanctions by at least a majority of the citizenry they are sworn to defend. we are talking about the human element of war and america is singularly lacking in intellectual curiosity and capacity, not just education but it's citizens will study, consider, debate and actively choose the purpose and nature of future conflicts when we put machines between us and our enemy. i think and who wrote the article quoted me in the last part, i like to end my discussions with what i think of as patriotism. anyone old enough to remember advice evenson, patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. in a forward fashion, patriotism is not going to do it anymore. we have to sit down and have a debate because this technology is coming. it is coming at us fast and it is going to present issues for the soldier. that is the one that worries me. and for our decisionmaker's. our decisionmaker's don't have the capacity to understand this stuff. we have to have a national debate about that. we ask a lot of our military and i hope this book, i hope it sells bazillion copies, i hope a lot of people will read this and enter into that debate because i think it is so important especially now. with that there is a chapter on what i think some of the things are that we could do. it is not the greatest chapter but this is a tough, tough problem. i am anxious to get some of your questions. >> if you have questions please raise your hand, and the ashes will bring the microphone forward. >> do you have any information what is going on in our embassy in cuba? >> i have gotten that several times, the short answer is i have no information at all. people were getting sick and thought it might be some sonic -- technically, that is possible. low-frequency sonic waves can vibrate your internal organs so it is conceivable. the short answer is i have no information on it. >> leaders and the military in government, if not chronologically challenged, technologically challenged, how, how are you going to make them understand because many of those familiar with technology are not in the military, how will you make the leadership understand how they can use technology to the best advantage for this country? the argument is always the military fight the last war's battles, how are we going to train military decisionmaker's to fight the battle of the future? >> i don't think it is the military decisionmakers who are the issue. the military doesn't generally speaking doesn't want to go to war. by and large most of the senior military leaders have a pretty good idea about the technology. it is the civilian leadership that is troublesome. the civilian leadership, the only way to make them listen is for the public to demand it. the public demands it, they will listen. they want to be reelected. it is a tough problem trying to explain to a political scientist how crisper work is a full's errand but trying to explain to them what the implications of it are may be something we could do. the public has to demand it. that is the only circumstance i can give you. >> thank you for writing what sounds like a wonderful book and i look forward to reading it. already really describing the failure of the people? the republicans accused the democrats of, quote, losing china when it fell to the communists in 1948, nixon spent four years in vietnam in a war he knew he couldn't win. today we are in afghanistan. there is nobody in this country who can explain our exit strategy or what victory will amount to in afghanistan, yet our politicians are terrified to tell us the truth because they know it would be unsatisfactory. one way of asking the question is is this a lost cause? leaders are terrified of their own people and for good reason. >> if i said it was a lost cause, i should have said a difficult cause. part of the problem, the biggest part of the problem is more has come frequently and it has come at no cost. we thought the vietnam war on a credit card. every conflict we have been in there have been no additional taxes. i'm not silly enough to think we could go back to a draft but it hasn't affected the american people. after 9/11 which was an awful situation, the president declared a national emergency and told the american people to go about their business. he didn't say go shopping, that is an apocryphal story, but go about your business. that is wrong. the only people affected by 9/11, beyond the families obviously, where the military. they got sent over and over. i signed orders keeping people in the military well beyond where they should have stayed. many of them went multiple times. i have no doubt some of them were killed and wounded. if it doesn't affect people they are not going to care. i don't know if that answers your question but we have to figure out a way to make it effective. maybe we won't do it so often. we will do it when it really needs to be done, i hope. >> you talk about the ethics of war, with all that is going, exponential technology, how ethics differs globally, can there really be an ethics of war? >> wonderful question. for literally millennia, especially for centuries, people have debated this topic. most, at least, advanced countries, civilized countries to follow -- otherwise war would be nothing but butchery which it was, by the way, back in the time of the greeks. so yes, i think -- i think the basis of your question if i can be so bold, groups like isis and al qaeda don't care anything about ethics. that shouldn't be what is important to us. we talk a big game about human rights. we have gone to war over human rights. if we are going to talk about human rights we have to demonstrate some aspect of human rights. civilized nations around the world signed up for things like the geneva convention and other international humanitarian laws. i think truly is a place for ethics. i don't know if that answers your question, we should do what we think is correct, not what other people do. >> upfront? >> do you believe the all volunteer military is the most effective way to staff military organizations? >> that is the question i get a lot. obviously i grew up in a time of draft. i don't think we have any other option but at all volunteer military. do i think it is the most effective way? know. i don't. but i don't have any other answers beyond perhaps having some sort of national service. the problem with the all volunteer military is if you look at the data coming increasingly it is coming from a narrower and narrower slice of the american public. it doesn't represent the entire demographic and that is worrisome to me. again, has nothing to do with the volunteer but the fact that it is all volunteer politicians have a tendency to use it, i don't want to use the term mercenary but use it more as a tool to impose their will on others and that is not quite right. short answer to your question is it is not the most effective way but short of a draft which will never happen again i don't know. >> how many aisles back there? >> this is purely technical. as an air force guy, you envision air combat, dogfighting, beyond unmanned aircraft. >> possibly in the future unmanned aircraft don't have the limitations and aircraft to, human assistances to try to keep the pilot alive. my question at some point would be what is the point? the short answer is possibly yes, technology for unmanned aircraft is getting so much better. i had students ask me once why don't we just have war between machines? my answer to that is what would be the point? at some point humans are going to die oreland is going to be taken. having machines kill one another doesn't seem to be useful. >> the gentleman in the center. >> following up on the question before, why did you say no to a draft? that is the best way to get the public tested into what politicians are doing, if everybody's son and daughter's might be affected. >> don't mistake my answer is a no. i grew up in the time of the draft and it was not without its problems. as we know, you can have draft deferment for bone spurs and a lot of people got draft deferments and it fell heavily upon a smaller subset. by and large everybody served. i don't think it is possible in the current political environment. if 9/11 wasn't an opportunity, i am not sure what would be. i do believe everyone should serve. i talk in the book about if you are not going to serve in the military at least serve in the government. if you are a citizen of the united states, russo wrote about the social contract, you have a responsibility. i would like to see the draft, never going to happen. admiral mullen, former chairman, he said what we should do is lower the number of active duty soldiers to a very low number and fill it up with reserves, the reserves would be the ones to go. that would impact families and families might say no. i didn't exactly say no to the draft, i am a realist. don't think it will happen. >> in the blue shirt. >> this is really just a broad question on the military budget, additional $80 billion or whatever it was, 3 quarters of $1 trillion a year, if we can't win with that, perhaps that. can the military spend its budget wisely and efficiently or is it just this behemoth that keeps growing? >> i was with you until they said wisely and efficiently. >> that is quickly. >> i was in the business for years. i bought weapons. i think we could -- honestly i don't think we need three quarters of $1 trillion. to be fair, much of that goes to operations, maintenance, spare parts, pay. over $200 billion go into the weapons business. i honestly think we don't get one system out onto the field until we start thinking about the next one and the other guys creating something we have to respond to. in my opinion it is too big. maybe if we looked at it very closely we would find it is exactly where it needs to be but my issue is the american people don't seem to care much about it. ask any typical person on the street what they think, you will never get the right answer. i that is sad because it is their money but a politician says we needed and they say okay, we need to go to war. nobody ever tells us how sending troops to the ukraine, how that makes us safe. you could say we are protecting nato and nato is with us. that is a long rambling answer. and did i answer it? >> i have one question that leaves us on a positive note. the military is developing neurological enhancements for soldiers, a way to use some of that technology in our schools to help our students today. >> first those types of technologies the military develops very often, almost always getting to the civilian world are developed by civilian companies and make it into the civilian world and whether they help to develop a sticky ethical question. the offer of putting brain enhancements in, having students take ritalin. everybody knows what students take ritalin. whether or not we should be enhancing people, what about the people who can't afford neurological implants. how does that affect society? you are probably on to something. those technologies will make their way into civilian life. how will they be controlled. you want to end on a positive note. our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are the best in the world, great, young people and they deserve everything they can get. [applause] >> join me again, as you exit this venue, our wonderful volunteers, accepting donations to the savannah book festival. it is because of your generosity we were able to take this festival free, please help us to continue keeping it free, thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> brian curtis wrote fields of battle. please move forward so we know how many seats are available in the back. we will begin at 10:10. >> live today from the savannah book festival. that was arthur robert latiff on the future of war and technology. it is going to be a few minutes until the next offer is ready to go at trinity united methodist church in downtown savannah. next up is author brian curtis on the only rose bowl to take place somewhere other than pasadena, california. live coverage of the savannah book festival continues shortly. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv tapes hundreds of other programs throughout the country all year long. here's a look at some of the events covering this week. monday at politics and prose bookstore in washington dc, to hear lanny davis, former special counsel for president clinton share his thoughts on the outcome of the 2016 election. on tuesday we head to roosevelt house in new york city where former white house official and cabinet secretary will examine our democracy and share his views on how to bring back trustworthy systems of government. later that night at new york university, the presentation of the ten america literary award given annually since 1963 which recognize books in a range of categories from biography or science writing to essays and poetry. on wednesday at the green light extorting brooklyn investigative journalist vegas on white nationalism in america. thursday syracuse university professor daniel thompson will be at saint and from college in new hampshire to discuss why moderates might be less likely to run for congress. later that night we are at the free library of philadelphia where rutgers professor brittany cooper will examine the power of what she calls eloquent rage and how it can be harnessed as a resource to bring about change. on friday, former clinton administration labor secretary robert reisch will be at the first parish church in cambridge, massachusetts, to talk about the economic and social cycles societies experience and their effect. that is a look at some of the events booktv will cover this week, many are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> we had three criteria. the criteria were one, the person had to be important or teach something important about the valley. and they had to have a truly interesting story. for fun i almost exclusively read fiction. i think that a narrative arc especially when talking about something as complicated as this technology and the notion of building a company to be able to take a person and tell their story was important so i needed people with interesting stories and it was important to me to have people who were not as well known. when the book opens i talk about this party i went to a long time ago. scio of a tech company with a famous celebrity ceo. this person started singing a little song, the only lyrics to the song is i did all the work, he got all the credit. and i think that innovation is a team sport and the analogy i usually use is of a baseball game where the picture has thrown a perfect game. anyone who was at that game watches in our as the first baseman steps on the bag at the last minute, the outfielders do it and the catcher is making it a perfectly calibrated call but the only thing that goes in the history book is the picture through a perfect game. anyone who is honest about how they succeeded in the valley is going to tell you it was a team effort. that was true then and it is true now. i really wanted a way to tell the story of the people who were just outside the spotlight but without whom the person in the spotlight wouldn't have been there. >> which one do you want to start with? sorry, mike. >> i will tell the story, always dangerous when the person sitting in the audience, they can jump up and correct you. i got a lot of people in this room know who mike is but as i go around to other places asking who knows, not very many people do which is always a surprise to me. when people know about the founding of apple they know about the two steves, in the garage in 1976 and what they don't know is that there was someone else who the third of apple and that was mike, the way my story came to me, we had gotten friendly after my first book which is a biography of an important friend. since i do a lot of history there were so many of these startup computer companies all over the valley, all over the country and they all had their brilliant engineers, not as brilliant, a marketing guy, not as brilliant as jobs, but what was it that made apple come up? the more i looked into it the more i realized there were a lot of people, there were a lot of people. one of those people was mike. when you look at apple in 1976 steve jobs was 21 years old, he had 17 months of business experience in his life working as a tech for atari. steve wozniak wanted to stay an engineer at hewlett-packard, he didn't want to start a company. how did those two guys hit the fortune 500. the answer is mike came in and brought with him a cadre of people from the microchip industry including jean carter who i know is here. if you look at apple, when they went public, good night, you had the president, vp of manufacturing, vp marketing, vp of sales, cfo, vp hr, several major investors, sequoia, all brought in by mike through his connections to the semi conductor industry and that to me is a story, remarkable that people didn't know that. the thing about the importance of building on what came before. how foolish would it have been for those two guys, we are going to do it ourselves because everyone else around them tried to do it themselves. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. march 10th and 11th live at the university of arizona with the tucson festival of books without her talks and call ins, this festival features ms nbc and katie torok and charlie sykes, military historian max boone, investigative journalist david johnson and many other authors. later in march, the virginia festival of the book in charlottesville and the national writers conference in brooklyn, new york. in april, we are headed to texas for the san antonio book festival and we will be live at the los angeles times festival of books. for more information on upcoming book fairs and festivals and watch previous festival coverage click the book fairs tab on our website, booktv.org. >> i am not an expert on favoritism but the effort of the book is to start a conversation about favoritism and what it is in this time and to make sure people do understand by dictionary definition there is a difference between patriotism and nationalism. patriotism is deep love of country but one key of favoritism and being a patriot is humility. .. and the danger with nationalism carried to extremes, you can have extreme economic nationalism, and also racial nationalism as an arrogant nationalism. we know this. one of the things i wanted to do with what unites us is remind people of the historical perspective that follows, that extreme economic nationalism in the 1920s led to the great depression. an aryan nationalism, racial nationalism led to adolf hitler. i'm not suggest we're at this point. i am suggesting that with the authoritarian nature of present presidency come sometimes it's only a short distance to extreme nationalism which can lead to nativism and then that can lead to tribalism. and in our great historical never before in history of mankind experiment which is the united states, that tribalism if we ever descended to tribalism, then we are through as the land of the free and the home of the brave. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. here's a a look at some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the "washington post." >> in those days until quite recently, the new drones, sort of in the last few years have changed the kind of thing that the air force thought they had at the beginning of world war ii. it's still the case there's a lot of collateral damage and that you don't know who to aim at. you can hit what you aim at but that's the current situation. back then it took them a while to realize that when they were flying high altitude, against antiaircraft fire and so forth, heavy winds, took great courage and many, many crews were killed in the course of this. they were not getting what they were aiming at. really, there was nothing much you could hit except whole sections of cities. you couldn't hit the corner of the factory as they thought they could when replying in arizona in clear weather with no wins and no at the aircraft. you didn't have that kind of accuracy at all and you were dying, you're losing your crew without hitting -- >> you had to do it during the day when there was light. >> more and more we did with the british had done for the same reasons early on, which was to fly at night or in clouds using radar which was not precise all. pretty much the same as what the british were doing flying. and using incendiaries, basically what the british had started in 1942 which was aiming at the built-up areas, mostly workers houses. and firewood spread better. or if you got too high explosive bomb, it would get something down there, whatever, people. at first our air force told the british baby killers, civilian killers. this was war crime, this was terrible. we came more and more to do that here and in japan when we discovered with the jet stream, so-called error wind which made it impossible to get anything very accurately, they decided to adopt fully the ability to cause a firestorm and was demonstrated in hamburg and princeton by the british, which is a widespread fire that simultaneously, not just sequentially, , but all at the same time by dropping a lot of incendiaries in the big pattern so that a column of air would rise very fast creating pressure in that area, bringing in wins from all around, changing the wind patterns basically. like a bellows in a fireplace or a furnace. and the temperatures would now rise to extremely high temperatures, 1200 degrees fahrenheit, 1500 degrees fahrenheit. people being asphyxiated with the loss of oxygen in shelters or as kurt vonnegut and put it, peoples bodies shrunk in shelters like gingerbread people basically. in tokyo, for example, in preston and hamburg. in tokyo where this is putting great effect on the march 9 and 10th 1945, how many people here, what i'm sure is relatively well-informed audience and not schoolkids here, how many know what i'm talking about, the night of march 9 and 10th? that's more than often. how many do not actually honestly? okay. they caused a firestorm, enormous temperatures. the asphalt on the street would be melting and burning so people came out of the shelters would be caught in the asphalt and would burn like torches. and it was the enormous wins that were caused, hurricane winds basically. i'm sorry to tell the details but i but i put in the book because i felt it had to be understood. many people reported babies being snatched out of arms of their mothers in this inferno. tokyo was crisscrossed with canals, so people who got out of the asphalt, out of the shelters, ran toward with their families into the canals to escape from the fire. but the canals were boiling, and tens of thousands boiled to death in the canals. the winds, the drafts were bouncing the aircraft almost tipping over, the b-52s. but in low altitude, thousands of feet still above the city, the aircraft, the crews had to put on their oxygen masks even though they were low to escape burning flesh which was making them sick. so as lemay who was in charge of that, curtis lemay, head of the strategic air command, told us in his book, he said it was the greatest man-made killing, death in the history of the world. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is a live coverage of the savannah book festival now continues pick you will hear from author brian curtis. he will be talked about his book that looks at the only rose bowl to ever take place outside of pasadena, california. this is live coverage on booktv. [inaudible conversations] >> good morning, book lovers. my name is nancy and i'm delighted to welcome you to the 11th annual savannah book festival, presented by georgia power, david and nancy cintron, the family foundation, and mark and pat. many thanks to jack and mary romano, our sponsors for this glorious venue, the trinity united methodist church. we would like to extend special thanks to our literary members and individual donors who have made and continue to make saturday's free festival events possible. 90% of our venue, of our revenue comes from donors just like you. thank you. we are very excited to have a savannah book festival app for your phone available this year. it's very easy to get it from the app store and there are directions in your programs. please try to download it. it will help you today. before we get started i had a couple of housekeeping notes. immediately following this presentation, brian curtis will be signing festival purchase copies of his books right across the way. if you are planning to stay for the next author presentation, please move forward to seats in the front so that we can accurately count how many spaces are available for the next group. please take a moment to turn off your cell phone, and no flash photography is allowed. for the question and answer portion, please raise your hand. i will call and you and the ushers will come and bring a microphone to you. in the interest of time and to be fair to the other attendees, please limit yourself to just one question and please don't tell a story. brian curtis is with us today courtesy of bill sickles and chris aitken, and boat and chris anders who are here with us. brian curtis is a "new york times" best-selling author of several books and has contributed to sports illustrated. curtis has served as a national reporter for cbs college sports and was nominated for two local emmys for his work as the reporter for fox sports network. please give him a warm welcome. [applause] >> thank you, nancy. good morning. how are we? i love savannah. you have great restaurants. you, every day is beautiful weather like this. [laughing] can i i just see a show of han. how many of you live in the landings? good lord tickets only part about about how phenomenal it is there but i'm truly honored to beer be in savannah to talk about one of the most impactful books for me that i've done out of my --,o tell you a quick story about rings. i don't wear a class ring. went to the university of virginia irks some men wear jewelry, some don't. i was researching this book and heard about rings. rings that are given to participants who play in the rose bowl. in particular, the 1942 rose bowl that i wrote about, players and young men from duke and oregon state were all given a rose bowl ring, signifying that they had participated in the story again. i didn't think much of it in my research until i had a military researcher work to get me the military files of a lot of these men out of the use archives in st. louis. and as i reconstructed their lives, and, unfortunately, there deaths as well, there were four men that played in this game who died on the battlefields in world war ii. what was interesting is that three of the four men when they were killed in iwo jima, places in the south pacific, the only possession on the body was the rose bowl ring from 1942. and those rings were mailed home to mom and dad, often arriving months if not years before their bodies actually made it home to america. i was relating a story to a gentleman named bill halverson, and the halverson is live up in oregon and is working on a book project researching him. his father had participated in this game and has served his country. he happened to mention to me with his father had died years earlier, he was buried with his rose bowl ring on his finger from 1942. and again this ring kept coming up in my research as i was crafting this story. i got a call about two or three weeks after meeting with mr. halverson, and he said i've got to chile a story. sure. i'm all about stories. everyone has a story. he said he met with you a few weeks ago in the lobby of the marriott hotel in downtown portland and i was telling you how my father, blessed be his memory, was born, excuse me, was buried with his rose bowl ring on. and i said yeah, you told me that story. he said well, i've got to tell you something. you got me thinking about the 1942 rose bowl and wanted to go online and buy some memorabilia for my kids and my grandkids. my children and i went online and we started googling and went on ebay and it was a rose bowl ring for sale. and it just warmed my heart as he's telling me the story that it meant so much to him that he wanted to buy this ring. then he said, we look at the ring more closely and it was dads ring. and i said, i don't understand. he said, many years ago there'd been a robbery at my parents house and unbeknownst to me one of the items taken was his rose bowl ring. so while i believe this whole time he'd he been buried with e ring on him in actuality someone had stolen the rain and that was selling it for thousands of dollars on ebay. he and his family cobbled up enough money. gone to the authorities and the authorities had either set the statute of limitations are gone, et cetera if the halverson said gather together money and bought his fathers ring back and i was back in the family possession. so this theme of rings kept coming up in my research for this book. what started out as an article for sports illustrated in the summer of 2013 ended up being "fields of battle." i thought this was a sports book but it didn't turn out that way. then i thought it was a military and war book but it really didn't turn out that way either. it really is a story of the young group of men and what sacrifice means and what service means, and what happens when you come home from war. so i was struggling to find my next book topic about four or five years ago. i'd gone about a year since writing my last book. i was reading a newsletter at the rose bowl put out and it was a little did you know fact section. it said did you know the only rose bowl game never to be played in pasadena was played in the room north carolina in 1942. as a former sports reporter and sports author i was shocked i've never come across that little-known fact. so i did what historians and researchers have done for centuries and i went to google. [laughing] and i typed in 1942 rose bowl. there wasn't a tremendous amount of research done on it but what few articles i read i was fascinated i have this granddaddy of them all game had gotten transplanted from pasadena over to durham, north carolina, and that's what started to pique my interest in this story. what i didn't know at the time that about the sports illustrated story and certainly i didn't know even during all my research is that of the 80 men who coached and participated in the game, only one is still with us today. if i'd written this book 30 or 40 years ago it probably would've been a completely different book i literally had to reconstruct a story of men's lives without the men there. without much firsthand or secondhand source knowledge. so one of the gratifying things for me in this early research process was just trying to find a family member pics i would be online sleuthing and reading obituary trying to find the name of the son or daughter, and i would finally tracked him down after two or three months. i would introduce myself on the phone and say, you know, mrs. parker, my name is brian curtis, i'm writing this book. i'd love to talk to you about your dad and world war ii and the rose bowl. and most of them would get emotional immediately and said brian, we would love to tell you the story but we don't know it. i had never talked about war, and dad never talked about the rose bowl. what we knew he played but we don't know much. as excited as i would get to track down these family members it was equally disappointed understand they could not be helpful to me. so i would get on a plane and go to oregon in the small towns of jefferson and albany and hood river and salem in the outskirts of portland, and try to collect as much information that it could from long-lost cousins or from local libraries or the archives at oregon state and similar doing the same thing at duke university where i found personal letters that were written home form the war front that probably have not been touched since you're donated to the archives. so part of this project was piecing together a military files, academic transcripts, what little newspaper stories there were about this game in 42-44, and and in coming up wia narrative. one of the blessings for me in doing this project is that i have been able to educate the families about their debt and the grandparent. i can tell them when he went to high school. i can tell them what classes they took in college, a lot of them got d's and f's. [laughing] and i was not shy about passing that information on as well. just so all the stories about how they worked hard, listen, your dad was as smart as you thought. [laughing] but i was also able for many of them to get hold of the fold military file so we knew when he enlisted in what dates they serve and what ship they shipped out on, and again it was duty for me because even though 80 or 90% information to research, i was able to pass it on to the families and give them a little bit closer to mom and dad. so really this is about building a story about a group of men who played in this now remarkable game, and ended up coincidence in the battlefield. what really hooked me on is that as did research to discover the story of charles haynes and frank parker. charles haynes played for duke university, grew up a couple blocks from campus, was an all-american wrestler and a boy scout and everybody in durham new vigor to enroll at duke. he didn't play much on a football team but he suited up for coach wallace and played in the game. shortly after that game, haynes found himself in the army. yet tried to enlist a couple of times earlier in the air force but his eyesight had prevented him from becoming a pilot. so haynes in supply solar two years from the game in 1944 and deciding in the hills of italy against the germans. it just so happens that about a month before october 1944, a few a few months before, july, he is at an intent meant while they were off the front lines and is talking just been named frank parker. frank parker happen to play in that same rose bowl game for the other side, oregon state. so here they are two years later not really knowing each other but having a connection of playing in the granddaddy of them all, so to speak. they both are leaders in the platoons and one of their jobs was to be the first up the hill. so imagine charging up a hill knowing the enemy is on the other side, you are the first leading thousands if not hundreds of men charging up a randomly numbered hill in italy. charles haynes one day in october 4, 1944 charges of the hill and as he makes progress, there's no bullets coming his way. there's no bombs. he can't believe it. he keeps going further and further your hits the apex of the hill when the germans opened fire. they rip open holes in his legs. he gets shot in the chest and it wound about the size of a softball is in his chest. bullets are flying. his fellow soldiers can't get to them to pick them up off the battlefield. so haynes is a languor, leading out to death. he says prayers for his mom. he thinks about his parents back home in durham. he says his goodbyes, and closes his eyes. it starts to rain, then it starts to snow here and our goes by, two hours, five hours, seven hours, 17 hours he lay dying in the snow and mud on the ceiling italy. until someone grabs his arm. charles, charles, wake up. wake up. charles barely opened up his eyes. he still alive at this point and who does he see idcs frank parker. frank parker, the vendor played against them on the football field two years earlier with help from another soldier picked up charles haynes bloody body, terri sewell downhill under gunfire, gets into a medical tent come he's transferred to hospital a hospital and charles makes a full recovery. frank parker after taking to the medical tent counterbalanced immediately and went back up the hill and saved other lives over the next 24 hours. charles haynes gets released, imagine almost dying on the field, and a few months later he is back on the front lines because we needed bodies, as americans in our war. frank parker and charles haynes create a friendship. they say goodbye in may of 1945 in the austrian alps. they stay in touch a little bit when they get back in the states but never laid eyes on each other. until approximately 1991. it was celebrating the 50th 50th anniversary of that rose bowl game, and the folks at oregon state wanted to recognize their only rose bowl champion. so they hosted a a banquet for whoever was still remaining and able to attend. they also invited any of their opponents who would played against them at duke. and there were just a handful of duke players that game. but one of them was charles haynes. and charles haynes said, i know we took a a good host our own reunion in a month but i can't wait to see the man who saved my life. i need to see if you still alive. charles haynes traveled from durham out to oregon, and as i write about in the introduction of the book, sure enough, he starts weeping as he looks across the room and sees the man the saved his life. four weeks later, frank parker and his wife travel to durham and the same can reunion takes place. and until their death, and then stayed in touch. charles haynes went through a couple of marriages, and his last partner, girlfriend, mailed me last year many of his last possessions, including some of the gifts that frank parker had given to charles haynes. and i wrote about these two men in this book because he are two guys, one dirt poor from corvallis, oregon, one who'd lost his father at the the age1 or 12 and a car accident, his uncle married his mother. he had to work all through high school and college just to make ends meet. here is charles haynes in the room middle upper class family, father was an executive to an american tobacco company. they both go off to war. they both killed dozens of men. they both get awarded medals for their service in action, but they come home to america and their lives couldn't have been more different. charles haynes was a war hero, opened up a restaurant, gregarious, had fun, took spanish and cooking classes at duke university, was friends with coach k, was known for walking around durham in full troop, opened a construction company, was very successful. had a couple of wives as i mentioned. frank parker moves back to oregon but stayed in italy an extra year after the war. he couldn't go home to face his lifetime sweetheart and wife. he thought it fundamentally changed as a man because of the horrors that he saw and the crimes in his eyes that he had committed. so he delayed returning home. he suffered from alcoholism most of his life. he became a fishman, never went back to complete his college education. lived his life on the sea, almost died a few times. after his wife passed away from an aneurysm, considered suicide multiple times. finally one of his eldest daughters got into a va hospital in kodiak alaska and then in portland, oregon, where for the first time after 50, 60 years he started to open up and talk about some of the demons of war. some of the other players in the game came home, severed from drug abuse and alcoholism picks some committed suicide. we talk about the greatest generation, and in my eyes they all are, but we think about tickertape parades and homecomings and these men who were really boys sent to islands in places far away struggled with this the rest of their lives. and part of "fields of battle," the book and narrative, what started as this sports book about other rose bowl went from one city to another ended up being a story about these boys going to war. but my own curiosity kept it from ending a war because i said to myself, what happened to these guys when they got home? did they become teachers? did more impact than? did football remain a piece of their life? i'm a former sports broadcaster, and for those of you who follow sports, you often hear broadcasters use war metaphors were talking about sports tickets the battle of the century. they left it all out on the battlefield. these are soldiers, and my men need to hit hard. after doing this book i realized how silly that is. because war is nothing like football. and what i learn is that these boys, as eager as some of them were to sign up at 19, 20, 21 years old, thought that war was a game. they thought the war would be just like football because the coaches would say, men, go over there and fight hard and hit start and all it took was about an hour in battle for these young boys to realize that war is nothing in common with football. now, as a side note some of the lessons these boys learned on the football field did help them in war, overcome adversity, getting knocked out and get it right back on your feet. the tough get going when toughness faces of them. and there are countless stories not only with these players but other athletes who have fought in war talking about the lessons they learn on the sports field kept them alive. so it's a triumphant story in ways. we won the war for those of you who don't know. those of you in savannah i hate to say it but the north actually won the civil war as well. the parts of the story that were great often overshadowed the sadness of not just the death, the suicide, the alcoholism, but stories like jackie who was two years old when he came over to america from japan with his mom. they settled in portland. he was raised in a public school in portland living a life in a small japanese community in downtown portland going to public school, was a great athlete, picked up the game of football, was a great basketball player, matriculate to oregon state and made the football team. everybody loved jackie. the only thing that sent jack the part was a last name and where he was born. but for all intents and purposes jack was an american. so he played sparingly throughout the 1942 season for the oregon state team and everything was going well until december 7, 1941. pearl harbor gets bombed and immediately any one of japanese ancestry was looked upon with suspect, certainly on the west coast. sweat the time that were about 42, 44 japanese ancestry students enrolled in oregon state. some the landlord kicked them out of their apartments for dorms. they were spit on. they were called names. many of them immediately withdrew from school to go back home. remember that the federal government began to very quickly in turn many japanese japaneses so they went home to sell their possessions. but jack was a college student. jack was a football player at the pacific coast conference champions. he was headed to the rose bowl picks a couple days go by and people gave jack dirty looks but all was well. oregon state is practicing getting way to get on a train on december 19 to take it across the country to durham. a few days before on a rainy day, two men in trench coats show up the practice field at oregon state and they go over to the coach and they whisper to him, and the coach says jack, jack, come here. jack jogs over, good student, good player, listens to his coach and jack introduced him to these two men who probably told him they were with the fbi, escorted off the field, told him that he's not allowed to go with his team to play in the rose bowl game. flash forward a few days later, the train station in portland, and they had a great farewell of people from all over portland. you've got to understand the magnitude of oregon state in 1942 1942 playing in the rose bowl game. this legitimized the university. this made the entire state proud. and you was there on the train platform but jack, crying, waiting as his team went away on this train trip. jack would go back home in portland or to listen to the rose bowl game on a small radio in his baritone. within months his parents were forced to close down the restaurant. jack was forced to sell all his possessions including a car. they were sent to what was an animal livestock holding area in portland, him and his family, and if you much later sent to an internment camp in the desert really of idaho where jack would spend his time. you know, jack passed away not before oregon state recognize him and the other japanese americans that were basically expelled from school and never completed if they were awarded on a raid agrees. he was given his rose bowl rainy. i was able to track down his daughter, lynn, who lives in the northwest. and so much still resentment and anger in the family for how they had been treated. and it was fascinating to get to know the family. i did my research. i promise that i would treat her and her fathers legacy the right way because i really believe that. and so the family opened up a bit to me. but flash forward to september of 2016 comment oregon state recognize the 75th anniversary team got help the university contact all these families to come back. remember i told you anyone is deceased from the game or team except for one, a duke player in louisville. but the sons and daughters came back many for the first time to oregon state. jack's daughter, grandkids and great grandkids came back. and it was probably one of the more emotional memorable nights of my life to see the embrace between the descendents of these former players and the common bond that all of them had shared together. and the duke the honored that team about a week later. of course oregon state won the game so they were much more enthralled and anxious to honor the team. jim smith is 96. he lives in louisville, kentucky, about sim sims as yol ever meet. he is a widower. mind as sharp as a type i defended jim. i now now call him and his family good friends. jim went back to duke with me in september 2016. we had the chance to talk to the duke football team to go out to practice and the honored jim on the field before the game. excuse me, at halftime of the game. but every day that went on, not just in my research but after the publication of the book, the book took on new meaning for me. how many of you in this audience served your country in some capacity wax thank you. thank you. [applause] probably many of you have a relative who served, whether afghanistan or iraq or korea or vietnam or world war ii or world war i. thank you. because families sacrifice, to come as i i learned that one of the greatest appreciations i got from this book is the respect i have for the men and women who serve our country. because what they see and what they go through is dramatically changes their lives. and so this book has made a difference for me and my life in my appreciation and is speaking to groups, seeing the eyes and faces of men mainly but women as well. because as i'm talking about what these world war ii guys went through, that veterans from vietnam and korea start to tear up, or from iraq and afghanistan, because they can kind of understand where they came from. for gentleman lost their lives who had played in the game, and something else that hit me is their lives were stopped so young. one of the gentlemen was bob mani who was killed on iwo jima, and remember doing the research and went to go find if his wife was still alive. and it went to see if his kids were still living. but, of course, he was skilled when he was just 18 or 19. there was no wife. there are no legacy children. i found a third or fourth cousin somewhere in pennsylvania who may be hurt about a guy named bob manny, but for all intents and purposes it's almost like this gentleman didn't exist. that was to some of these other men. and i've made it a point now to make my contributions to places in their memory, if only the summit continues to recognize, and that's just for out of 80. imagine the tens of thousands of men who have sacrificed their lives in all of our wars, who did not leave behind a spouse or children or grandchildren. i think we always need to keep them in mind. the parallel stories that are right about in "fields of battle" is this climactic rose bowl game and war. but at the same time these teams are playing for a football game, fdr and churchill are in d.c. planning for war. and in these little nuggets that i would pull out of my research, the oregon state can get on a train and as i write about in the book, it's got air conditioning. it's got menus. it's got beautiful white linen and silverware, things that these young boys had never seen before. and they stopped at all the small towns and they got off in chicago to stagg field to practice and stretch their legs. well, it turns out as i was doing my research the origins of the manhattan project, those scientists that were working in the early stages of all the scientific things that produce the bomb, or working in an undisclosed lab about 200 yards from where the oregon state football team was practicing in chicago. and then when they suit up for the game, both teams, and again that oregon state won a genuine first, 1942, fdr and churchill are in the white house at one of the early conferences of the war deciding where should we send her allied troops first, where are we going to attack. so it was kind of these two parallels going on that i i was following this sports journey but also our journey to a war. another little-known fact that i discovered is that pearl harbor, when it was attacked, actually to college football teams in hawaii at the time of the attack. the players from a university outside of portland, oregon, were there as was the team from san jose state university. they were there to play a round robin of games against the university of hawaii. so they are there having breakfast, , these teams get hee to board buses to go toward the island. they start seeing these bombs drop in the water and they are seeing planes overhead. and these boys turned to the waiters and waitresses and the folks working at the hotel and say, what is going on macs don't worry about it. it's just u.s. navy exercises. so they go back to eating food coming pretty shortly thereafter the smell of oil after hotel six or seven miles away stores to waver in. the japanese bombers are now spotted. word comes over the radio pretty shortly, and those men were immediately and scripted into the hawaiian police forces. they were given guns. they were given rolls of barb wire, , told to poop patrol the streets, laid barb wire on the beach is it would be weeks before most of those boys have returned to the united states. in fact, a handful of those boys never left hawaii. they served in the army or the hawaii national guard in hawaii, got married, , had children and never came home. it's these little tidbits that are learned along the way that are at least fascinating for me. two quick last ironic stories. one is wallace, the head coach at duke university. previous had won national championships at alabama. and wade during this time decided that if my boys were are going into service, so was i. so this 49-year-old football coach shocked the college football world at duke went short after the rose bowl loss, enlisted into the army, rose in the ranks, would go overseas in 1944, would participate shortly after normandy, control the 242nd artillery, the begins in the war, with a spouse himself, and at one point in the battle of the bulge in the snowy forest on the edge of belgium, he is freezing and he jumps into a foxhole to try to get some coffee. and says to these young lieutenant, vision private, may i borrow a cup of coffee? and he is freezing. the german takes office go, gives wade the jacket. gives him a cup of coffee, get some food. wade wembley was a lieutenant colonel said to the junk, what your name? he said stan checked. where are you from? well, i'm from oregon. stan had played on the oregon state rose bowl team that had lost, or had one, excuse me come against "wolf boys: two american teenagers and mexico's most dangerous drug cartel." they're in a foxhole two years later in the middle of the war. one of these other coincidences of these two teams coming together. there are more of those stories that i write about throughout the book. the game actually ended, the winning score was an unbelievable catch by a tiny little guy named jean grey from oregon state pit at the time, longus rose bowl touchdown pass in history that won the game. four years later, those same hands and arms that had caught that winning touchdown were now gone turkey a thought as a pilot in the war and after the war decided to stay in the army air force and lost both his arms in an awful train accident after the war. so this book is meaningful to me. i hope for those who get the chance to read it you can take something away about service, about sacrifice, about a unique time in our history. some of the same things for those of you who are sports fans we hear about today paying players, academics, concussions, all the same issues by the way 75, 80 years ago pics i hope you enjoy this book is much as i enjoyed the journey data wrote about, and i'm happy to take some questions. thank you. [applause] >> if you have a question would you please raise your hand. i will call on you. the actual come over in the people from c-span would love it if you're feeling comfortable standing when you give us your question. raise your hand, please. >> being a sportscaster do you have a a favorite player or a favorite team that you follow? >> you know, i can't answer that question. [laughing] >> you've got to be a yankee fan. >> i am not. [laughing] >> i'm not buying your book. >> are you a yankee fan? [laughing] that i love the yankees. i don't know what to tell you. [laughing] no. actually i'm a fan of the philadelphia eagles. [applause] i grew up in wilmington, delaware, just outside philadelphia because of the work i do i kind of backed off my allegiances from pro or college teams. i'm generally a fan of whoever is winning. [laughing] >> other questions? >> could you talk a little bit about -- >> weight. >> could you talk about the decision to cancel the rose bowl? i think a lot of the other bowls were played near their actual sites, portugal, et cetera. >> great. thank you for the question. you know, when pearl harbor got bombed a lot of folks across america wondered if the game was going to go on but rose bowl organizers had a reset the game pick oregon state and duke wanted to play. some of the men of course immediately enlisted or went off to war but we are america. we're not going to stop just because we got bombed. but slowly day by day there started build the backlash by the military against playing the game. why? why? because 50, 60,000 people in a stadium in southern california is attempting target for the japanese bombers and are still so much insecurity about it. about a week after pearl harbor i believe december 13 general dewitt who was in charge of the west coast for the u.s. military telegrams, called the governor of california and said, i request that you not play this game and not had a parade. the governor of course at the time abided by their wishes and canceled again. there were editorials in the charlotte observer and "new york times" go back and forth about whether or not we should play this game. and when is the right time to restart sports? as soon as the game was canceled and word spread, chicago raised its hand. the cotton bowl in texas, nashville come all kinds of cities said wider to play the rose bowl game here works in the end wallace wade, head coach of duke, was a very powerful coach of the time and said well, , we are in the game. why don't we just post it here in durham? quickly after the cancellation of the game it was announced that the rose bowl game would be played in durham. the tournament of roses who oversees the game tbit and official sanction. so it still counts as an official rose bowl game. there were still people in north carolina i didn't want the game to be played now they thought they would be a target for german bombers coming over. in fact, as a write about in the book they wanted to get an aerial shot of the stadium filled but before they flew a plane over, they made multiple p.a. announcements to the crowd to say look, etc a plane, it's not the germans bombing pickets actually the good guys trying to take a picture. so it's a great question because it led me to my own thoughts about 9/11, which for someone like me is the best i can recollect. i was too young when vietnam was going on and i wasn't born in paris and obviously the world wars i thought about 9/11 and the first game and that's played in the yankees played and the nfl struggled of when should we play football again. the closest i can compare it to was what about about about 75 years ago. when is the right time to play sports? right? is it there to get a country back on its feet? are sports there to serve as an unnecessary distraction, or do they take away holies and manpower and we should be focused on other things other than sports? i don't know the right answer. it's a great question. >> thank you. brian, you've written a number of books, a lot about sports, but could you answer the question of what are your favorite books that you've written, and why? >> i think, so i'd written eight. i think for me the two most impactful books because of the difference it made on me, not the difference it made on people, not how many books would sell, not what was a vessel or not, was probably this book because of my learning about service and sacrifice. and then the book i wrote five or six is ago called the legacy letters. and i had written five or six sports books up to that point and i was looking for a book that had more meaning. when 9/11 happened i was living in los angeles as a sports reporter, and always felt guilty that i couldn't do more. i wanted to go to new york. i wanted to help. i wanted to search the rubble at ground zero. all i could do was give blood in los angeles which i did do. so flash forward years later when i was looking for a meaningful book i wrote about a camp that exist for the children who lost a mom and dad in 9/11. i'd read this article and i said, that's my next book. and so i partner with an organization called tuesday's children which is still in existence in new york that was created to serve the children and the families, the widows and widowers of 9/11. and what i did was i decided to see if families would be willing to write letters to their lost loved ones on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. and the response was overwhelming. i got to know many of the families intimately pick as you can imagine there's lot of emotion even ten years after. so would be a 14-year-old girl writing a letter to the dad that she lost at such a tender age, or the two-year-old who never knew mom or dad, or the widower who still can't get over the loss of her husband that had never gone on a date, has never really been able to move on in life. so that book had a clear impact on me. it makes you want to hold your kids tighter. it gives you a better appreciation for how quickly life can disappear. so all my books, it would be this world war ii book and the 9/11 book, the legacy letters. yes, sir. >> thank you. brian, you mentioned a number of soldiers, a number of players who went on to live afterwards, but for their sake because you made a point of saying that the four who were killed never had a chance to have families, never had a chance to have children. do you remember their names? as you say -- could you say that if you can't force, please? >> thank you for sharing that. i can remember three off the top of my head, bob manny, everett smith, al hoover, and the fourth will come to me. one was killed on patrol in iwo jima. one got off a the waters outside of -- and was shot before he ever reached the shore. al hoover was a marine on haley lou, and legend had it that he died on a grenade to save some of his comrades, as i kind of piece together things i think a grenade did kill him. i'm not sure that he intentionally had jumped on a grenade. and the fourth name am going to think about because i'm embarrassed i can't remember it. [inaudible] >> that's okay. it's a great question. other questions? yes. >> my sense is that after world war ii, battlefield veterans didn't have a lot of services available to them, or today hopefully it's a lot better. is that basically true? >> it absolutely better. obviously we know some of issues going on the va today, so some people may argue it's worse. there was no such thing as ptsd, right? it was called the scars of war, or bomb trauma or things like that. so the va did exist but really it was certainly not therefore mental. it was there if you lost a limb to try to teach other use prosthetic at the point, the elementary prosthetics. i think for me i think after the gulf war we start of a different appreciation for soldiers coming home. and while our va services are not where they should be, certainly we understand better the mental costs of war than these gentlemen did. because remember, you know, imagine seeing someone's head blown off next to you. imagine seeing the horrors of war and to never ever talking about it. not to your wife, not to your kids, not to a therapist. and then expecting to come home any meter to get a job or finish school, get married and live life happily. and that to me is why so many of these gentlemen are the greatest generation. because of what they did indoor and were able to carry on and have successful lives. women we overlook played an important role of world war ii, i write about in the book, most of this was on homefront or serving as nurses. but certainly in those days we think of the little women staying at home taking care of the kids and the gardener of the men went out, and that was true for some women but a lot of women served here on the american women's federation putting together bandages, caring for the wounded when they came back, et cetera. yes, ma'am. [inaudible] >> do you speak to a lot of veterans groups and have even asked to speak to the ones who go to washington, d.c.? i'm not sure what the program is, flight for freedom. >> was i believe it's called honor flight. that's actually one of the charities i contribute to in honor of these for gentlemen. honor flight pays for the flight and the a founding member to fy back to washington to tour the world war ii memorial which if any of you have never done, do it. as far as speaking, i'll speak to any veterans group i don't care whether there are two veterans in the room or a thousand veterans in the room. so i'd never turn down an invitation to one of those groups. i've never gone to d.c. to do it. certainly if you may want to invite me, i'll can do it because i feel like that's part of my payback today. it's the least i can do for their service. any other questions? yes, ma'am. you need a microphone. [inaudible] >> i can't answer that question until you get a microphone. [laughing] >> what's your next book? [laughing] >> now i am able to answer the question. i have no idea what my next book is. [laughing] idq that came out in the fall of 2016. i took took a little time off and, frankly, i am kind of struggling. that is not an invitation for you to give me an idea. [laughing] i was joking with the bow and chris have been such a gracious host big as me what's one of the most common themes there and what it wants know what my next book is, or they got a great story to tell me to write about. which probably happens a lot of authors. i don't know. i know not going to do it for money. unless someone will pay me for it. i'm not going to do it for any other reason than i am attracted to the story, i am passionate and is going to make a difference. and if i never come across the next 50 years to one of those, i'll never write another book. but i'm only going to do it for the right reasons. [applause] >> we can have time for one more question here does anyone have another question? yes, sir. in the back. >> have you read the book the boys in the boat, and do you see, if you have, do you see the parallels between your book and that book? >> it's a great question. how many of you read boys in the boat? how many of you have read "fields of battle." [laughing] you see the problem we're having here, people? i believe they are for sale in the tent here. [laughing] fields of battle is a tremendous book. the books that laura has done, unbroken, you know, the genre of historical nonfiction of which is false in, those books kind of pave the way for publisher and commercial interest in books like this. taking what ostensibly is a sports story like rowers in the olympics almost 100 years ago but making it into much more of a cultural story, a human interest story, in no way and by comparing my book to theirs. their books are phenomenal, but yes, this all falls in the genre. the publishing world goes in cycles of book works so than ever wants to write a book in that genre, and maybe in a few years this genre of historical nonfiction related to sports may die away and maybe in 20 years it will come back again. so it just depends. and i'll take one more question. [laughing] [inaudible] >> well, one more question. i'm going to ask myself the question. and say, ryan, what is your one take away from writing this book? ryan, that's a great question. i think the take away is that everybody's life is amazing, and to me, whether you fought in war or didn't, whether you lived a very quiet life here in sava,

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