because i am absolutely convinced we have to continue to lead the world into the kind of future we want. we can't sit on the sidelines. we can't retreat. we're going have set backs. we are going to have disappointments. but over time ,-com,-com ma our story has become the dominant story. it represents the hopes and aspirations of people everywhere that is what i want americans to hunters and in the main reason i wrote this book. i know there's a big debate going on about our role in the world and we have some real unfortunate comment quinces still to deal with from prior decisions in the lake, but we can't have decayed our responsibility. how we define, how we execute it will be the stuff of political debate. but the world needs us. america matters to the world and yes the world matters to america for prosperity and security and democracy. so i hope more americans will engage in that debate and i look forward in the coming months to have that discussion with people who read my book and have questions. speenine to follow everything rittman said about you in the media? >> i can't. it's just overwhelming. i can't do it. i skim it. if it is important it will come to me i assume. a lot of it is inaccurate or unimportant to me, but i try to keep up with it, but i can't possibly read it all. i'd be doing nothing else. >> the book by simon & schuster, "hard choices," hillary rodham clinton. >> thank you very much. >> so i tell the story about how high, whose every aspect of his identity is in one way or another it threat to israel. my gender is male. my religion is my son. my citizenship is american, but my nationality is iranian. my ethnicity is persian, culture is middle eastern. everything about me since i saw the warning signals for israel. and so the experience of an arabian american single man trying to get through ben gurion airport in the 21st century is a reminder to everyone that despite the globalization has brought us closer and has diminished the boundaries that separate us as nations, as ethnicities, peoples and cultures, despite all of that, i've got to do is spend a few minutes trying to get her bakery and airport to remember that those divisions remember that those divisions commend the things that separate us are still very much alive. >> welcome to jackson, mississippi on the tv, named after him to jackson the city has been east capitalism 1821 the public our comcast cable cart race, we highlight the history with local authors and undecideds seem. >> she loves jackson. she felt she could write anywhere, but she knew the people here. i think she was writing here because i respected her giver her privacy. she could go to the grocery store and they wouldn't bother her. they really liked hearing she was quite coming he was going to restaurant pinheads turn as she walked to her table. >> i had one merchant to call me and he said i want you to know i taught to my national office today and they want me to tell you that we don't need business. these are the stories that help the white citizens, the powerful that is dedicated to keeping you and i sit in class citizens. finally, ladies and gentlemen, we will be demonstrating here until freedom comes to here in jackson, mississippi. >> as a child, i remember vividly my mother talking about this. she would always say do you know who this person was coming to know what he did? she was always dismayed nobody had really written about him already hadn't really gotten the kind of respect that she thought he deserved, unlike martin luther king junior, she didn't feel like he got the kind of recognition. >> we begin our future on jackson with the plantation slaves who lived there. ♪ ♪ >> we are a prospect he'll plantation, which is sort of the nexus of the whole story of africa. it is a very story that few people know about that encompasses the u.s. and africa in the free slave colony of the largest group came from this plantation and emigrated to liberia in the 1840s. prospect he'll was founded by isaac ross who was the revolutionary war veteran himself carolina who came to the mississippi territory and mississippi territory in 1808 with a large group of slaves and free lack. some of the free fax had in the revolution and the slave spends elsewhere most live mixed-race and it comes to several plantations in south carolina. so he came here and establish this limitation, ranged for the sleep backs to buy land in the area and he set up i was slave-based plantation standard was a fairly egalitarian arrangement. the slaves had a certain autonomy. he was obviously very close to them and he never bought or sold to anyone so the slaves became a really tightknit community. when he realized he was going to die in the slaves would end up being sold or just become commonplace, she wrote in his will at the time of his daughters to the plantation would be sold in the money used to pave the way for those to immigrate to liberia very freed slave colony had been established by the american colonization society. the american colonization society with two seemingly conflict demark nation or groups. one was abolitionists who felt that they would make the emancipation more palatable by providing certified macinnes and four, i mean, not exactly disporting free linux mythmaking in the south there is no much opposition because the slaves and then areas such as this one out, for slaveholders. so there was a lot of these is to do for you ladies because then they would be the minority. said the idea among the abolitionists was that they could provide a way to remove part of the population that it would be more palatable to the south to accept the freedom of slaves. so they're also a group of slaveholders who supported it for basically the same reason. they felt that it was inevitable that emancipation was going to come to pass in that this was a way to remove a large population of free blacks. he wasn't totally egalitarian in its approach. as a crowd couldn't free the slaves. in the second free that group without legislative approval, which would not have been forthcoming. he felt this is the best chance they had to control their destiny and his starter rick reid. he wanted to keep them in place and tell her day at which time it would be like to immigrate. the grandson contested the will of massenet, started. i was afraid with the young guy, in his early 20s at the time it didn't like the idea of selling the families plantation in giving the money to the slaves and free them. so he contested the well. duet back-and-forth and eventually made its way to the mississippi supreme court. so the decade that it was tied up, during that time as the story went, a group of the slaves became dissatisfied and felt like he was going to prevent them from migrating to liberia and they were not going to be free. so as this tori went, there was an uprising and they set fire to the house one night hoping to kill him. the house burned. a little girl died in the fire. isaac ross wade was his full name. he was not injured and a group of 12 slaves for lunch afterwards. from a tree i was sold behind the house. i one of the last descendent. so that was the highest drama of the story. after that, the mississippi supreme court ruled in favor of the slaves essentially that although it was a property issue that the court would anyone has a right to do what they want with their property at the time of their death and so therefore no one could your fear with the freeing of the slaves and allow them to immigrate full text if it ross wade lost and then regained control of the property after the state was settled and built the existing house on the site of the original that burn and he lived here. not all of the slaves immigrated. there were about 300 in about 250 went to liberia and about 50 states for various. and their descendent still live in the area. and all of the accounts and document the needed today when people describe their choleric repatriation and they talk about going back to africa. you have to understand, these people, most of them were americans. they have been here for three, four, five generations. it wasn't like they were going home. they were going back to the confident to the continent their ancestors originally inhabited, but it was quite a risk on their part. they are representatives of the colonization society they are. so they set them up and made their way to mississippi in africa. they started farming and trading and building the houses. but that first year in sure it was really, really challenging for them and in the letters they wrote back to prospect he'll, the only way they could communicate and they were always asking for we need this, we need that. there were a lot of shortages. they were cut into being provided for herein they could get everything they need if they are. so you can't overestimate the challenges that they face when they went. there were a lot of basically greek revival houses to freed slaves built in mississippi in africa and across the river with louisiana and liberia, which was settled by freed slaves from louisiana. there is georgia, virginia, kentucky, maryland county and all those people came from this leads in the u.s. so they took their culture culture, what they did here they are. they built houses like this one because after all they are the ones who built this house. so they knew how to do it. there were a few of the freed slaves to liberia and make bad decisions, who enslaved local people. slave trade was still going on in some of the indigenous groups were involved lave treats. this house does he immediately between them in the freed slaves who arrived. it is sort of like the colonists in the u.s. and native americans. that was their approach towards the indigenous old and they weren't allowed to vote and some of them were enslaved. the first effort was aimed at documentation. i went throughout the court records and then i started to track down people. i had no idea starting out is going to end up in the civil war in west africa basically between the descendents of indigenous people in the street slaves who had been sort of the upper class and have ruled over them. so while comet like here. both times they are not forgotten either. the story was still playing out in the me to 90s when i first started this and liberia. i felt asleep till the war is over and the effect of chinese people because i found a settlement place because mississippi in africa. there is a powell universe. how could we not know what happened to these people. i've got to find out. eventually it became apparent the war was going to go on. the civil war in liberia were not from 1992 mike 2003, so became apparent that that is going to find out how the story played out in west africa, i just had to go. fortunately in monrovia, the capital, the fighting had a 100 miles south of the capital when i went. so even though it was a war zone, i was in in the middle of the fighting. it just made it a little more complicated to do my research and a lot of the people have been displaced. but i found it is ultimately a payoff. i found the local people totally embrace what i was there to do. people in liberia recognize the u.s. is like the old country to them. and it's also of course like pete will in developing regions of the world all over. it's a possibility free incident to have contact in the u.s. so everybody wants to talk to you. as soon as they found out i was interested, he just opened doors everywhere. i remember i was in this walled calm pound that was the mamba point hotel that had all of these strange people like gun dealers and drug dealers and missionaries. it is a very weird mix of people. the first night i was there a top of the bartender and he asked what is here. is that i'm planning to find people that immigrate to mississippi in africa. he said where are you from? asynchronous ip. how about you? i am from mississippi, two. i was a real eye-opener because i say talking about mississippi in africa are mississippi in the u.s. and he said those. he felt that the story of prospect he'll is still being told in that context because they knew that that was their identity at comair, they've been educated. they had a little bit of money and they came. they have a very complex history, too. but everybody that i now were very interested if they know everything about what's going on in the u.s. and they don't understand why no one in the u.s. understands today are because they feel such a strong connection with america and most americans couldn't tell you the difference between liberia and libya. even as i was writing the story, you see people here today from the natchez area who are white and they see the story one way. they are out here because they are fed fascinated or related by blood. we've also had groups out here that were black who related to this story in a completely different way. my whole goal was to try to include all those versions of the story because it is the story about access to power and essays, you can learn about that from the group that was denied access for so long and then see what happened when they gain access to it. some people make bad decisions. some people abused it. sounds live on mercer wretched human events it committed atrocities because they could, because they had to power. when you had freed slaves who agreed to it. , they did the same thing. it's human nature. some people go to fire. but i know when i would talk about this, a lot of times to white groups, they would look kind of smug like steve h. at the same thing we did. i don't think it's as simple as that. i think it's just a story is that some people going too far and some people trying to do the right thing. you had won three of those in the story. research on a whole new meaning to me through this story. i don't profess to understand it fully by any means, but it made me understand that there's a lot of different ways that the history is told and all you really should do is ensure that everybody has the opportunity, which had not been the case certainly in mississippi history and so recently. >> is a writer i see in this output is essential. i take what i know for granted. i see the newest venue than the old spl deny that just because my eye has been trained by experience. so i know where i am. i have a face to see people moving in the tree light. >> we're in jackson, mississippi. it is a national historic landmark and step two was a writer born in 1909 and died in 2001. she was a writer who won just about every literary prize service to receive other than the novell. she studied throughout the world, really published, which she wrote some short novels. she's probably best known for her short stories. >> that was the form she must value. so she has four collections of short stories, some of which are not that short. totaling just under 50 stories in those four collections. >> then there is one writer beginning, which is actually from the time she was born and growing up in jackson until the time of her publication of her first story. it's very entertaining. of course i personally love that one. but also the optimist hours the one that won the pulitzer prize. she wrote anywhere. most of her writing she did here and she would find tonight here. >> this home is designated as a landmark in 2004. the house open to the public for tours in 2006. i haven't even been here two years, but i can't tell you how many times people have said in a tour how did it come just to hear her typing and they did. she had the windows open up upstairs. so she did quite a bit of work here. >> this is much like her room when she was here. she had her typewriter. she would make notes on anything available. check book, little scraps of paper. the address book, she would jot down names and she could be on a bus or a beauty parlor or grocery store where she was see some rain and she would think of a name or hearing name and she was shot names down. some of the names she has a real, so she would know not to use the whole name in the story because it was a real person. >> sheila jackson. she felt like she could write anywhere, but she knew the people here. i think she liked writing here because they respect that her and they care for her privacy. she could go to the grocery store and they wouldn't bother her. they really liked her and you would go into a restaurant and you either had to turn a she walked to her table everybody would be punishing everybody about eudora welty. she knew the people. if you read the stories, you see how observant she was because the way they set it, she never wrote about anyone in jackson, but she knew the people of mississippi. she was invited to go to yandell, which is an artist colony in new york and she really didn't like it. i mean, there were a lot of writers fair. but i she said, they expect you to go to your room and write and that is not how she wrote. for example, the story about why lived ipo, she happened to walk in to a country post office and she saw an ironing board and a post office and she thought -- so this story developed. the whistle, which is a story about people burning everything they own to save their cracks. she was spending the night with a friend of the country and she asks her friend what was fair. she said there's going to be a freeze tonight. that's still at the farmers not to cover their crops. so everyday happening. she was just observant and the story would develop. >> should write up the story. she would type it out and then she would be dead. and then she would decide to add it. we can catch them here. she would read it and the seamstress with cut out a strip in state goes better here unmanageably change a few words and handed in. .. >> particularly as it relates to dh the internal life that people often don't talk about, but it's there. she really, her powers of description are amazing. not only the physical description of nature, but also just the interior dramas that are going on within the individual but also between close individuals. >> uh-huh. it's, it's extraordinary. >> but i think the southerner is a talker by nature but not only a talker, we're used to an audience, we're used to a listener. and that does something to our narrative style, i think. >> up next, author michael vinson williams talks about his book, "medgar efforts --ive veries, mississippi martyr." >> for anything on capital street, let's let the merchants down on capital street feel the economic pinch. let me say this to you, i had one merchant to call me, and he said i want you to know that i've talked to my national office today, and they want me to tell you that we don't need nigger business. these are stories that help support the white citizens council, the council that is dedicated to keeping you and i second class citizens. now finally, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be demonstrating here until freedom comes to negroes here in jackson, mississippi. [applause] >> 15 minutes past midnight, evers got out of his car with the his home -- beside his home. in a vacant lot about 40 yards away, a sniper fired a single shot from a high-power rifle. the bullet crashed through his body, through a window into the house. he died within an hour at a jackson hospital. city detectives believe the shot was fired from this tree, they have found a rifle in the bushes which they say is the hurd weapon. they say a-- murder weapon. they say they also have other clues. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ there are. ♪ >> as a child, i remember vividly my here talking about medgar evers, and she would always tell us it's extremely important that you know who this person was, that you though what he did. and she was always dismayed that nobody had really written about him or he hadn't really gotten the kind of respect that she thought he deserved unlike martin luther king jr. and malcolm x and others. she didn't feel he really got that kind of recognition. he was born, of course, this decatur, mississippi, but it's very important to understand the significance of his family, his here and father in particular. because they were teaching him that it was his responsibility to not only care for the community at large, but his responsibility to the larger community. and so he grew up with this kind of attitude. his father, james evers, was very much protective of the family, a person who talked about the importance of manhood and their responsibility as men. and so he grew up with that. his here as well taught him the brotherhood of all men. and in particular that there are responsibilities also. so he grew up with these kinds of ideas. it's important to note of his childhood, too, he was often times faced with racism in terms of individuals he knew who had been lynched and what that meant for him. and so the childhood for him was a growing experience. but out of that came this idea that you have a personal responsibility, and that's what's important, i believe. in the 1950s and 1960s mississippi, it was very repressive and violent in terms of african-americans in their position and status in the society at large. we're talking about second class citizenship, we're talking about individuals who were denied opportunities to vote, denied opportunities for equal access to education, denied opportunities to participate fully within the society. so it was impressive, to say the least. but most importantly for understanding the kind of environment is that it was a very violent time. and so individuals who decided they wanted to raise the vote at times could be killed or beaten at a moment's notice. and this was not just connected to the right to vote. any person who exhibited any kind of attempt at demonstrating their hand hood or woman -- manhood or womanhood was subjected to beatings or brutality, those kinds of things. that becomes important for understanding not only what medgar evers was doing, but also for those individuals who were also activists along with him as well. because you're acting against a society that in many instances will kill you. and that's the kind of environment that we were talking about. individuals also would lose their jobs, you know, if they identified as individuals who were trying to change the system. they may have loans that would be suddenly called due. so these are the kinds of things that would go on. the employees would be notified of their participation, those kinds of things. so it was really kind of an oppressive environment in the 1950s and 1960s when evers is operating. he decided in 1953 while he was at a regional council negro leadership meeting in which they were calling for volunteers for the law school of mississippi, he decided then that he would volunteer to do that and actually put forth his application in 1954. the importance of this is evers believed that african-americans should have an opportunity just like everybody else. not only to go to school, but also to participate in all aspects of the society in which they lived. now, he put his application in in january of 1954. it would go through the process, but in the end, of course, he'd be denied on a technicality in which they would say that he hadn't got the proper support from where he had lived originally. and so he would be denied even though they said that we would open it up again for consideration, nothing ever came of it. the important part of that, however, is the naacp was paying very close attention to his application at that point as well, because the naacp was focused upon trying to integrate institutions at the graduate level. and so once he was denied, they actually offered the naacp field secretary position to him. so the naac, became this vehicle for which he then could express himself fully. the naacp field secretary was responsible for organizing naacp chapters, it was responsible for investigating all instances of brutality and wrongdoing throughout the state. the field secretary also was responsible for making reports, any kind of problems or issues and sending that to the national office in new york for publication as well. so the field secretary option was not just something that was localized in an office, but more so they went out of state speaking to groups of individuals, encouraging individuals to register to vote, encouraging lawsuits, filing affidavits, showing individuals how to register and organize. and so the field secretary's responsibility was immense and massive, and it covered the entire state. definitely for medgar evers once of the more significant ones happened with the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old emmett till in which his respondent at that time was -- responsibility at that time was to investigate what happened, to try and seek out witnesses and then try and get justice for the till family. and that was something that really kind of bothered him also, because we have a 14-year-old child who was brutally murdered, and these kind of things replicated themselves as well. in 1955 there were several murders in mississippi, lamont smith in brook haven, mississippi, and, again, evers was responsible for investigating those. and then trying to get justice. and so with that you have to go in and oftentimes in disguise to try to figure out what had happened, to try to speak to individuals who may have witnessed it, get a sense of what had gone on and then try to fill out affidavits and things of that nature. and most importantly, to get the word out to the naacp headquarters in new york so they also could publicize what was going on. and so these are some of the more prominent things that evers was involved in. i think it's important to understand when we're talking about medgar evers and civil rights activism that every day the individuals get up and leave the house, this is the mentality we have to think of today, that they understood full well that they may not come back home again. and when they leave their families and kissed them this the morning, that that may be the last time that they see them. but yet they still do it day in and day out. and for the field secretary, that's something that he's constantly in that kind of fire and that kind of environment. it will become much more difficult for evers after he gives his national or his televised address in 1963. because with prior to that he has to go in many i instances undercover. if you're dealing with sharecroppers, you go in dressed as a sharecropper, in the middle of the night where you can talk to people where they can't be seen by whites in the area, and so it's very, very difficult. after he gives his televised address, pretty much everybody knows what he looks like, so it makes it more difficult to go incognito or undercover in that respect. so it was always difficult, and it was always trying, but evers understood that going in, and he would often talk about the fact that even if he was killed in the process, that would be worth it if it changed the way things were. and that's the kind of mentality of the person that we're talking about here. and so when you start looking at the environment, when you start looking at what people are faced with as field secretary, your job is to go in the heart of all that. and then on to top of that you'e being monitored by organizations whether it's the white citizens council, the mississippi state sovereignty commission, they're also keeping an eye on everything that you're doing, everything that you're saying as much as they can. and then they have these immense files that they keep on you also. this assassination occurred during the early morning hours of june 12th. this is june 11th, of course, kennedy had gave his presidential address dealing with civil rights issues, and evers had been watching that. he gets home a little after twelve after leaving a meeting, naacp meeting as well. and so he gets home a little after twelve, he gets out of his car, and he decides what he's going to bring in, and he decides that he's going bring in the house some t-shirts with the words "jim crow must go" printed across them that the naacp had had earlier. and as he gets out of his car, he's shot in the back. and his family, of course, is awake because they're waiting on him to get home, and they hear him pull up, and then they also hear the shot. and when he's hit with the bullet, i mean, he's -- and this is a devastating shot, but he's strong enough to when his wife opens the door, she sees that he's crawled pretty much -- and it happens right inside the carport, he's crawled pretty much to the door as if he's trying to come home, as she remembers. and then, of course, the neighbors hear the shots that are going on, and people come out. and they see him in this state including his wife and children. and so this is a very emotional time because people understand now the severity of what had just happened. here's an individual who had done nothing but work toward advancement of african-americans and to bring justice to the state, and then he's shot in the back this way. and so it also kind of released a movement too. his assassination as people try to come together to bring about positive change. but the assassination is what really, i guess, kind of places this really kind of focus in terms of the severity of what is going on here. >> there was a sense of, i guess when i say bittersweet, i mean people are happy that, or at least relieved now that that part of it was closed and that the individual who had actually murdered medgar evers had been found guilty. but at the same time, we understand that this person had lived his life, you know, a long life. he was an old man by the time he was convicted. and so he had an opportunity to see his family, he had opportunities to enjoy himself and those kinds of things that were denied evers. and so when i say bittersweet, that's what i mean. you have this kind of closure part, the person is found guilty. but then the person that had did the most to try to change society for the best, his life had been cut short, and his family had been denied that. but more importantly, the state and the nation had been denied what he could have done with the rest of his life. and so you had those kind of ways to it. but overall people are quite happy that justice had finally been served, at least at that point. what i really wanted to do with the book was to not only talk about the life of medgar evers, but to situate him in the larger civil rights discussion. i wanted to understand who he was and understand how he did the kind of work he did. because i didn't want to just tell the story of an individual, i wanted to tell the story of a man and what civil rights struggle actually meant on a personal, familial, professional level as well. i think his impact is he really demonstrated the humanity and the humanness of civil rights struggle and the humanness of what it means to be a person living in society at whatever time and space you're in and what your responsibility and roles are. and so i think by looking at the life ofhead garre evers, you really see that -- medgar evers, you really see that in great and vivid detail. even though he was an individual who was very much low key, what he did spoke volumes, and people are still hearing that hedge today. that message today. >> next, from booktv's trip to jackson, mississippi, we talk to alan huffman about his book, "here i am: the story of tim hetherington, war photographer." >> weave just come in from -- we walked this day about-off? >> in and about 35 miles. >> about 35 miles starting at the river bridge, about ten of us -- [inaudible] we just endured 5-10 kilometer of fire fight. >> the way the title came about was we were looking at a lot of his footage. he, he would often when he would show up someplace, i guess more or less tag his video for his archives, he would say like you do at the beginning of any video, he would do it for himself. he would say this is tim hetherington, i'm in liberia, you know, february, 2003. here i am. and that's how he would start it. and it just, to me, sort of summed up his approach to everything and that when he was there, he was there. he wasn't just passing through to get a quick photograph. tim was not sort of the bang-bang club guy that you hear about, the photographers that rush in and get the quick dramatic shot and then move on, you know? that's sort of the lot of host war conflict photographers. but tim really immersed himself wherever he went and got to know the people in these war zones and tried to illustrate their lives and not just get the most dramatic image. so he was there in a very real sense beyond just passing through. what i learned as i was going through tim's work and looking closely at his writing and his, all of his photographs and video was that focus on individuals, that that is what drew him in. he didn't start out as a conflict photographer. he went thinkably to cover -- initially to cover, he started out covering a group of athletes from sierra leone who were in england that had been injured in the war. or, excuse me, i think it was liberia. because he did both. and they were, he was interested in this soccer team. and so he went back to liberia to find out their story. he wanted to tell the story of these young soccer players who had been in various ways injured by the civil war in liberia, and when he got there, he became, you know, engrossed in their lives. and then the circumstances that had brought them to where they were. so that's when he made the decision to go back and cover the civil war. he joined up with james bretson who was a documentary film maker who was already going and who had been before, and so what he wanted to do was find out about those people's lives. et started out, his point -- it started out, his point of entry was those boys, so he empathized with them. he wanted to find out what it was like to be a rebel. and he went back unlike, you know, as i said, he wasn't like a member of the bang-bang club where they come and go. he went back for, like, two years. he stayed in liberia after the war ended and rented an apartment can bought a motorcycle and worked for the u.n. earning war crimes -- researching war crimes and got to know all of these seem very, very well. -- all of these people very, very well. got to know a female warlord, essentially, rebel named black diamond, and he photographed her extensively. she also spoke with sebastian for the documentaries, and she's in the book. her story about how she came to be in the midst of that conflict, you know, it's not just some crazy civil war in africa which for americans it's really easy to see that. it's like, you know, just another war, you know? but these are people just like us, you know? they're dealing with it. and that's what attracted tim. and so when he went to darfur to cover the genocide there, it was the same. he was looking for those people, you know, to find out exactly what was happening to them, what they were experiencing. he did that with blind orphans in sierra leone. he always was looking for something that was a way in to a person's life that would enable the viewer or the realizer to relate to these people and to show that these are not just some foreign person fighting this an obscure war. of -- in an obscure war. these are people just like us that are just dealing with the situation that they've been dealt. so that's what he did everywhere he went. the, you know, restrepo, the film that tim made with sebastian sebastian younger, i think it was one of the most anticipated pieces he took place in, and you can definitely see the hand of tim in that. because it doesn't have the conventional voiceover narratives that we associate with those sorts of documentaries. there's no voiceover at all. there's no music. it's very, very straightforward. tim and sebastian mostly alternated over the course of a year spending time with an american platoon in the chorin gal valley of afghanistan. so what really interested them was not the politics of the war in afghanistan or the military strategy or any of that, it was what is it like for these soldiers that are just young guys from america that are stuck up on this hillside in a remote valley within the taliban's stronghold? and what is their life like? and, you know, tim comes in, he's this tall brit, and they're all just like, you know, young hearn guys with tattoos and stuff -- american guys with tattoos and i'm sure they were extremely skeptical of him at first. both of them, because they're journalists, and these guys are soldiers. but tim had a great sense of humor, and he loosened everybody up right away. he kind of made fun of himself, and he got to know them so well that, you know, these people -- they felt completely vested in him. and so that was, that was evident in restrepo. it's a very, very intimate, personal film even though there's, there are battle scenes, there's a lot of violence in the backdrop and sometimes in the foreground. but it's mostly about those guys, and that was, you know, obviously sebastian had a hand in that as well. but that is also classic tim, you know? to just focus in on these people so that you end up watching a story about these guys that happens to be taking place in the corn gal valley. and that was the way tim approached everything. having gone through all of what tim produced as much as i love restrepo, i think that the piece of work that really stuck with me of his, and his books are great too, but he did sort of an experimental film called "diary" that you can watch online. it was about grappling with going back and forth from these conflict zones and with his own experience and is seeing, seeing sort offedly replicated. in one -- oddly replicated. in one scene you're in a fire fight in liberia, and in the next scene you're in a cab in london, and it was this whole thing going back and forth where there's bombs falling, and then there's the fourth of july celebration in new york city. one of the things that tim was, i mean, yap led with was -- grappled with was how to reconcile the things that he was seeing this these conflict zones and seeing this replication, you know, you can imagine you come back from a war zone, and everybody's like, you know, well, by the way, there was no fresh kale at the grocer today. there's obviously a challenge involved in trying to acclimate back and forth, and most conflict journalists feel more at home in conflict zones. and i think tim spent a lot of time trying to digest that and sort of reconcile those two things, and "diary""diary" his t to do that. and it's a really brilliant's of work. to me, i've watched it 20 times, and i never, never tire of it. i think going to all of these or war zones tormented tim. like it would any feeling person. and and especially someone like him who became so engrossed in the lives of those individuals. you know, you're going to see a lot of death. you're going to see all of the ugliness on full display of humanity, and i think he had a hard time reconciling those things, you know? and i, and he talked about it to sebastian in particular, but to all of his close friends about, you know, what did it mean that he was there, you know, sort of, i don't know, he said he wasn't sure sometimes whether he was a vulture or part of the conscience of the world. i mean, it's hard to know when you're going in and you're making your living by documenting these horrible things that are happening to people, he had a hard time with that. but i think the most traumatic experience based on what everyone told me is when he was in the koren gal valley, and they got in a fire fight, and a guy was killed. and tim kept filming. and one of the guys, like, started shouting at him, you know, to stop filming. and i think at that point, and tim did. but at that point, he really was wondering, you know, what is my role in this, you know? what am i? and, you know, if i can shoot footage of photographs of a dead body on the side of the road in monrovia, you know, what -- without any, you know, there's no name to go with it in the caption. it's just -- >> one thing for me is to connect with real people, you know? to document them in these extreme circumstances, you know, where there aren't any kind of neat solutions or where you can't put a neat guideline and say this is what it's about or this is what it's about. it's not. uh-uh hope my work kind -- i hope my work kind of shows that. >> tim was, early on, did not attempt to mask his subjectivity, and i think you see that more and more now in more and more photographers. some people don't like it, you know, because they think that's not their role. their role is provide a record. but it is a different approach to journalism and to covering conflicts that i think tim sort of pioneered. and he was also, he sort of straddles two worlds, you know? the old world of still photography and this sort of pervasive social media world that we live in now where everything is just happening, everything is covered, everything is going up at the moment. tim felt like that there was still a need to not just post these pictures and move on which -- so there was these two different times, you know? -- tims. you know? let's just sit back and assess the situation and figure out what is most important, what am i trying to frame here, what story am i trying to tell, what can i learn from this person's experience that might not be illustrated by a conventional conflict photograph, you know? and that's why a lot of his pictures you barely know there's a conflict going on. you can see it in the expression on people's faces, but i think tim showed that there was a way to do that and be successful at it. and i think he, in that way he sort of bridged a gap between journalism and art. and that was really always what he was interested in doing because he was definitely an artist, probably more so than a journalist. but by exploring conflicts the way he did and by the way he didn't think of himself as a conflict photographer, it's just what he, some of his best work came out of, and it's a way people mostlme

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