Us marine deploying to the mediterranean. East africa in iraq, he grew up on military bases from the east coast of the United States to japan. He currently lives in new york city, but calls atlanta home. Please give a warm savannah. Welcome to jared alexander. Good morning. Wow, give me one sec here. Okay . First thanks for having me. I its been a hard year for facetoface interactions with books and her two years i suppose and just being here is a real honor. Actually, im was really happy to be invited and speak to you guys about my book and about some of the stuff that sort of influenced it. And thats kind of what i want to talk about actually is i i just when i thought about what i was going to come up here and talk about i kept thinking about other works and other works that sort of but maybe as a kid and as an adult sort of moved me into writing about war the way that i did and so i thought i took a little take a little time to do that. And i i guess first off i want to start by talking about kind of a book that maybe wouldnt be considered an inspiration for a war memoir, but it was hells angels by Hunter Thompson. Um the story of how his work kind of came to exist and the reason we all know about it is just about as important as the work itself, especially as it relates to understanding the kind of the fickle ways and means of a writers career and the trajectory of that and so by 1965 hundred worked as a as an itinerant journalist for the Dow Chemical Company as a Foreign Correspondent in south america. You know, hed hed written for laurent sporting sheets in puerto rico and as a beat reporter for a few local newspapers with middlings success. He had a novel which would eventually publish as the rum diary in the late 90s, but by 1965 living is living in San Francisco with a wife and young son his days as a writer looked really bleak. At the time i dont think he could get work as it on the docks, you know unloading shipping as they came through. You know anybody with sort of a 10 cent listen history though kind of understands the relationship between San Francisco and the 1960s. And for a short time the city eclipse new york is an american epicenter of cultural and artistic upheaval you know hunter by either fate or repetorial intuition found himself in a position to witness a sort of confluence of talent and social forces that would inevitably spread across the country think of Alan Ginsburg ken. Keezy, you know who hunter was friendly with and the swelling counterculture of hate ashbury. You know, the hells angels motorcycle gang was one of the darker forces sort of grabbing the zeitgeist in the San Francisco area in california large at the time. You know a hundred received an assignment from the nation to write about the angels in the march of that year, march of 65, and then eventually was published in may. An interviews years later hunter said, you know hells angels all of a sudden proved to me that holy jesus. Maybe i can do this. I knew i was a good journalist. I knew i was a good writer, but i felt like i got through the door just as it was closing. I think the trajectory of a writer especially one before they publish is probably the most interesting at least in me how they get to where they are how their life enrolled views eq through their pages. I think sometimes i think sometimes you can read the desperation in someones first work, especially if theyve been trying for decades to publish something, you know, something really a thirst necessarily or an eagerness eagerness to please some reader which is create sort of bad writing in and of itself, but but just kind of a general all or nothing vibe this sort of this is my one chance kind of energy, you know, im gonna sort of shoot my shot if you will. You get that with hells angels the feeling of now or never a sort of planting the flag and concrete. Its an owner an honest and open in very assured work, but its also very controlled. This isnt the hunter caricature. We come to find in the early 70s the sort of gonzo fear and loathing in las vegas do all drugs and delamate care sort of attitude. This is a very professional Hunter Thompson a very controlled controlled and a very mindful journalist. You know hells angels is hundred trying to prove his worth in an industry that a stunningly amoebic with his ability to shift it. Whim whats relevant or worthy of attention. Are going to be hunter, its our its hunters most honest work because he doesnt have the gods of character to hide behind or couchs points. He hasnt figured out how to do that yet. Now my first attempt to publish something about my time in the marine corps felt dead flat. It was a shelved it for nearly a decade after that. This is probably 2008 early 2009. I shopped around a rather terrible manuscript and was flatly refused and im very grateful for that in hindsight, you know, but i spent 10 years after that between the shelving of that work and then the first iterations of the next one and what i inevitably ended up selling which is what became volunteers. And a large portion of that time though. I spent that i kind of given up on the idea of writing about war as a memoir. I drifted toward fiction or just writing about the war in some other way. I felt i couldnt find a creative, you know in that i needed to write about the war in a way. Thats incredible or at least interesting. Well, the first manuscript failed because the writing simply wasnt good. I was also too close to the subject to see it clearly. Years later my life had changed and the distance between myself and the subject which is very, you know, powerful potent a distant some distancing grown between those two things. And ever so everything i attempted to write about it felt somewhat unmotivated and flat. Now ive read hells angels probably five or six times mainly when i was younger and more interested in the man than the than the subject or as a writer. You know when i was a you know, 19 20 years old has sort of atavism was attractive to me, especially as a marine when i was sort of bound by its, you know, rules and edicts which can be a little suffocating. You know later on though. I began to see the book in in the ways. Ive already described you know, the the the the tightness of the pros and this he put into it. But in the summer of 2015 i said down a real red hills angels all over again and found inevitably what we came away into my own subject in a way of writing about my own subject and what i hope is a unique way. And the first part of hells angels titled rolling boys. Its sort of a fast burn. Basically. Its a long lead paragraph that sort of sets up the stakes for the rest of the work. Its percussive and filled with like serious motion. Its its very energized. Theres a lot of its you can feel the motorcycles rolling down the interstate, you know, and you know waving their chains around and sort of causing a menace hunters both riding with them perhaps not as a member of officially but certainly in a loose spiritual sense observing their behaviors and attitudes and relationship with the world, but also his own relationship in the process. My time in the marine corps, though while i was a member of that organization was largely taken the same way and i was a participant but also an observer sort of watching the marines around me as they lived generally in fought and war specifically while the marine corps is not the hells angels, you know, i saw similarities between those two groups from its tribal loyalty to its politics, you know, never mind the direct connection between veterans and motorcycle clubs, you know connection hunters draws on in his own work. One of the early struggles. I have a writing about the world lives in the way what we tell war stories, you know, theyre somber both are by Artistic Design and do the weight of the subject. Theyre very heavy. They kind of press down on the reader. But that wasnt the experience i had in the marines at least not absolutely, you know war is kind of loud and visceral, you know, its mean almost as a fashion statement in our culture and and it reflects itself in the field under fire. You know, i can wax poetic about the dehumanization of the military and the dehumanization that can occur in war, you know, theres certain theres certainly enough that cliche and literature to go around it wasnt entirely true to my experience. I think we were sort of influenced by the cliches as much as we were a part of them and and marines wanted to go to war as much as hells angels wanted to blast their motorcycles down california interstates and quote showed the citizens some class. As hundred observed, you know, i found his opening a way into my own subject with the same verb and sat down to write would become the first scene in the rack book and ill read it here. Oscar mike, the marines are on the move. We are the devil dogs the leathernecks the shock troops and the hard chargers are born to kill members of the suck the green weenie the rod and gun club the hardcore our core the United States marine corps. We were modern era visigoths with a bigger budget and better armor. Vikings of the western world complete with healthcare and heavy artillery the marine corps is Like High School gym class with guns and we flash down the highway in western iraq like a full court, press rumbling with the menace of our v8 diesels in a long roaring column of dusty armor spiked with machine guns and automatic grenade launchers littered with radios hunting knives and cans of high Octane Energy drinks. Crosses dangle from our necks and the nylon bands that rep our helmets have been marked with our blood types a positive o positive ap positive and permanent black ink like sigils for the apothecaries snuff and cigarettes sit in our pockets like mana. We can run a hard line back to seattle and san diego the bronx and Upper Peninsula of michigan all the rotting hamlets in central, oklahoma, nebraska and the deep south. Weve earn geds and Public High School diplomas. Weve pulled prison time in underfed Community Colleges and worked off lazy academic hangovers and bloated party schools. We went to class and set board through canned lessons on the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny. We waved the flag. We pledged our allegiance and so we are here. Maybe you love this once we are your friends your brothers and your sons. We are your fathers and your uncles we are your husbands the next lovers and cheap one night stands. We hate the marine corps the sometimes we love it too raw. That entire initial section, which was about a firefight that i was participant in the summer of september of 05 was nearly about 10,000 words and i said down and wrote it in a flash. It was really fast. I wrote in august of 2015 and then right after that i wrote down the 40,000 words and most of that is in the book now. And whatever issues i had about writing in the marine corps, you know that the sort of flatness of the pros and my sort of i guess exhaustion with the subject. Hunter helped me kind of unravel that and take a step back and look at it through a little bit more of an artistic lens and i was a huge help to me. And again it gave me a license to look at the military and the way that he looked at the hells angels and i saw a lot of similarities there and that sort of separation gave me a lot of it sort of two knocked a few chains off and i was able to really kind of put the words down and a felt and easier way. The next two books, im gonna talk about are kind of working together in a loose sense. And the first is good by darkness by William Manchester in the nexus. Next is the book called the return by hisham atar. Were all kind of connected to history. I think in in some way you both personally as it relates to our immediate environment and family, but also in a Larger National and Even International contexts. Events in our world kind of bounced tortoise like adams and the sound wave, you know, sometimes its imperceptible, but its always there in inevitable. When i sat down to write volunteers or even as i right now, i have to recognize and wrestle with this fact. Was my upbringing around the military and choice of the marine corps is my service and in iraq is my war inevitable did it and did history outside of my control have an impact on my and at what scale . The answer to these things are obvious to me, but its worth mentioning because i suspect theres a tendency to discount cold determinism in favor of the emotional safety of free will. But ultimately i felt this the history of our world as it relates to personal experience was important to contextualize the events of the ideas i had about my world and about my place in it William Manchester was a marine sergeant in the pacific during World War Two, you know, he went on to write a book about macarthur that i want to pulitzer some years ago. And go and goodbye darkness. He remembers his experiences in the war through a prism of memory and history as he travels from the South Pacific to okinawa as a civilian after the war so he goes back to all these old battlefields and basically recounts the history of the pacific war while also, you know taking you through the trajectory of his own life. Effectively, you know effectively following both the marine corps trajectory in the war. But also his own in sort of exploring the traumas that those things cost himself and the nation at large. You know bringing the larger history the war into the narrative allows him to widen the scope of his experiences into an examination of the era and how its moments were defined by those aspects. Regarding World War Two he wrote. To fight and World War Two you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s depression by struggle for survival. In 1940 two out of every five draftees have been rejected most of them victims of malnutrition. You had to know that your whole generation unlike the vietnam generation was in this together that no strings were being pulled for anybody. The four roosevelt brothers were in uniform and the sons of both henry Harry Hopkins fdrs closest advisor and leverage salt and stall one of the most powerful republicans in the senate served in the marine corps as enlisted men and were killed in action. But devotion overarched all the overarched all this it was a band woven of many strands. Now World War Two is kind of an overgrown subject in the commercial american lore, you know, its its notion sets up the behaviors and attitudes of the soldiers who came after it most americans who who go to war on the most americans go to war kind of on the stories the last one. Im certainly a an example of that, you know as hair mentioned, you know. You know, michael hare mentions who all get into in a little bit, you know soldiers from vietnam were inspired by the hollywood heroism of the Second World War. I was motivated into the military both the set by both the Second World War in vietnam. I dont think its possible to talk about experiences and more without placing it and some kind of dialogue with the war that preceded it. Each war certainly deserves to be examined in its own. But when i sit down to write anything on the subject, you know the wars that came before have to be included especially the warped waste history and ideology shaped those conflicts. You know, i think that our invasion of iraq is an example of that. It was sort of motivated by this, you know, a lot of the language in the talk. We heard similar verbs and nows a describe our war it was using the same way. We use those language that language and World War Two, you know axis of evil. I mean it was it was almost, you know pulled and sort of cheapened down and shoved into the narrative on iraq. It was almost. Uncanny the relationship between the two its ironic that the iraq war ended up more like vietnam, but thats another subject. And the next work was hisham putnam matars Pulitzer Prize winning work the return father sons in the land between history kind of applies its forces in him in ways. He cant avoid or tries he might you know hishams father a prominent critic of more gaddafis regime in libya was kidnapped and imprisoned by gaddafis goons and ultimately killed. In the book matar weave both his experiences in libya as a child and abroad is an exile and the history and end of qaddafis dictatorship along with matars own return to libya after the arab spring to search for his fathers remains. About his father. He states. My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar form. He is in the past present and future even if i had held this hand and felt it slacken as he exiled his last breath. I would still i believe every time i refer to him paused a search for the right tense. I suspect many men have been buried have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live as we all live in the aftermath. I think about writing of my own Family History in this context, especially as i said out to write about both my dad and my stepdad and how they influenced me as a kid or how their mistake missteps also influenced me. While my relationship with my fathers in history doesnt have the way to matars on story. I could not help but feel a connection to a search as it relates to my own. Was i searching for my own fathers in these wars or in my service . Where does their history end in my own begin . My both my father and stepfather were in the air force. My stepfather was in the persian gulf war and my my father was in the cold war as a air Traffic Controller an area where fueler my mother and grandfathers were also in the military. You know matars work gave me the sort of inspiration to evaluate my role in the context of that history. Now the last two i these are these are really personal not works for me and theyre one as well known one is less or so, but they are connected together almost to the hip. In fact the two it would have the two authors crossed paths with each other in there as they we