there you can find information on the haqqani network as well as other videos from our series. i would be remiss if i didn't and with extraordinary things in gratitude to kernel chris toner and to the great men and women of the third brigade combat team. the infantry division, the task force, all of them have done terminus work to make it possible for these great patriots to achieve their goal in an environment where they don't necessarily have all the capacity that they need to. in order to make their country succeed. you and your soldiers have done a terminus job. i have seen it myself. i really would want to thank

you. in the grand scheme of traditions, we want to thank you very much for joining us. [applause] have a wonderful day. >> next on c-span, a special friday night edition of booktv. .

please join me in welcoming captain smiley to the 2012 savannah book festival. [applause] >> thank you, linda. thank you for making this happen and please, again, i'll thank your wife later this evening. i'm honored to be able to speak to you this afternoon. i wrote my autobiography, and i'll cover that in the end, but just to motivate and inspire people and give them a glimpse into my life, the awesome experiences i've had and also the hard times. a glimpse of my life is a short way and then definitely love to open up to questions afterwards.

so i'm standing on mount rainier at about 10,000 feet at camp mere. there's no trees, it's a beautiful, sunny day out. i'm sweating, have sun block on my face, apparently, a few thousand feet makes the sun a lot hotter. but it was warm, it was nice. a day earlier we had climbed to mount paradise, 4-6,000 feet up. chicaned our way up through the ice sheet, but again, it was a very easy climb. and this day up at camp muir, we were practicing being tied in together on a four-man team because the next day we were going to attempt to make the summit. again, very relaxing. and as the day was coming to a close, we were all sitting around a campfire where the camp guides were warming snow to make water for us the next day, and

as the lead climb guy after he was finishing the route that we were going to take said, you know, we're going to wake up about 11 and get climbing at 12. so as i'm going back to my tent with my buddies i thought, this is awesome, we're going to get 12 hours of sleep. he said, sorry, scotty, it's called alpine sleep, and you're going to get less than two. i did get less than two. we could not have asked for a better night to climb. the moon was out, the stars were shining, we all had little lamps on our foreheads to see where we were going and in case for safety reasons guides or safety rangers could come and find us if anything happened. but again, it was a beautiful, beautiful evening to climb. and we'd stop about every hour and a half to two hours to rest sitting on our backpacks,

drinking water, gatorade, getting some type of energy. and after we had summited through disappointment lever, this huge rock face on mount rainier, my legs were done. my quads, my core, my arms, my body was dead tired. and as i sat on my backpack just thinking you still have thousands of feet to go, tens of thousands of steps, the lack of oxygen, it's getting to you. i looked up at the lead climb guy and said i don't think i can make it. i don't think i can make it to the top. i rewind several years earlier, raising a large family, three brothers, three sisters. we were definitely a team, and we definitely fought together, but that competition that i had with my two older brothers and, you know, always trying to be tougher than my younger sisters who probably beat me in everything, it pushed -- i pushed myself. academically, physically and spiritually. because i knew inherently that in order to be someone and to do something i had to get a job, i

had to do something with my life. and it had to start now. so that meant i had to study, do homework even though i never liked it, never wanted to do it. but i knew inherently i had to push myself to be someone in the future. and as i came close to the end of graduating, i chose to attend one of the best schools in the world, united states military academy, in west point, new york. you know, we telling my mom and dad, my mom crying like why don't you go to the air force academy be, it's only a few states away. [laughter] you know, we're from washington state, and new york and washington, that's two sides of america. and inherently i kind of knew my mom would probably visit me just as much in new york as she would in colorado, but having an older brother at west point kind of meant something to me, and that was one of the deciding factors. me dating my girlfriend, it was difficult to say good-bye because we all know how important high school

girlfriends are. so as i'm heading on my one-way ticket by myself, yeah, one way. like, i knew i only had one ticket, and it was going to drop me off in new york. the first half an hour of that flight i just spent crying, tears were coming down. and i know the men and women sitting next to me were like what's wrong with this guy, he'sback coe. but i was leaving my comfort zone, i was leaving my girlfriend. that same day i got from the military academy, they shaved my head, put a gray t-shirt on me, very high black shorts, black socks up to my knees, black loafers on. yes, i did look like a dork, but i was comforted because everyone else looked the same. everyone was on the same team,

so there was a comfort. it's funny to say this, but they gave us rank. it was new cadet. no, not cadet, new cadet. they didn't even call us cadet until we became a cadet. but new cadet we were told how we ranked. it was right below the commandant's dog -- [laughter] yes, dog. but luckily, we had a little self-worth because we were ranked right above be naval goat -- the naval goat. but we also had to do duties every day. as new cadets you delivered upper classmen's round ri, clean the toilets, do odd-end jobs. we thought they were worthless, but it was important. just household chores. and i remember going down the hall 120 paces per minute, that's moving out without running, carrying this big pile of laundry, didn't know who it was, didn't know where they lived, i didn't know anything. and this upper classman stops right in front of me, this

female. and i'm 210 pounds of twisted teal and sex appeal. i'm a big dude. [laughter] and when she stops me, i'm like yes, ma'am. and she's like, i'm not a ma'am, i'm a sergeant. where are you going? no, sergeant, no, ma'am -- [laughter] and i just start balling. and -- bawling, and, i mean, it's embarrassing to say, and it's sad to say, but after she pulled her jaw off the ground in shock, this big, burly dude is crying in front of her, she looked at me and said, hey, you need to understand that we're training you here for a reason. and in 47 short months, you're going to be leading men and women in the united states army. and if delivering a piece of laundry is this difficult for you -- [laughter] you may need to reconsider what you're doing here. and she said, go back to your room, get yourself together because i was probably still

sniffling, and think about why you're here. and so i did. i went back to my room. and like i said earlier, everything that i had, none of it was the same. my whole life was stripped from me. but they did allows to keep one knickknack. apparently, everything that is yours is called a knickknack. i don't know the definition of knickknack other than something that you own, but the one knickknack that i was able to carry with me was my bible. and so i open it up. and specifically to philippians where paul is talking about he's been beaten, he's tired, he's hungry, but he says, you know, through christ i can do all things. i'm thinking to myself, okay, a guy who's been beaten, a guy who's hungry and tired, he doesn't mention delivering a piece of laundry, like i'm pretty pathetic. but it really got me thinking that if god wants me here for a reason, my family, i think i have a purpose. i need to gather myself together and pick it up and understand the values that i'm being

taught, the selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage, the values we're being taught on a daily basis and do my job to the best of my ability. so i did. i made a decision to stay at the military academy. i made a decision to make a difference. and as i went through the military academy, i gained great friends; edward, dave, adam, just amazing christian men i could hang out with. they said i always studied, well, i was there for a reason, to get good grades. and i was coming up a little short many times. [laughter] so i knew the importance of life. but i also attended biblical, christ events, officer christian fellowship. i was able to teach sunday school my junior and senior year with my friends. and we taught second grade and, granted, if any of you do drop your kids off at daycare or sunday school, make sure they don't run the operations like i did. we would line the desks up, and these students would be running on the desk. i was always afraid someone was

going to break their arm and it would have been my fault. we remember this andrew harris, cute, darling little boy, chubby. i've got two boys, they're kind of chunky. but he was darling. what's up, drew? my name's andrew, and i said, but yeah, drew's a cool name, right? yeah, i guess. it was awesome to see how i was trying to positively influence him because i know in my life the way i was positively influenced by sunday school and men and women that i looked up to, it was just awesome to see the positive impact that i was able to make and just a small difference i was able to make in people around me. and luckily, i was able to graduate in 47 months with my class, and i think we were all very happy and never thought i'd see that beautiful place, west point, again. and was finally able to move out to fort lewis. i happened to date the girlfriend that i'd left four years earlier, five years later

tiffany became my bride, still with me now. and i was finally able to receive a 45-man platoon. i mean, given i was 23 years old, i now was in charge of four stryker vehicles. if you don't know what a stryker is, it's a big metal vehicle with eight wheels, four on each side, the first four turn. you can, i think the driver can push a button, do you want to use four-wheel drive or eight-wheel drive? and i'm like, how is eight-wheel drive a choice? but it was awesome. shoot .50 caliber machine guns, throw grenades, it was awesome just to see the leadership opportunities that i was given. that female that had stopped me in the hallway four, five years earlier was right: the challenges in the army were a lot more, were a lot more severe. the values that i was taught -- integrity, personal courage -- were huge. i remember counseling soldiers on a daily basis, why are you late? why didn't you show up? you know, great job.

that was awesome on pt, that was great leadership. it was just amazing to see the awesome opportunities that i had. and after a few short months of being at fort hue bit -- lewis, we received orders to deploy to iraq. and again, it's hard to go home, tell your wife sorry, honey, i know we've only been married for five months, and i didn't tell you this, but two of those months i was at ranger school. i was only able to talk to her for five minutes over those two months, so she luckily still loved me and still stayed married with me, so i was still in the good. but now telling my wife that, sorry, i've got to go for a year, it was hard. it was difficult. again, the stress, the anxiety began to, began to come down. but again, i knew that god had me there for a reason, and i knew i was still serving my country, protecting our constitution. so we pushed out. six months after being a platoon leader, training my men, making sure they're in physical

fitness, mentally straight, physically right, we deployed to iraq. and i was able to keep a journal on a daily basis, and it's funny, the first thing i wrote was i feel at home. i'm at pascal, washington, and in the summertime it's 95 degrees, no trees as far as the eye can see. hit down in iraq, same thing. it was creepy, but i felt at home. it was awesome to see the work that we americans and international forces were doing over there. we were helping rebuild their government, helping rebuild iraq. my platoon was in charge of the mayor's government center protecting it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. we helped rebuild schools. i remember going into schools, and they had softball-sized holes in the ceilings. the blackboards were curled away from the wall, unusable. two to three children were sitting in one chair. two to three children in one

chair. if i was the third, i'd love to be in the middle. but it was sad. none of them had books. just the poverty, it was so sad to see. but we helped build those schools. we helped rebuild parks. we handed out soccer balls to the students and the kids. it was awesome to see the amazing impact that we were having. we helped redistrict electricity, gas lean. it was just the amazing impact that we continually made was awesome. however, we were attacked on a daily basis by insurgents. attacked with improvised explosive devices, bombs in the road, bombs in cars, suicide car bombs, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades. any number of weapon they were using against us. i lost my company commander, captain bill jacobson jr., on december 2 21st of 2004, the day after my first anniversary. he lost his life in the mess

hall bombing with 21 other men and women in the united states. 60 or so other men and women were injured. it was devastating to see. i ended up losing six of my soldiers being wounded and being sent back to the united states. the loss of life was hard. it was hard to take. it was hard to comprehend. but in the end i knew we were still there for a reason, we were still there for a purpose. one of goals that i had was to read through my bible in a year, and i continually did it. whether it was out in the city, in my little hutch, my men would ask me, sir, what bible -- what book is that? oh, it's the bible. i was able to pray behind my stryker just taking it in. it was awesome to see the positive impocket in that i was able to make. but in 2000 my life -- 2005 my life was forever changed.

i was actually first a little ticked off because we had the same information as the day before and, unfortunately, i looked up at the date on the top of the page, and it said, no, april 6th. as i was -- my platoon and i were heading out the gate, i was joking with one of my squad leaders. you know, it's funny, i'll have been married to my wife a year and a half after this deployment, and i'll only be with her five months. i don't know, it was just something funny that i said. after getting a description over the radio on a possible location of the suicide car bomb, it may have been spotted, we headed north into the city. going over some rough terrain in sketchy places of town, talked with my company commander, an amazing man. and he told me, hey, go search up in this area. that may be in the location. as i was coming north, i spotted the suspicious vehicle. he was on the northern side of

the road facing west as this road intersected with one to have main highways. and as i'm coming from the south, i turned to cordon him off because i knew that was the best decision i could make. if this man was bad, which no one knew, i had to protect the iraqi people. i had to protect international/american forces. so i was parked just 25 yards to his south. 25 yards away from his vehicle. he was parked about 10-15 yards to the south of the market. the markets were where everyone bought/sold groceries, fish, food, anything and everything. honestly, i looked for six months for a store, and i never found one. apparently, they were all markets. but as i looked into the car, it was only a single driver. head was cleanly shaven, face was cleanly shaven, looked like an innocent, nice guy.

had a gray shirt on, long-sleeved shirt that came down to his wrists. he was in a silver opal, opal were apparently cars that everyone in iraq drives and no one in america knows about. but again, the suspicion was raised when i realized the back of the car was a little lower to the ground than the front. and given the rules of engagement, you can't just shoot someone because they looked suspicious. well, sir, scott, why did you shoot him? well, i got scared. you got scared? so you killed a man? well, yeah, sir. like, i have a gun. like, you can't do that. and given the rules of engagement, you can't just shoot someone unless you know they have the weapon, you know they're aiming, or you know that they've been -- they've killed someone or they're in, i should say, they're in the action. so given the rules of engagement, i couldn't just shoot someone that looked

suspicious. so i knew the best thing to do was to yell at him to get out of his car. so as i did, i was looking over my left shoulder kind of facing him. i was in the lead stryker vehicle, had metal basically up to my neck, i was inside the stryker standing up. i still had my m-4, my oakley m frames on, i was looking cool. had my kevlar on. doing everything that i was supposed to do. looked at him and said, hey, get out of your vehicle. and i knew he heard me because he looked over his shoulder straight at me and raised his hands off the steering wheel and then put 'em back down. nothing happened. i was like, okay, well, maybe he understood or maybe he's saying i don't know where i am, i'm lost. i didn't know. so i yelled at him again. he raised his hands up again off the steering wheel and shook his

hands no and let his foot off the brake. i then had to make a decision. so i shot two rounds in front of his vehicle with my m4 and, boom, my world went black. i woke up a week or so laettner walter reed army medical center, my life forever changed. my world went black not only physically, being blind the rest of my life, the shrapnel had cut my left eye in half, entered the frontal lobe on the left side of my brain and metal went through my cornea and taking out my optic nerve. i saw nothing but blackness and was told by the ophthalmologist that you would never be able to see again. so my life went physically black. that day. but it also went spiritually black. i no longer believed in god. everything that i'd done, everything that i believed in

now no longer meant anything to me. i remember one of my best friends, edward, coming into the room. i think it was before one of my surgeries and said, hey, scotty, why don't you say a prayer? i said, no. i don't know how to pray, and i don't know god. and i think it, the room went dead silent. like if there were cockroaches in the room, you would have heard 'em. my wife went back to her room realizing, you know, i'd been married to an awesome man, and i still am, and i'd be fine married to a blind guy, but being married to someone who didn't believe in what he believed in before, that was something different. so she began to pray. friends began to pray all around the world. and for me it was a choice that i had to make. it was a personal choice that i had to make. i knew i had support. friends would come into my room on a daily basis singing christian songs. i know doctors thought our room

was creepy because balloons would be coming out, i thought the room was huge. apparently, it was like a little match boxcar. but it was that support. but again, it still came back to me. i was the one that had to make a choice. i was the one that had to choose to make a difference. my company commander called me every other day to see how i was doing. we were awesome friends. my brigade commander would call me every week to see how i was doing. something that doesn't normally happen in an organization, to have the top leadership call you to see how you're doing? the support that i had was amazing, was awesome. and people like toby keith, country singer, gary sinise, the actor, generals, three-star, four-star would come in and try to see me and i'd say, no, no thank you. and one day my wife said, scotty, andrew wants to see you. she didn't say who it was, but something hit me.

it was andrew harris, the boy who i had taught sunday school with three years earlier had driven down from west point, new york, with his dad to come and see me. and i don't know if i knew that day or in the days to come that the impact that i had made on that young child had done a 380 -- 180, and now this child was positively impacting me in an amazing way. i knew if a little boy who was seeing this torn apart man crying on his bed, if he still looked up to me, i still had a purpose. i still had things to give back. i still had so much to do. and i, again, it was a choice that i had to make. i could have been someone like gary sinise in forest gump, i don't know if you remember lieutenant dan living a pretty lascivious lifestyle, or

continue to fight, continue to serve and live by the army values of selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage. and luckily, i chose the latter. i still wanted to serve. i still wanted to give back. so i made a decision that day that i was going to get out of bed, you know? granted, the injuries to my brain, i was still partially paralyzed, and as i pulled the iv, like, little stand over to me i'm not sure if i was going to ride that into the bathroom to take a shower or what, but i was getting out of bed. please, scotty, stay seated. the nurses came in, put me into a wheelchair and took me to the shower. and that day i took the worst but best shower of my entire life. it was the worst shower because i had no energy. the only thing that i could do was to hold on to the ada shower rail in the shower as my knees were quivering. the water felt like needles and

knives pricking me, my neck, my back. it was burning. the nurses, i could have swore they had steel brillo pads as they're scraping my back, scraping my shoulders. it was terrible, and that's why it was the worst shower of my entire life. but it was the best shower of my entire life because i had made a decision. i had made a decision to make a difference, to accept the life that i had been given, to accept that i was going to be blind the rest of my life, but i was still going to live. i was still going to make and be someone. i wasn't sure who, but i was still going to stand and be someone. and that verse that i had looked up back in west point, philippians 4:13, came back to me. i can still do all things through christ who strengthens me. i just had to make a choice. and that's what i did. and as i continued my recovery, walking every day step by step, building off of what i had dope

the next day and -- done the next day, and sometimes it'd be two steps forward, one step back. i know my wife, i'm sorry, those one step back were definitely hard days. i was able to move on, attend the blind rehabilitation center in palo alto, california, where i was able to learn how to use a computer, learn a little bit of braille -- it got tough. but again, i still wanted to be who i was before, and it's funny, we all here want to be independent somehow, some way. i'm married and, you know, sometimes i don't like my wife nagging on me, and i know she's not, and i know she doesn't like me nagging on her. but that independence was still, like, just hovering over me. i want to do things on my own. i want to go to the gym on my own. i remember, you know, asking to go to the gym at the blind blind center, and they kind of looked at me like, huh?

what that's that? i was like, i want to work out. 210 pounds of twisted steel and i think you kind of know the rest, i wanted to work out. but they wouldn't ever let me go by myself because they were too scared i was going to get lost. .. very easy ayman, i was very surprised they wouldn't let me do this before on my own will come after a couple weeks of doing it, they finally let me go by myself. and i usually worked out in the afternoons after i had done all my training, walking around, learning braille, learning how

to cook, learning how to do all these necessities of life. ws at was about 4:451 went and about 5:15 when i finished so i couldn't drink in water that day and i know the importance ofknor drinking water now. i was dehydrated. so i'm heading out in the 95-degree p.o.w. well into the sun and needed to do is make tht right, take the first left across the ottawa to come for them 1520 arts come air-conditioner water, awesome. it's going to be great. across the alley i don't feel the mass is so blind people come you increase the art of your stick just in case you missed something here so increase a little more i walk about 10 to 15 more yards than realized, i'm lost. i know many of this year and back track is common sense here

proportionally a buying guide backtracking is a blind eye back tracking. [laughter] i still didn't know where it was. and a half an hour later i am still lost. trust me, i'm a very open person as you can tell unalaska 2-year-old if they can talk, what's true to my aunt. how do i get here? that there was no one. no one was around. it stopped sweating about 20 minutes earlier. dehydrated, angry at life, not understanding why i was put in this position. i threw my stick down in anger and just sat down started crying kamas guide, whiny me, why this? unfortunately, it never should've been the question i asked. i don't think it came to me that day, but in weeks and months to come, it should've been how, how

can me? what are you going to use me for? but also, trust in other people. you don't have to be this independent study does every day and yourself. on top of the world. no, working as a team and relying on others. i made a decision. not only copy, but in the months to come i had to depend on other people and i had to make a difference. and if i want to make a difference it couldn't be on my own. one of the other decisions i had to make in a few months was that i want to stay inactive duty in the united states army? know in the united states army has ever been blind. they have been blind, but there quickly moved. no one had actually ever been blind and that's okay, i'd like to stay on active duty and how do you say okay. the last part is the hard part because i think there've been a lot of people who are combined

and stay on in the army says thank you for your service. would really appreciate it. we the paycheck for you somewhere else. for me, that was the decision i wanted to make because i still wanted to make a positive change, knowing the enemy, but in the community. after praying with my wife and friend boat commanders, it was a decision i made to stay on active duty. as i push forward and went through the struggles of having generals e-mail you and call you and seek it out at the army, i don't think you know what you're doing, you're really messing up the situation in the army's anders, trust me, iran alone ship. but again, having amazing leaders like the chief of the army corps of engineers, general casey, general haig and, general shoemaker, general petraeus, general aggregate command called

me and said we support you, want you to stay in. leaders like that i continue to want to be like. leaders like that i wanted to make a difference just as they had. and so i did. i was able to stay inactive duty. that brings me back to not renew your period just before a 10 duke university, i am on narnia, blind. every step i was taking us to the young punk independent guy who wanted to do everything himself, did need help, didn't need assistance. so again, breaking down and i know my friends make fun of me. i don't think i can make it. man i was worse. i'm probably going to die on this mountain. avalanche is going to come. i'm too tired. but again, i came to that choice. i have to do it with other people's decisions in god's decisions. so i oscillate guy, a medic in the right steps quirks of course

the answer was no, you're not your tenacious little small things like that i was able to start pushing forward. and again making change to finally something i'm not really that day come a beautiful sunny day out. it was awesome and i felt like i was on top of the mountain. but it is funny that it wasn't these little problems or i could say actually big problems that were the end of minister problems in my life. i was blind. and the issues that have, whether he can in lost the palo alto sidewalks, not wanting to move out of my bag, getting tired on the rainier, they went into my pelvis, just as we all know here with issues every day and i know is they quickly to introduce from the nba, my problems were not over.

imagine statistics class. as you can see here been in business today not to do you get this. the students i cannot. unlike now, what are you talking about? financial accounting. hundreds of thousands of excel blocks with numbers that work off each other. i just did a small glimpse, one block at a time. unlike a paperless or thousand 455. look on your sheet. okay, where is the? i mean, it was amazing the issues that i had come of it all came to teamwork. it all came back to the army values that i had to trust another people. the platoon i'd know, men and women that supported me was the same support i still needed. having friends like eli here today be a partner that would help describe instantly and understand where things went and how things went allowed me to finally graduate and it was

awesome. again, i felt like i was on top of the world, graduated with an mba. there was a small step to better myself and making a positive change because quickly after graduating from duke was back to my alma mater at the united states military academy. like i said earlier, something i never thought i would have to do again is to see that place and luckily i never had to see it. last night that i was now instruct her. as teaching military leadership to students. 18 students per class. teaching and leadership, transformation leadership, been an extreme environments. was awesome. it is funny because the first time i went to class no one knew i was fine. i say hey how are you guys doing. i'm scotty.

though, jodi. hate you doing. as i started the class, segmenting scotty smiley. i'm a military leadership instructor. awesome to have you all. looking around the tip of a gas, do do do. something important to know i'm blind. if you want to raise your hand from your arm is going to get tired. [laughter] hollis half of them laughed because they literally thought i was joking. the other half is like, is he serious clerics they quickly found out guess i was, but it was awesome and amazing at it since i had throughout my short life that gave me an amazing ability to teach them, and amazing ability to begin a positive change i had wanted to make that change, to counsel soldiers and council cadets to lead them to do physical fitness in the morning with them and then in the afternoon, to get educated more and more each day

to make a positive change. after one semester teaching my class asked me, scotty, do you want to commend the company. commanding a company has been in charge of 200 soldiers. you manage, lead them from six in the morning when you do physical fitness to whenever you are done at night. and when he asked me, i was in shock. because i was registering, but fair. i didn't say this, but sir, i am blind. how am i going to do that? but i think he could see the positive nature and the positive impact as making a statement that i couldn't do anything but make a positive change in the company there at west point. and so i did. i went home, tactile life and she was in shock. are you sure? i serious?

was like yeah. i think he knows i'm blind. [laughter] but if he does that, let's go for it anyway. but again it was awesome to see the change as able to make in the way of transitioning unit at west point. wounded soldiers who'd been injured in combat who had cancer hard issues, nest their knees or shoulders that they have to be somewhere. and he gave me the ability to the time in the positive difference in their lives. and it was awesome to make a change and as i had gone through struggles and trials have been able to resolve some and continue to move on, and opportunity came to tell my story, to write not a biography casino military after action

reviews, how to sack o, how do you do, what are some good sustains and improves and that is what i wanted to do was to continue to make a positive interest, write a book about change, hope, write a book about how my life has been positively influenced by not only god, but my family and friends in the united states army. so that's what they did was write a short story about the positive changes on it positive basis. or this ability to attempt to make a change. we still go through trial. it's all about getting out and continuing to make a change in a daily basis. thank you so much for having me here. [applause]

we have about 15 minutes for questions and we have a routing might. if you have a question for mike is over here. raise your hand and shall come over to you. >> remember i can't see hands. but they are raised, red that? >> thank you. i'm here with my wife today and it is her birthday. i do not hobble chios, but she's had a lot of birth dates. during that time she's done a lot of great presents, that's your talk today was the greatest of all.

[applause] captain smiley, how long do you expect to stay in the serious clerics >> right now, and still active duty in the united states army. my family and i moved from west point new york about five to go in the ac in georgia right now. i'm attending the captains career course, mandatory course for army officers and after this i am going to attend a university merkin a rotc program, which is in washington state close to home. and for me, but factor in how long you to stay in the army is how long i can take me to love the positive impact in the positive change i'm able to make. i think each and every day as i see the soldiers of nice and the men and women unable to serve it, i still think it's going to

be some years before my wife either forces out of the army or we make a deciding area that god has a bigger and better place for me. so right now, i can't say i'm enjoying what i'm doing. >> thank you for your commitment. >> thank you. >> hi scott, jennifer griffin. i want to ask you, what is the last image that you have the sheer number? >> the last image that i remember your, physical image is the man who blew himself up. that is the last thing that i remember seeing. now on top of that, while given

that, that's not a very good image to have in my memory bank. so i sent to cover it with the last time i saw my beautiful wife. the last time i saw her. i use my company commanders computer to skype her and my company commanders talking to his wife and my wife was over at her house and it's kind of a funny little story, that she had a change action on and let absolutely gorgeous, beautiful. and you can imagine, and freshly married in six months away from my wife. i think you may know what i'm talking about. it was hard. but her beauty was just amazing. the funny story to that as i saw her look over her left shoulder and i knew someone was talking to her. and a few seconds after she takes her jacket off and she has this little tank top on and i think what happened i later

heard months later was the company commanders wife said to think he really wants to see bundled up in a jacket? so i haven't actually think my company commanders wife for letting me see my wife shoulder, but again, those are the views that i try to think of than just my wife's beauty. i.t. beautiful little boys, just imagining what their faces look like. it is hard to say that i'll never appealed to see my boys in space, but they are cared for, personality, the motion they draw, their happiness is all fun and it so amazing that with a very plain the park or upside down of something, jumping off picnic tables, i think i still train my children like i do this sunday schoolers, but it's just asked them to how those boys look and just remember or to try to think of what they are view, what they look like.

but again unfortunately the last thing i remember seeing is the man who blew himself up. the question was how old are my boys. i have two amazing beautiful boys. the first is greedy. he's a little over four and a half and the second is grand, a little over two and a half. brady was named after we thought it was a cool name and they are not twins. they are two years apart. graham was named after one of my best friends, edward korean, again a friend who stood by my side through thick and thin and was thereby my bad praying for me, supporting me and children's names, to name aspirin office i wanted it to be someone as impactful and amazingness and. so today my son graham was up

but an honor. >> good afternoon. q. forgive the suicide bomber and the feeling he been some bizarre way a feeling of his own clinic >> idea. i was part of the healing process as each and every one of us go through trials and struggles. it is coping. if the coping mechanism. for me, denying being blind is hey open your eyes. the caseinate, buddy. it was hard not to deny it. but at the same time, part of not denying it except dean. and part of accepting the forgiveness process and for me being a christian, forgiving was the toughest thing i had to do was forget the man who blew himself a period it was hard. he had a mission. he had a purpose in just a greater purpose here, those two

missions were conflicting with each other. uninsured -- i hope i did something onto a family over there they would forgive me. but that is difficult for me to forgive and i was able to finally forgive him. but on top of that i had to forgive myself because i was the one that placed myself there. i was the one, canada short story short story told aitchison from the military academy to go infantry chose to be in the unit i was then. i chose to be in a place that was at that time. i know all of this year, things happen to have a guess, they are not our choice. people do things to us and forcing upon us. people confront us and they are not our fault. but in my situation, i had to forgive myself. but most importantly, in the healing process, i had to ask god to forgive me. you know, we all say it is very difficult to forgive someone and trust me, i know it is. but to deny god, the person i

have loved my whole life and the person i vote doubt torrents and then the person i say goodnight to live and good morning to first, to deny him was the hardest thing that i did and to ask for his forgiveness was difficult. but once i did that, i was able to start moving forward and start making mall steps and recovering. like i said a little earlier, it is not like the light just turned on. at meal time again i'm blind, let's go move on. no, it's difficult. the healing process takes time. it takes time to know that you're blind, to know that this is the life you're going to live, but to take small steps in getting out of bed, taking a shower, learning how to brush her teeth again come eat again. all these things take time. but in the end, i would never change a thing in my life.

being blind, everything that has happened to me i would not change a thing because i know god has opened up the door for me to speak my beliefs come to share my beliefs on who he is and what i believe and i just don't think i would've ever had that opportunity if i was on arbakai and not had my eyesight taken. so i would never change anything that it happened. but again come it started with me and it started with forgiveness. >> hello. i wanted to laugh, was anyone else injured during the attack quiet >> is actually other people that were injured. my squad leader who is in the right back hatch, he passed out

because of the concussion blast and the gunner and the left rear hatch. so the striker has four hatches. the driver has won in the very front as the fifth hatch. but if he ever opens up, he would get beat down because it uses the driver to your vehicle, your 12 soldiers unable to know. so i was in the front left hatch. my vehicle commander was to make writing in heat until the 50 caliber machine gun, which is right above and outside the vehicle in the right were hatch was my squad leader who had the headphones on, do i contact you, who i mention i was talking to earlier. he passed out in the left who are hatch with the 240 gunner, which he too 40s a big 7.60 machine gun that can definitely cause some distraction. he actually received some shrapnel in his face, but was returned to duty that same day. and those were the only other two soldiers that were injured. and i asked others because that day is a bit fuzzy in my mind,

just because of the concussion i received an injury that occurred, there were several iraqis civilians that were very seriously injured and i unfortunately don't know what happened to them and unfortunately, when a bomb goes off like that, there are no real known remedies to who will get hurt and who will not end that is again one of the scariest of having a car bomb go off is you have to have a nonchalant attitude if i hit civilians, i'm fine with it. if they hate americans or international forces or iraqi forces, their consideration is better. but those were the only people i believe were injured that day.

>> thank you so much. >> thank you so ne he won of the greatest

experiences of this week is when i got the opportunity to meet both of my senators, bob casey and pat to me and being able to meet them and talk to them. >> some of the leaders like leon panetta how important is to be financially sound because if we are not financially sound, devoting money to the national defence will be worth it because you won't have money to devote to it. all of my congressman and senators there's a lot of partisanship going on and i am the one that's reaching across the aisle and everybody we've met here from congress said that in the kind of makes me wonder if everybody is saying that but it's not happening is there a discrepancy between what they're saying and doing and i never thought about that before i came

here. >> "new york times" reporter and fox news reporter jennifer griffin have both been working out of jerusalem report and on the arab-israeli conflict. the right about the mentality of those fighting on both sides in their book, "this burning land." authors talked about the book at the least the 2012 savanna bookn festival. this is 20 minutes. meu jennifer griffin and greg myre have been coveringg international affairs since they met in 1989 in an overflowing stadium in south africa wherengs nelson mandela, imprisonedson colleagues received a briefingol on the decades in jail in 1993ee jailgriffin and mr. myre moved to pakistan to the war-tornkistn afghanistan where they were among the first interview members members of an obscure group

called the taliban. they landed in jerusalem in 1999 racing two dollars while covering the worst fighting ever between israel and the palestinians. reporting on every major event from peace talks from palestine uprising of a witness frequent palestinian suicide bombings and the israeli military incursion. the israeli-palestinian conflict is the basis of their new book "this burning land". miss griffin and mr. myre have been sponsored to the 2012 savannah book festival. [applause] >> thank you for their wonderful introduction and thank you to dick and judy for sponsoring a said to my sister caitlin who is

a proud graduate and -- mike and enormous powers posted some events for a while we have been here in town. is true that greg and i -- i worked for fox news and he worked for the new york times and work for national public radio and we like to say it is possible to have peace in the middle east. some people here wanted to call us the mary matalin and james carville of the middle east. greg has more hair. and a little more charm. alisha explain to you how we got to jerusalem. it was 1989 and it was the end of apartheid and nelson mandela was in prison. i was a sophomore at harvard university and decided to take a year off. i went down and met gregg. i didn't know i would meet him.

and the baseball cap -- he stood out and came in to use our phone in a booth where nelson mandela's colleagues were getting out of prison. and it was the first legal rally for the african national congress. i saw greg and we met and started dating and i was back to harvard finishing up my schooling. for two years we dated from afar and finally i moved down after graduating and for graduation my father had given me $1,000. it was a check that was supposed to last the entire year. it was going to help me launch my career as a freelance journalist. i arrived in south africa and i didn't know what it was to be datingied .. foreign correspondent.

he said to me as i arrived on friday, glad you are here but i am going to somalia because there's a famine and i don't know when i will be back. so i was a hot headed young 22-year-old and i stewed about it for a week and took the money my dad had given me and gregg had already left and there was no communication at the time. was in flight it is today where there are e-mails and cellphone is. wasn't easy to talk. there were $30 a minute satellite phones that i did know his number and he didn't know that i was going to track him down. so i bought a ticket to kenya because there weren't any flights, there was so much gunfire in the streets that planes weren't landing. there weren't any commercial flights so i flew into kenya and went to the little airport that if you have ever been on a safari there is a little airport

they use for small planes and they had unicef light on one side of the airport and on the other side there were some planes that the drug dealers were using to take the drug are conic that they shoot in somalia and so i asked the unicef folks for a place on their flights and they said you are not an accredited journalists so i tried to show my harvard id but it didn't get me very far and they said you can go down to the other end, if you pay your weight in cuts they will fly u.n.. so i was starting to do that and one of the unicef workers felt sorry for me and got me on the flight and i landed and we did a corkscrew landing with the plane because they were trying to avoid gunfire from the street. i found great at the unicef

house and surprised him. >> she is not lying. i was surprised. as soon as i got over my shock a very profound truth settled upon the which was -- i share this particularly with the guys in the audience. if a woman stocks you all the way to mogadishu, a place with no commercial flights telephones or electricity or running water, you are out of options. if she can find you there she confined you anywhere. i quickly embraced my faith and mary jenifer and took her to afghanistan for our honeymoon. >> which i have not forgiven him. we spent our honeymoon in kabul.

>> we got lodged as foreign correspondents travelling around partly by choice and partly by serendipity. we enjoyed going places. we saw the final years of apartheid. we were there when nelson mandela walked out of prison. we saw some terrible wars in africa and somalia and mozambique and angola and we went to pakistan and spend a lot of time and afghanistan. we moved to cyprus and traveled through the arab world. we went to moscow for three years and got to jerusalem. there had been a pattern covering conflict. we got to jerusalem thinking that might continue on. is important to remember in 1999 it was different in jerusalem. it was quiet. for three years there had been no major violence. after the cold war ended in 91 the israelis and palestinians began talking to each other. they were meeting on a daily

basis. as we walked around one of the first day as i was there i went to the temple mount. the place where the ancient jewish temples were and where the golden dome of the rockabilly dismal the iconic dome of the rock has been built on top of the ancient temples. the church where jesus was crucified and buried is half a mile -- all within yards of each other. this muslim -- palestinian muslims at prayer. mostly older people older -- reading from the koran but what jumped out at me was 20 israeli soldiers, they left their guns out side but there pad around in their socks and getting a guided tour.

sort of cultural sensitivity, the root -- holiest site in judaism but at a muslim holy site that has been there for 1300 years and this is part of the atmosphere. it was one of coexistence. learning to live together after decades of conflict. every day in, every morning 150,000 palestinians from the west bank and gaza strip would commute to israel. they would work there doing all sorts of jobs. construction in restaurants and gardens, manufacturing. at an end of the day they would go back. , weekend israelis would leave israel and go into palestinian towns and have a chicken lunch. they would go to get their car repaired, drive all away across the west bank to jericho where there was a casino and they gambled day and night seven days we can drive home at midnight on a very isolated road in palestinian territory without fear of anything bad happening.

where is this great conflict everyone is talking about? >> before we knew that the conflict found this. as greg mentioned we decided to start a family because this is the most peaceful capital we have lived in for a long time and i was pregnant with our first daughter and it was early and i was still having morning sickness and i got a call from the bureau. it was september 28th, 2000. the day that aerial around took the fateful walk on to the temple mount. i got a call from my bureau chief who said you need to go to the western wall. sharon is going to the temple mount. i have morning sickness. the feeling going. he said you need to go and he was right. we started broadcasting live. between -- no sooner had sharon taken those steps that rocks started flying over the wall on

to the jewish worshipers who were praying at the western wall. if you haven't been to jerusalem is hard to visualize how built on top of each other these holy sites really are. the rocks started flying. the next day the gunfire started and before we knew it we were covering the palestinian uprising. a.k.a. the intifada. as it evolved we covered numerous suicide bombings. probably 150 suicide bombings. we were at the scene of a hundred of them. there were days when one of our participants reminded me i would go to work literally with a flat jacket that would raise -- that

was the reality. and amelia was born in jerusalem. in an israeli hospital the atmosphere, muslims and jews side by side lying in blood. and unbelievable atmosphere. it was a very surreal time in jerusalem much like the feeling in tel aviv and jerusalem. the winds of war were felt impalpable and people were required to carry around gas masks so every israeli was assigned a gas mask. we would go to work with our gas masks. when i went to the hospital to give birth to amelia when you check out of a hospital you are given a certificate -- not a certificate but you are given

pampers or formula for the baby. we were given a certificate for a gas mask for the baby's crib. and we right in the book and it is no exaggeration to say it is no exaggeration to say that on the day they're born israelis begin preparing for war. you could say the same about the palestinians. >> during this time, this is part of our daily reality of you wake up in the morning and what made it different from the other conflicts we had covered is you often do when you were in a war zone you might be going to the place for limited period of time, very conscious of your safety and security and everywhere you went but here in israel and the palestinian areas you would wake up every morning and things would seem normal. everyone would get up and go to work and take the kids to school and you felt you were in a normal -- especially on the israeli side westernized society

right to the nanosecond something blew up. this horrible feeling of starting a normal day knowing bad things were going to happen. everybody had to make their own calculations about what was safe and what wasn't. you have the endwest debate. can you go to that restaurant? is that restaurant save? sit outside in a cafe because it is safer when the bomb goes off outside. it is not -- the energy dissipates in open air as opposed to close space where it is magnified if you sit inside. lease it away from the window because the glass can be as dangerous as the shrapnel from the bomb. you have these odd conversations going around. we might for example go to gaza when heavy fighting would be going on and staying in the palestinian areas, we would be

down there for a week and very much war correspondent mode and on a weekend might come back to jerusalem and israeli friends would call us and say that is crazy. what you doing in gaza at a time like this? let's go have coffee at our favorite coffee shop. we say are you crazy? that is a dangerous place. there is a place to get blown up. everyone has their calculation of what was safe and what wasn't. you would see these surreal experiences everywhere you went and going around jerusalem on a day off trying to clear your mind of everything that is happening you could get 10 or 12 or 50 security checks just like going to the airport. my favorite was going to a bank because israeli soldiers off-duty usually stolen uniforms carrying around automatic rifle and a good number of israeli civilians also carry around automatic rifles. if you go to a bank and see a security guard. delivery place of business has a security guard outside and you

had this conversation that the only take place in israel. an israeli civilian would walk up with automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. security guard would look at him and with a straight face he would say you have a weapon? and the guy with the gun would dance with a straight face no. and they both knew they were having this conversation which is i'm not asking about the automatic rifle on your shoulder. do you have a bomb underneath your jacket? so after they have that little preamble the security guard would take this electronic wand and waving around his body and say go on in. go to the teller over there. this guy with the automatic rifle would go up to a bank teller. thing about that. walked into the bank tomorrow, the citibank with an automatic rifle, go up to the teller and say i would like to make a large withdrawal and see what sort of reaction you would get. in israel nobody even blinks.

this is life in israel at the time. >> it was a very surreal and every day was filled with these calculations of how to psych out the bombers and avoid catastrophe. everything would look normal on the surface. even if our two young daughters by the time we move to the states we had never taken them to the grocery store because the grocery store was a place people gathered, it was a target and it was too dangerous. we wouldn't do is that but it was safe enough to go to friends homes and a real enough to go to the rose garden in jerusalem but if we wanted to go to the movies there with a mall in jerusalem and we would circle three or four times around the entire mall because there are five or six entrances and you want to see where the shortest line was a new -- you knew the bomber couldn't get into the theater because there was a strict security outside but didn't want to waste time being in a long

line. so the weight of this pressure of constant stress, of living in this environment. if you had moved in after a few years of fighting you would have said these people are crazy. how can you live like this. it was like the proverbial frog in hot water. turn up the heat a little each day and make the calculations and that is what israelis and palestinians to on a daily basis and that is how you live in a war zone. one night in particular it was a saturday night and we knew on saturday night there was a strong possibility that there could be a bomber making its way into jerusalem. the sabbath would fall on friday night and it would become dark and you knew that everything would be frozen for 24 hours because streets were empty out, people would be in their homes

but 24 hours later when the sun went down and the sabbath ended the bomber would have already been in place and you knew people would be back at the cafes at the pedestrian malls. everyone would come out of their homes and we held our breath on this saturday night and stayed in, and exhausted from covering the conflict and before we knew it we put and louise to sleep. shea the 6 months old at the time and suddenly there was a large explosion and we could feel the windows in our apartment rattle. we look to each other and we knew immediately what had happened. there had been a bombing at a cafe. we lived on the same street as the prime minister's residents and their with the cafe called the moment cafe. the baby woke up and we started passing her back and forth. started calling the police and i was on the phone with my fox

team. already on the scene because that is what we did. with a fire drill and we knew, we started running from the apartment, the owner of the cafe at the apartment building, and he knew intuitively that it was his cafe. this is our life for quite some time. >> we wanted to do more than compile anecdotes. we wanted to humanize the story and tell what it was like for israelis and palestinians. they have been living through this their entire lives. you could certainly go back to

1948. in the state of conflict -- they have never woken up and said this would be an ordinary day where nothing is going to happen. there's always that possibility. there is imminent disaster and something terrible happening. it looks like it has been another decade, one that goes back six or more decades. this conflict keeps devolving and this is important revolution. there was this special moment in the 90s until 2000 when after 50 or so years of conflict the israelis finally found a way to talk to each other and there are differences -- they didn't close the gap but they're very close. this last decade cost not only physical damage but psychological damage. the two sides of the separated in ways they interact or had to

deal with one another. we saw conventional wars 50 years ago and terrorism in recent years. israel and iran confrontation, keeps changing. it was miss a decade ago. these new and evolving issues in the region. >> we wanted to show how the landscape has physically and psychologically change in the last decade. what is notable is in washington it seems every four years you have a president come in and want to try to solve the israeli-palestinian conflict and it never fails. there's always an attempt to restart talks and this belief that overnight you can bring the two parties together and do this. we wanted to show how the last decade, you have to understand

the results of the suicide bombings and the occupation of the west bank by the israeli military and building of this incredible wall of suspense down the spine of '67 borders, how that has completely separated the two sides, they're psychologically as far apart as they have ever been. it is an outgrowth of the muslim brotherhood. very different group of palestinians living in the gaza strip compared to the west bank which is a more secular minded group of palestinians. there's no one to negotiate with on the palestinian side because you have the division between hamas and the 5 top leadership. the years we spent in jerusalem, most foreign correspondents spend three years max covering

the conflict because you get burned out and felt it would leave feeling there was no hope, don't want to hear about it anymore. there is quite a dearth of writing by correspondents who lived in jerusalem. a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were working journalists. not that easy to move two jobs at once and small children and by having small children we felt we had this incredible access to digital very rare you can cross the front lines of war and drought kids off to school. there are times i would be interviewing masked gunman from the martyrs brigade and i would call greg and said can you peak emily up from preschool? i am engaged right now. it was absolutely surreal. as a result we grew to have incredible entity -- empathy for both sides and both people.

>> we are talking about the things we went through in west jerusalem which is the israeli side of the city. their palestinians and israeli. palestinian -- everybody is affected by the conflict. you can't escape. even if you just want to go about an ordinary daily life you get dragged into the conflict. there was one palestinian family in particular that drove this home. in the west bank town of lebron, very important biblical patriarchs believed to be buried there. jews leaders who questioned and muslims, very important site. there are jews were shipping every day, there is a big mosque. all in the same compound that has been divided into different parts and he karate family live near the center and probably had more daily friction than any

other place because you had the situation with 500 israelis living where, got a round-the-clock by the israeli military and 150,000 palestinians in the city and when the palestinian uprising began in 2000 the israeli military seeking to protect these israelis, the jewish settlers in this community imposed a curfew and wouldn't let the palestinians leave their home. i was there one day early on and the usual rock throwing rubber bullets were going on and on was with a photographer and we were trying to be careful but we found their cells in a narrow street and one end of round the corner came some palestinian kids throwing rocks and molotov cocktails and on the an end israeli soldiers firing teargas and rubber bullets. there is no sidewalks. houses on both sides. we were backed up against it. my photographer friend who had been hit three times in his

career by israeli rubber bullets felt perfectly happy. this is exactly where he wanted to be. he was getting great pictures, couldn't be happier. i am desperately looking for an exit strategy. so i turned around, bay on the door behind me and looked through the grill. invite us in. we start talking to the family. a lot of kids running around. look almost as chaotic in the living room as on the street. we start chatting and i find out this is a traditional family home. two stone homes. there are seven brothers raised their. they married seven wives and brought them into the home and started having kids quite rapidly. there are 70 people in those homes.

there has been a curfew on a. they're not able to leave their house and go out the front door. every couple days the israeli military would drive by with a loudspeaker and say you have three hours to go shopping, to get fresh vegetables and milk and that sort of thing and come back and a curfew be imposed another 72 hours or so. i tell this story because the israelis wanted to do this for fun. they felt they needed to do this to protect the israeli settler communities. every time i would go back i would check in on them just to see how they were doing and get an updated census count. in 2004, the neighborhood had just emptied out. there had been so many curfews and it was so restrictive that every family in the neighborhood had left. the market was closed. the schools were closed. there was -- they were virtually the only family left at that

palestinian section of town. .. now they were the only family for several blocks in either direction, pretty hard-to-find rental housing for 90 people or more. they were now over 100. they didn't quite know exactly how many people were in the house. more than 100, more than 70 were kids. for many years they would walk out their front door and they'd go right to the center of hadro commotions commotions to center their lives come to school as the markets were up'dwalk therel now if you want to commit walk into a deserted street, except for several israeli soldiers who put up an airport style metalnvo chair and a conveyor belts to st literally too good on the street was like going through airport security for them although there is nothing in that direction- e

you're trying to live your ordinary life, people on both sides would be constantly dragged into the conflict. >> it was a pressure cooker and some of our palestinian friends, journalists who we knew told us that one of the unintended consequences of the israelis moving back into the west bank, obviously, trying to stop these suicide bombers reoccupying these cities, encircling these cities even though palestinians who weren't part of the conflict the only place their children were allowed to go and play was at the mosque. they weren't allowed to go to soccer fields. they weren't allowed -- but the israelis didn't want to be seen as keeping people from their religion so they allowed the families to send their kids to the mosque, to pray. well, these palestinian journalists didn't want their kids going to the mosque because that's where they were being brainwashed and that's where

they were having -- it wasn't just as simple as going to pray. there were sometimes fiery sermons and these young impressionable kids who had nothing to do they fell under the spell under some of these radical pressures and so it was this real catch-22 where this pressure cooker environment. the israelis thought they were beings generous by allowing the palestinian to go to the mosque but the palestinian parents themselves thought this is not where i want my child being brainwashed. greg interviewed two 16-year-old boys in the west bank town of nablus and he went up to these towns and just to give you an idea how -- there aren't any heroes in these towns. there aren't any sports stars, any michael jordans that they could look up to. all you would see in these towns would be posters of what were so-called -- these so-called martyrs, they called them saheed

posters people who killed israeli wearing -- looking militaristic and the young 10 to 14-year-old boys that's what they had to look up to and greg interviewed two boys -- they went to school every day with their photograph, their school photograph that they wanted used on their martyrdom poster if they got caught in the clashes or they decided to start throwing rocks at the israelis and if they died that day. so little boys were thinking already of how they could become a martyr, so-called, on those posters. >> there was this incredible paradox there that also was fundamental in our decision in the book and what we wanted to explain in the book and the paradox is this. you have israel, this small country that despite having constant -- being a constant state of conflict for decades has done -- made enormous strides in its development and

you look at israel today, economically it is stronger than it's ever been. it's survived the palestinian uprisings, global recessions and has a very dynamic high tech cutting edge economy. its military is stronger than it's ever been, culturally it's a very strong dynamic fascinating place. and yet israel could never get the security that it craves. it has been seeking for over six decades and wanting to wake up and say, i live in a normal country, in a normal place and nothing bad is going to happen today. and on the palestinian side, every country in the world supports palestinian statehood. even israel, the past israeli prime ministers, some more enthusiastically than others but say they would accept a palestinian state so you can't find a country in the world that opposes palestinian statehood and yet the palestinians cannot achieve a state. and in many ways they seem as far from a resolution today than

they've ever been. and so we wanted to get at that and say why is this conflict dragging on and on and on since the end of world war ii when neither side can achieve what it wants? and they don't have mutually incompatible goals. israeli security and palestinian statehood is a difficult thing to achieve but not impossible and not mutually incompatible. >> we decided it was time to come home in 2006 and you know there was the war in lebanon between the israelis and hezbollah. a soldier had been kidnapped in the gaza strip. we saw him recently who was released after five years of being held in the gaza strip. other soldiers were captured in the war. greg and i left the kids at home with a babysitter and -- >> the dhog >> and my cameraman malcolm james gave us his golden

retriever while we were gone for 34 days and that was a bribe as we went up to the lebanese border but we covered day in and day the rockets coming in from lebanon. the incredible tension up in the north of israel. and on the last day of that conflict, i remember distinctly because i was doing greta's show. it was overnight so it was about 4:00 in the morning local time and then the ceasefire was to begin to end the conflict. and so we were all waiting for that ceasefire and at 6:00 am we got a call from the gaza strip that my two colleagues from fox, a correspondent and his cameraman had been kidnapped. and they had been kidnapped we later found out by the same group that had the soldier. and immediately, we dropped everything. the israeli bureau chief was an old israeli tank commander and you could never tell eli no and he -- he and i drove down to gaza and other than the soldier

i think he was the only israeli who was in gaza that day. we sort of sneaked into gaza. we started meeting with any and all of the palestinian militant leaders. there were midnight meetings in the middle of the gaza strip where we would be taken to the home of one of the militant leaders and i remember one in particular where we showed up. it was olaf's wife and eli and myself and our palestinian journalists that we work with and in the circle were probably israel's most wanted militants. they were sitting around the only light at the meeting was from the headlights of the vehicles that had brought us because the israelis had knocked outlet the electrical grid in that part of gaza and you could hear the whirring of the drone up above and you knew you were being watched and it was nerve-wracking. the palestinian leaders were

sort of thumbing their worry beads and we had an emotional moment where the wife of olaf and myself and we stood up and we pleaded -- and it was all men in this circle, and we -- we used the sort of good cop bad cop strategy and we just laid it out for them and said they needed to release steve and olaf. and miraculously and after two weeks it was a long, long two weeks, they were released and at that point greg and i decided it was time to go home. it was also time to go home because our daughters were starting to pick up a little more on the conflict and the kind of work we did and we -- they were very good friends with the son from the "washington post," "the washington post" correspondent son. they used to play in the garden near our house. and our babysitters told us at one point that they came home laughing and they said, oh, annelise and bennie had taken the mobile phones and role-playing said annelise says

there's been an explosion and tel-aviv and bennie said have you sent a photographer. [laughter] >> at that point we realized it might be time to get back to america and with that we should probably put it up to questions. >> we'll leave at that and answer your questions. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] >> yes. we have a microphone making its way to you. >> i just wanted to ask you, did you know you were going to write this book when you first went there? did you keep notes or a journal or are you just relying on what you remember? >> it's a good question. no, we did not know we were going to write this book and we didn't keep any notes. the only notes we had were really the stories that we had written and we did have a good archive of that because of the pieces i'd done for fox and that greg had written. but it's amazing how memories

work because the really strong memories -- they don't fade and the really -- the good stories and the poignant stories, they stay with you. we started this book with we moved back to the states. greg started working on it in the states. i was diagnosed with breast cancer i think it was 2.5 years ago and we were finishing up the book and we were finishing writing the book while i got chemotherapy and greg would come with the laptop to the chemo ward and i would want to strangle him and i would say, leave me alone. i don't want to talk about this and he used it as a way to actually get my mind off of cancer and he -- he would say tell me about the time you were in gaza with steve and olaf and he would type the notes as we would -- and that's how we got through chemo. we finished the book during that year when we were dealing with cancer. [applause]

[inaudible] >> good question. >> yeah. writing a book with your spouse. >> we have different writing styles. i'll say that. you may notice there's some italics in the book, and that was our compromise because it was my voice. and he kept trying to edit my voice. >> the fact that she worked for fox and i worked for the "new york times" and then at npr was never a problem. it was stylistic issues like how do we want to present this story? or is this story more important than that one? it's trying to mesh your two personalities into one narrative and it took a while how to do that. >> actually, we will be honest, it was a little bit of a strained process. but this is sort of like marriage counseling for us. we're doing this tour and -- but it is hard to write a book with your spouse. and it's hard to -- for two

people writing the book and you have different ways of the stories. it wasn't the details the facts so much as just the voice. >> i've not read your book but, obviously, you make a wonderful duet. there's an image of war correspondents. it's very different than the two of you with your children. many other things have been written about hard drinking, chain smoking people sitting around the bar of the hotel. you know, i could ask you a million serious questions about your subject matter, but it's just curious to me, what did grandma say? what did the grandparents of your children have to say about your decision to live with the kids in a war zone? >> our parents were hugely supportive. in fact, they came and visited us while we were there. and oddly, you know, they were concerned for our safety but they sort of got caught up in the spirit -- the spirit of it and so they never gave us is

hard time, even when we had kids there. so i really have to congratulate them for being so supportive. >> well, i think there's one image i'll never forget and my sister katlin is sitting in the tenth row right there. and she -- when she was about six years old, and my sister cassie they were young and they came out to visit us in pakistan, and i think it was so surreal for our parents. they didn't really think about what we were doing or the danger that we were in, but we took them up to the khyber pass and i have a picture of katlin and cassie up on a camel at age 6 and whatever it was and they were being guarded by a pakistani pastun with an ak-47 around his waist and this was right up above the gun bazaar in the -- what's known as the tribal areas in pakistan. and we took them up there. and we thought isn't this --

isn't this great? it was exotic, it was wonderful. i think one of the wonderful things about the period in which we covered wars is that it was pre-daniel pearl and i say that because the iraq war and daniel pearl's death was a real watershed moment for journalists. and it's always been dangerous to be a war correspondent going back to world war ii, vietnam, you name it. there are great, great correspondents who you can remember -- many of them lost their lives following wars. but that was a real turning point. and we feel so lucky that there was a period in the '90s that we were able to traipse around inflicts and somehow we felt that we were immune or bulletproof or maybe we were just young and naive. but we got to see things up close and personal that i'm not sure i certainly wouldn't want my children doing that today.

[laughter] >> could i ask you to please stand if you have a question. >> i realize you haven't been back in afghanistan for a while but i would like your opinion on this. do you feel that based on your knowledge of the way people live there and the way society is there, that whether the united states military leaves tomorrow, a year from now or 50 years from now, will things actually be any different? >> well, actually i was in afghanistan in december 'cause i still go back and forth with my job at the pentagon and i was traveling with secretary panetta when he was there. and i think what is quite humbling and distressing to those of us who have watched the afghan conflict, whether it was the war between the mujahedeen when we were there after the soviets pulled out or the rise of the taliban, the end of the taliban, and the last 10 years of war is that very little has changed in afghanistan in terms of at the tribal level, in terms of building any sort of a government or dealing with the

corruption that is enemic there. there's a lot of good that has been done in the sense that i cover the military and i see every day the extraordinary feats and what they achieved in various provinces but doris lessing wrote a book that sticks with me, the title of it and it says, it's about afghanistan and the wind blows away their words. and you just have a sense that whether it's this great military or previous militaries. as soon as they're gone the afghans have a way and they will go back to their own ways and i don't think it will have changed based on my experience. >> i'll just add one very, very quick note. girls are going to school in afghanistan today. they weren't in the late '90s. >> absolutely true. >> if the u.s. stays there, they'll probably keep going to school. if the u.s. leaves, it's a possibility there could be back-sliding. how much is it worth or at what price should the u.s. pay so that afghan girls can go to

school? it's a tough question. it's one very quick example of the kinds of questions you're looking at. >> setting aside the politics that we would like the americans and the israelis and the arabs, what do you personally feel would be the equitable solution to the israeli-arab conflict? >> we have been very clear all along, we don't have the solution. we're journalists not policymakers. but an equitable solution is one that both the israelis and palestinians can live with. it's never going to be a perfect solution. these are two peoples that have been there for centuries. they both have legitimate claims to the land there. they're going to have to find ways to share it. and as i said. it's not incompatible. israel needs -- the one thing israel really needs is security. and they deserve it. the one thing the palestinians need and deserve is a viable state. you can have both of those things but it will have to be worked out between them. i think the united states can play a very valuable role as a

mediator but the u.s. can't force it. a forms quote by james baker when he was secretary of state two decades ago was, the u.s. can't want peace more than the israelis and the palestinians. we can't go there and say, here's a plan, implement it. and so i think when you get strong enough majorities on both sides and they agree to some sort of compromise, that's the solution. >> the question was, what do our daughters' birth certificates say in terms of where they were born? and they say jerusalem comma. they don't say a state because jerusalem is to be negotiated according to u.s. policy. but you remember there is a supreme court case this year -- this became very relevant because there are -- there's a

case before the justices. >> where the child was born in jerusalem to jewish parents who now live in the u.s. and they want the birth certificate -- i guess the passport to say jerusalem-israel. and the u.s. state department position is since the fate of jerusalem has not been resolved, it just says jerusalem. and that's exactly what our girls' -- it was literally an issue for us because, we thought this may make it difficult if they want to travel in certain countries in the middle east, it might make it difficult. we said well, there will be 20 years to sort that out. six months after annelise was born, 9/11 happened and both our organizations asked us to go to pakistan and we thought about taking our daughter because we knew people there and we could keep her in a house while we worked there. but there was no way pakistan was going to allow somebody in who had a jerusalem birth stamp in their passport so literally

at six months it became an issue. i went and jennifer stayed in jerusalem. there you are. >> fatah and hamas, who stands out leading palestinians to peace? we're very aware of the leaders in israel who are quite able to do that. what leadership amongst palestinian people will move towards peace? >> well, the problem with fatah and hamas -- fatah you have mahmoud abbas who's the president and you have salem fayed and who is well thought in the middle east and you have the leader of the gaza strip and the two sides as much as we've heard talk of them uniting in the -- in recent weeks, the gap between

what they believe is enormous. and the hamas still does not accept the right of israel to exist. and so i think there's an open question about who is the leader of the palestinian people and who certainly hamas has shown no signs of wanting to negotiate with israel. and the israeli prime minister, benjamin netanyahu said recently to mahmoud abbas if you do a deal with abbas then there's no more talking. these are the issues they are grappling with right now. >> we have time for one more question. [inaudible] >> i had the most extraordinary room with a view to give birth to both our daughters. a very special place. okay. and thank you very much. thank you. >> thank you. [applause]

>> s.c. gwynne's, "empire of the summer moon" tells the story of the four year battle between comanche warriors and the u.s. army and white settlers. the author spoke at this year savanna book festival. this is 45 minutes.ank >> hi, everybody. thank you for coming. i want to talk this afternoon about how i came to this book or have the book came to me, which in some ways was a simultaneous event or how i became of the 25 year in journalism and several attempts on the decides he wants to be in historian. not only that but he wants to write about comanches and the great plains, which are about a far as connecticut and thehow frozen moons of jupiter.empts at

i won't bore you with all f theo details of my literary past, but ozen moo put unst it as briefly as possible, i had my little epiphany in the spring of 1970. 1970 p i had just been admitted to princeton university and i was traveling there for a weekend, one of those weekends where you see if you want to go there. and it was safe goriest day in may, just kind of like thishis morning and spring was in full bloom. ws in i had taken a train.and the the last leg of the train trip was on a smaller train of the bp jmp which stands for princeton to princeton junction and back. that's if you read onto the campus was on a smaller train which was the princeton to princeton junction that took the right to the campus. i happen to be reading of book by f. scott fitzgerald called this side of

paradise. it was flat -- about life there princeton in absolute a magical. i cannot even read two paragraphs now it is so adolescence but at the time it was magical i finished it just as the train pulled into the station princeton is as cute as a button. finishing just as the train pulls then and i walk up to the campus and i remember thinking there is absolutely nothing in the world that i would rather do than to write like scott -- of scott fitzgerald. it was all downhill from there. [laughter] for the next 15 years i wrote a bunch of fiction and publish some of it got a

graduate fellowship but none of what i did was much good unfortunately. not great stuff i worked for i had jobs was a banker and a teacher but all the while i persisted to see myself as a writer i would go home at night and read by gertrude stein i did better henry james or whatever was doing. and still i was aware at some level as time went buy i was not exactly living in paris sipping champagne and i was aware of that it was not happening for me. at some point* it occurred i could make a living by writing so i became a reporter in my early '30's. if i got better and better at nonfiction that dream slowly went away everything now is black and white at my age. it is hard for me to understand myself were things were not so absolute where you could be an

international banker or a writer. the fiction dream went away then in one great glorious a spectacular book as 700 word novel that the main effect was to cause my agent in new york not to return my phone calls. [laughter] then it was gone and it was a cathartic experience. it did not happen that long ago but it had to be done and we all realize what we cannot do. the legendary blank page that the writer sees. the blankfailed novelist. ln heicon but his thee of pageblank page that the writer sees. that blank page for a

fiction writer absolutely astonishing on that blank page there's no rules it could be about iran or mars or new jersey horrible will be or a martian death the more it -- meritor lifer birth. what am i supposed to do? i don't know. applying to my a journalism as well as my history it is palpable or rio something very real that you hang onto minstar with the premise of the real. so i and up in austin, texas as executive editor of a magazine called texas monthly now i know what to do and if there in texas the comanche nonsense started. when i told my journalist

friends i was writing the history of the comanches i got a lot of blank stares you can see the of wheels turning in their brains to figure out the angle. is there an indian nation health care obama no, no, no just a dusty history something that happened 300 years ago and say that is great. [laughter] we cannot wait to read it. meaning good luck jack i frankly did not care burger wanted to do well and we should all do things that we want to do. the fact is a lot of us write books but very few are interested in jumping back into history partly because, not to run them down but they have the

attention span of an act. partly because the obvious lack of qualification. having a thesis ridden in in 1871 it is at the library although what i hear you can check your thesis out in the princeton library so my plan is to go check it out and take it somewhere and burn it. [laughter] but i have not done that yet. [laughter] i am not a historian not sitting in oklahoma university mulling over native american history so why does a reporter become interested something that happened in the faraway past? is something called

generational memory i grew up in connecticut in massachusetts part of the country were native american tribes were subdued a long time ago. the 1600s i was aware of the indians on cape cod even playing summer baseball they cease to exist as the free tribe 100 years before my ancestors got off the bow and nobody really knew about the mohegans or at all a consequence because too much time had intervened. nobody had a conceivable memory of them. but in texas where i moved as the time bureau chief in 1994, the whole sense of the frontier and native americans was radically different. never would have written this book or have gone near its divided now move to texas one of those strange

circumstances that happens when you move. in texas it was part of my job to travel the state and write the stories for "time" magazine then texas monthly i met a lot of people who told about the comanche's part of the lady who sat next to me at texas monthly had both of her great grandparents were killed and a comanche raid. i knew my great grandparents somebody's grandfather had done business with them and there's a sense of the immediacy of the frontier. and often in my travels of beard and mixing of legend and history i am doing a as a story lakota makes these

great close but the factory had burned down so why and went up sitting in a bar he would tell me about a pat -- a battle that took place right out there you could see it with a spanish janet comanche's. i don't know what he was talking about. it turns out to it was the end of spanish power in the new world. literally where the comanche's rolled the end of spanish power in the new world which is a substantial event as the aztecs could tell you. stories like that here i am traveling around the state saying i don't know anything. one of the reasons is the immediacy of the of frontier the comanche is the last of

the indian surrendering 1785 then there was jostling on and off the reservation happening into the 20th century. the frontier was the immediate thing. the tribe that was featured in most of the stories there were a lot of wichita in a bunch of other tribes in texas even like the apaches but the tribe that you always heard about were the comanche i don't know about you but in my depredations bringing they were something or a word that occurred in the john wayne movie old -- always a code word for danger. that is the comanche arrow. always like that. you did not know why the comanches were bad. but they were bad and they

were very bad folks. there was a remembering of the past going on in texas that got me interested in this story. but it is not just the remembering of the past but also for getting. simultaneous and contradictory revelation. although they were playing off almost everybody else had forgotten the average texan talk about the fastest-growing .. state 500,000 people per year coming and coming from illinois and mexico they don't know these things. my daughter did not know these things. she grew up in texas and she is 19. in 1940 i would venture to say every single schoolchild in the state of texas new

the kidnapping of the parker the rescuer then her son was the last of the greatest chiefs talk to a texan above a certain age they could tell you those things. this is a good story if you have read my book one of my great discoveries was a guy named jack hayes john coffee case. the original and greatest ranger. the greatest indian fighter one of the greatest commanders america ever produced he developed in the comanche war techniques that were for that had never existed before later used with brutal e effectiveness with the war in mexico and adopted a failed invention

by a man named sam been can -- stand in the connecticut and it was said before jack came into the american west everybody came on foot lugging the rifle but after him they came on horseback carrying six guns. i am leading up to something because i am trying to describe the process of remembering and for getting. jack hayes seem to be completely forgotten. there is a county named hays county and inside of that there is a high-school called hayes high school the greatest ranger and by the way in a state that absolutely treasures rangers the texas rangers are mythical. would you suppose in the state that the mascot of the

high school team would be the rangers'? no. they are the rebels. [laughter] i have no problem with rebels except jack hayes left texas to become the first sheriff of san francisco during the gold rush. he is not a bubble but nobody in hays county knows who he is people in san antonio where he was the sixth stage six shooter knows who he is this was going on and hear was the a great opportunity i saw as a writer because i am a relatively smart guy and even living in texas i did not know who they were. did you ever hear of geronimo? everybody heard of him. yes here of custer?

yes. here of mackenzie the actual greatest fighter? never heard of that. >> john coffee hayes who should be a household word like davy crockett but he is not? and no. you can just keep going. the fact is for me as a writer i could go sell a book in new york to people not only to an editor who gives me many which they do but i could sell to a country that had never heard of these guys. what it a cool thing. the answer to why they tended to we bottled up and prisoners of their region. 700 copies go to schools and libraries and the distribution so i saw my opportunity. i took it. the comanche story is just one of the great stories and what i love about it is it

is the best kind of a school you can get from the most beloved history professor to use a vehicle the comanche tribe which is very cool in itself but to teach you how the west was one. it was not one by the white people until it was lost by the comanches. they constituted an incredible physical barrier to everything that happened in the west the mexicans and texans and americans and spanish and everybody else. and determined what happened around them. occupied the southern plains 250,000 square miles. they basically in a sense held up themselves the ford progress of the american empire put before that they blocked the northward

expansion of america partly the reason is the spanish jennifer in the provided them with an astonishing piece of technology known as of course. it was the attempt to move west turns out the made the mistake of farming that comanche and amaze. texas exist because of comanche's. what does it exist? here is what happened. the mexicans needed to stabilize the northern border. they own the texas in one way to do that the israelis have discovered is you settle it and put people there. the more you settle the more it stabilized in of the purpose is to control that is what you do. taxes did not want to do there because there were comanche's but the red next lee scott irish red head people like davy

crockett, they had no problem coming in to settle in this land. the grand plan of mexico it backfired because the texans wanted independence after a little bald at the alamo they got it. so in the fact this is not the only reason taxes happened but in part misguided to stop the comanche. that is a good way to tell history to somebody who does not know the history of texas. so many other things, the rangers are a product and finally with the 40 year war just true of line from san antonio through fort worth that is where the frontiers at 40 years. nothing even remotely similar happened with any other tribe. i call them the most powerful tribe in american history and people ask me if

comanche is meant the western sioux in who would win? there is actually a show with a computer bits a mongolia and against the historical union but even though they are fabulous warriors but they mean the power to influence the course of history. and absolutely no tribe has such a determinants effect on what happened in north america. the plains tribes were mounted. you could find them. they were agrarian. nomadic course found comanche's or shai man o' war arapahoe or the sioux indians were far harder to eradicate. that is a big military picture but the way the bookworks on the one hand

you have a big picture of the rise and fall of the comanches which is interesting because of their great power. but the other side is the more intimate and small story of the parker family the little girl who is taken so the way my book is organized alternating chapter. big chapters than the parker family and eventually runs together. the organizing event is in 1836 this is where quanah parker was taken a small moment in has -- history that has historical significance. that was the same year texas one its independce. h of texly hbuilt

and i don't know that they necessarily knew this butas they were sort out into comanche on e the comanche frontier it was almost ridiculous almost ridiculous. they were way out beyond almost anybody else on the frontier. one thing to keep in mind how the american west was settled, people sometimes think there was a sweep across that went north or south. it was not to. it was all south. the human frontier was in texas nothing going on up north. fifth great clash was down in the south. five people were killed others were wounded five captives women and children one was cynthia anne parker. this is a routine raid they had been doing this for

many, many years. but in historical terms it was a defining moment of the front here. two reasons. first-come it marked the start of the longest and most brutal war between americans and a single native tribes also because it involved the woman who was to be the most famous as a captive. it took place precisely at the point* where the westward booming american empire that the parker's did not realize that enormous american empire moving west. meeting the 250,000 square bio comanche empire. nobody could see this at the time but it was right there. that is where the parker's build the house. how they had any idea that is what they we're doing i

am sure they never would have done it. why was that empire there? the reason it was there is a result of 150 years of sustained combat with one goal of the south plains. why? those the master the horse like no other tried because that is where the buffalo were. over 150 years the comanche's essentially use their unbelievable mastery of the course to challenge as they went south nearly exterminated the apaches eventually gaining what they wanted which was the south plains which is where the buffalo were. that is where the parker's plucked that little house right on the edge of that. pretty good idea.

this is where they built the frontier paradise and the chain of events, i am sorry. one more thing that is really interesting about where they put the house. if you look at america before columbus the entire east coast was one dense grimm brothers forest. it was dense. dense. slipped from the east coast about the 98th meridian. right through the middle of texas right from san antonio in dallas and essentially it was bazaar's you have a culture in the east was the culture of the woods based on timber, land, water. when you got past the tree-lined this is a terrifying moment. no trees to build houses. no water.

all of that happened right there so it was asked that edge of that physical geographical.org geological moment where the land changed and that was there. that is where they built the house. we have that captivity of cynthia parker she bore three children, refused to come back. famous as the white squall who would not return. that story played out. her oldest son in the greatest comanche warrior of his age, not going into er quanah pa he but he was a brilliant field general, neverct defeated by whites inhe battle.s

he led the last of the comanche and theth terrible days of 1874 1875and all been killed after all the other tribes have surrendered. he moved to the comanche reservation and transformed himself in oklahoma the way that his mother had. she had adapted brilliantly to the comanche culture now he adapted to the white culture. he went from the fierce this plains warrior to the most successful influential indian of the period and controlled a small cattle empire, outfoxed the white man add to the leasing games in a friend of to the roosevelt and accumulated a large fortune of almost all of which he gave away to help his fellow comanche's.

the year is 1871. keep in mind a 35 years after the first battle of the comanche. the frontier was still shockingly where it had been. it was not moving. keep in mind with the civil war men who were running america are the gramm warriors who have destroyed the south. the president is ulysses s. grant and william tecumseh sherman and also phil sheridan all of these names are familiar. and these are the men who were running things. 1871, they unleashed the greatest war machine in american history. looking at this tribe that was sitting there holding up everything. 1871 these guys said, one of the reasons the comanches were still there as i point*

out is the civil war took the attention away from the planes. 1871 that attention was no longer focused on the war or reconstructions but now look to see what we will do about the comanche problem. quanah parker was 21 years old the leader of the most remote and most hostile bands in the panhandle by low becker amarillo texas. they were an amazing bunch. they kept away from the white man contracted very few of the disease is. 15,000 horses, they traded with men who operated out of new mexico. you see them in movies as a rough bunch.

so grant and sherman decide they have been death so they center colonel mackenzie down, and he wrote rues career parallels custer. so they send mackenzie 600 bluecoats ride out and they will get the comanches and the target is the village village, quanah parker has a village. we don't know exactly how big the village was but we think 200 tepees. it was the village was when the and children and dogs and cattle and horses. what happened is astonishing quanah parker it gave mackenzie the most extraordinary lesson of planes were fair.

the indians were vastly outnumbered. reached loading repeating rifles the comanche's if they had anything at all it was the muskets but mostly bows and arrows. let me see if i can briefly describe called the battle of blenko canyon. the bluecoats they're pretty tough people. there were not complete idiots thereafter playing cat and mouse where quanah parker stampedes sources, the bluecoats calgary move forward and locate the village and they will move on the village. they march to where the villages but it is gone.

so they send the scouts out to figure out where it was. what has happened is they get to a point* where they realize all of the crisscrossing lines. a horse to avoid vertu long poles on the back of a horse so they could carry things because they did not have wheels. as a large group of migrating comanche's move to have parallel way at the -- lines in the sand so suddenly all of the lines go crazy then the village disappears and then they realize sinhalese the village has doubled back and it is now behind them. 200 lodges we don't know how many people but a bunch with four years. they are furious they have to give up the next day now they will just go get the

village and they are mad. now the village disappears again and now they realize midcap brock is a steep cliff that rises between 200 and 1,000 feet the whole village disappeared up the cap brock. so the soldiers go up to the top the realize the village has gone down and attractive again and again the crisscrossing lines and they lose it. it sounds like i make this up it is the account of the medal of honor winner who hated quanah parker but admires what he did. the village disappears again and goes back up the cap rock now the soldiers have them. back up to the top of the cliff this is where the

planes go dead flat for oceanic and now they can see the indians getting away. just like on cue or from whoever a howling norther wind that can blow in the fall the temperature drops 60 degrees in an hour it is the blu number dropping ice and snow. mackenzie has forgotten to put on their wit -- winter clothes because it was such beautiful weather and into the howling gale he leaves the warriors off and away and mackenzie and his men are forced to hunker down and lucky they did not freeze to death. but essentially quanah parker got away. he schooled mackenzie of the planes warfare. one of the key things is

escape. but very few instances in history where a commander takes of village into the field against his adversary and wins. that is the kind of commander quanah parker was. he was quite brilliant. the obviously escaped to find another -- fight another day he would not surrender until 1875 almost every single one of their food source had been killed. that is all i want to say tonight. i would be happy, do we have time for questions? i am happy to answer questions. >> [inaudible] that was her cousin rachel parker plumber. >> [inaudible] >> yes. this is one of the great things that you have at your disposal. rachel plumbers diary which

is an unbelievable account for the very few captives she was taken for many months on to the planes so it is rather extraordinary. it is published i also held the original. yes. i don't know how many around here but in texas the rare book collections will have it. [laughter] i don't know if i could living dead in most main library is but the rare book collections to easily could. >> you're descriptive as of the comanches ability to fight on their horses was absolutely fascinating. there are a few statistics on how fast they could fire in narrow -- fire eight o

that maybe people would be interested. >> talk about the comanche's amazing ability with the course the first time americans saw that was the expedition of 1834 iran into them they simply could not believe what they were looking at. people today could do what they did which is basically to use at a leather thong dip down to the side of the horse so you could not see them there were behind the horse but also fire under the neck of a horse with extreme speed trick riders have duplicated it now but they could hit things with a full gallop.

never seen anything like it before. nobody has ever seen their ability to break a horse. doing this that nobody had ever seen that they would often do things like chase the wild horses that were over a large piece of ground. they will let the course, to the water and before the horses got to drink the wolves do this to the caribou, the horses are constantly on the road not allowed to drink. so at the end what you see the comanche's do is try to get a rope on a horse and get to the horse and it was in a complete lather then take its nostrils and blow

into the nostrils and it would gentle the course. is like methane people had seen before the only indian tribe with breeding and understood all of that. but the comanches, as far as we know in history, a small tribe that lived in what is now wyoming which is now not a significant tribe then something happened that nobody saw and the emerging as a terrific a powerful force by virtue of the horse broke. >> [inaudible] >> interesting you should ask that. 1400 registered excuse me 14,000 of those, 9,000 lived close to the old homeland of the reservation which is in oklahoma southwestern part.

a few comanche's that are more widely dispersed. they have a couple of casinos for our think they do okay but they are wrestling with the same things that most other tribes wrestle with, but they still exist you can see the nation website and it is interesting. i had the opportunity for the honor with my book talks in the planes comanche's would come to it. there were 10 of them and of 80 stood up to say what do the comanche's think about your book? [laughter] a lot of them like it. some of them don't. i talk about quanah parker father's death that goes against history. i know it does but i just believe that and we will not

come together but on the hold the reception is pretty good. >> [inaudible] >> a very good question. how many people that i interviewed? and nine. because there were no living people that could inform 1/2 fined back then. but i had in the 1930's thankfully there were two or three different projects where people recorded comanche's from the old days from the pre-reservation period. they did studies and there is a lot of that. i relied on that. those guys did my interviewing for me. there was not much point* like interviewing me about

my grandfather's experiences of world war i. one of these days, i wrote about the chickasaws last year when of the goals is to do current day interviews. >> [inaudible] could you elaborate how much society has organized retribution? >> the question is to what extent were the raids the comanche's performed were revenge or retribution part of the planes were fair? the plains indians were a warlike group and they

fought. that is what they did. when somebody would conduct the arapaho conducted the success of reagan as the comanche they would watch the countertrade and it went both ways. this is the way it went sometimes their raids meant to get horses sometimes if somebody killed the that would call for revenge but it is the way it worked and it was part of the deal the same revenge was exacted on whites later. will hold adobe walls that vote last great expansion was a giant revenge raid against the white truck they had done qantas said it was because of the death of his father but the comanches were very brutal so were all

plains indians and also native americans with treatment of the captives and torture and revenge raids they were common to native americans. if you are a historian you have to come to terms with that. it happened. . . and i single and sitting there thinking fast going and what he meant was -- and i've gotten the questions hundreds of times since then there was a notion the was popular particularly in the 60's and the best example io

that the impression created the indians were these kind of tentle spiritual people, they bu were nice fundamentally decenteo people who were steamrolled by this culture that broke its of treaties and destroyed them andt wa massacred them and it was kind e of fighting a one-sided deal,if and if you look at the comanches is that simply isn't true. they were enormously powerful in their own right.were they vict were they victimized and out?rolled and ran yes, they were, but that is not fundamentally who they were. and to think -- i wasn'taking a political point in my book. i was just describing what i found and what i found was yes they were quite regal and quite warlike and held their own against everybody but that particular view was just overly complicit decodes even the five civilized tribes from the southeast if you go back to their origins they were enormously powerful and they

were warlike and they were noble in their own way so again i had no political.. i had no political agenda. anybody else? thank you all for coming. [applause] bob casey and pat and being able to meet them and talk to them.

isakson of the leaders talk about when portrait it is to be financially sound because if we are not financially sound, devoting money to national defense is going to be worth it because you want of money to devote to it. >> they participated in a week-long program in the nation's capital all of my congressmen and senators there's a lot of partisanship going on and i am the one that is reaching across the aisle and it makes me wonder if anybody is saying that but it's not actually helping as the discrepancy between what they're saying and what they're actually doing and i've never thought about that before i came here. we ask students to submit it to you telling what part of the

constitution is most important to them and want. today we are going to be visiting virginia to speak with a 12th grader.aaaw >> good morning.aa >> the top of cuts your video come how did you choose the second amendment as the topic for your document requests most likely somebody knew you and there's people all around for protection and hunters and gun collectors and stuff that figure that this is a topic that affects a lot of people and was probably important to a lot. >> in your video you ask is the second amendment a necessary right. what do you mean by that? >> we wonder if the original

intent is still applicable to our society today and asked to see if we live in a society that needs guns at all or maybe just the right to have guns. to the of the original intent versus its current application? >> they are making the constitution very thorough in writing for good reason, and the right to bear arms, the reason that was there is because they wanted the citizens to have a chance in case the government they put in place after the game in prison for corrupt the wanted them to have a chance to be able to overthrow their oppressive government and would probably be

england we would never be able to defeat the british army and get freedom. >> you interviewed to virginia tech students. how do they help you understand the different sides of the issue? >> it's one thing for shootings and things like that on the internet and on the news, but actually talking to people that are directly inspected by a shooting field of a lot closer to the issue and told us there were shootings and they were locked in the cafeteria and they were not allowed to come out until they were determined to be safe. so they are really close to an issue that has to deal with the second amendment. any decision i made on the second amendment may be in a pen

in the form should be well in for me uneducated. estimate was your favorite part about creating this video? for flux, getting a lot of the different opinions from the two students that we interviewed in the same with the of members of my group seeing what they thought about it and thought about the second amendment. >> congratulations on the wind. >> thank you. >> here is a portion of the video the right to bear arms. >> i ask what is the militia? it is the whole people and the best way to enslave them. >> the best we can hope for and the people what largest be properly armed.

firearms are the american people's liberty. >> you can watch the video in its entirety as well as all other documentaries on the web site, studentcam.org and continue the discussion on the facebook and twitter pages.

she said when i get a raise at work she's proud of me and like we got a raise, our family got a raise heat. it to include what her husband doesn't she has a lot of respect for what her husband was doing the six former u.s. trade representatives discussed

options for expanding american trade with countries around the world. several speakers were critical of the obama administration, saying the white house lacks a comprehensive trade policy. topics include recently announced high level trade talks between the u.s. and europe. the center for strategic and international studies hosted this to our event. >> okay. folks. >> good morning everybody, welcome. we're delighted you're here. i must confess when meredith broadbent said she wanted to hold this event on a friday before a long weekend, i thought you're crazy. no one is going to stop at this thing. but it just shows that enormous

gravitational pull of the ufcr. this is quite a bunch. [laughter] my name is john hamre, the president of csis. i am currently writing a fabulous book. i never really understood america until i read this book is about the early history of america, and you get right down to it -- i am a political scientist so my version of history is all about, you know, geopolitics. that's not america's history. america's history is about trade. [applause] it really is. it's just amazing. as you start opening up the shaping of the american republic was very much driven by the way we were going to connect in this larger world, how we were going to do that. and god knows we have been for a lot of different episodes. we were protection as you could get at one time in our life we

pass legislation that said it was free and open territory to steal anybody else' trade secret and we had a pretty rich history of irregularly, so now it's about time that we be humble with it and think about where we are going in this world, and frankly the world would be improved dramatically if we had a much stronger more active trade policy in america. the, we are going to talk about that. we are going to talk about that today. i want to say thank you for all coming. you have important role to make this a live session. i know the intellectual content of the presenters and that you were in for a very rich discussion but it's going to get a heck of a lot better engaged in this, so i would ask you to draw on that and to bring the best out of these remarkable

individuals. i'm grateful and i know i speak for all of you grateful as a nation that these women and men were willing to lead such an important way for the country come and they are still willing to be active in the policy of america. i have a short session upstairs when we were chatting saying it's exciting to have people that are still committed to making this a better and stronger country and working through the publishers we face, so we are very thankful for that. where is mike moore? thank you for coming. former director-general of the wto. we are going to send you back to take care of russia. laughter could you're going to have your hands full. of course he's now a year as the ambassador just doing a phenomenal job. we are delighted. welcome. [applause]

>> okay. i'm wasting the time because i am taking it from the experts who are here so let me turn this over to meredith broadbent to get started. we will have a series of things april 26 we invite you to come because david kemp wants to deliver a major address on this point and we would like to invite you back to come to that. let me turn to meredith and pull this out of the way so all of you can see. >> thanks, dr. hamre. thanks for coming today. this is an event we all look forward to and for next year we need to order to table some somebody on the upper level and the low level so we are not falling off the end of the table. this is an exceptional group of

talented political leadership and negotiated experience and they've taken their time to give their views on the priorities for the u.s. trade agenda to get i do want to draw out their different perspectives. my assumption going in today is there's a huge amount of agreement among these individuals that have served as the united states trade representative under four different presidents going back to 1981. they are sure i believe caused the care about the role that trade plays in strengthening the global position of the united states. i should mention to those of you that hour in our electronic audience the united states trade representative is a cabinet level official so far with the rank of ambassador who is directly responsible to the president and congress for trade policy. i would be in trouble if i didn't say please follow this event on her at csis.org#6ustrs.

as the united states looks ahead this year there is more of a blank slate on of the president can construct a new trade policy than there had been for quite some time. they've been cleared thankfully, and all the pending free trade agreements are done. negotiations on the transpacific partnerships are a work in progress with several large trading partners and close allies raising of the strategic considerations in addition to the economic questions of the market size and growth potential. the fact that countries have declared the wto round of multilateral negotiations to be at an impasse meeks is certain that the comprehensive worldwide trade liberalizing result that might have been possible is not to be in the near term. don fer nexium vlore the global mechanisms that were proposed like the hugely powerful swifter

of cutting formula which would have wiped away anachronistic peace in the developing countries and advanced developing countries. what we do have, i would argue, is more freedom, more freedom to calibrate and refine the u.s. trade policies based on growth opportunities, in particular regions and countries. when it comes to president job-creating benefits of trade there are many like-minded countries in the world and we hope to share about the targets of opportunity stoddard out there today. we are honored to have these former u.s. tiahrt leal priority d.c. for the auction on the trade agenda. we hope today's discussion will result in some practical suggestions on how to move the trade agenda forward. in terms of organizations of the events, each panelist will get five minute opening statements to address a few selected topics with the understanding the trade agenda is so full what we are not able to do justice to all

the major issues. with that i am encouraging the panelists to comment on each other's presentations as the feel inclined to do so and then we will turn to the audience for questions, please, keep them in mind. with that i will introduce the panel. there are longer biographies are available to you on your shares in the room. the ambassador mickey kantor served as the secretary of commerce for president clinton. the investor is a partner at mayer brown llp and serves as adviser to morgan stanley and as a member of the board of directors. he led the negotiations resulting in the north american free trade agreement and on labor and environment, health and to work with congress for the passage of the implementing legislation. he served as the chief negotiator to create the world's largest and most successful trade pact and support of the president in hosting three of

the early successful apec meetings with the leaders in the region but chairman and ceo of the company ambassador hill was the u.s. trade representative from 1989 to 1993 and the administration of president george h. w. bush. during the negotiation of nafta she was responsible for the blair house agreement that broke the impasse with europe on agriculture that led to the conclusion of the round. she's currently chair of the committee on u.s.-china relations of the dialogue and is the co-chair of the offensive board here at csis as well as one of ours. ambassador clayton practices international trade and agriculture and served as the from 1985 to 1989 and the ronald reagan administration where he negotiated the u.s.-canada free trade agreement and launched around in the negotiations to

include services and intellectual property in the culture. 1989 ambassador kantor, excuse me, was named secretary of the agriculture and he steered the bill in congress and also served as president and ceo of the exchange. ambassador charlene barshefsky is an international partner reserved from 1997 to 2001 and is also in the clinton administration. she was the chief negotiator of the china wto the agreement as well as the global agreement in many sectors and areas including financial services, telecommunications and high-technology projects. investor brock is the trustee and served for four terms as a member of congress and subsequently in the u.s. senate he was the u.s. during the

ronald reagan administration from 1981 to 1985 and served as president reagan' secretary of labor 1985 to 1987. the chairman of the offices specialize in international and investment and human-resources and finally susan schwab of strategic adviser in though government and global trade practice and a professor of public policy at the university of maryland she served from 2006 to 2,009 in the george w. bush and administration where she negotiated and achieved congressional approval of the permanent relations with vietnam and the bipartisan 2000 deal which addressed the sensitive issue of labor and environment. she also negotiated the bilateral agreement with russia and they've been involved in the negotiations in one turnover. in addition, she oversaw the initial just government decision

to join the partnership negotiation and initiative that is embraced and pursued by president obama. with that will go to five minute opening statements starting with ambassador kantor. >> thank you, very much. i appreciate it. i don't know where he came from. >> first of all i do question the sanity of everyone of you being here on that friday. [laughter] and passover weekend when you could be playing a golf or doing something else. i do question that. the say how honored i am to be with my colleagues and friends. it's really interesting. i think we all have been friends and colleagues and have shared almost virtually the same if you want to call it ideologies certainly the same support of trade with very few differences and i'm honored to be with all of you sitting q so much.

i'm going to be very brief antley of we have 45 minutes later in the program. >> he is making a question right now. >> i know you want to stay here for that. he will miss it but that's okay. let me leave this out quickly. i'm going to talk about it and my personal view where i think the trade policy ought to go in the next administration what ever that administration happens to be your democrats and republicans sitting appears a this is not about politics, it's about hopefully a legitimate and rational workable trade agenda. first, let me say this agenda has to take advantage of what we all want which is a rules based trading system that draws on the rules law and implements discipline on all of us. all of us in terms of international trade.

that's what we need and that is the big and small agreements are about. we just need to do more of it and put in some framework of trade that can work in this seems to me that it leads to dependence on each other and enhances globalization and strategic and political and you cannot divide her. would you do in trade from what we do strategically and politically together as critical in the school placed world so that we get to that. first of all i will start with enforcement is a major role to play. it gives confidence to trade especially for the american people and the congress what. it's important for access to markets, and it's what we did

and carless started so well and we were able to finish in the system. it's worked well and is a component of trade we need to continue them and second, we need the president of the audits states to advocate trade a one to talk about the u.s. in this section right here very quickly. we cannot pushing trade agenda allows the president of the united states to offer the next president will be whether this president obama or whoever the republican nominee happens to be at the top of the agenda and i can tell you it just won't work. we won't go anywhere, the congress will follow, that people won't follow, we won't sell trade and it will enhance our jobs and the economy, and frankly our safety and freedom as well as political and strategic issues, so the president has to advocate.

third, i'm going to say doha is dead. why don't we just admit it to each other. and as a there are certain things that are critical we can get done. for instance, as charlene can tell you the questions and answers, the i.t. agreement she did so well on the telecom agreement and financial service agreement or what, 15-years-old, 17-years-old? looked at what has happened just in the information technology since then. we were in the dark ages 17 years ago. we have to redo these agreements it makes them more effective than they are. we have a great opportunity. we ought to look at the financial-services the same as telecom. second, we need to work and deal with the workers' rights and the environment, multilaterally beef to protect intellectual property and have the effect of investment protecting as well. agriculture was to be a separate negotiation and a separate

agreement. we agreed to do it and haven't done that it's time to turn and you can talk about that turn and do something about we have a chance in these areas in these areas to make some great progress if we cut spending so much worrying about something that doesn't exist, it's the doha round. [laughter] and will make a difference, frankly the information technology and gannet telekom and financial service taken together is as big as the uruguay round as big as the impact economically. so we'll to go back to them and make them more effective and would be a boon to the trade is the trends of the partnership wants because it is called the justice of the partnership where is mike?