conant recounts julia and paul child's careers during world war ii. the cookbook author and television personality began her service in 1942 as a file clerk and was later stationed in india and china. the author recalls the couple's travels as part of the clandestine office as well as the interrogation of paul child on charges of communist sympathies. this is about 40 minutes.

>> the answer is simple. she didn't. we will get to that later. the other thing is despite what you may have read in "usa today," but have achieved was not a secret code. now, more serious note. the most common question i get is what on earth brought me to this topic, how did i come to write about julia child, and more to the point how did i know that julia child, the pocket of friendship of cookbook and television thing had worked for the country's first intelligence agency? the truth is i read in the "new york post." i happened to see a headline, secret recipes of spies. and it reported that julie had been an employee of the oss, the office of strategic services, which as most of you know? we set up by president roosevelt in the early days of the war. it is the forerunner of today's

cia. anyway, i was in washington at the time. this would've been the fall 2008 and i was on my book tour for "the irregulars." at that time the national archives released a huge cache of previously classified documents. this was a huge, huge haul of papers, classified records, and it detailed the 24,000 people that it worked for the oss during world war ii. these records identified for the first time the vast civilian and military network of operatives who have served their country during the time when it was threatened by nazis and by fascism. and some of these people were very notable, but very unusual, and the most unlikely possible secret agent. you had among them supreme court justice arthur goldberg, the actor sterling hayden, white sox catcher moe berg, an historian arthur schlesinger, jr. but perhaps the most unusual and

notable was the chef julia child. the news that julie had worked for the oss made headlines across the country. everywhere i went on this book tour for the next few weeks people would stop me and asked me what she really a spy. what did she do, where did she go? and i didn't know the answer to any other questions i began doing some research, and one thing or another led to the beginning of this book. now, like so many wartime secrets, julia childs oss grid was really not a secret at all. that basic facts of her intelligence career could be looked at this easily ingredients to a recipe for quiche lorraine. laid in her life she opened up a bit about our past. she had broken her vow of silence and talked a bit about her escapades for the oss. she even mentioned a few paragraphs about it in her memoir, my life in france. it was mentioned in various books. one movie about her and paul had a brief bit about it. and it wasn't all the obituaries

when she died in 2004. but as soon as this huge treasure trove of archives was released, there was great excitement about the new material that might be unearthed that cost a bit of history. after all, the cia held onto these classified documents for many decades and have been very reluctant to release them. it took william casey the former director of the cia to intervene and finally convinced them to release the records. and they begin slowly releasing them in 1981. these personnel records of the oss personnel were the very last batch of papers to be released. and julia child 130 page oss personnel file, classified document, dated details of her dynamic career in the intelligence agency and made for some fascinating reading. the first thing that became clear to me as i thumbed through the documents was that contrary to all those newspaper headlines julie was never actually a spy, but she very much hoped to become one when she joined the

agency in december 1942. like so many young people in the wake of pearl harbor, she moved to washington and was determined to try to serve her country. she was single, 30 and unemployed with several failed attempts at a career behind her. she was also looking for a second chance in life, a chance to remake her life. a chance to do something special. she was the daughter of a well-to-do rancher. she graduated from smith, but she had spent most of her postgraduate years as a social butterfly. she spent a lot of time playing golf and tennis, attending parties and generally having a good time. she was keeping house for her widowed father, and living a very sheltered life. she was by her own account a pretty plain person with no skills. she didn't speak any languages and should never been further out of the country in a day trip to tijuana. she always thought she was bigger than life. she always thought she was destined for big things, but by

30 they had miserably failed to materialize. still she was tall, very athletic, she was sure she'd be a natural for the army or navy reserves. when she was rejected, the form letters came to talk, they stated. she was bitterly disappointed. she used family connections and got a job at the war department. it was a low level secretarial job. she was a typist and she lost it and show determined to work like a demon to get promoted. she did and she got herself transferred to the offices of the legendary colonel william "wild bill" donovan. the newly appointed head of the oss. a mysterious and shadowy new intelligence agency. as one reviewer noted, the cloak and dagger business was like bread and butter to the young julia. she found a mysterious agencies exciting and glamorous and she loved her brilliant and eccentric college. she soon found herself assigned to an expanded the research project called the emergency sea

rescue equipment section. she was working with an eminent harvard zoologist, his name was harold jefferson coolidge and he was no less a blue blooded descendent of thomas jefferson. she was developing a shark repellent that could be rubbed on pilots who had been down at sea to protect them. they conducted bizarre experiments in designing their rescue kit. and julius responsibly was to go to the fish market early every morning for the fresh catch. for the first time in her life she loved her work and felt she had found her niche, the place where she belonged. the oss for all its selectivity was a pretty strange group of people. to a lot of colorful personalities, and had the kind of idiosyncratic leaning atmosphere of a small liberal arts college, and he had the same tolerance for oddballs and eccentrics. she heard that donovan's ideas of the ideal female employee was a cross between a smith graduate, a power smaller, and a td kids grow. finally, for once julie had all

the right qualifications. she even had a private income after her mother's death, it made her appear before. the rumor was that donovan only hired people from the ivy league and the junior league because he believed if you were well off you are less susceptible to bribes. this did not making the least bit popular, and critics scoffed the oss stood for oh so social, and oh so secret. the actual fact was that the oss it did not begin recruiting until well after all of the other services had had their pick. and so donovan was forced to scramble to find real talent. face with building a huge intelligence gathering operation and administrative bureaucracy virtually overnight he had to get creative. but he knew specific skill set he was looking for. he needed someone with the brains to make decisions on the fly, the street smarts to know when to throw out the rulebook, someone with an abundance of self-confidence, and

overdeveloped -- under developed sense of fear. of course, the same call vacations that could be used to describe any number of very dubious characters, and critics later charged that donovan slack standards meant that all sorts of dangers people were employed as spies. steel, donovan began by hiring lawyers from his own wall street firm as well as prominent attorneys from other firms and businessmen that he needed to recruit a wide variety of academics, everything from psychologists and anthropologists and linguists, mathematicians, even ornithologists who achieves rare birds across asia. he recruit an assortment of creative types including artists, painters, writers and inventors. with typing of the snc simplified the vetting process by keeping it all within the family. if the oss had a girlfriend or sister who happen to go to college and a decent typing speed, she would be brought in and promised a better job and faster advancement to get by a

change yet any four-lane witches or had lived abroad, she would be whisked off to other secrets by schools and start intensive training here now, while working for the oss in washington, julia became fast friends with a number of young women that were training to be spies. and she was green with envy. one of them was a young woman named jane foster. jane like julia was from a wealthy conservative west coast family. she was an adventurous california girl. but there the similarity ended. jane was widely traveled. she had briefly been married to a dutch diplomat and station in java, and she spoke several linkages including fluent malay. jane is everything that julia felt she was not. wildly sophisticated an and a learned, witty and outrageous, bold and daring enough to be true. while jane was -- while julia was stuck collating files, jane was taking a crash course in espionage and learning everything from forgery,

cartography, cryptography, to the fun is about the os as called for our operations from how to create subversive propaganda and rumor campaigns to demoralize the enemy and creek descent. another oss colleague that became a great friend of julius was named betty mcdonald. that he had grown up in honolulu and she had been a young reporter at was very first on scene after the pearl harbor attack. she was recruited because of her working knowledge of japanese and their wartime experience. she and julia would disappear. she and jane would disappear for weeks at a time on orientation courses and small arms courses where they learn how to master a thompson submachine gun and a colt 45. julia was desperate to go to france, but after 17 years of high school and college french she discovered she couldn't speak a word. she had no special skills to recommend her for overseas service. so when the word went out that donovan was looking for warm bodies, anybody's, to help set up and run network of new

intelligence bases in india, burma and china, she immediately volunteered. she didn't care where she went as long as she got to go. newly formed oss was woefully understaffed. it's important to remember that when you think of the oss, you generally think about the paramilitary and guerrilla operations. they get all the glory. you think of grainy images of agents parachuting behind enemy -- indy lights but the fact of the matter is of the 13,000 employees, about 4500 of which were women, the vast majority spend their time writing reports, collecting and analyzing information and planning missions. so the fact that many of the oss is very unorthodox activities could be conducted from behind a desk meant that women could be equally as effective. and so while the majority of women did remain in washington, helping to support the os as

far-flung mission, a very small percentage went overseas and even tiny percentage ever went into an active operation. but the small percentage that did go overseas, like jane, like julia and betty, they carry out their assignments with the same audacity, self-reliance and seat-of-the-pants ingenuity that donovan inspired and everyone that worked for him. now, julia got her wish and early 1944 and she joined a contingent of operatives that were sent to india. but on the long month-long boat trip for travel orders were changed and she ended up being rerouted because the dashing new supreme commander of combined operations had decided it would be a much nicer, not to mention much cooler, place for his wartime headquarters. candy which was a mountaintop resort and had once been a oss, was not a hardship post.

nestled high in hills it was a good 1000 miles from the fighting and it was picture postcard pretty. at a buddhist temple and a scenic lake where you could get a boat and go rowing with your boyfriend. the female oss personnel were put up in a giant british colonial hotel called the queens hotel. it was rundown and overrun with rats and mosquitoes that it looked very grand. their office headquarters detachment 404 of the oss was house on an old tea plantation a little bit out of town and is made up of scattering of primitive bamboo huts, but the palm trees and the past running between the bungalows and the tidy little green tennis courts made the whole placing more like an island retreat at a wartime headquarters. while the said he was green and romantic julia's judd job was in english. should put in charge of the oss registry, known as camp nerve center coming to contain all of the most top secret documents their the military plans and

operations, classified cables from the joint chiefs of staff in washington, the codebook as well as locations of all of the oss missions around the world, and their real identities and there is codenames of the oss agents in the field. it was an important job. it carried great responsibilities and it came with the highest security clearance. julia jokes even developed a top secret twitch from handling so much highly sensitive material. so while she was never an operational agent going behind enemy lines, she did become a very able and effective intelligence officer. by her last few months in china where she served in a remote military outpost at the foot of the burma road, she was working through very, very difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. she carried on for a devastating flood that swap their base, a raging cholera epidemic, and an occasional outbreak of crossfire from the chinese revolution that

was overrunning their camp. by the end, she was a seems and veteran of the oss and she would dole out slices of opium to native agents from a large loaf. which she said reminder of boston brown bread but which oss staffers euphemistically referred to as the operational payroll. julia would often say later, looking back, that the war made me do it was her personal and political coming of age. it confused her with a new confidence and curiosity about life, and it was where she met her mentor and her soulmate, paul child. and embarked on a life altering romance. julia met paul who designed war rims for the allied generals on the porch of a tea planter's bungalow. she was a neatly smitten. he was 41, a decade older and a head shorter. he was world-weary, withdrawn, and somewhat difficult here his colleagues regard him as a

loner, moody and set in his ways. not an easy man, julia confided to her diary. and artist, paul had started out by skipping college and running off to work as a sailor. he had studied painting and sculpture in paris and spoke impeccable french. he was a self-taught photographer, black belt in judo, housebuilder and jack of all trades. he considered himself a connoisseur of the finer things in life. arts, food, fashion, poetry, women. officers in their detachment, and after his initial advances were rebuffed, became the very best of friends with jane foster, who described in his diary as a wild messy girl, always in trouble, always gay and irresponsible. he adored and admired her. jane had become famous -- infamous overnight for her inspired scheme to release propaganda material encased in

condoms. her plan was to have a submarine release the little floating rubbers off the coast of malaysia and indonesia, and they would float ashore there indifferently messages of allied support. donovan was skeptical but he gave her the green light. during the year they were all there, jane and paul became inseparable and julia was left to pine for a man who took little notice of her. although a painter she wrote in her diary that she knew he was not attracted to her, and like the more worldly type. she was not wrong in guessing that he did not reciprocate her feelings. twin brother, charles in which he raved about jane's madcap personality and how there is wartime escapades. he would note in passing that julia was a nice girl with good legs. he dismissed her as a grown up little girl noting that 8312 it was in experience and overly emotional and a virgin. and was busy trying to be brave

about being an old maid. not want to give up, julia's soldiered on. in early 1945, she and paul were transferred to china while jane stay behind where she was training native agents, and running subversive radio broadcasts. seizing her chance, julia monopolize paul's attention. she would explore with them to out of bounds areas, venturing to all kinds of back alley chinese dies. and she tried to prove her mettle by daring to eat exotic delicacies from baby frog legs to pigs knuckles in sweet and sour sauce. these these resulted in days and days of dysentery, no to os answers as the yankee rabbit and the shanghai shoot. [laughter] sorry, can i say that on c-span? anyway. by the end of the war, julia was head over heels in love, and paul, well, paul was still on the fence.

he feared therefrom very different backgrounds, and he traded meeting her right wing father keyword that julia would revert to being a path to being a socially at the end of the work of any suggested a return to the peacetime lives and see how they liked each other in civilian clothes. said they returned to the states and with their separate ways. ball back to washington and julia to california. she and embarked on a mission to win him over. she subscribed to the "washington post" and "the new york times," much to her father's horror, so she could read what paul read. she even took up a novel opinion of what she found rather x-rated at which paul adored. and she took her first cooking lesson so she could make him a homemade meal when he came to visit. well, after a six-month of a long distance courtship, and an increasingly steamy correspondence, paul succumbed to julia's charms. he allowed his heart to overrule -- his head to overrule his heart and they were married in

september 1946. in 1948, two years later, a childs move to paris. paul went to work for u.s. ideas, united states information service which was a branch of the state department, and julia continued her cooking lessons. they reconnected with her old friend jane in paris who was a painter. anand a founder married to a vey odd russian man, but as paul wrote in his diary that day, jane was just as lazy, hazy, impractical and lovable as she had always been. the happiness of their union was short-lived, however, as it also embroiled in a red spice get it in a few years after the war, the euphoria of victory had been replaced by new fears about the spread of communism and cold war. after the fall of china to the reds in 1949, when mao tse tong led the communist and set up the people's republic, an increasing number of officials of truman's

administration became convinced that communism posed a real threat to america's security. by the end of 1950, spy fever had gripped the country. by 1953, after three years of unrelenting media coverage, the rosenbergs got the chair, all of this seemed to confirm the people in government that there were spies in every nook and corner of washington. as the journalist richard once observed, senator joseph mccarthy was a political speculator found his oil gusher in communism. he kicked off his anti-communist crusade in 1950 with a speech in wheeling west virginia in which he claimed to have had innocent a list of 205 known company is currently employed in the state department. julia and paul were en route to the newport -- post when the

book burning and finger-pointing begin to work for ever from dashiell hammett to the close friend the journalist teddy white duet cover china for "time" magazine were banned from the shelves of the u.s. as -- u.s. i s. libraries in your. paul had to take the books off himself and see that they were destroyed. rumors about what mccarthy's smear tactics might lead spread like wildfire. julia and paul watch in dismay as one after another of the career foreign service officers they had served with in china, among them some of the very closest friends, were accused of disloyalty and for sale while still others quit in disgust. somehow the victory in china was now being seen as part of a master from one plot enabled by a bunch of secret communists within the state department known collectively as the china hands. at the same time, jager hoover, the ambitious head of the fbi, was out to destroy general donovan's reputation to be

viewed as a threat to his espionage in part. donna began to protect his former staff started burning the oss records of his former personal. that many of them, like jane and paul, had been left of center. julia and paul's poignant letters in the spirit captured the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that permitted a small diplomatic circle. julia considered mccarthy to be a desperate power monger, she wrote, and laid his potential campaign of innuendo and intimidation was destroying a country that she loved. i am terribly worried about mccarthyism, she wrote her friend, in 1954. what can i do as an individual? it is frightening. i am ready to bear my breasts, small size though they may be, stick my neck out, i won't come on back on anyone. to sacrifice cats, cookbooks, husband and finally self.

inevitably, jane foster and paul child became caught in the bustle of mccarthy's red spice. on april 7, 1955, paul received an urgent telegram summoning him to washington. their old friend, jane foster was being investigated by the fbi as a russian spy. when she was arrested in paris, the authorities had ransacked her apartment and found paul child's name in her address book. paul and julia found themselves than in the middle of a terrifying nightmare, full-scale fbi espionage investigation, lengthy interrogations, and a drawn out internal state department loyalty and cory. friends, family, neighbors and former employers were questions about paul's past. his communist proclivities come his loose blogging lifestyle, and his blatant homosexual

tendency. if you want to have some verbal fun, he wrote julia in despair, try to prove to to fbi guys that you are not a lesbian. how do you prove it? julia and paul decided they would not be intimidated. they chose to stand by their friends and their principles, no matter what the cost. in the chaotic months to come they would have to endure the shame of being accused as well as the suspicion that paul rightly predicted would always a black mark by his name, and curtailed his career advancement. ultimately, they would also have to come to a very painful decision about whether jane was really a soviet spy or the victim of an overzealous fbi, and an unscrupulous double agent. without giving away the whole story, i would like to say that the point of this book was to examine the complex issues that is close knit group had to face in that controversial historical

era. and to explore the intriguing ways that personality becomes destiny, and how these two very adventurous california girls who came to be wartime friends and intelligence colleagues, came to meet such different states. one becoming a beloved american icon, and the other ending of a lonely exile. thank you. [applause] >> do we have any questions? no questions? great. well, that -- yes? [inaudible] how long did it take you to write the book? >> it took probably about three years. id. the previous book was about the oss, so i had a great deal of material which helped speed

up the process, and i was very red into the period and the characters. but the last book i did was really from the british side, and so this one was more from the american side, and it really is based on paul and julia's diaries and letters to but there's such a wonderful that i had a fast and very colorful archive to work with. [inaudible] >> yes. cooperative. and, in fact, some of the families, even of minor characters in the book you are oss colleagues of theirs, who were on the boat, work with them in china, people gave me their letters and diaries. so the very vivid descriptions you get in the book, you get a lot of dialogue and you have a lot of scenes that make you feel as though you're there. and the reason is they are drawn from so many diaries. because i had somebody

characters, i limited the numbers of characters i mean, but all the incidents were true and happened. and julia stood up for obvious reasons. her height and a very vivacious personality and jane because she was very outrageous and infamous during her time there. solos everybody had a story to tell, and an anecdote that they remembered. [inaudible] >> they were from families. after that, jane foster's family offered me personal letters and diaries. there's that huge archive that paul and julia child left to harvard. other families also provided me with letters and diaries. and then i did an enormous amount of research in the military library, and repositories. where i found all the telegrams and intelligence report that they filed, many of julia's

memos, jane foster's reports, all of their superiors reports about them. and so i could really tell you where they were and what they were doing much of the time they were abroad. and then they all state such close friends come and they kept exchanging letters throughout the '50s. so even after the war i was able to keep up with them, and they were very frank in these letters. they are very moving about their fear of losing their jobs and what's happening to their friends. so you can really get a feeling for the time.

>> the teleframe was very vague, and, in fact, they even thought in the beginning perhaps he was going to be offered a promotion. and when he got there, nobody would talk to him or tell him what he was doing there, and it finally became clear that he was in some sort of serious trouble. and then he was pulled in for this very long fbi interdpaition. and he cabled julia in germany saying, it's kafkaesque. i don't know what's going to become of me. and that went on for almost a month. and then they were able to unite again in paris, and it was several more months until he managed to get himself cleared, though in fact they continually investigated him for the next year. so it didn't become public in that sense that there weren't headlines about it. in fact, you know, the sad thing is hundreds and hundreds of people were under investigation in the '50s. remember, the hollywood ten had

already happened. charlie chaplin had been under investigation for months and had fled to europe. so you had very high profile people that were under investigation every day, and so paul child did not make the news, julia was not famous yet. she hadn't published her cookbook. they weren't celebrities. but their friends all knew, everybody in the state department knew, and it was humiliating and terrifying. and they, paul rightly predicted that his career would probably not recover from it. >> was paul brought before the committee itself or just by the committee investigators? >> he was subjected to a full loyalty inquiry, that was the fbi investigated him, the united states information service

investigated him, his past going back ten years and all that. but he wasn't dragged before a senate subcommittee. in the end even though they thought he was about as liberal as you could get without being a communist, and they thought he was probably a homosexual and accused him of all kinds of other sort of nefarious acts, um, julia was from a very wealthy right-wing family, and her father was one of the early supporters of nixon. and she pulled every string she could in washington, and he was finally cleared. >> what role does paul play in -- what role did paul play in her celebrity? >> that's an interesting question and a complicated question to answer. if you, if you look at the arch

of their relationship, she was a very insecure -- as he put it -- inexperienced girl when he met her, and she turned herself inside out to become someone that he would like and admire, and perhaps one day love so he really n a way, became her mentor. he educated her, he shaped her interests, and through that she took up cooking and fell in love with french cuisine. and she emerged from all of that a completely different person, a much more confident, outspoken, um, really charismatic individual. and she really credited him so much with that, that when she became a celebrity virtually overnight with the publication of her cookbook, you know, she worked on it while he supported her for about ten years, it took, the first cookbook. and it came out, and it was an overnight success. and she literally stepped from being a nobody into the limelight and becoming a celebrity. and it was interesting, she would always use the plural, we.

we did that in referring to herself and paul. because, i think, of the enormous debt of gratitude she felt she owed him. >> how did you get interested in this genre, you know, this historical genre? >> you know, that's a good question. you know, i'm from a war family. my grandfather, james b. coin a minute, was the president of harvard when world war ii, in the early days of world war ii, and he was appointed by president roosevelt to be one of the men that led the organization of the manhattan project and the development of the bomb. so i grew up in the far east and in cambridge surrounded by wartime scientists and politicians and the men that led the war effort. and so i think i got hooked on war stories at an early age, i got hooked on war movies at an early age, and it just stuck.

>> what other books have you written? >> i wrote a book called "tuxedo park," and that was about a group of physicists who congregated in a secret laboratory in tuxedo park, new york, and began experimenting with radar. and, ultimately, they would lead the wartime project that developed all of the radar systems that helped win the war in europe. then i wrote a book about the development of the bomb in lassal most called "109 east palace." and then i wrote a book about british spies and the development of the oss, and that was called "the irregulars." so you can sort of see a theme. [laughter] the lady in pink, yeah. >> what happened to jane? >> well, i can't tell you that, you have to read the book.

[laughter] but i'm glad you're curious. you have to find out. >> thank you. >> any other questions? yes, sir. >> after these investigations were over, did they have bitter feelings toward the u.s.? >> i think that's one of the things that's sort of very nice about the book is you see different people's reactions. betty mcdonald went through this whole process as well. in fact, she was married to colonel hefner who had been their boss, and he helped donovan burn the fbi, burn the papers of the oss personnel before the fbi could come and get them. but she, as well as julia and paul, never became bitter about the u.s. they were very bitter about that period, and they really hated mccarthy. but they stayed very optimistic in the ability of people to learn and change and, after all,

they all returned to the united states and leved very happily in the -- lived very happily in the united states from 1960 on. so they weren't bitter about that, but they did have very sad and complicated feelings about the 1950s, even though that's when so much good happened to julia in her career. she would always have very mixed feelings about that period of time. >> we have time for a couple more questions. >> [inaudible] >> oh, sorry. how helpful was the goth to you -- the government to you in getting information? [laughter] or unhelpful? [laughter] >> well, you don't want to say unhelpful, that's kind of an active term. they, they make it hard for you. um, i had to, um, order all the oss documents, and then for

almost every character in the book, the fbi files. now, jane foster's fbi file is more than 65,000 pages. if you can imagine. now, as you get further in the book, you'll meet a number of other characters whose fbi files are longer. so you get these papers in sort of packets of 200 at a time. every time you need to request them, you need to double check, you need to wait, and it takes about three months. >> [inaudible] >> it's just a very arduous process to go through what we call the foia request, the freedom of information act. it takes the patience of a saint, and you don't get everything. and when you do get the fbi files, they're redacted. a lot is blacked out. whole sections are whited out. then you can go through a whole other set of appeals to argue that they should give you those papers. so it's a never ending process. i have a feeling i'm going to be receiving fbi files on paul and

jane, you know, for years to come. [laughter] i hope i don't find anything shocking in there. yes. >> since they were such letter writers, did julia or paul ever write a letter to mccarthy? >> no. not that i know of. so it's possible. but i wouldn't think so because they pretty much hated them on sight from the beginning, and it only got worse. they wrote an awful lot of letters about him though. i mean, there's just reames and reames of sort of angry screams against him in the letters and diaries. and it's actually just fascinating to read how it darkens, you know, from the 1940s through the hollywood ten when they watched all of that persecution of the, of the artists and directors and actors in hollywood. and then he moved and set his sight t on the state -- sights on the state department. you see their fear and anxiety deepen, and it's really compelling reading.

thank you all so much for coming today. [applause] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> like to wade in on this a little bit, you're talking about fundamental confusions. if you think about what a warrior is, a warrior is a person who, first of all, chooses a side. the warrior clearly knows that these are my people, and those are my enemy. and he will risk his life and limb to use violence to try and stop the people who are trying to do violence against his people. that's a warrior.

a policeman will also risk life and limb, but they cannot choose sides. they have to be on the side of the law. if a policeman chooses sides, it's called corruption. we have fundamentally confused the role of warriors with the role of police, and we've put warriors who are trained to oppose another side into a situation to act as policemen where there's no agreed-upon law. they have to be on the side of the law. if you go to the state pen in any state in this union, the people who are inside will all tell you if you say, well, is it bad to kill or is it against the law to steal, yeah, they all agree, there's an agreement on the law. we've put people who have trained as warrior z into a situation where there's no agreement. well, you know, it's perfectly

justify to cut a come's ear's off if she's humiliated her husband in some way. oh, which law are we dealing with? and the second thing is, if you have policemen that are trained, they are generally more mature. infantrymen are young. would you take a 19-year-old and put him into a neighborhood with an aunt weapon? -- automatic weapon? it's not likely he's going to do a very good job. you send him against the enemy and he clearly knows who they are, he'll do a magnificent job. that's what 19-year-olds do. we're going to be finding ourselves in situations time and time again where we're putting people who are trained one way into a role that has none of the requirements that make that role successful. >> and clarity of purpose in this battle is a real force multiplier. um, in the middle of matterhorn, you have this devastating moment when a u.s. officer suddenly

realizes and begins worrying over the fact that the north vietnamese army units that he's imposing are infeudsed with a sense of -- infused with a sense of purpose and mission. and you offer this devastating observation. you write, for the americans, that kind of clarity was a thing of the past. the ma reeks seemed to be -- marines seemed to be killing people without objective itself. and the cycle of, the cycle of this dynamic can quickly detach itself from larger strategic missions, especially missions with ambiguities, counterinsurgency. >> right. oh, i think it's an absolutely interesting parallel between vietnam and the current war in afghanistan because, you know, you think about world war world war ii, i mean, my father, my uncles they all fought, and it's like, are we making progress? be yeah, we took guadall,