i am sure you had a great morning and we have a lot more in store for you this afternoon. starting now with our panel writing about war this is something we, as a committee, but about when we put these festivals together to try to have something for everyone in writing about war is something that is very particular and certainly very relevant and in our history and current state of the country in the world. we have some amazing authors who have written about two very different wars. war in vietnam and the war in iraq. one is nonfiction one is fiction. both tell the stories of what it means to be waiting war and to be in war and i thank you will find it a very interesting afternoon. the panel today will be moderated by [inaudible], third-generation of a military family who attended west point and author of the acclaimed novel dress gray about his time there. he's written extensively about the military and with the calmness for the village voice and many other publications and currently is writing for [inaudible] magazine. covered the wars in lebanon, iraq, and afghanistan. he will be moderating this afternoon an amazing trio to be upstaged in conversation with each other in you, the audience. thank you for being here. but the conversation begin. however, remember please turn off your cell phones but no flash photography and if you want to talk about it today you can go on social media to our headstock # mr ws and when this session is finished we ask everyone to clear the theater so we can get ready for the next presentation or conversation. please come up to the stage. [applause] >> welcome. i'm [inaudible]. on the right is frances fitzgerald, born in new york city, daughter of jasmine gerald and educated at radcliffe which was then a women's college associated with harvard. i see a few out there that might remember those days. she has written over the years for the near times and esquire, rolling stone and other publications. she is the author of numerous award-winning books including her epic history of vietnam, "fire in the lake", which won a pulitzer prize, bankrupt by the national book award was recently she wrote the evangelicals, struggle to shape america which is published last year but she lives in new york. philip klay over here was born in westchester, new york, son of william and marie therese klay and was educated at dartmouth and after graduating went to candidate school, quantico, virginia and came in marine lieutenant 2005. he served in the marine until 2009 including 13 months in iraq during the same famous search. in 2014 he publishes collection of short stories "redeployment" which won the national book award for fiction. he's written for [inaudible] and contributed two essays for "the washington post" and newsweek in your times. in 2015, 2016 he was a fellow at princeton and this year he won the george w sj prize for journalism and arts and letters. he also lives in new york city. i live in sag harbor. i was happy to be invited to do this. it caused me to think about a part of the writing is done over the years and i'm proud of. i can't say i enjoyed all of it but the thing that occurred to me right off the bat was there is writing about all this other stuff and then there's writing about war. ... >> to describe the united states back in the world. i was recently reading a book by graham greene, and i found a wonderful quote aha really is appropriate -- that really is appropriate for occasion, and that was time gives poetry to battlefields. and i think writing about war and the writers that do it have the job of writing about battlefield before poetry gets there. and that makes it especially different and difficult. because they've always said that the first casualty of war is truth, the second casualty of war is language. and finding language to write about war is what the challenge really is. and one of the reasons it's so difficult is because the warmakers and the defense intellectuals like rumsfeld and, in the case of iraq, wolfowitz and the rest of 'em, they always spoke a language that was sort of incomprehensible. and incomprehensible on purpose. it was language of this kind of military intellectual speak and so-called diplomacy and so forth. and really what they were doing was speaking many a way that you couldn't -- in a way aha you couldn't understand because it leaves the people that make war and that order wars free to go and do can whatever the hell they want to do and get away with it. because the fact is if you can't describe it, if you can't find words for it, it sort of doesn't happen. it's like the tree that fell in the forest that nobody was there to witness. i'll give you a good example from iraq when i was over there in 2003. rumsfeld had just declared that there was no insurgency. so i looked around, and there were all these dead bodies that wore american uniforms, but there was no enemy. so how do you write about a situation or how -- is it a war that you're writing about if you've got dead bodies but no enemy? i mean, these are the kinds of problems that you confront when you write about wars especially in the, in the modern times. frankie? >> well, it's a hard act to follow lucian -- [inaudible conversations] >> excuse me. forgot. i was saying lucian truscott is a hard act to poll always, but -- to follow always. but i think he's completely right. war is, first of all, totally consuming to the point you simply, rest of the world dissolves behind it. and at the same time, extremely difficult to get a purchase on if you're somebody like me who had no military training at all and wouldn't know one end of a rifle from another. but the issue really is language, and -- illustrated by rather horrifying tales. a couple of weeks after i was in vietnam for the first time and had only seen saigon and the pleasant side of it, and, you know, i'd been to somebody's birthday party on the roof of the carabell hotel where there were roses and campaign and -- champagne, and, you know, you would hear booms in the background. it was somebody mortaring somebody else, but you never worried about it somehow. or people didn't. and i was, went with these friends, new friends, up to quinn yan, and a big ballot had been going on. -- battle had been going on. it was an operation to clear nlf and north vietnamese out of province. and one of my friends went to the military hospital to see a friend of his, militarying with the vietnamese, the arvin military. and i decided to go to the civilian hospital. and i was met there by a doctor, an american doctor who was something called from operation hope. and he, they were these doctors who gave their time for six weeks to, you know, two months or so just to go and serve in the war. and he was, i would say, hysterical. i had never seen a man, but particularly not a doctor, quite as crazed as he was. and he took me around, and i began to understand why. i mean, you know, there were virtually no beds, there were no nurses, people in the hallways with entirely burned by napalm or white phosphorous. swollen bodies not going to last. there was a -- he pointed to a dog that was in the courtyard, and he said, you know, you realize that it's carrying a human leg. and so he was absolutely agitated like that. and then i went, then i put my head into one, into a door somehow. and it was, turned out to be an operating theater. and the new zealand crew there doing operations. and they said come many in, come in, come in, including the surgeon. they didn't seem to have any surgical, you know, gloves on them or anything like that, and i certainly didn't. i'd just come in from the dust and the filth in field. and come in, come in, and they started chatting about what are you doing the here, you know, so on. and i thought, you know, they were trying to get a bullet out of this woman's body. and i thought, you know, please, you know, pay attention -- [laughter] don't talk to me anymore. and one of the nurses finally looked under the sheet and said, gee whiz, it's my aunt. [laughter] and i thought, you know, between the two groups of people, this incredibly joke item -- jokey new zealand team and this completely crazed american, you know, how do you write about this? i mean, it was -- both things were totally true. i mean, it was just completely crazy and at the same time completely so awful. and i couldn't even think at the time what had been causing these casualty the but, of course, it was the air war. it was the american air war that was doing most of it. that's how the napalm and the c4 and so forth got there, or ld be other long-range weapons. and i thought about this for a long time, and i couldn't decide how to write about it. i mean, which tone do you take? what language do you use to describe something that you've never remotely seen before in your life? are you going to sound hysterical yourself? are you going to sound, if you ache the other thing, are you going to sound hard-hearted or what, you know? so i'm going to stop there because that's just one example. >> you return to the sanity of that scene, i remember something that the journalist john zack once said about michael heir, and the thing that he -- michael hare, and the thing he admired was he said, you know, thinking you go out, you're a journalist, you get the facts, you compile them into some sort of rational order, and hare allowed himself to bo insane. >> yes. >> you could see in the prose and the experience of actually going nutty, of being exhausted, of nothing making sense was part of that experience. you mentioned about the -- [laughter] sort of official language, right? and i think, you know, one of the things with that that insurgency that didn't apparently exist but was somehow killing people, you know, we americans, we love to -- we love violent solutions to the complex problems. but then we have -- [laughter] very little patience, right? and i think that, you know, you always see every presidential election a bunch of people will go up and say, you know, i think we need more money for our military. and i don't know why we're spending so much on foreign aid, you know? [laughter] >> yeah. >> it's, like, it's another tool of u.s. power, you idiots. nobody in the military is like, i like bullets, those are cool. why are we spending so much money on gas, you know? that's lame. [laughter] we only do one thing that looks cool on film. and then we kind of pretend that the other things don't exist. and when i was, i'd been out of the military for a while, i was writing about it, i did ap an event in washington, d.c. this was in obama's second term. and this was around the time where, you know, obama had been elected saying he was going to pull out of wars, had pulled troops out of iraq only then have the rise of isis and, you know, isis took mosul and was pushing into kurdish territory, and so the obama administration was ramping up purely mill air aid. and they were introducing more and more people on the ground, special operators. but they always kept saying, you know, we're not putting boots on the ground. and a buddy of mine was, yeah, apparently special operators wear combat slippers. of. [laughter] and then, you know, the press secretary was asked, you know, if we had troops in combat. well, we're not sending troops into combat, though on occasion there may be troops -- can you know, trying to say how do we describe the fact that it is true that there have been people who have engaged in combat without saying they've been in combat. and so during this period, we're introduced, and this meeting of congressmen and a couple people, and we were talking about veteran transition. and susan rice said, you know, very important, this subject, you know, in our administration. and, by the way, the audience was a lot of military folks and about a does then severely injured -- dozen severely injured troops; guys missing legs, you know, guys who had been burned all over their body, missing ears and noses and such. she says, and one of our proudest accomplishments in the obama administration is ending both wars. and somebody in the audience went -- [laughter] and i was looking around, and there were no tv cameras, and i thought are you, are you lying to us? or are you lying to yourself? and then a couple weeks later president obama said much same thing at a fundraiser. so, you know, we like to, we like to try and solve complex problems by killing people. we certainly love stories of raids and, you know, american sniper is a movie that you can watch and even children in that movie are actively engaged in trying to kill americans. apparently, iraq is a country with no civilians. and so it's very fun if you think about war in that context. you can just think about killing bad guys. and everything else disappears. >> you know, i forgot to do one thing when i came here, and that was to bring the book scoop. scoop, every time i've been to a war starting in lebanon and then afterwards, i've taken that book because scoop is the perfect book about writing about war. because what happens, everything that's said to happen in scoop isn't happening. they say that, oh, well, there's fighting going on over there. you go there and there's no nighting. but everything that's -- no fighting. but everything that's happening isn't happening, and that's what you're describing. you're describing this -- well, there's really two things going on here. you were describing an out of body experience, and you were describe thing being on another planet. [laughter] and it's really a combination of the two, an out of body experience on another planet is what's being -- [laughter] what being at war is. i remember when i was in iraq, i was out in talafar which is an outlaw town, and there's a lot of fighting out there. and i hadn't had any hot food for a while. i'd been on the border of syria in a little, teeny base camp. i flew back and went to this mess hall to have breakfast, and i loaded up this tray, put it on a table, and many front of me was a flat -- in front of me was a flat careen is tv the. -- screen tv. most of them showing espn, but this one was showing c-span for some god forsaken reason. [laughter] a bunch of guys carrying rifles, very dirty, came up and put their trays down because the tv was on and started eating. i looked up there, and there was a guy on a stage like this in an auditorium like this full of people in suits, and he was talking about the strategic footprint, the derivation thereof, blah, blah, finally, the sergeant next to me turns to me and says, sir, do you know who that motherfucker is? [laughter] and i said, yeah, i do, that's douglas feist, the guy who sent you over here. and he picked up a piece of toast with jelly on it and threw it and hit the e screen. [laughter] the other guy sitting next to him said, that mother-- they all started throwing eggs and stuff. the screen was just covered with food. and feist is up there talking to this auditorium pull of preppies at the american enterprise institute, and these guys -- who were at the war -- were throwing food at him. that was an out of body experience. [laughter] i would recommend scoop to anybody who wants to learn how to write about war. because it'll tell you all you need to know about covering stuff that's not happening and how to find the stuff that is happening. >> well, the other thing is that probably the best book about the vietnam war was written before it happened. and that's -- >> the quiet american? >> graham greene. >> yeah. >> yes, the quiet american. it's -- everything's there. the vietnamese, the american. it's a british character, but it's really the french. you don't really have to know anything else. but, actually, the problem was you do, if you're a reporter, you have to. you were describing it, lucian, as going into a room and having to describe all the furniture in the room. well, the furniture is changing all the time too. but, so as a reporter, you really have to, you know, have your examples and get them right and know what you're talking about. and that's really very hard in itself, particularly when people are, either don't know themselves or are lying to you. so you kind of have to loll around until you figure out what the sort of outlines of it are, where the corners of the rooms are. and then to try and write about it is the second hard thing once you've figured out where the lines are. and it can be done in so many ways too. that's why i love redeployment, because it's a series of short stories, and so you're not bound by one tone or one set of languages. and it's very helpful. >> it was important to me to have, you know -- i didn't want to go -- when i came back from iraq, i didn't come back like, okay, now i understand what's going on in iraq. i came back and it was the like, what the hell was that? you know, like, not necessarily things i'd experienced, but also things people i knew had gone through. and, you know, because you, you go to war with all these stories about war that you've got kind of rumbling around in your head through the culture and whatever you've been reading, and then you go and experience things that don't necessarily match up to that. and then you go back to the stories that even's telling about war, right? and sometimes that they're projecting on to, you know, whatever you want to say. finish so, you know, i wanted to have 12 guys who if you got them in a room, they wouldn't agree about the war, they served at different times doing different jobs. the pieces wouldn't evenly match up. because that seemed to be a more honest way of talking about the experience than, you know, from the the inside than trying to have some sort of cohesive, authoritative depiction of what the thing was. that's, you know, that's the job of -- [laughter] people -- i was just trying to burrow deep into some very confused skulls that happened to resemble might be. [laughter] -- resemble mine. >> i agree, and i think to talk about the actual writing thing and what reporters face is this whole idead are that you're an alien in this world, especially reporters who weren't in the military. you were in the the military, i was in the military, so it wasn't a foreign war to me. but i still didn't understand the acronyms and all this kind of mysterious speak. and as i said before, one of the reasons for all that mysterious speak is to keep it secret from you. and getting through it is a difficult thing. and what i found when i got over there was you just open your eyes. you don't even really have to ask questions. i had one question that i asked of every guy i saw in iraq, and that was where the hell is the electronic battlefield? i had heard all of this stuff about the electronic battlefield, and i got over there, and i didn't want see it. so all these guys are going, i haven't seen it either, sir, you know? hey, jim, where's the electronic battlefield? and i looked around. what they were telling everybody back in the united states, all you guys were looking at tv, it was all the electronic battlefield. generals were standing up in front of flat screen tvs, and they're showing shit, you know, from a jet flying over and booms and all that kind of stuff, you know? what was going on over there was they were fighting a war with the same weapons they used in vietnam, the m-16, the m-60 machine gun, the .81 millimeter mortar. the humvee was just a jeep. and i looked at the other side, and the other side had the same weapons that that they had in vietnam. >> they had older weapons. i knew a chief ward officer, a gunner, gunner walker, who had a collection of weapons the that they'd, you know, captured, and they had everything from, like, sten guns to an m-1goran, old technology of war. >> yeah. and they were -- but we were fighting. >> yeah. >> howitzers that they used in vietnam. they were driving humvees that were made in 1980 in 2003. >> some of the helicopters, you get 'em, they'd shake, and oil would fall on you. they're like, is okay? they're like, no, it's bad if it's not falling on you. [laughter] if it's not, you need to let us know. >> when lucian told me that- in an e-mail, i couldn't believe it. i could believe the facts, certainly, but what i couldn't believe was that i remember has ever written that. it was exactly same weapons on american side that was used many vietnam. no one i remember ever wrote that, and i think i would have remembered if i had read it. >> all you had to do was open your eyes and look at it. i mean, an m-16 is an m-16. i fired the first m-16 i fired many 1965. so a 1965 weapon was being used in 2014. the m-4 is just an m-16 with a different stock. and you could get this information just with your eyeballs. and, i mean, i'll give you another good example. when i flew into iraq, i flew in around midnight and got there. it was pitch black, landed many baghdad at the airport, and they said, well, you can stay in that building over there. i went in this building and got a room on the sixth floor. it was some saddam building. and i woke up in the morning so i could see around me. i couldn't see a thing at night. and i looked out the window, and i saw vietnam. i was in middle of iraq, and i looked out there, and there was a gigantic vietnam base camp. tents and lines of tanks and lines of front loaders and lines of bulldozers, guys walking around on gravel walks and all that kind of stuff. and i just looked and i said, you're doing the same thing all over again. i was there for the first day. so i turn around to this first lieutenant that was standing behind me, and i said, hey, lieutenant, that's vietnam out there. and he said, yep. and i said, we're fucked, aren't we? and he said, yep. [laughter] and i had story. i mean, that was the story. we were making the same mistake all over again, and visually you could see it. you didn't have to ask a single person a single question, and you were right there. >> true. i -- david halverstan, i remember, said, well, you know, we're doing it again. it's like punching your fist into a hornets' nest. and, indeed, it was. i don't think there's any reporter that had been to vietnam that didn't understand this. but at the same time, nobody did it seem in the congress. there were some, there were some, but, you know, not too many. and certainly, nobody in the administration. it was very extraordinary. >> well, if you're going to sell a war, you don't want to tell people it's probably going to take, you know, a decade plus. [laughter] so you have to convince yourself paris that it's going to take -- first that it's going to the take six weeks. six days, six weeks, probably not six months. >> yeah. and it'll be free. [laughter] that was the amazing thing that i saw i was that, you know, this war is going to the pay for itself. and i don't think that, first of all, i don't think any war has ever paid for itself. but i -- >> you know, when donald trump was campaigning for president, i had the opportunity to ask him a question at a veterans forum where veterans were asking hillary clinton and then-candidate trump questions. you know, my question was pretty simple at time. he said he had a secret plan to defeat isis. do you remember that? still around. [laughter] he's just, you know, he's just holding it for right before the midterms. [laughter] and my question was fairly simple. you know, i pointed out that over past decade plus we'd spent a lot of american lives, blood and treasure, securing areas, bringing down violence in pretty far-flung regions only to see, you know, insurgent forces move back in the minute that we leave, you know? i know marines who spent time in san gen province. there's one platoon that suffered like a 50% casualty rate, right? injured as well as killed. brought down the violence, you know, within a couple -- the leave, within a couple seasons that region is an open space for the taliban. i said, you know, supposing that you do have a plan and supposing we do defeat isis and other groups, you know, what's your long-term plan to insure that they don't come back? which, to me, seemed like a fairly reasonable question this long into two wars. and he gave -- it was a little bit rambling of a response. [laughter] mainly criticizing obama. and then he said, well, you know, we should have taken the oil. we should take the oil. so the dream of wars that a pay for themselves is still alive. >> i think that wars -- one of the things i think you have to do if you're a writer to to understand a war is to boil it down and sort of understand what's happening in front of you. and wars are really in large measure at sort of essence about moving men, moving troops, moving people. and where people move and how they move really says a lot about what the war is and ultimately whether or not you're winning it. i'll give you a good example. in world war ii, i come from an army family. my grandmother was a general in the war -- my grandfather was a general in the war. and they moved men, they moved individuals and bodies in two directions, in a straight line from, in that case, north africa to berlin, a straight line. and the other movement, of course, that happened was from vertical to the horizontal to under the ground. and that was the way that war was fought. since then we've been in these wars where the bodies move in a circle. you get a base camp, and you sit in the base camp, and then you send guys out during the day or at night in a circle on a patrol. they go out and then they come back and they come back around. and they go in a circle, in a sense, where they're in the united states, and they go over to iraq or afghanistan, and they stay for a while, and then they come back. so you can look at the wars just physically with your eyes and by watching what happens to bodies and see what's happening in the war and which wars we win and which wars we don't. >> i get -- my quest was, in vietnam, was to try and understand the really unknown subject, the vietnamese. and, you know, people would, you know, in the embassy would admit to you that they didn't understand them. i mean, it wasn't just -- i mean, a lot of them spoke vietnamese. it didn't matter. they just -- it was a subject which really didn't come up very much. and nor did losing. [laughter] this was the real difference with john paul vann, i don't know if you've ever heard of him, but there's a great biography of him. at this point in his life, he was, he'd actually been thrown out of army because he'd been so obstreperous with the command. he was working as a sort of quasi-civilian. in any case, he said -- his big question to me is why viet cong were always very strong the province right next to saigon, 16 miles from saigon. he said, you know, why did the arvin keep getting defeated there. it was a question that dan ellsberg took like a piece of string and started pulling at the string. and he would find one answer after another. and everything he pulled came down vietnamese politics. that was the end. that was the end of piece of string. >> you know, there was a soviet journalist talking about the soviet war many afghanistan, wrote a wonderful book called "the hidden war." and he says, you know, experienced travelers will tell you to get lost in a country. that's the way you come to know it. but in afghanistan we couldn't even to that. we'd stare out at these villages through 8 inches of bulletproof glass. and i read that in iraq after coming back from a convoy which i'd stared out at iraqis through several inches of bulletproof glass. and it's always -- i mean, this is the moral force, you know, the things you can't quantify and more, the opinions and feelings of the people amongst whom you're fighting. which is one of the reasons why, you know, it annoys me to see this view of wars where we're, you know, we've got special operators, and we're conducting raids, and it's just about our guys and then the enemy. because the real important thing is the societies where we're fighting these wars and what happens in those societies. and this is, by the way, something that our enemy knew very well. when i was in iraq in anbar problems, we start thed to have a lot of success. is and one of the reasons is because various of the tribes in anbar at the time banded together starting in ramadi. they were feeling threatened by isis not just because isis occasionally killed them and they were brutal, but also because eye us was starting to gain further control of the black markets and smuggling routes, and they figure if they allied with the americans, they'd have a big hammer in which to slam isis, the islamic state at the time. so we start going through ramadi and bring kind of, lowering the violence in ramadi and then fallujah and these other places. and, you know, we think that we are winning the war. at the time the islamic state was putting out a strategy for fighting back. and the slogan for the strategy was, this was in 2007, was nine bullets for the apostate, one for the crusader, right? nine bullets for the sunni sheikhs and sunni tribesmen who are allying against us, only one for the americans, right? and so even as we were bringing all these gains and sort of setting up these kind of local sunni militias to hold relatively fragile peace, the islamic state was preparing the groundwork and the strategy by which they would eventually come back which is what happened when after 2010 the shia prime minister started attacking sunni politicians, and they were able to woo all the tribes back to their side. and all the gains we had went like that. >> well, i think that we've battled on here long enough. [laughter] i think it's time we'd be happy to take questions from the audience. >> [inaudible] >> is there a mic? [inaudible conversations] >> hold the mic very close to your mouth when you talk -- [inaudible conversations] >> sorry about that. >> oh, i think he's first, and then you'll be concern. concern -- you'll be -- >> this question is for fran access. your name is frances, right? >> yes. >> of all the reporters and correspondents that went to vietnam, you seem to be, certainly to my knowledge, the only one that managed to dig the deep must have to understand -- deep enough to understand the culture of vietnamese. my question to you is what was it about you that made you able to do that, and how much about vietnam did you know before you went there? did you learn it all on the job? >> very good question, because i think probably reading is key to most things. but i learned most of it when i returned. i learned all the questions while i was there. i didn't learn the answers until i started reading seriously and reading the french, mainly french anthropologists and that kind of thing. and so suddenly things began to make sense to me and, that didn't before. so gradually these questions that i'd kept bringing up were slowly answered. and i could see, i could see things that i never saw before. for example, i came back at one point -- i think this was in 197 3 -- and there was an enormous series of new buddhist temples many saigon. and i suddenly knew what this was about. it was that the rich people felt guilty about -- and they, and they didn't like their circumstances of, you know, foreigners being still in control. but they felt guilty, and they felt they had to, that they had to give a gift to buddha. and, therefore, clean their consciences by doing this. but instead it was just, it was this new landscape that was part of their, of this feeling of theirs. that's all. >> what type of -- [inaudible] is being given to marines that have fought in afghanistan and iraq over long periods of time when they get out of the service? >> so question about assistance for marines when they get out of the service. in many ways, we're in a much better place. i think we know a lot more now about, certainly, mental health issues and the kind of variety of complicated problems that are associated with returning home. i think there's still, you know, there's still a lot more to go. and often times, you know, we've heard the much-publicized issues with the veterans administration, and there are some kind of public -- private sector organizations that help out. i think one of the things that is very important for a lot of people getting out beyond strictly medical care is, i mean, really a sense of community and purpose as well. that for, you know, when you're in the military, you have a mission, you have a community, you have a set of virtues you're supposed to embody, right? samuel huntington once said if modern man will find his monastery, he'll find it in the military, right? many many ways -- in many ways, that's true. the marines have their own saints, right? chesty puller, sheddly butler, you forget about his communist-leaning later years, dan daley and, you know, all the meldal of honor recipients and so on. and so you kind of know what you're supposed to be. and even if you're the, even if you're the sort of marine or soldier who's like, fuc the corps -- fuck the corps -- oh, did i just curse on c-span? [laughter] we were talking about the language of war. [laughter] and that particular word's a very important word -- [laughter] [applause] >> in fact, can i stop you? it's so important that i testified at a trial of a banned book which had this bad language in it -- >> yeah. >> -- because it was about war, and i finally said to the judge and the jury, you know, i remember a guy was cleaning his weapon, and he construe an entire sentence using only that word. [laughter] >> you know, the thing about it is you have, a lot of times people complain about language in the book. and some of the stuff in the book is pretty raw, right? but, look, the things that happen in war are obscene, right? people -- friends being killed, people dying, seeing injured civilian, right? being screwed over by the military in some cases, right? all these things are obscene, and you're going to put 20-year-old, 21-year-olds, you know, men and women into that situation. and if they're going to seek to pull out of them the language that is adequate to expressing their experiences, they are going to come up with the rawest and filthiest and sometimes the funniest language that you've ever heard. and if you're reading about war and at the level of just the language it doesn't make you squirm, you're reading b.s. >> yeah, i remember one night i went out on a patrol in iraq, and there budget anything happening -- there wasn't anything happening. we ended up standing around. these guys were all using that word. i said i've got something for you guys, let's see who can come up with the longest sentence using that word the most times. we did it for the next week. [laughter] >> yeah. >> guys were, like, studying and taking notebooks and -- because i said the sentence has to say something, it's got to go from here to there, it's got to have a verb and an object, you know? that sort of thing. [laughter] but the challenge is use that word as many times as you can. i don't know, some guy came up with one that actually made sense 27 times or something. [laughter] it was just wonderful. >> we've got another question -- >> let me just very quickly answer that, finish that. even if you're a guy who's, like, screw the corps? that's an identity. you come out of the civilian world, and you don't have that, and you need to rebuild your tribe, rebuild your sense of community and reconnect yourself to a lot of the things that were actually kind of great and beautiful about being in the military in spite of all the insanity of it. and so i think that that and the things that veterans do, the sort of charitable organizations like team rubicon which has veterans doing disaster relief and that sort of thing is designed to fit that need. but i think that is one aspect of coming home and reconnecting with civilian populations that's really important. yeah, sorry. >> another question? >> is the lady over here as well -- >> can you speak a little bit about the language during war, all the wars you've talked about and even before with regard to the enemy? i end mean, it seems that soldiers need to create a psychic distance between themselves and the enemy in order to do what you need to do. and certainly, these words and names seep into the culture broadly. how does that evolve, and then how do you take that back when you come home, if you do? pleasure. >> i agree, you know, it was -- i bet they're the same words, they certainly were the same words that were in korea and perhaps even in parts of the pacific war as this vietnam. gook. >> yeah. >> lineage, you know? it's practically in the old english dictionary. [laughter] and the new one was charlie. because of viet cong. and charlie was rather, you know are, nice. [laughter] >> i think, i think that question almost answers itself because what soldiers do in war is kill people. and you don't want to think of the person that you're killing as somebody who's got a wife and a kid and all that stuff. you want to think of them as a thing or whatever. so soldiers come up with words words -- haji in iraq -- to use with respect to the enemy. and then in world war ii, you know, there was nazis but bosch and all that sort of thing. i think it's absolutely and completely natural that that happens, because what you're trying to do is put those people in the ground. >> yeah. >> another question? >> [inaudible] i don't recall -- [inaudible] >> just put it close to your mouth. >> just stunned me, i don't recall this disgusting attribute to the enemy in homer and virgil, so i'll just make a comment. that seems to be rather new in western civilization. but i wanted to say something to phil. thank you, by the way, for glorious book. the first story about soldier returning home to his dog reminded me of -- [inaudible] and i started to cry. so thank you very much. but i had something prepared much before this, but you've been circling it now. phil, i don't recall what i've been reading since the times story and c.j. shivers' book and the review of shivers' book. the belittling of leadership that came from the august article in the times, the book and the reviews that i was going to quote but i don't want to bother the audience. i read your book, the paper when it first came out. i don't recall, and i could be wrong, much criticism of the generals who get medals, i understand, because grunts die. but you've been circling around it afternoon. this afternoon. is there anything like that in the book that the i can remember? >> in my book? >> yeah. criticism of higher-ups. >> i think the story that's most about policy is there's a story about a foreign service agent trying to navigate the bureaucracy of war and trying to connect the sort of overall policy with what actually people want on the ground. my book is, you know, my nonfiction has dealt more with military policy more directly recently. but in the book, i was more interested in the experiences of people closer, closer to the ground. and c.j. shivers in his book, "the fighters," self-consciously avoid -- he was talking with generals altogether. because, you know, from the his perspective they're the journalists, they can do that better, and he is always going to trust the ground experience of what's happening as reflecting more truth about what's occurring overseas than not. you know? about -- [laughter] i mean, virgil and homer, i don't know, there's certainly a lot of brutality. there's some ugly, ugly things that happens. and certainly, if you read the bible and all of the stories about how you want to, you know, dash people's infants against the rocks, i think the dehumanization of the enemy has been going on a long, long time, and this is nothing, nothing new. in fact, i actually think that we in the modern military, we handle it better than other centuries, which tells you something about other centuries. [laughter] >> we have -- [inaudible] this is actually a perfect follow -- [inaudible] first of all, thank you for coming the our little town. [background sounds] >> and the follow-up question is we've been talking in the past -- >> can you hold it -- >> hold it closer? okay. recently i met someone from u.n. peacekeeping operation division, the minds. and it dawned on me that what happened to these people is not part of our present experience. aha we forgot -- that we forgot about the people who were injured by the mines and that mine-keeping operations are still going on. so the question is, a, are you engaged in continuing dialogue about that in your writing? and, b, is there an audience that will publish that kind of writing? >> not me particularly, so i think that, you know, that's, that needs to be done. but you bring up a good point. i mean, it's not so much an audience, it's who will publish stuff nowadays. i mean, there are no magazines left. newspapers are closing one after another. you can -- i'm lucky to have a spot on web, on salon, to write stuff. i mean, it's few orer and fewer and butter places to -- fewer and fewer and fewer places to publish anything. >> there is at higher levels of groups who are passionate about demining. and some of it is going on. and in vietnam it's been going on for some time. but it could go on forever, i suppose. because there's that many mines planted. but i don't, it hasn't reaped the level of -- reached the level of, let's say, completely outlawing as in chemical weapons or something like that. >> yeah. >> yeah. the stuff that you're talking about, about the language, etc., and publishing? it's reminding me of -- i've just been reading these two books. the first one i finished was a book about world war i by, i think, frederick manning? is that right name? the middle part of reason, or something it's called? and it was published, he wouldn't even put his name on it. it was published as an underground piece of work because he actually uses the f-word and so forth. and it seems so real when you read it. and then after that i read, i'm reading now "for whom bell tolls," which is about spanish civil war. and the language is so hard to get used to because hemingway is writing, reminding you that they're speaking spanish, but it's many english. so it's all convoluted, and they use thee a lot. and you never -- or every time they say something objectionable, it's like, well, obscenity you, you know? it's so hard to get used to that. i love the book, but the language, the it's so, it's so weird. and to think that this guy that really had real language in it couldn't even use his name or, you know, was considered underground, and it was, like, whispered about. it's just so weird. do you know the book i'm talking about, the world war i -- >> i've not read it, but i remember there was a description, just like a british researcher after the war, you know, writing in the 1920s about soldiers' songs who explained that many of them had to be censored because of the excessively frequent use of a venerable yet disreputable word for the act of fornication. [laughter] >> one of my favorite things to do in iraq was find somebody -- everybody had a translator and the generals especially. i was around petraeus, and he had a translator that went everywhere with him, and my favorite thing was to go find some young guy that spoke english and get that guy to translate what these iraqis were saying to petraeus rather than listen to what petraeus' translator was saying. and the difference between two translations -- [laughter] was wonderful. i went to this one meeting that petraeused had with all of these tribal chiefs and all these guys, and they were standing up and just cursing him out. and his translator was saying, well, sir, they're talking about the sewage over there on that part -- that neighborhood, you know? and the guy sitting next to me in audience was saying you won't believe what they just said to him. and so, and, you know, if you had to write, i mean, i didn't speak any of those languages. i don't speak arabic, i didn't speak pashtun or whatever. but if you could write their curse words in their language and make it understandable, it would be such an addition to the richness of writing of war. i mean, it would be wonderful. let's see -- >> i'm going to raise my hand. i'm the mic holder, but i have a question, and that is you all touched on the idea of seeing reality versus what the the administration or officials were stating. how do you deal today with the accusation of fake news? >> good question. >> yeah. [inaudible conversations] >> it's absolutely nothing new. the fake -- i guess nobody goes back to the entomology of what fake news was. it didn't set out to describe what trump uses it as. trump uses it to describe the entire panoply of news writing about him. but i guess if the word existed, generals would have said that the stuff being written about them not doing well was fake news or whatever. but all these, all of thesish -- these issues have been with us forever many one form or another. they might be call fake news, but maybe not. do you remember in scoop the guy that ends up getting the british pulitzer prize at the end for writing this stuff -- who had the same last name as the guy who actually wrote it -- didn't write it, and the stuff they were writing wasn't true. so the guy got a prize who didn't do the writing about the stuff that wasn't true. it's the perfect -- [laughter] perfect ending for any story about any war which is why i've always carried that book around. [laughter] >> the guy down in front here. >> [inaudible] i think, would it matter to people, would hay actually care -- [inaudible] they tend to know it when they see it. i think that, i think that we feel ourselves so insulated that we feel there's no cost to consuming things that serve only to confirm, you know, the view that we have of world already. and i think that, i think that's, ultimately, really dangerous. >> i remember in my youth being on a panel one time about watergate, and it was all the big reporters on watergate, woodward and bernstein and this guy, jack nelson, and jack anderson and all these guys. and way down at end was me. so watergate, the conservatives thought that watergate was big big -- was fake news. it never happened, and it shouldn't have brought down a president and so forth. so one guyed stood up and said why should we believe any of yousome i want to start with you down -- so they started down with jack anderson or jack nelson or something and came down the line. and they really didn't know what to say, and they finally got down to me, and i said, well, you shouldn't. you shouldn't believe what i write. go out and find the other guy that wrote it and another guy that wrote it and another guy, and then take all that stuff and decide what you think. and that's what you do. i mean, that's why the first amendment exists. and this whole thing about fake muse is just such -- fake news is such a bunch of bologna. if you don't like what you're reading, go read something else. that's been the way of the world as long as there's been writing, and as long as -- about anything. wars or anything else. any other questions? we just got a short period of time here. >> [inaudible] more on journalists and writers and on you and how you -- [inaudible] meaning, like to write about it, to be in it, to the come back to america, to then recall it. in some ways i've heard writers say it's retraumatizing to write about these stories. or is it ca or that are tick for you? do you know what i mean? like, writing about war, you're experiencing it too. so how do you stay balanced? >> i think it is cathartic, i do. i mean, i remember coming back in the middle of the vietnam war, and service -- the war was really big at the time. i just almost couldn't stand being around anybody who wasn't as firmly anchored to the television set and the news as i was. and i finally had to leave new york city and go into the countryside. i could work there alone, and i could just think about what i wanted to, neededded to think about. and when the book was finished, it was finished. i -- the war was not finished, but i, and i kept going back until the war ends. but when it ended, it was really finished. and i sort of didn't want to talk about it again, because i didn't want to be so mad. i didn't want to be so very angry ever again. >> yeah. i think, i think it, for me, it's cathartic in the sense of writing about any difficult subject is. where the job is, i call it figuring it out. you've got to figure out what's happening, figure out what you're seeing, figure out how to describe it, figure out what it means. and then once you figure it out and you write it down, then, you know, that's where the satisfaction is. but the challenge and catharsis, i think, comes from trying to figure this stuff out. >> it's funny, i actually -- you know, i didn't, cent think of the -- i didn't think of the writing process as catharsis, although i do the think writing about war did the opposite. it unraveled what i thought i knew, right? which is what i like about writing fiction. you sort of take ideas you have of world, and then you put them under as much pressure as you can until you start to see the cracks in, you know, what had been your vision of reality and things youment hadn't seen before. i think i was less concerned with question of recall, which is important, but, you know, sort of keeps -- i feel like it sort of keeps the question within the realm of mental health and physical health. and more with the kind of decisions aha people make and more. you go to a war zone, and you're not afforded graham's choices about war, right? you have a series of discreet decisions that are really important sometimes but which take place in this vast, broader context which is totally out of your control. and i wanted to the talk about the kind of collision of values that happens in war and the ways many -- in which the type of person you wanted to be, the types of things that you wanted to embody somehow start to seem at odds with themselves or impossible in, you know, the view of your home country. it starts to a mirage -- it , and what do you do when that happens. and that's not a question about trauma, it's a sense of our community, about our moral sense of ourselves, about our political sense of ourselves. and i think that that was maybe the more important thing to me, and it was the unsettling, but i wouldn't say it was traumatic. but writing the book was definitely unsettling. >> well, the unsettling thing right now is we've reached the end concern. [laughter] this panel discussion. and thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> thank you so much . be you have an orange pass, please feel free to stay. otherwise we're going to need to clear the audience for the next conversation. so thank you all. and thank you to our panel. wonderful job. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-spaning 2, and this is coverage of milford readers and writers festival in pennsylvania held last month. >> good afternoon. welcome again, everyone, to the last panel of the day, and we're very pleased that we have here today to suzanne braun levine who is a member of our board, also a member of the committee for the entire three years we've been working together. she, if you don't know her, was first

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