On the bush museum i wanted fewer. The photo on the airplane is one of the most important for me because it shows its being rebuilt while iraq and afghanistan are kind of not being rebuilt. It was cold an called the potaty and it was where they have potatoes they werhadpotatoes tho potato chips and then when the battles started and we had issues of how to dispose and as respectful way as we could, it became an easier place to store the bod bodies while the mortuay affairs team tried to determine where a local, so if it did affect her a paper describing how the marine corps came to terms with the mission that was challenging after a debate over that in the immediate after hours. The potato factory im getting asked a lot about because i think based on the photographs that focused on those images and rightfully so. The heroism is there but the horror is more. I think we finished and i appreciate the Panel Members sharing part of your stories and i want to appreciate all of you for taking time tonight i will say if you order a from amazon i know politics and prose is able to do these because we had believed in the power of writing and books and where we buy our books. Im not antiamazon but i believe i always support goliath, we can also support the david job out there. [applause] the books are available at the checkout counter. In [inaudible conversations] the latest releases through interviews and book discussions. The programs are indepth, a look at questions from viewers with phone phone and email into social media the first sunday of every month at noon eastern. After words is the conversation as a journalist, public policymaker and also with opposing viewpoints airs every saturday at 10 p. M. Eastern and we will take you across the country visiting the festivals and the parties where authors talk about the latest works. Booktv is the only network devoted exclusively to nonfiction books. Booktv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Now three authors discuss books about war at the Los Angeles Times this to love books that cover world war i, world war ii and vietnam. Its moderated by the la times columnist jim newton. Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone. Before we begin i have a couple announcements. Youve probably heard this a couple times. Needless to say, please turn off your cell phones. Just a note there will be a signing after the session and the signing area number one. We just walked right by it. If you get outside, there will be people to guide you. And finally you are not supposed to make personal recordings being this is on cspan. My name is jim newton, pleased to be with you today and part of this lovely annual event. This is my tenth festival of books and the first one that ever reigned for us. I am pleased today to be able to help guide the discussion with these three superb authors and their fascinating new books. They are very different, to our nonfiction and one is a novel, to our explorations of familyve and personal history and one is replete with graft infection. Still, as i have the opportunity to read them all in recent weeks, they do have things in common. All three are written by americans in the future protagonists are not. Moreover, the title of the Panel Suggests all three said their work against the backdrop of war. Protagon in fact americas three most exhaustive wars of the 20th century and the hundred year walk chronicles the genocide from world war i, the guest of the shooters think what unfolds the chaotic invasion and three invasion of lithuania as it changed hands between the nazis and the soviets and the sympathizer tells the story of vietnam during and after the involvement of their. This is the first book in the genre. They are working here in new forms tha and i can tell you wiw great success. Im going to let the authors introduce themselves directly intdirectlyand then i will ask e questions and people go for 45 minutes and i will then turn it over to you and you will see thr microphones where you can ask questions. I will remind you at that point that youve asked a question. I know the temptation to get a microphone. We are here to hear from these folks today so i hope you will honor that. With that said, lets start with you if we could. How did you come to write your grandfathers story and why . A guest at the shooters banquet began with a conversation between myself and my mother from almost sevenn years ago now. I come from a blended family. My fathers side of the family is jewish, my mothers side is first generation of lithuanian catholic. I had grown up with this knowledge that my lithuanian catholic grandfather who id known and loved as a young person was actually a hugo who fought against the soviet h incursion before the germanso occupation in world war ii and he had managed to throw his children literally in a horse and wagon when the war was ending and the lithuania was collapsing and they took them to safety. T they ended up in a hilltop and they hated and later they were in a camp and ultimately they came to the United States. There was more to his wartime life at a certain point because i think the experience of having a daughter myself and wanting to know more about the history that i could relate to her i think that has something to do with it. I asked my mom the obvious question, what does one do during the war and she said while, he was a police van. I will say that i was appalled that it took me that long but all of us have experiences in our families where there arewe things we know we want to ask. We want to find out more but it takes a long time and sometimes we dont ever get to the place where we ask the questions that i asked. I came to find out that my grandfather wasnt just a police van, he was the chief of the Security Police for an entire region. They were the most notorious collaborative force in thefo country and some of you may know 95 of the Jewish Populationlatw were exterminated at the hands barely have the lithuanian collaborators but that conversation is how my book began. S also there is a long telling one for you. Spin absolutely. Very similar to a lot of thehe things that rita brought up. Its based on my grandfathers survival of the Armenian Genocide and its a story that i have heard about since i can remember since i was a child my mother would always tell me what happened to her father during world war i during the entire. It sounded really gross to me like why would my family do th this . I didnt understand it and i truly didnt understand what happened to my grandfather until about ten years ago a relative translated and i could finally read his account for the firstsi time. As i was reading and turning the pages i couldnt believe the endangered protagonists with my own grandfather. If they didnt get out of the situation my whole family line wouldnt be here. My grandfather felt he survived in order to tell his story and said that became a responsibility for me. Its all based on mynd is all grandfathers journals and we found them once i started to look into this and so you follow him from when he is building a new business and is successful and then the war breaks out and he is conscripted into the turkish army and the labor battalion and then the deportation order happens and then he ends up being pushed further and further east across the modernday turkey and syria to eastern and is in a caravan and everyone is dying or being killed and so the 100 year walk follows his journey and then i t retrace his steps from his home outside of presentday istanbul to eastern serious near the iraq border. Youve written about vietnam before but it was a nonfiction subject, why the novelold my first memory was from pennsylvania being taken away from my parents and give them away and has always stayed with me the idea that its been imprinted on me and my parents survived the decades of war and even though they spoke of that they exhibited through their t actions and feelings and so did everyone else in the Vietnamese Community that i grew up in. And as an american boy growing up i was very cognizant of the fact that it was something that was important to both and theta American Community as a wholean but they only saw one side of the story. My own personal life is very interesting whereas the novel is my re bandage. My attempt to tell the story from the perspective that most americans have never heard of before which is how the south vietnamese experienced this and my narrators are also giving us the communist perspective and when he arrives in the comic he is telling the viewpoint of how they see American Culture which isnt necessarily in a positive light so it is a very satirical novel as well as i get people to think about what it looks like. But i think the topic has been hard to exhaust which is why i had to write another nonfiction about it. It is in the much larger context of the warfare thats been waged since 1898 when the United States took the philippines and hawaii and the korean war andd vietnam and now iraq and afghanistan as an extension of the century long campaign. Am and i couldnt see those kind of things in the novel. Go back to that for one second. One of the questions i had foror you is in your experience to reform the sins o sense of the n anyo way . I wrote the novel to criticize. The theme of the novel is sympathy and what i took away from that is the easiest thingar to do is to sympathize with ourr own side. The virtue and the flaw of my character makes him a great spy and thats what i learned from writing the novel but if there is any hope for peace and reconciliation in things like ae that it requires the expansion of sympathy and empathy beyond the communities to a much larger human community. Can i ask you to 64,000dollar question, what is it that is so compelling about the war since youve written about is in a different way that makes it such a dominant part of the narrative where thenema, li literature . I will tell you a few things about it. As i think so eloquently, if you grow up in a family that has been touched by the war in my tw case on the jewish side of my family and the lithuanian side of my family my mothers mother was swept up when my mom was 8yearsold she was banished to the camp and presumed dead so that was part of my mothers experience as a child and however i understood it or defend, it became a part of the underpinning that i grew up with. I grew up in a household where the war whether it was discussed or not was present always. So as i got older and became a writer, thats something that interested me. How does it impact generationshs after . In the course of writing this book which allowed me to kind of morphed into the Investigative Journalism and do a lot more history writing and research than i ever thought i would, my notion of history itself changed and ive come to see it as ahavm fluid entity. What we think of as a historic truth is hopefully always changing and expanding. Of by virtue of people writing and revising and revisiting one of the things that contradicts that is we all know there are survivors of different kinds of experiences reaching the end of their lives and what we hear to clean those testimonies for us. I dont think that we have even yet begun to explore all the ways in which the historical consciousness can grow and enrich a speed ont us beyond thf literary nonfiction into a kind of worldview. Spike let me ask a slightly different question. One of the things i noticed about all of these books is they take place in the war but in the periphery in a certain way so yours begins where most end. And similarly, you are writing about world war i, but b. Are not in what we generally think of as the heart of the action. Is there Something Special aboue the periphery of the war . For me i wanted to tell the story of what happened to the armenians during world war i, which was the war often to pickk your atrocity for me i wanted tt to tell the story of what happened to a million and a hali armenians. First of all, its my grandfathers story so it was very important for me to telle what happened. I just thought if i could learn about it through this hardworking guy i its a universal story of someone who has dreams. We think about the war. There are emotional and physical limits tested. You see the incredible courage that comes out when people are in the situations and overcoming the odds to keep trying to liver and a its timeless he just wanted to get home to his fami family. Look at the war and the periphery and the lens of a person you can connect more with that period of time. Youve not written a political book. Its more personal than that and yet the politics of genocide and the notion of the denial is present even today in the international relations. How do you analyze that and how does the controversy overshadow. Theres the words Armenian Genocide. I tried to stay away from it as much as possible. I do want it to be recognized thaasmichael points for tellingy grandfathers story and writing the story is to educate others about what happened. One of the things that struck me the most. I wanted people to learn. Theres a lot of primary information about it so i just chalked as a reporter wil look t the newspapers of the time and look at the back issues and you will see that its chronicled in the world press. And so, yes anyway. He just wants to hell. We dont want to stand around and march and demand. We just want our families to know what happened and be recognized. You i read a talk that you delivered last fall and realized some things are so nasty they should simply show them as theys are. How do you carry that out . To be reading the war novels but also scarred me because there is a scene i read it and he did the right thing by showing the ugliness. To show how they could go to the vietnam war with 150 pages and hide them in in the novelist dt instead in the moments and editorialize and tell the reader this is wrong with these people are doing. He simply showed it to us. And when it came to writing my own novel i realized thats what i have to do as well. I cant give them the comfort of telling them this is right and this is wrong. Tyi i have to show what i think of as the expression of humanityfu which is also to be inhumane. Going back to the question one of the reasons that persists its not something that takes p place by these monsters come it takes place and keeps perpetuating because it is done by us. It should rub our noses into this reality none of us want to confront. They want to see denying that this entire time and finally forced to recall that we areared forced to experience both within within. Rape and torture common themes. They seem to be endemic in wartime. Any thoughts on why that is . Theres this whole idea that already exists but then when itt breaks out it gives people the permission to do all sorts of things that are legitimated by the nation or Community People are being sent off to say theres all these things happened no one wants to remember the terrible things so he told the war stories about terrorism and sacrifice and everything else. We dont tell the stories of the fact that our sons and husbands did things they wouldnt want to talk about at home. Ledge because we cant acknowledge that in public it keeps coming back up and becomes the territory. I really resisted the term monster for instance talking about my grandfather or other people whose participation andwa atrocities i learned about either firsthand from survivors or the process of documentation. I went to Eastern Europe many times and was fortunate to collect a lot of testimony. For some people its almost as bad and the humiliation before the death often perpetrated by people who have several months earlier bought bread from the person they were going to walk over before they shot him in the town square so the question how could this possibly happen butqs it can, and it does. I focus on my grandfather as a collaborator in some depth because analyzing what brought him to do what he did and then basically shed the skin were 8,000 men, women and children were shot. The interior of a jewish cemetery, 1,000 noncombatant polls showed nothing. How does that happen, how doesto someone walk out of that life and walk into another life . Rt for me the most important lesson is that it can happen. We all think of ourselves as being beyond anything that might propel us under any kind of address to do horrible things that we have read about and studied and im not suggesting that we can all do with my grandfather did that humanity is a broad term and we dont do ourselves any favors by limiting it and saying they are here, the monsters are there but we are here. I think a lot more needs to be learned and investigated because for instance this is just an aside but we have been reading in the papers theres the attempt to figure out how young men are recruited and what draws them to do the horrible things that they do. People have been asking for years would lead to peace, the raiders, they were not nazis, they had always been antisemitic but for years what happened that allowed suddenly the population to galvanize so viciously until 95 of the population was gone. Let me follow up because it might be high altitude. As you come away from this experience is there something very specific to that situation to allow that to happen . I dont think anyone is possible of that kind of crime. But i have done some work around the scarcity of resources in the future for those interested in it. So for instance, when water becomes a scarce commodity, who will we become been around a scarce commodity . We may not dig a pit and shoot people but he also may not offer a meter or water. So there are degrees of humanity that we can slowly losety depending on the situation. Its about dehumanizing a group into two allow these things to happen. With world war ii and the holocaust its about dehumanizing a group and you declare them as other it almost separates you from then. You see it happening now. It keeps repeating itself and you see i its now being declard as dangerous where many people are branding a whole group for the actions of individuals or the islamic state. So you just see it happen over and over. Its about dehumanizing. So they are different. I just wondered whether these same kind of phenomenon were present where i would assume it is more difficult to demonize an enemy. I dont know the answer to that but i wonder if torture or rape is endemic to all or if it is easier to dehumanize other situations . Certainly there were families against family. There is a partial answer to that very question. You do draw extensively from the record. How important was it to you to be accurate given that you are writing a work of fiction . Ive watched probably every american war movie so at a time it came time to write the book i didnt need to do research about the war itself but where i did do a lot of researchers around the pieces in the fall of saig saigon. Its thit speaks a weekend day y and minute by minute because i wanted to put the reader into the perilous situation that they found themselves in as they were literally fighting to get onboaronboard the last airplanee last boat out of the city. In the other piece of the research was done making of an american movie about the vietnam war shot in the philippines that my narrator ends up being a consultant for when he comes to the United States. There is some comedy in this and it revolves around the fact that he goes and he helps make this movie and it is a comedy because at the same time as this movie is being shot, all of the socalled people have come from the amount ovietnam to the philn that they are living in refugee camps to perform as viet cong soldiers in this movie so they fled from communism and then they are here now to play the very people who persecuted them in the first place in order to be killed by american soldiers on screen. S i needed to get the details right. Curious im curious the experience of writing about a Family Member do you feel a sense offof responsibility . I wonder if you take pride or responsibility and how does the perception of your grandfather as he learned about him in the course of the Research Effect your sense of self . Ers iceni family different now and my mothers story coming here as a child from turkey. Since i learned more about the book i learned more about the effect of the war and threw my family and how my grandfather was traumatized and would tell my mother every year he was going to die the next year into the next sharewood Waller County and he would say to her again they were incredibly poor when they came here. I understand my mother more and my family and their struggles and the legacy passed on to me having a responsibility of having to tell the story. Did you tell the manuscript before it was published . My mother who is here i shared it with her at different points and i consulted her through the book because there were so many things my grandfather wrote about and he would out on what he was feeling at that moment that maybe he didnt write down in the journals. So, her memory was an incredible part of reconstructing it in addition to what he wrote that i see myself differently because my fathers side scottish english and declaration of independence and i was verymy proud of that as a child and i see my family background in a more nuanced way. One thing dawn does very well this juxtaposes the story of her father with a journey to retrace her grandfathers steps and thats one of the captivating things about the book. My grandfather again i think the fact i knew him well and loved him and it made a big difference as i was researching his past. When i began to understand the scope of the killings thatstand happened partially under his purview i think i was so intense on documenting it as thoroughly as i could because i didnt want the material to rest on the supposition. I wanted to relate to hisly wane activities and that took me to poland and germany and other parts of Eastern Europe. I think that certainly from family comes identity and also comes responsibility. Half my family is jewish. My jewish grandmother who lived the old age of 104 was the matriarch of my family and she pronounced very loudly one summer when she saw me wearing a little gold cross that off my t polish girlfriend for my grandmother saw on the street corner, for tha, for that on thd and said you were jewish and about sealed my identity. And as i was working on this book i was very glad that she was no longer living because i think it would have destroyed se her. T she was very mucbut she was very my head. In i felt once i learned about the major massacre called the polygon massacre which was one of the holocaust by bullet exist all over Eastern Europe and western europe the thing that haunted me was the anonymity ofe the dead, the countless people that lost their lives and it sounded to me like i wanted to write a book that would in some way make it manifest. I am my grandfathers grandfather. Its that simple. So thats what i did. The jewish side of my family, yes. My mother was actually terrified about the work and i made a deal early on but i wouldnt share the research i found unless she specifically asked for it. She didnt speak to me for several years but interestingly enough, i did a book expo interview before the book came out and my mom asked to see that interview and we sat down and watched it together and she put her arms around me and she said im so proud of you and then she read the book. So if 86, she did a full circle and i have an incredible aspiration for that. She said you did a good job. I dont ask about the technique and how you did this. L how long did it take you to write. It was a horrible experience and i didnt know what i was doing so when it came to writing the novel i wrote a twopagewh synopsis that was fairly accurate. It wasnt where i was going to go but it ended about two thirds the way. Instead i wrote my novel. You realize we are on tv. For two years i was in a zone than i would run in the afternoon at the gym and that was an important part of the process because as i was running i would pass the 30 minute mark and new ideas that come into my mind the next week. It took a decade and a part ofou it i tried to do as Much Research as possible, so i had my grandfathers journals and i just went through it as meticulously as possible. Researh he left the names of people and where he was and what month ie was in this camp and so those were all clues for me so i spent years researching and i took out ads in the papers to see who survived and if there were any accounts out there and then i search for the same massacre myo grandfather escaped from and very few people survived in the area that is now controlled by the islamic state. I spent years searching for thiy mans account and i finally found after years in the newspaper and just described the massacre abbott on details. It they massacred the whole caravan and it just, i just searched for years and it took me a long time to finish. I had a really bad high school french. I was able to go through the papers and i went to oral history. They all reference each other when you look at memoirs from my grandfathers town they would show full names. So i just went through everything i could about people from my grandfathers town and they were old armenian and thenr try to just expand his account. Would you read that with a to translator . We started with my mothers friends and they were all retired and would sit around and ask me what are you doing and why are you single in your 30s, so that was taking a while and then i had an incredible and heard for a allowed me to see what was in the book. But i also took classes at night because i couldnt even read the script of the book that i was holding to go through newspapers and everything so it took quite a long time to. It was in yiddish, hebrew, many other languages. I worked with a lot of translators and i found myself in these archives and i did a lot of interviews. S. My wonderful friend who wrote the book some of you may have read what we record everything, video everything. That turned out to be great advice. I wrote the start of the book and then i need notes. They were on napkins, on the back of a menu come up loose sheets of paper that i remembered to pick with me when i left a certain hotel and somehow they all got organizedin about three and a half years after the first round of travel i was still traveling but able to sit down and start writing. Then of course you go on a deadline with your editor where you start giving them certain chunks of the book. Much of this was about traveline and talking to people and researching. Im going to ask one more moe question so he can come right ti you. Go ahead and we will call on you in just a moment. N mind. The short story collection that i agonized over ten years about my publisher bought it. The first 50 pages have been written and bought by my publisher as well. I dont know. Im probably going to move on to a happier topic for a while and then think about whether there is a story that will compel me. A lot has happened in the publication of the book and im going to be writing about it in the long form. Whether that will turn into another book i dont know. There was one character in my book was a triple agent under the auspices of nonfiction i ask not to include certain details that shbut she is a character tt stayed with me and who i thinkof will find a life outside of mom fiction when that will happen in my study i dont know. You stated that there were feelings for the war to bring up a monster into these terribles e atrocities. What is your observation today and is there something we should be worrying about in the reports of the radical rightwingther activity . Absolutely. I also want to say antisemitism isnt the only horror that we are facing. But if you are connected to the goingson it is frightening thea exodus of the Jewish Population from those countries now. Its frightening that lowjewishp population left because the nationalism and antisemitism. Its also for theemitism disenfranchised. Its very scary. It is a recapitulation of something to some degree but also it seems to me as if it is a stream and current that never ended. I think about one of my trips to berlin, the person taking my husband and me around was quick to show us all the monuments and ways in which they are honored in the devastation of the holocaust and would casually mentioned to us they always have threats every week. Thats still the way it is and its important for us to remember it. So yes its frightening. Have your parents or others read your book and giving you feedback on their opinions about the book . As far as my family goes my father was proud to see it and insisted on having his picture taken with the book. As i was finishing it an up andt home to see him again and said you have sacrificed so much for me and i want t i want to dedice book to you. How should i dedicate the booknd and he said dont put the names in the book. The reason why is because he is afraid that the history of the vietnam war still lives and he doesnt want to be touched byinm those. The families that lived throughr have scarred by preventing these other Family Members and the history isnt passed and still d remains traumatic. Ins the question seems as though your research is expensive in eastern turkey how did you finance the research in thesese years and years of travel, are you independently wealthy . I got an advance and that is how i spent my advance. So whenever you hear they got a big advance, dont think they bought a big car with it, that, how i was fortunate enough to be able to do the years of work ii needed to do and then i have to say i have some wonderful volunteers. There were people who got really interested in what i was doing and offered some help to people in israel. I also got an advancement and was able to fund a lot of my research and then i went through the savings. Savings. Is yours was a ten year project. Yes, i was very excited when i left new york and my job and i had a good amount of money saved. But like i said, thought it would take two years and i thought it was a great advance. Then as i dug in, i realized, your pull string and look at one library for for something and you dont find it. You just have to find it so i ended up going to france to lick your collections there, looking through research and armenia and having people help me in romania. It was not the best financial decision but the best personal one. For dawn, what you think it might take for a future u. S. Congress or president to have the courage to stand up to turkey and declare that it is a mportanc it will be a long tied along time maybe we do need turkey that much. So they cannot exert as much influence. But i just continue to say why it happened and so are other people that is what is important that the story is told. What i learned mw from your book is what it that there is something perverse. Absolutely you brought hitler reference to what happened to your mediansia before the all holocaust which is why this important to tell the stories san miguel is a reader and finds it difficult it hurts. As dave write her if you do have to experience how do you cope with that practice it is all very personal butur oe its the dark places . I have to it met those of the best to years of my life i spent writing the book waf laugh by treasure it. Years o i just took tremendous pleasure but what you are talking about i did reach that point towards the end of the book behalf to recreate those things for several months. And also looking at torture manuals that led to some unpleasant facts. I think all of us are here to committed with fiction and nonfiction that many people dont want to investigate. Know tha and we have to endure beenion it compared to what those had to go through. I will always remind myself as difficult as it isalwr testimony after testimonyread fr there is nothing compared to what my grandfather went through. But and became a connoisseur of very light material as we were watching a very bad show why are you watching that . I cannot take anything serious we want to give our heart and soul to it to. The sow that is the Guiding Force bob with some of the difficulty of the material knobs that we have to flesh out to bring alive on the page. Hopefully we can do that. Were you wanting a certain outcome renault wanting to find that transcript . When i started a wanted to find material that doesnt. Early on the logistics of where he was in the things that were happening it was very easy to say of course, per kroeber but wanted to be as methodical as i could whiff Research Integrity i got to a point rise stopped popping into would find something elsegot toa and then it was the reality of what i did find. Dd find something to tarnish your grandfathers image . When i started out i did you didnt know how reliable his account was. It wasnt like i went into it with the genocide but i didnt know how accurate. Of so that is why i did such Exhaustive Research and he was extremely accurate. That matches up with then one day of what my grandfather wrote. Account th it is just time been and time again. To end up with finding that family and we go through them. It is constantly lined up like that. Been. We have the right to. Assume the journals aree indispensable greg. Absolutely i could not do without the journals and start with the account because then it just turns in the middle of world war i. N the mi and then that tells the happy time before the war but absolutely a could not have done that
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