you're going to go into politics, you know, you have this lofty vision of who you're going to be. and the, um, the administration had made these health care deals like the nebraska one that were very unpopular and didn't look that great, and barack obama was starting to look like a more ordinary politician. and that's really what she was reacting to. ..tes to the 2012 savannah

book festival. [applause] [applause] >> thank you very much for that introduction. it's a great pleasure to be a here. this is my second time in savannah so i'm not a rookie and i came back because i had a good time last year. and it's a book festival where they treat the authors really well so i want to thank marilyn and scott richards, who are my hosts and i think robin gold and stephanie who are sort of the management of this complex exercise and then all the staff that has put together a really, really wonderful program for all of us to get together and learn a little bit about literature and writing and what we have to say. i'm going to tell you a personal story today. it's something that i don't normally do but this story i'm

going to tell you is in large part what motivated me write the second book, what it is like to go to war. and one of the things i talk about in that second book, our culture has basically got some kind of agreement, like i call it the sort of code of silence about what really goes on in combat. what really goes on when our nation asks our kids to go out and kill some other kids. i'm no pacifist, but i think that we've -- we tend to sort of want to not think about it very much. and my family is the same as all families. i was 50 years old when i found out that my father had fought in the battle of the bulge. well, dad, you know, wasn't that a big deal? you never asked me, you know, i'd get all kinds of, you know, stories well, when they got drunk at normandy and that sort

of stuff. what it is is that, you know, our culture is very good you don't whine and you don't brag. well, any combat veteran will tell you that 95% of the time is to white line and complain about and 4% things you want to brag about and that doesn't leave you much in that culture and one of the things i was hoping to do with this book is start breaking that down a little bit. a little personal history. i grew up in a very small town in oregon. it was a logging town then it was called seaside oregon. back when i grew up, i think virtually all the fathers had been in world war ii. and we called it the service back then. that's when your uncle was in the service. and i think, again, our culture is starting to make a change. i don't hear the surface anymore. i hear it called the military and i think that's an interesting switch in language,

that is happening, that we should think about. and i got a scholarship to yale. and blasted out and joined the marines because, you know, that was sort of the thing to do. guys in my high school football team would join the marines. i want to be like them. i want to go down there and i joined the plc program. it's sort of like a marine rotc. they don't pay you. you get run through boot camp in the summer and then the people that survive that go to college as reservists. you don't get paid but you get to be a marine. i thought that's like a real good deal. we didn't have to wear uniforms or march around in college. and then i got -- the rhodes scholarship and i didn't think i would get to go and i wrote a letter to the marine corps and they said take it. and i felt really guilty because the guys i trained with and kids

from my own high school went over is there and we lost a five total who died in vietnam and i was feeling like i was just hiding. so i went to the war and i ended up in the third marine division, fourth marines and we were stationed in the jungle, in the mountains way up where the dmz meets the laotian border and i was the infantry platoon commander and the executive officer of the company and finally, after i got shot a couple times the marine corps figures well, he's either too students or too brash or too unlucky and they put me in the spot savior planes and that's where the air medals came from. and i was asked how could you get air medals in the army. i wrote this book, what's it like to go to war for several reasons. the audience was young people who are considering making the military a career. i wanted to reach them 'cause i

don't want any romantics joining, you know, united states military or armed forces. i want people to join it with a clear heads and clear eyes about what they're really going to be getting into. and i also wrote it for veterans because i had to struggle with a lot of things. i thought well, if i can struggle with these things and get a little bit of clarity, somebody reading it might be helped about it. and i also wanted to write it for the general public and particularly our policymakers as i get into the speech i think it's very important that we understand that we are involved very deeply in our wars. but we tend to think we're not. i opened the book with a quote from bismarck. and one of my favorite quotes. and bismarck said any fool can learn from their own mistakes. i prefer to learn from other people's mistakes. and i thought, well, if i can put some of the mistakes down that i learned the hard way, maybe someone else would do it. and here's write launch into

this story. we were on an assault and going up a very steep hill and by this time it had broken down into chaos. you have all those plans and as everybody tells you as the first shot all the plans go poof and the way it gets done individual 18 and 19-year-old marines know what the objective is and they figure how to get there and that's how it really works. two hand grenades came flying off the top of this hill and they exploded and i got knocked unconscious and when i came to, it was sort of a mess. i was still functioning. and two more grenades came back, boom boom, two more grenades came from a hole above us and we were scrambling uphill because we wanted to get under them and we flew back and lieutenant marlantes said it's not going to be too smart and i told the two

guys who were with me, next time you throw the grenades i i'll go up to the side and i'll be in a position to shoot these guys when they have to stand up to throw the grenades and i worked around my side of the hill. and i could see that one of the soldiers is already dead and the other, you know, just like us. he was a kid. late teens. and he rose to throw the grenade and our eyes locked. this is a very unusual thing in combat. you generally don't ever really lock eyes with the people you're about to kill. and he was no further away from you than about the third or fourth row here and i was just waiting for him and i remember whispering to myself because i couldn't speak vietnamese don't throw it, if you don't throw it i won't pull the trigger. if you don't throw it and he just snarled at me and he threw it and i pulled the trigger.

and at that moment, i didn't feel a thing. in fact, i remembered being slightly chagrinned because i hadn't anticipated the recoil on the rifle and had bucked it just a little bit the drill sergeants kick you in the rear end for doing what they call bucking your shot. and it hit the dirt slightly in front of the guy and went into him after it hit the dirt and then, of course, the battle's still going on. years later, probably about 10 years later i was in one of these california sort of groups that they had and, you know, all the california stuff about getting in touch with your feelings. no one had heard of ptsd. we were totally unaware of it and, you know, i was the typical sort of guy that was there trying to get in touch with my feelings. my wife had brought me there. you know, so finally the leader turns on me and she says, well, you know, i understand that you were in the vietnam war.

uh-huh, you know. and she said, well, how do you feel about that? is the typical answer and so she said, well, why don't you -- why don't we start talking about it and she asked me to apologize to this kid that i shot. and i'm game. i said, okay, i'll do that. and i started to think about that kid and, you know, that kid did have a mother and a sister or whatever. and i started to cry. and i started to bawl. i mean, i started crying so hard that my ribs ached. it was literally three days i couldn't stop crying. i would go to work and i would just have to suck to me and people would talk to me, i would have to leave, i would have to walk around. so i managed to shove that down again. i can't deal with this. i got five kids to raise at the time i only had a couple. and fine, everything is cool

again. about 1990 i'm driving down i-5, about 2:00 in the morning and, again, this is a wonderful veterans thing. you're all by yourself, you know, you got a little bubble of dashboard in front of you and country music on the radio and no one can touch you and you're actually doing something. you're actually trying to get somewhere. so it's time. these two eyes peered right in the windshield in front of me and i knew -- i'm not crazy, but it was like karl, you're going to have to deal with this. you're going to have to deal with this. now is the time because it's starting to come out in my dreams, this kid's eyes. and i had to figure out what is going on. and what was going on is that when you kill somebody, you actually suffer a wound to the soul. there's all kinds of other trauma that happens to you and we're getting better about treating the other kinds of trauma, brain injuries, just witnessing carnage, losing

friends, being afraid constantly every day. we're learning how to do that. but we haven't done such a good job because we have a culture that is basically trained everybody here and good decent kids have learned in the judeo-christian culture that thou shalt not kill and they're 18 or 19 and they join the army or the marines or whatever and suddenly it's like go out and kill somebody, kill somebody 4 country. and then when you're done doing that, why don't you come home and get a job at mcdonald's flipping burgers and you're asking a 19-year-old to take on the role of god. it's the deity that should decide whether a human lives or dies, not a 19-year-old kid and yet we ask that to be done. and as i said before i started, i'm not a pacifist because there are times when i think you just cannot reason with the people who are trying to hurt your

people. and that's what warriors do is that they use violence to stop someone from using violence against the warriors' people. and there are moments where we finally fail, whether it's our fault or the other side's fault but the negotiations break down. there's going to be no change in the minds. osama bin laden is a classic and him. you're not going to reason with someone like that. there's only one way to do it and you send the kids over to do the fighting. but we're not getting something right. i read an army times article two months ago it was citing a va study, a 2010 study that says that veterans are dying by suicide at the rate of 18 a day in this country. that's a sobering number. now, people say oh, it can't be that guy. that's only 8 is a sobering number. there's about 24 million veterans. if you put that into context that's a pretty small

percentage. but 18 suicides a day is very, very difficult number to sort of say everything is fine. and one of the things we have to start thinking about is what i just started out saying about this wound to the soul. things have changed in our culture from 100 years ago. ways that we used to deal with the guilt of killing another human being. we could avoid the classic say is god's on our side. i always remember that the moment that it occurred to me this was not such a great argument i was playing football in high school and we had to go up against north catholic and north catholic was slated to go to the state championship and we were slated to go to the state championship so this was the big game. and our local catholic priest came into the locker room and, you know, we all get down on our

knees. it looks like friday night lights and he starts praying, the father didn't pull any punches. he cited win the ball game and i remember sitting there thinking but doesn't north catholic have their own priest? [laughter] and that's where god on our side for me was like something is not right. we're still fighting people who are actually still there. people we call fanatics but they just do believe that god's on their side and i think they probably suffer less guilt about killing a human being because they sort of can put it into some kind of religious righteous context. i think they're wrong. but they're not where we've gotten in our culture. but since we've gotten there in our culture, now what? and one of the things i like to say about the vietnam war, it wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a successful war as far as the united states was concerned. there's a german philosopher who

had been in the second world war on the german side and he had gone to england for business in the late '50s. it happened to be when they were celebrating the battle of britain. and everywhere he turned there was some preacher saying god delivered us to we talk and god was on our side and he remembers he used to look down at his belt bubbling saying god is with us. there's nothing like losing to start make you think introspeckive. and, you know, i'm part of that process. how do we do it today? how do we always do it? we do it -- if you're a decent 18-year-old kid, you do it by actually tricking yourself into believing that the enemy is not a person. then that way you're not killing a person. we have all these terms for it, gooks, towel heads, hajis.

the human race can pseudo-speciate the person. you actually in your mind are fighting some animal that is trying to kill you is trying to kill your friends and so you can pull the trigger. it's way easier to do but what's difficult and especially if you're as young as most of our fighters are is to be able to get in that mode and get out of that mode and then get back in it and get back out. that's a psychological trick that is extremely difficult at that age. and ultimately it breaks down, just like it did for me. what happened that day is that was not a gook or an nva soldier or enemy. that was a kid. that was a person as we locked eyes. and it came out, eventually, i had to deal with it 'cause i was raised thou shalt not kill.

what do you do? i had a friend who was a pilot, air force pilot, a lot of missions in north vietnam and he had done a mission where, you know, legitimate target and he bombed a village. and he woke up about four years ago in the middle of the night. he said just sobbing. and what was on his mind was that village 'cause he went -- there were kids there, there were, you know, civilians there. and he killed them. and at the time he was doing his job but at some point it starts to come back and haunt you. so what we need to understand and i think we need to help our young people understand and our leaders who are sending them in to do those jobs is that there is a relationship between combat and the spiritual. and you might be crazy. marlantes has gone off the deep end. i'm okay. i've gone to the va i got my meds. the reason i say that what is

the spiritual about ultimately? why do we have religion ultimately? it's because we're afraid to die. i mean, that's really where it is. when you're dealing with death, or you're dealing death, you are in a spiritual space. think you cannot deny it. you may deny it for a while. you may fool yourself that you're not dealing with but you are dealing with a very serious issue. and war itself is definitely one of those spaces. i call it the temple of mars. you enter into a field where suddenly it's not ordinary life. you are in the role of a god. you're trying to deal death. and, you know, our culture really likes to think that religion -- i call it pixie dust. i mean, we'd much prefer easter bunnies than the crucifixion. and we would -- we would -- we don't want to think about the dark side of religion at all but a lot of religions around the world have a very dark side.

i mean, some of them that were more -- we'd call them more primitive if you think about the aztecs who used to, you know, rip people's hearts out so the sun would come up and you think about the demons of tibetan buddhism and in christianity, don't tell me that gogatha was a dark space. our culture prefers to be on the light side. now, it even happened in the military. i remember that i was on a hill in vietnam. it was christmastime. and i wrote about this in the book. and we had been isolated there. we'd been -- my platoon was left to guard what was left of an artillery battery and we were the infantry trying to keep the nva away. and no one could get to us because monsoons, they were just shrouded in fog and we couldn't get any resupply. we could hear a chopper way down below. we were probably about 6,000

feet. it gets up to the hill. it had flat headed right up to the treetops to get underneath the fog and out steps the battalion chaplain and i thought, wow, this is amazing. and he comes up and he was just cheery and wonderful and he handed me a bottle of southern comfort and told me a couple of dirty jokes. i'm a 23-year-old lieutenant, you know, i've been fighting and dealing with death and i got this? you know, he's so typical of our culture. it's like he himself was trying to deny what i really needed which was a little spiritual guidance as did the kids who were on the hill with me. but even our own chaplain, you know, it's that sort of thing if someone is dying in the room, you talk about whether the mariners are going to win next week or not. it's so classic. the other thing that you think

about the experience of combat and the spiritual if you -- if you think about and you sort of categorize a lot of things the mystics have dealt with, there's certain elements of the mystical experience that is common to all mystical experiences. one is that they are totally aware of their own mortality. they become aware that death is right over their shoulder. that's an impression from don juan. death is with you always. the other one is that they do enormous amount of psychospiritual exercises, yoga, chanting, meditating to be in the present moment, not thinking ahead, not thinking about the past. you're here. be here now. all that. they get to a place where their own ego is sacrificed for the greater cause, for the greater good. and they're usually part of a group, convent, the monstery,

the church. no matter what the religion is, they're usually part of a group, every one of those things happens in combat. every one of them. now, i don't know if we're talking about the opposite side of the same coin or if we're talking about an equivalent experience that doesn't have anything to do with it. i just don't know. but i can tell you that it's very telling how similar it is, except it's dark. like i say to people, the mystic probably sees heaven and the soldier sees hell. but that is the -- that is opposites of the same coin. and we expect these kids to sort of go through this experience and then come back and like i said, go to work at the gas station and mcdonald's which is sort of the equivalent of the st. john of the cross coming back from monastery and get a job and have a good time. there's no way society has a way of preparing them or helping them recover. and finally, the one thing --

putting it in this other context of the more spiritual is that there is a difference between pain and suffering. people suffer when there's no meaning to what they're doing. you can go through a lot of pain and not suffer and that's, you know -- i mean, childbirth is one of the things. it's one of the norms painful pain and it's so meaningful that you're willing to do it but if there were no outcome like that, it would be a horrible experience. and it's just that switch about your attitude for it. so what do we do? how do we -- how do we deal with this problem of 19 years old being asked to do this for us? problem number 1, is the 19 years old are not interested in what i'm talking about. i mean, i was there. beer, sex, rock 'n roll.

i mean, that's where they are. they're kids. it's up to the adults to try and get this right. and i was criticized someone got me on this topic and some guy in the back. oh, i get it, it's like the english teachers in high school saying you may not like tolstoy or shakespeare now but some day you'll appreciate it. and i said, yes, it's exactly like that. [laughter] >> if i had known some of the things he was talking about it would have eliminated i'm sure a decade of suffering in my family. if i had just known this is what's going to happen to you when you go to war. this is the way you're going to feel when you come back. these are the issues you need to deal with. if i had just known that, even to be able to name those things it would have moved me toward healing a lot faster. the well, humans heal is different -- the way we protect

ourselves is different than a lot of animal kingdom. we don't have shells like insects or turtles what we have is a rapidly enacting immune system and a way to stop the building but you will take the hit but there's no way you're going to get a 19-year-old prepared for war and say, okay, now it's not going to bother you. it's not going to happen. that 19-year-old is going to get wounded, if not physically he's going to get wounded in the soul but what you can do is you can do things to make that healing process afterwards way more rapid. and that's, i think, we can do -- we can start to do that in the military and more importantly, we civilians have to do it. probably the first thing that we need to be very careful about is to understand the warrior psychology of the very young person which is to protect a

people. if they are protecting somebody they have a job that they feel way better out than if they're out there killing people. that was one of the problems with the body count issue in vietnam. after a while we began think what we're here for is to rack up the body count. we're supposed to kill more people. that seemed meaningless to me. i think it was meaningless. and i think it was also a really dumb tactic. had we been back protecting the villages not only would we have shift the odds 3 to 1 against you and on the defense 3 to 1 against the other side but the score should have been racked up like how many -- how many murders did we save in these villages by protecting the people in these villages as opposed to how many people did we kill leaving the villages behind and going out to the mountains to find the enemy so it was wrong tactical point. if you kill a million of us we're still going to be here

fighting you. and as i point out people, when people talk about kill ratios well, we killed 15 of them and only 1 of us what did the american people focus on, 1. they didn't care about the other 15. they care about the number here. so it's a bad political strategy as well. and you can clearly see cases where going after osama bin laden, that's good. we were trying to protect our people and there's no arguing with him. there are other times when we wonder like in vietnam is this really what we're supposed to be doing? and we've got as a republic and this is still a republic have to think carefully about where we commit our 19 years old, line them up with their basic psychology. and that's important to think about. the other thing is being able to accept when you're in the combat zone that move you back to what's normal again, which is out of this position of seeing

the enemy as an animal, if you don't move it out quickly that's when atrocities happen. atrocities happen because people are in the mode of these are animals and so it's easy to kill. you can do things. a lot of things that struck me that got me thinking about it i was -- we'd been hit several nights. we'd been fighting hard and there were dead enemy bodies just below our fighting hole. and i come down walking from hole to hole and i notice a couple of kids had cut their ears off and stuck them on the rubber bands on their helmets and i'd been there long enough these are kids, you know, it's like letterman sweaters. i mean, they're not thinking. and i just said, look, you can't do this. i know they killed your friends. but you killed their friends. and i made them take the ears off and go down and bury the bodies. and this wasn't trivial and we

were still being shot by snipers and it was a full blown battle and it was dangerous work. and a couple of these kids started crying. tears started rolling down their eyes. and what i realized is that their basic humanity had been regained by just this recognizing for that moment now the enemy was no longer an animal. they were humans and if you could move move people faster to that, i don't think that will hurt our fighting ability believe me when the crap hits the fan, the kids will be there fighting and they'll not be thinking about this and you move them faster and i think people in the marine corps, the corpsmen were older and they had longer training periods they were like the platoon psychologists. you don't need to have a priest out there. you just need somebody who just can sort of take it on and say, okay, let's just think about this for a second.

take five minutes to remember what we just did. we're all alive. we came through. we lost some friends. let's think about them. let's think about their enemy. they were drafted or they were crazy or they were misled. let's just move on from there instead of shoving it down which is what i did and what a lot of people have done. i think the other thing you have to understand as a republic is that it's really not the military's job. i was at quantico when this book came out, i've been invited to the air force academy, to the naval academy, marine corps invited me down to quantico 'cause they are concerned. they are interested. they want to be better. and i commend them for this but one very frustrated colonel came up to me and he was just spitting and i'm a second lieutenant and he said we're marines not psychologists. he's right. they're marines they're

psychologists. that's not their primary function. we have people in civilian life that are psychologists that can do that sort of things. ptsd symptoms come out 10 years later at best. so the military is going to be doing things they don't know if it's working or not. they don't know after a kid goes through some rehabilitation program or release program to get them ready for civilian life, whether it's an effective program or not and i had one guy say i got six programs under me and i don't know which ones are good. how can i? and they can't, we've got to sort of remember that it's up to us, the people that have sent those kids out to get them back. and i think one of the biggest, biggest problems is that we have an unconscious attitude that the veteran went to war. but if you think about it, we pay the taxes, we voted for the

people that authorized the, you know, the veteran to go overseas and to do the job. we were reaching that trained the scientists that built the weapons. we were bankers that financed the banks. we were farmers that grew the food that fed them. whether we like it or not, we have all gone to war but if we have this attitude that they went to war, do we have -- is there any wonder why when they come back they feel a little alienated? we have this long chain of interweaving events and activities at the end of which you have a 19-year-old kid that pulled the trigger, that was his part of going to war. but in our culture, that 19-year-old kid bears virtually all the burden of the killing, of the hardship and it's like, well, you know, too bad, i'm sorry. and a lot of us have genuinely affectionate warm feelings towards these kids. we want to help. it's not like we're cold and

calloused but it's an unconscious attitude that we pay for to go do this job for us. no, no, we did this job. what the united states armed forces are, they are the weapons of the citizens of the republic and their leaders. but when you send them to war, we pull the trigger. and when we finally get that through our he does heads, i think we'll have a success return from our veterans. thank you. [applause] >> fire away. [laughter] >> just before you start, yeah, there's a mic. someone had a mic. >> germ warfare, you almost get

a sense that for many that war is kind of a video game. and i'm wondering what you feel what is lost in terms of our humanity when we actually don't experience what you experience seeing the eye of the face of the enemy? >> i think -- if i could paraphrase the question, what about germ warfare where you have someone at an air force base killing people thousands of miles away with no effect? how you will that affect our humanity. two things that jump in my mind, when i was at the air force academy there's a huge dining hall. they feed 10,000 kids in 20 minutes. they have replaced what used to be an airplane hanging over the tables with a drone. that is very symbolic. future warfare is going to be fought robotically. and i think it is a dangerous

trend for our humanity for several reasons, one is in combat for infantryman today, there's a natural break on violence. first of all, you are afraid. you are afraid and believe me if you can figure out some way to not getting exposed for danger, you will figure it out. that will put a break on the activity. the second thing, you will see the carnage. you will see your friend's leg getting blown off. you see what's left of the animal. when we remove these natural breaks, the only way we can step up to the plate is to remember that we now have to shore up the humanity side of it and we're not thinking about that. i was delighted because the woman -- she's a general in the air force and she's? charge of their curriculum at the academy says we aren't thinking about it but we need to because the technology outraces our humanity. i mean, our technology goes like this and our humanity, i don't

know if we changed since 5,000 years ago. we're making progress. i mean, we don't, you know -- at least in this country we used to not torture people, for, you know, getting confessions out of them. we ended slavery, warfare itself is way, way more human. it's still ugly but world war ii. we firebombed cities, we did horrible things. we don't do that anymore. but still the technology still outraces us but i think your question is very valid. it's a question we need to think about. right back there. >> the video games that racked up body counts that reward you for how many people you can kill in 2 minutes. is that a factor in this kind of impersonalization of killing? >> yeah. the question the impact of video games and whether it's a factor in impersonalization. i think it's a factor and i think it's like -- it's like all

things dealing with kids. is that -- i had two boys, three girls and my two boys -- they'd sneak away down in the basement, stay up all night and go to bed when i would check on them in the morning at school they told me they were up all night playing video games. it's in them. we are not the top species in the planet at the top of the food chain because we're nice, you know, we just love other animals. we're at the top species because we really are very fierce and that's -- i think it's in us. the issue is, you're going to have to learn how to guide that. you're going to say, okay, you like to do this, it's sort of exciting, isn't it. but this isn't real. you are safe, you are doing this. if this was a real game, if you made a mistake on the council you'd blow your leg off. we don't do that. if you talk about kids about that instead of repressing them

saying don't play video games. the right solution it's just regression is just like sex. it is built into us. it's what saves our hides when we need to call on it. if you repress it, you're going to get a lot of weird stuff happening just like people in the 19th century we were repressing sexually and we had a lot of weird stuff that came out. so i think you're going to have to learn how to guide it and not repress it. and video games are an important part that video games are not real and that you can get yourself numb because you can go from video games and drones and not have a clue that you're not doing anything different and i think it is dangerous. here. >> i had the honor of hearing the colonel of the rangers here speak. he said that that 2100 troops and about 20% were officers and they were the crem of the crem, you know, like yourself of the drafted era and they also

eliseted the head of the football team, you know, could be -- do you have any common denominator of what drives that 'cause i think there's a misnomer in our country that a lot of people are joining the military 'cause they get a pair of shoes. >> the question was, the current military -- the professionals, and they're all professionals from pfc up because there's no draft are very top-end people and the guys in the military say, look, these people want to be there. they have volunteered. they take seriously. it's a profession for them. they're not there because they're poor kids who don't have shoes, which is -- i think what -- where that sort of myth comes from is again, it's our thought that well, there must be some other reason that people would want to be, you know, marines or soldiers than that they just actually find it exciting and want to get involved in the fight. so we come up with this -- well, they only did it because they

needed a job. of them do it because they want jobs. i mean, i've talked to a lot of them. how come you get in the air force? well, i got out of high school and i didn't know what to do. i thought i could learn how to repair radar or something. and so there's a lot of them that do it fothat but by and large the ones that gets into the real deal, the infantry, they want to do that. they're warriors. and thank god we've got them. and i think that we need to recognize that that's what's going on. but as i said, i think that we need to -- what you fall into a space is, oh, well, they're warriors. they volunteered. we're not involved. that is not right. and i was at a fayetteville reading outside of fort bragg and a young couple came up too me. they looked like they were three years out of high school. i don't know. they looked really young and she has a young baby and she's holding a toddler and her husband is straight and tall and

in his fatigues and she breaks down tears and i finally get her under control, it's like, what's going on? and she turns to her husband he's shipping out in two days and i turn to this kid, wow, is this your second tour? no, sir, it's my seventh. this is a republic, is it not? do we not roll all of our oars in the same boat? we always have to have professional military because we could gin enough trained people fast enough to react. but, god, seven tours? i think we're letting the side down. >> initial wars are first world war, second world war, korea, we tend to bring the fighters home on ships, it took a while. they had some time to decompress and then vietnam they put us on an airplane and sent us home as fast as they could. >> right.

>> and some of us were going from combat five days -- four days later, whatever we're back with our families. there was no time to decompress. how much of this added to the ptsd issue that we're facing today? and are we creating the same thing again with guys coming out of afghanistan and iraq that are flying home immediately back to their families. it's difficult to change -- to change this persona that we're talking about. >> yeah, yeah. the question is, you know, after vietnam most vietnam veterans were just basically dumped and were back with their families within four or five days within being in combat. and i can attest to that. i got off -- i flew from vietnam to el toro marine base in california. i had another year to do but most of the other guys were getting discharged. we got down off the airplane, there were card tables set all the way down the runway and they processed them through. don't -- and the last table was would you like to have cash now

or a ticket home, which would be the equivalent amount. and i know a lot of the kids took cash and went down to the bars in san diego and they're probably still there. you know, that was really wrong. you have to have time. i mean, my father said he was seasick for a month but he spent -- he spent a month talking to his friends and wonder what it's going to be like at home. i wonder if there's any jobs. and they weren't inclined to talk deep dark serious stuff but they had time to decompress. they didn't move immediately and, again, i call it this field -- this temple of mars. we are blurring it. i mean, you go out on a patrol now and you get into a fire-fight and you come back and, you know, call your girlfriend on the phone. what happened today? oh, yeah, well, we went on a patrol and we had a fight. oh, that's nice, honey. i hope you come home soon. it's like, you know, we have to start thinking the technology again is out racing our psychology and so we have to start thinking about ways to do

that. i don't have a solution for it. but i do know that there are better ways of doing it. and this blurring of the battlefield with normal life is going to hurt our culture. i mean, you got a guy driving to work computing in the morning with the other commuters and coming home and did you have a nice day at the office, honey. yeah, we killed three taliban today. it was pretty good. is jeremy's soccer game this afternoon. that is a blurring that pretty soon killing becomes normal. we cannot make killing normal. when we have to do it, let's do it. but we can't say, oh, it's just part of the deal. it's too easy. we killed this guy in yemen -- i'm glad he did. i think obama made the decision but that's easy. he called up somebody -- i don't know where it was and said go get this guy. and there was no political pressure about it. there was nobody in danger. we just eliminated the guy and off we go. no political heat anymore with this kind of weaponry. so we better think about it.

yeah. >> [inaudible] >> it relates the black night killed the blind king and he gets off his horse and is showing respect to whom he killed. >> yeah. >> back when you saw who you killed like what you were talking about. >> yeah. >> but you got off and paid your respects. >> yeah. i think you're right. that's that old -- coat of chivalry. that's the sam roadway code. samurai, there was a fight against two samurai and the guy went down before the other samurai and he had his sword out and he sheathed it and he walked away and he said i walked away. i was angry with the guy. i couldn't kill him when i was angry with the guy. we're talking about ideals here. that's an ideal. but that's where we should strive, 19-year-olds generally aren't going to do it. if we start to think about it and talk to them about it, i

think we can move them. i really do. i mean, i have a lot of confidence that we can -- we can get traffic report. but we have to work at it. it's not going to happen automatically. over here, yeah. >> you're talking about warriors but now some of the warriors are women and what about -- [inaudible] >> what do you think? >> the question is what impact do you think women serving in the military will have? and in particular because this sense of the front line is no longer with us. women are exposed to danger. and they're behaving magnificently. they always have. even before women was in the military, you know, women that went through the bombings and, you know, in germany or in england incredibly brave people. and the question is, what impact would have it? i really don't know, but i do know that it's not going to be

simple. it's not just sort of like well, it's just a question of equal rights and equal opportunity. the fact of the matter is, is that we're -- when you get to a certain level and the military is creeping up on the line. they just authorized women to be in certain staff positions in infantry companies and i'm going like, that's okay. because we need good managers and let's get the best ones. i don't have a problem with that but when you talk about moving them into the infantry unit at the lower level, you're starting to -- you're starting to mess with basic psychology. i mean, you're -- i'm sorry for the graphics here but when a guy -- when a kid leaves his unit and goes back on an r & r on leave and when he comes back he is greeted by being beaten to the point where teeth are knocked out because they have to make sure that he's back with them. these 19 years old have contests masterbating to see who can shoot their stuff the highest. they don't wash for 60 days.

you're going to put a woman into that situation and you have -- you have to wonder, is she ever going to be part of that group? and will that group start to do things to protect her 'cause it's just genetic. boys protect girls. the girls are the ones that -- let's that's face it, one guy can still be left and the tribe can survive. the girls go, the tribe's dead. it's just -- i think it's genetic in us and so when you get to the point of that final line, the military has done a great job and the women have done a great job. there's countless exhibits of the humvee being attacked and the woman getting on the machine gun and pulling the trigger. she can do that. but when you get into the hunting group, i wonder. and i just don't know. but i think it's not simple. we need to think about that. yeah, back here. talk about how my first book came to be. yeah, that was a long, long

process. i came back -- i'd always written, you know, i fancy myself some day i'd be a writer, ever since i was a little kid and my cousin and i wrote a novel about space invaders and oddly enough two 9 years old saved the world. it's my first semi auto biographical novel that's been lost to history so i thought i would write the great american novel about the vietnam war and i came back and i whipped off -- i mean, it was 1700 pages of what i call psychodump. that's what this myth where matterhorn was a manuscript was just me about a year after i got back. i was at oxford and it was 84 pages which was smaller so it was only 1700 american pages. you finished that and i came back and i looked at it, oh, dear, this is awful and you got to get serious. it isn't something you just do and you got to learn craft, how

to develop plot and characters and went at it again and then finally got a first draft in matterhorn and finished in 1977. and i tried to sell it then and no one would read it. i couldn't get anybody to read it. it was never rejected. they just rejected my query letter so i guess i can't write query letters but i can write novels. no one is interested in this war, and look, literature -- all art has a very difficult marriage with commerce. we don't pay the rent unless some publisher makes the decision that he can sell the book and make a profit out of it. that's just a fact. i don't have a problem with that. but it's a difficult issue. i mean, you can write all the literature you want but you're not going to ever be able to get paid for it but you can do that. but if you want to get paid for it, you're going to have to, you know, deal with these guys in new york. and i was dealing with them. in the middle of the '80s i would get letters back and i

would try it again and i would be like, there was no market 10 years ago but now the market has gone, hollywood has already saturated it, full metal jacket, platoon, there's no market and in the 90s it was like well, maybe you could switch it to the gulf war, you know, we could make it more relevant. [laughter] >> and i was delighted because by then microsoft had come up with search and replace and i said well, all i have to do is put in desert for jungle. [laughter] >> and i got a new novel. and in the ott it was well, we got a mountain in it at matterhorn, right, why don't you set it in afghanistan. finally the way it got published there was a series of women that counterintuitively -- 'cause it deals with war, a friend of mine was sitting in the -- in his house. he got a call from an old friend. his old friend is a professor at berkeley and started a tiny little literary publishing firm, two people, tom farber and kit duane and mebdz i got this manuscript you ought to take a look at it and sure, okay,

everybody has got a manuscript well, send it to my senior editor, kit duane. and my friend is excited i remember saying to him, ken, i said it's going to cost me 50 bucks at kinco and you expect me to send a book about war to a woman in berkeley. [laughter] >> and she was the first one that broke it free and it was published. and my wife came to the idea -- 'cause no one would even read that book. my pay was 1200 copies. i got free 1200 free copies and the run was 1,200 books. and the deal was if we don't sell them all out in three years you get the rights back and if we sell them out, then you get the rights back. so no one would read it. we tried to get people to review it. all right, and so she said we'll enter it in the barnes & noble discovery program.

and some woman in milwaukee or someplace read it and loved it. sent it up to her boss, a woman named joe lamar who's in new york. she loved it. she's the head of the program. she sent it to her boss, a woman named cecily hensley who's the chief fiction your for barnes & noble and she knew if they bought the book they would bury it. and so she took it around to new york publishers and that's how it finally broke. interesting. [inaudible] >> one more question. right here. >> okay. [inaudible]

>> about 90 minutes after we'd been eating eggs and bacon. so i consider that to be the real deal. >> yes. >> i think you misunderstood what i said. they were talking about motivations for joining. and i said sometimes the more technical jobs people do join because they really want to get -- they really want to learn the skill, and i stand by that as opposed to i really want to get out there and kill people. i think -- but the fact of the matter is, what we have to understand is that a warrior is someone who was willing to use violence against the enemy of his people to protect his people. and no matter -- and the air force guy is exactly the same position as the woman on the polaris missile is exactly the same position as the infantryman. they are willing to use violence and they are risking violence

being used against them to carry on the mission. the more technical you get, the more distance you get. there's no denying that. but i think that we -- that you did misunderstand that it's a motivation. you don't really learn very many skills in the infantry. i mean, i'll just stand by that except pulling the trigger and making rifles. you do learn skills in the navy and the air force that are applicable to civilian jobs. so there's more of a tendency for people to join for that reason, for that motivation and the question was, are people joining because they're poor? they don't have anything else to do? and i think that's not true. that there is a difference for why kids justify that. [inaudible] >> no. right, yeah. anyway, that's it. so thanks very much. [applause]

>> this program was part of the fifth annual savannah book festival in savannah, georgia. for more information, visit savannahbookfestival.org. >> the morality of capitalism is the name of the book. the subtitle, what your professors won't tell you. it's put out for students of liberty and megan roberts is the communications director for that group. megan roberts, what won't our professors tell us? >> well, the morality of capitalism book project that we did this year was an expansion of our book project that we do every year. last year we published selected works of one author with the subtitle what your professors won't tell you and this year we did the morality of capitalism project. we gave over 100,000 copies away to student groups all over the country to distribute on their college campuses. the morality of capitalism is more focused on the ideas of capitalism and capitalism as a moral argument not just an

economic one. and so it's collected essays from writers from all over the world sort of with that viewpoint of capitalism. >> and that includes john mackey. who is john mackey? >> john mackey is the founder of whole foods. >> and what does he write about? >> he writes about capitalism again as this moral argument that we have the moral high ground as capitalists. we are saying to people that they have the freedom to decide how to live their lives. we're not going to dictate that to them and it is in my opinion a very moral argument to make. >> what is students for liberty? >> students for liberty is a 501c3 nonprofit run for students and by students. we provide a network of support and resources for student groups all over the world. we have leaders in europe, africa, oceania and all across the united states that are just promoting the ideas of liberty on their college campuses. >> when was it founded? where? >> it was founded in 2008 by a group of young interns actually in the dc area. they got together, had a round table discussion on best

practices for promoting liberty on campus. and then they decided to have another meeting and then another one and then eventually they formed it as an organization. >> how many campuses are you on now? >> we have well over 700 student groups in our network. so like i said, all over the world. >> and this is your second compellation? >> yes. this is our second compellation that we put together in partnership with the atlas society. >> the ayn right hand society. megan roberts is a communications director and one of the copy editors on this book, the moral of capitalism. >> coming up next, booktv presents "after words," an hour-long program where we invite guest hosts to interview authors this week karl marlantes author of universal