Oh, yes, you can. Thats what a war is all about. And general mccristal and others said mcchrystal said we should spend 95 of our effort persuading the people and 5 attacking the enemy. That makes no sense. If you start putting all these restrictions upon the use of force, do you know that we ended up having a lawyer in every battalion who had to decide whether we could use air in an attack for fear that somebody would be courtmartialed . So we put restrictions on ourselves beyond the restrictions that police have in major cities in the United States. Host bing west, in your view, was the iraq war necessary . [laughter] guest with perfect 20 20 hindsight . Absolutely not. Host at the time what did you think . Guest at the time i did because i believed then, as did most of the American Public and the congress, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would give them to terrorists. That turns out to have been wrong. Wrong idea. Host in your book about the iraq war, the strongest tribe, you write that although sacrifice on a National Scale is not required for every conflict, a Healthy Society does not treat war as an extension of domestic political competition. National security cannot be sustained when domestic Party Affiliation and ideology determine the support for a war. Iraq was a symptom, not the cause of the ideological polarization in american society. Guest i think it should trouble all of us tremendously when you see parties, the democrats or the republicans, aligning on issues strictly on their ideology rather than being americans, youve got a problem. And senator reid whos the democratic senator in charge of the senate basically said the war was lost. You dont go around saying things like that when youre an american and were at war. So i think that this country has become entirely too divided along ideological lines. I dont know what the solution is, but we have the stop beating up on one another. Host the iraq war in the 2000s, the vietnam war in the 60s, same division, ideological divisions . Guest no, no. I think i fought in vietnam. The way the American Public, both parties, treat our military so vastly different that were a much better country today. Much better. We, were our spirit toward our troops is terrific. And that was vastly different than vietnam. And thats whether youre democrat, republican or independent. Were much more behind our troops in this war than we ever were in vietnam. Host back to your book with, strongest tribe, about iraq we depend on volunteers to man our thin red line. By the tone of our criticisms, we can undercut our own martial resolve. If we, as a nation, lose heart, who will fight for us when valor has no champion . America loses. Guest im a grunt. I was born during world war ii, and both my uncles were marines. When they came home from guadalcanal and iwo jima, they were my babysitters for the first five years of my life. It was inevitable i was going to go into the marine infantry because thats a tradition in my family. For four generations weve been marine infantry. When youre in a war, you need a fierce spirit that youre going to win, and you need tough guys who are out there, and theyre cohesive, and they believe what theyre doing, and they receive awards for destroying the enemy. And you cant change that. And i think that we have to be very, very careful that we dont start sending shifting signals. But ive been, again, ive been very pleased to see recently were beginning to give more medals of honor, more ways of saying we acknowledge your bravery, we acknowledge that you killed the enemy. I dont think we can ever lose sight of that spirit. And we have that spirit. Right now if you want to come into the marine corps, for instance, you have to wait a year. Thats how long the queue is to get into the United States marine corps. So i think were on pretty good ground with those who are coming into the military today. Host bing west, when you look at the history, the last 30, 40, 50 years of wars that the u. S. Has fought, how has it changed from vietnam through iraq, iraq, afghanistan . Guest i would say the first huge difference is death. We fought, if i could call the word existential war in world war ii. We had to win that war. Unconditional surrender. When i went to vietnam, all of my top commanders in the marine corps had fought in world war ii, and we had the idea when you get into that fight, you get into that fight. We went over as individuals, not as whole units. And you accepted death. It just happened. Sometimes you didnt even know who he was, and he was dead. That was world war ii. In vietnam, 50,000. I see a vast difference today in iraq and afghanistan not just on our side, but the other side. Everyone is much more cautious now. Its like tribes fighting. You dont want to fight to the last man on either side. The american indians, when they were fighting in the plains against our troops, etc. , in the 1860s, if they were losing a battle, theyd retreat. It wasnt an idea that you had to stay on a battlefield until you won or lost. I have to think we have to be very careful that we dont go too far with this, that death itself becomes what you want to avoid. But the biggest difference ive seen on battlefields is the attitude toward death. Host where is the act of killing, you write, as a nation we have become so refined and so removed from danger that we dont utter the word kill. The troops in the strongest tribe book arent victims, they are hunters. Guest and i regret that our generals have become babe too educated maybe too educated. They all have doctorate degrees and things, and theyve develop to liberal schools and theyve gone to liberal schools, and theyre unwilling to say when you go out onto that battlefield, you go out to kill the enemy. We have things like our chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, admiral mullen, when he was there saying you cant win a war by killing the enemy. Well, wait, thats what wars are all about. And we cant get so refined that we believe that we forget what war is. War is the act of destruction, violence and killing. And the people at the top have to be more like this general, sometimes hes called mad dog mattis, who is the commander of our troops in Central Command where they dont flinch from it. You go forward on that battlefield. I expect you to be so ferocious that you will continue to kill and you will continue to destroy until you defeat the enemy. Host whos dakota meyer . Guest dakota meyer is a wonderful example the reason im smiling is i think hes a great example of Young Americans today. Dakota meyer came from the farm lambeds of kentucky, graduate farmlands of kentucky. Aggravated assaulted from high school, came into the marine corps. Hes a big kid i shouldnt use the word kid, but hes only 24, 25 now. And he was in a battle where some of the other marines who were advisers were trapped. Dakota was off the field of battle, and he rushed onto that field of battle to try to save his other comrades and refused to be defeated. And he fought for six hours with just a small group, three or four of them, against 30 or 40 of the taliban who had come over from pakistan. And he showed remarkable bravery and was awarded the medal of honor, but he didnt want it. The interesting thing about dakota is that after he received it, he felt he had been a failure because his four friends had been killed. And to this day, i hope hes got been over it more, but dakota was shaken by the fact why should you reward me when my friends were killed . If i had done my job, theyd be alive. And thats not true because dakota couldnt possibly have saved them. But he was a fighting machine for about six hours. He just wouldnt stop fighting. Host what was your role in writing into the fire . Guest well, my role was in that particular book i had spent a lot of time in the area, and i knew the units. I knew all of them. I missed that battle, but by us in the others. And as an army captain came up to me one day, and he said, hey, sir, you have to meet our pit bull. I said, whos that . He said that happens to be corporal meyer. And i went in just to shake hands with him and just talk, and all of a sudden there was a rifle shot. That would happen occasionally from different positions. And dakota is out the door immediately in this shooting. And i rooked at him looked at him and i thought he wasnt on sentry duty, what was he doing . I said, whats up with you . And he was just very, very angry about what happened. And i thought maybe people should know about that. So i talked to some of the generals, and i said do you know what happened out here . And they began to investigate it, and they just said certain things had gone right and other things had gone wrong. We hadnt given those troops the support that they deserved. But more than that, i wanted to write the book to explain to the American People kinds of young men that we really have out there. In this book, dakota meyer is writing i am the gun, im a sniper. Shooting is technique, no emotion. Sometimes you do think about it, that tiny figure in the distance is a human being. He may be a great guy, or he may be one of those animals who will beat his sister to death for having a boyfriend not arranged by the family. You are not there to judge. My only job is to bring him down before he gets to cover. I fire burst after burst, i hit his legs first, then his back. I keep shooting until im tearing up a corpse. I rip through 200 rounds. The sound of the last rounds echoes down the valleys with no return fire. That rpg gunner died alone, no riflemen were providing cover for him. I wondered if he was dumb or if he had gotten away with it before with. I trotted back to the bunker. Guest dakota was a sniper. Ive known a lot of snipers through the years. But everyone on the battlefield be, every grunt ive known after youre in that for, say, three or four weeks you have to become dispassionate. You dont think about those people that youre killing as human beings. They are simply targets in your sights, and thats how you have to look at them. Theres a place for compassion, but the place for compassion is not in the middle of a fire fight. Dakota, for instance, had fired 10,000 rounds before this fight, and so to him it was just aligning his sights and shooting. Aligning his sights, shooting. His mind was blank in terms of is that a human being . You dont think about that person as a human being. You think about him as an object that has to be destroyed. Host bing west, where did you serve in vietnam and how long, and howd you get into did you volunteer . Guest oh, sure. I had to. I mean, well, its such a tradition that, of course, i was going to become a marine. I was going to become infantry. And then i was with several different units, one was called the ninth marines, another one called force recon, another called a combined action platoon. So i got a chance to see the big battles and the small battles. One of the generals over there wanted somebody to write about what they were doing at the small unit level because his experience had been in guadalcanal and okinawa, and his name was general wald. So e sent me out to the different battlefields where id been fighting to write about them so thered be some sort of doctrine we could hand on to the Junior Officers going out op the battlefields. So i saw a lot of different kinds of action in vietnam. Host how long were you there . Guest well, i went back and forth several times for the marines, and then i joined what was called the rand corporation, and they sent me right back there to be an analyst, so altogether i guess i spent 1824 months in vietnam. But i got a chance to go all over the place. Host in hindsight, should we have gone into vietnam . Should we have worked with South Vietnam . Guest thats an interesting question. I come down on the side of, yes. I this will never be resolved about what happened in vietnam. And there are two schools of thought. One school of thought is that there was decay in the government such that it was going to topple anyway. Thats the dominant school of thought. Theres another school of thought that i think i belong to, and that is that after we withdrew because i was there, i was there in 66, 67, 6 8, part of 69, different times that if we had continued to give the South Vietnamese aid the way russia and china gave to North Vietnam, that North Vietnam would not have taken South Vietnam. Now, i know most historians listening to me say, bing, youre wrong. But well never be able to resolve its a counterfactual, but well never be able to resolve it because we did cut our aid. And thats what worries me about afghanistan. Host how did you get into the writing business . Guest i, i think be youre, if youre a writer its going to show up. Because you feel compelled at some particular point. And its, you read, then you want to express yourself. Its not like i ever sat down to be a writer. My goodness gracious, never. If i knew you could make a living that way. But i kept coming back to it and back to it. Host how many battles have you covered as an author . Guest oh, wow. Define a battle, where people are shooting each other . Host im thinking fallujah. Im thinking youve been if iraq, youve within in afghanistan, youve been in vietnam. Guest oh, youre talking a couple hundred. There are patterns to any war, and when im out there, i dont generally, i didnt wear armor out there. I relied on moving fast and tucking. [laughter] ducking. But of after a while you can see patterns in war, and you know whats, you know whats going on. And it differed tremendously. In vietnam when you were fighting the North Vietnamese, they were terrific. And they would dig. They were like moles, and the earth was very, very soft. And theyd dig trenches about like this, and theyd get in that trench, and ten theyd have their ak rifle pointing at you. And you had to be on the ground flat because they were shooting just about this high hitting you right about hip level. And they were great with mortars as well. I had a mortar la platoon for a while. Im sure theyd say they were better. Then you go to iraq, iraq was city fighting. It was more like weity in 68. Wei city in 68. And the rpg, the rocketpropelled grenade, was the preferred weapon in iraq and to a large extent in afghanistan. When a yes maid goes off, it hits the side of a building, and it shatters the concrete, and its the fragments that really can do a job on you. And you add to be very, very careful when you were moving around corners. But on the other hand, the person using the rpg has to expose himself because of the back blast. And if he makes the mistake of staying out there for more than three seconds, hes shot first. So its entirely different than the jungles of vietnam. In afghanistan you had two different fights going on. Up in the mountains, they would they being the taliban would shoot at you from only, say, 500 yards away, but thered be a huge crevasse between you and them, and it would take you six hours to get up to where they were shooting. When you get down south, they had what they call the green zone because theres one river that goes all the way to the south of afghanistan. And for about four miles on either side, you can grow anything; poppy, watermelon, corn, wheat. Whatever, you name it. That was just like going back to vietnam. When i went to afghanistan and the techniques of fighting were almost similar to what i did in the village. Sixty years ago. Almost identical. Host bing west, where is the village . One of your first books. Guest well, the village in vietnam is south of demanage up near what used to be called the demilitarized zone, so its all the way at the top of South Vietnam just before you get to North Vietnam. And a dozen of us, one squad, were sent out there to work in the village with 5,000 vietnamese villagers and build a militia to defend the village. So i wrote the story of what happened to the 15 of us who went out there. And of the 15, seven were killed before it was over. But it was an adventure. And i dont think any of us would trade it ever again. Every single night wed go out, wed get into a fight of some sort. But the villagers were on our side. It was entirely different than afghanistan. You cant put americans out in the villages in afghanistan. Too many people would betray you one way or the other. It was more solid in vietnam. Either they were with the viet cong or they werent. But you didnt have this phenomenon you have of xenophobia in afghanistan whereas an outsider youre just rejected. No, that wasnt the case if vietnam. The fighting was harder though. Fighting was harder. Host how long what was the name of village . Guest ben neah. Host how long did you stay . Guest the marines stayed for about 385 days and then moved on. And i kept going back to see how things were going in the village. And when the North Vietnamese came in in 1975, the first thing they did was take the plaque that had been dedicated to us by the villagers saying thank you for all your good work, and they were going to throw it in the river. And some of the villagers said, well, wed like it. And so they kept it. When i went back to my village to visit in 2000, they showed me they still had the plaque. And then i was visiting with the village chief who had been a boy in our fort of 10 when i was there, and he said a word which means older brother, you know, he said i have 10,000 in my village, what am i going to do with them all . I said, dont give me that, you won the war. He said you dont think hanoi cares about me . So needless to say, we made a donation, etc. But they felt an affiliation was we had because we had fought, even though were on the other side from those who, ultimately, won. Host good afternoon and welcome to the booktv on cspan2. This is our monthly in Depth Program with one author, his or her body of work, and this month we are talking with military author and historian bing west. And mr. West began writing, by writing a field manual, a training manual in 1966, small unit action in vietnam. The the village, that we just talked about, came out in 1972, reissued in 2002. The march up taking baghdad with United States marines, came out in 04. No true glory came out the next year, and then the strongest tribe, a New York Times bestseller, war, politics and the end game in iraq, came out in 2008. The wrong war, another bestseller, came out in 2011. And finally his book with dakota meyer, into t