adjustment to life upon his return from iraq next on booktv. this is just over an hour. >> thank you, all strands. thank you all so very much for coming out. to support independent bookstores and supportive books. i wrote a book, kind of shocked actually, but it is my great pleasure tonight, eight inches man in in the house, my editor, who was pivotal in keeping me under control as i try to craft perhaps the most unlikely structure to book in the history of writing where i attempted to replicate fairly closely the way we remember, which, of course, has no chronology. ..

>> i am going to read a couple of small selections from my book, which will give you a look. i exist in this book is a messenger. it's not a portrait of me and my family, it's not a biography. it is a portrait of my perspective and what is most important. what is most important is the reader. hopefully what i have done will

guide you into your own memory. this is a book of memory. the power of the child and the child's belief. and how that child actors and i live on jan -- how that child echoes in our lives. we are very much a product of who we have always been, and most people who knew me as a child, there are a few, they knew me when, back in norwich, new york on jan new york. in delving into my memory, which is what i had to do to make this book, i really found myself relatively unchanged in many

ways. experience has all changed. the journey from where we began to where we and has and had some very powerful threats, and that is what i traced in making this book. i'm going to read in early passage of my first public performance come in and take it forward to my first serious performance, in my mind, on homicide. my father dragged us to england, which is in no way a labor to me. while we were there, the british were very serious about drama, even in elementary schools. i got into a play. the play was about queen boadicea, i will set the tone

for what comes later in my performance of homicide. here i am in england. i attended school there in my class spent a year studying roman britain. the teachers organized a play about queen boadicea. legionaries or caliphs come i wanted to be in the legion. but i was cast as one of queen boadicea's warriors. we were revert you. we were sent home a list of things to make and instructions on how to dress for the play. i sure the requirements to my father, who looked at them as though he couldn't read and handed them to my mother. shield, sword, belt, dark cloak. to make a shield comes to give me a large piece of cardboard

from a grocery box, we put brown butcher's paper on it. i said that a warrior, he would never have a shield with vegetables on it. my mother found some black material when she found. i wore brown shorts and a belt. my mother was at a loss for how to make a sword. we finally cut strips of the cardboard come up with them together, and wrap them in black plastic from a garbage bag. it looks terrible. my father was happy to be free of blame for the errors i found in wardrobe and armaments. when i arrived at school, i was immediately ashamed. some of the children came to class and elaborate armor that looked like after it replicas of

roman uniforms. his parents -- their parents spent weeks making their costumes. the entire buried in range command we looked like a horrid. papier-mâché heads and brown cloth bodies from each one over to men. we pulled a the chariot around the room with the girl who was the is the queen standing in it. my part consisted nothing more than following queen go to see around. aligning against the romans and then charging to my traumatic death. on the day of the performance, before 100 parents, staff, and students, we just and marched into the auditorium. the legion look wonderfully imperial. but i was relieved not to have been chosen for rome. i can imagine how my armor would've looked if i had been

left to craft it from a tomato box. we assembled in the hall outside, speeches were made inside come at some point we were given a signal of engines. my parents said that as we came in, i was the barbarian most noticeably smiling. boadicea gave her speech about liberty, and then we were to attack the ranks of for our freedom. a boy made a/at me, and this was my cue to perish. during reversal, i went through the motions of pretending that this was the performance. i threw myself back over the screen. might be coming off the stage. sword and shield tossed into the air and i struck the oak floor with a smack that sounded loud even to me. i was told afterward that half of the parents stood up in the play went silent with a gasp.

a teacher hurried to my side, and she stooped, trying very hard to not let her voice sounds hysterical. can you hear me, dear? she asked, with her hand on my chest and it was cold. yes, i hissed, trying not to move my lips. are you hurt, sweetheart? can you move? i've been killed, i whispered. keeping my eyes closed. i heard and i'm mother's voice as she withdrew, and the play went on. more boys falling carefully. go to boadicea drank poison and slumped in her chair. she was pulled out of the room. it was my first memorable public

performance and a blend of the two professions i would go on to pursue most seriously. pushing forward, at this point i had graduated from vassar with a studio art degree, which led me directly to the marine corps come a which is a natural progression of anyone from vassar, infantry officers in the marine corps are. [laughter] after my first period of active duty, i came back to what was our first home, and i wanted to get back into acting, before, of course, immediately returning the reserves and spending another 14 years in the service. here i am at the end of my first tour, 1996. a great deal of peace during a period of time.

after a three-year tour, my wife and i moved into a little house in college park, maryland, our first home together. i wanted to audition for homicide, life in the street from a because it was a good television show and was filmed in baltimore only 30 minutes from our house. it it was coming back from the only local show at the time. it was probably the only chance that i have a significant role. i had given my head shots to a casting agent months before and i was called in to play an extra. he said i would need to wear shorts, slippers and about her. i arrived on site, and a production assistant boarded man of him to go to hair and makeup. i was informed that i was to play a corpse. which was disappointing. i sat shirtless as my death was applied to me. i was covered with a pale paste to be seen in a partially unzipped body bag, and a large hatchet wound was etched onto my

forehead. it was an impressive wound. address in my bathrobe and slippers, got into another van and was driven to block to the set. in a small warehouse, there was a makeshift morgue. the show often by the detectives there to the examined the fictitious dead. there were film crews suiting up. i was directed to the body bag on the pool table. as i lay there, i did not participate in the banter. i wanted to be noted as a professional. focused. i heard the actors speak their lines while i kept my eyes closed. then as the lighting was

adjusted, and the actors continued reversing elsewhere, i remain on the table. i did not speak. i waited as the actors were brought back and i held my breath and control my instinct to shiver until they called cuts. maybe if they saw me they would believe i was not alive. they began to shuttle people away for lunch somewhere up the street, and the actors disappeared along with the crew. i lay on the table. i had no intention of moving until directed to do so. the satellites skirt clicked off. i could hear footsteps in the back and things being moved. the set was abandoned. i sat up in the body bag. i was alone. i have been left behind. it occurred to me that i was not going to be directed anywhere.

but on my bathrobe and slippers and walked outside. it was december in baltimore. bitter cold, and i didn't know the area very well. a member of the crew was walking back and i asked if there was a shuttle coming back. he seemed surprised to see me and gave directions to the church were tutoring was laid out. i would have to walk. i begin to head up the street in my bathrobe and slippers, my bare legs feeling strange as the cold wind stop them. i felt remarkably exposed. i walked across streets where people were christmas shopping and felt myself being noticed. i smiled, as they stare, unsure what they were witnessing. i had forgotten how my head must've looked. [laughter] there were many homeless people stumbling around baltimore mad with drugs or savage with long this regard. i could've been one of them, insane with the chill of winter. i arrived at the church and went in the front entrance. as i stepped through the doors

come i looked directly into a classroom of black children. who probably went silent. it took me a moment to see that lunch was downstairs in the church basement. i stood, a keeping mood. i joined the rest of the dampening the church. after we ate, the shuttle returned us where we finished finish the scene. afterward, hair and makeup was busy, so they gave me some wipes designed for moving makeup. i drove home with the makeup on. i stopped at the 711 and bought a soda. the clerk gave me my change and pretended not to notice that i had been killed. he was very polite. at home, i looked at myself in the mirror, it was good work. the split skin on my forehead, the dream color of my face. i began to wash it off in the

sink. my skin bread with rubbing and wax shallot. i was alive again. later, i watched the episode. eager to see my performance. i appeared briefly in the background, out of focus, unrecognizable. my will was unnoticeable and all the attention paid to detail surrounding the were impossible to see. i was, as the dead are, blurred and transformed, faded. a year later i was called in to audition for a serial killer and returned to the set in baltimore. in the series finale in winter again, i was killed. less homicide on the show. i lay for hours in a pool of red syrup. my hair actually goes into the sidewalk. i lay there in between takes is the crew piled blankets on me. i wanted to be professional. i didn't complain and i didn't move. i held my breath why they ruled the film. when the episode aired, my parents said they couldn't

watch. so everything old is new again. that gives you a little look into how i have kind of taken everything. i have always wanted to be professional. i have always found that suffering is in someway necessary for me to continue living. and i have enjoyed sorting into efforts which have required -- we can only say ,-com,-com ma discomfort, throughout my life in some way or another. it has built me into who i am. i speak with enthusiasm that which many of us would prefer to avoid. there is something about that. something about the unknown and unknowable that has always fascinated me. that gives you a look into me, which provides context, as i said for the messenger. the rest of the book will hopefully guide you more.

i do go into the war and my family. my mother and father especially amah who were there during many of these critical moments in my early childhood those moments have echoed. what i discovered is that i could restore those memories once i had lost them. that was the true power of deep memoir. some people who have read it have been taken back to their childhood. that is what i want. that's what makes me feel like i have finally done it right. is when there is that shared experience in someway. disparate, though our passes, we were all children and had childhoods for better or worse.

and it is very much who we are right now, which was built by those moments. how much time am i running? >> are we doing okay? shall i read somewhere? okay. five more minutes, all right. i wore the official uniform of the writer, which is a thick corduroy jacket. [laughter] which i will not hesitate to tell you is made out of pure heat. i'm just going to slide this off, if you don't mind.

i'm going after large subjects in this book. i have to pay myself a little bit to serve as a conduit for what i have discovered in my time. of course, it is so much about time. something i've been concerned with my whole life. for some reason i'm even as a child, i thought i'd never had enough. there's never enough time. i was assessed with permanence and the idea that i could somehow pleasing to the world something which would endure long beyond me. my father being a writer, of course, did that. in some ways than, i have found that possible with this. in my youth, it was stone. of course, i learned things about stone and its life. i'm going to read a small piece from the beginning of the

chapter called ash. ash is a substance without a real attachment to the air it is not part of the fundamental earth. it exists only as aftermath, a product of fire and tragedy. staying in the ground and the wind. it is made by a particular destruction of life down to the elemental carbon. something has to die absolutely to become ash. pompeii was buried in hot ash, hot enough to seal people in its mass and burn them so completely that only the empty volume of their bodies remained. hollow spaces in the settled embers. lester has been poured into the molds by archaeologists, restoring the last form that the dead had assumed before disappearance. we know the most about roman life because of this city. the substance of destruction preserve it.

it was my torta to get the metal bucket of ash that my father carefully dug from her cast-iron stove once a week. the ash had in it its own pile beside the compost. but both decreased in size. i didn't think much about the ashes i carried it out into the snow. it looked like crushed wasp's nest. i would dump it in the snow and watched as it melted to the older ash underneath. in summer i spent long days digging in the abandoned ash dumps that held treasures, china vows, glass medicine bottles, and lives up to you and yours would emerge as i excavated a household garbage pits. most of the minardi been discovered and done tastefully by two brothers. they made a living at looting and sold off the antique bottles, and broke much of what

they carried off. i was left to sift through what they missed. i found marbles, chipped teacups, rusty razors and porcelain doorknobs. i didn't consider what else was in the ash. love letters, journals, books, new secrets of families went into the ash. they were all there is a search for the objects that were still recognizable. i really found one actually saw. i remember making a trip with my father to the nearby college town of hamilton for the newspapers. it was an adventure to see the landscape every time. in the winter, i wonder what we covered under the bombs in the snow. i imagine them to be ash dumps

of vanished homesteads. almost all the remaining houses along the road had firewood stacked on their porches and a trail of smoke from the chimneys. i could smell the wood burned from her car as we passed. i remember it clearly. the shadow of her car rippled as we moved from a changing with the ground, flickering telephone poles and senses. we were like sit on the snow, deformed, but recognizable. eight a child's charcoal drawing. i could see myself very small. my father in the front, driving, changing sides, both of us blocking the sun as we passed over the countryside late in the afternoon like a cloud of smoke that was known to us. i have seen cities destroyed in my life. people buried, graves dug up.

i have lived outside in the elements. i know that everything is recomposed from pre-existing matter, that we are all fragments from earth. pieces of us are from stars, meteors, the ocean, and the dirt, and the dead. we will not be able to keep these pieces either. our bodies doomed to be given back to the ground. i have been present at all the evidence of every particle is part in the universal transients. and i have decided to believe none of it. so, "dust to dust" it. i go into a lot of territory into this little heavy book. and i hope you will follow me. it is a book about healing of the universe. i hope that you will join me in doing so, as you read this. now it is my distinct pleasure and honor to have a discussion with mr. george packer.

whose book, by the way, is fantastic. [applause] [applause] ottmar. [applause] we will pass this back and forth. >> thank you. >> then, where did you learn to write? because your memoir is beautifully witten, but it is not the book of someone who seems destined to be a writer. you are always in the world of objects. you are always making things and building forts and building airplanes, your building weapons. your main relationship seems to be with physical -- the physical

world, not with words. he produced this book, which is a book of a literary soul. did your father teach you? did you apprentice yourself to some great writers? how did you become a writer? >> well, i am obsessed with the tactile. i am obsessed with the idea that we can make objects that live beyond us in some ways. the book is that object come also. i did grow from a hole in the earth in some ways. i spent my time in the dirt and was stone. that is where i developed this visual, very direct relationship with my landscape in my space. i come from a visual background. the book is, i think, it is written to be understood

visually, and i focus on trying to make sure we can see a good deal of space. i grew up in a house of words. my father being a writer, my mother being a librarian, i was almost doomed to in some ways, if not participate, to actively revere language. >> although you could just have easily rebelled and maybe you did for a long time and set up i'm not going to go that route as a writer. i'm going to be an infantry officer and a studio artist and etc. >> yes, the other dooms. that is a good point, but i think i was so genetic that i wasn't really involved in language so much. my expression came from construction in some way, even if it was art or a print or a trying. that was how i spoke.

and that is how i thought it was most effective. and it really was being in iraq have forced my hand. all i had there was expressing these things which were monumental discoveries in my environment, which i didn't have images for. i couldn't describe them visually that way. i literally had to find language, and it was then that i discovered that experience could be transferred through words in a way that i had never imagined it was very possible, despite the fact that there are plenty of adventure books. >> you mean, when you were in iraq, other ways of expressing yourself had been cut off? and the need to express was more alive than ever, so letters were the one way be found to do it. >> yes, and i think that in those letters, my voice emerged.

that is where i found my order for words. even then, i did agonize over sentences and work placement in the right words. i knew from my father that words were important in that they could be the wrong word and i didn't want to go down that path. i strove to find language which was exact, even though it is from one perspective. >> out of nowhere, i received some of these letters from a complete stranger, benjamin busch, back in 2007 when the war was still very much going on. to me they announced that here is a marine who really can write. i have read a number of iraq war memoir. your book is not back him as he said. you seem determined to refuse it

as a iraq war memoir. it's not announced as being about the war. i think that is probably why, because that is not the book it is. they all have a sameness, which is also true about the war. in the way they that he set out to write the book, where you actively trying to tell your readers, don't expect what you think to expect? this is going to be something else. it's not going to give you, you know, the simple ratification of reading about a young man at war? >> it is not a limited progression. it is not a linear narrative that we expect of memoir. it is also not confined in some ways. most memoirs focus on.

the knack of time with a very particular comical path, that leads nowhere. it is a picture of a person. mine wasn't so much to describe me, it was to describe my different perspectives. as a child when i went to london, with my parents, there were castles. they were still preserved and thus, in my mind as a child, i assumed well, stone is the medium of perpetuity. i will work in stone. and i became a stone mason. >> and he built a stone wall? >> stonewalls imports and everything was built out of some because i knew that stone would

endure because i had seen castles from the 1200s and they seemed fine. that was all i needed. that was my empirical data. of course, as you follow the chapter of stone, you get a sense for my reverence for that substance. that very solid thing. of course, it necessarily has to take me into war, where i find myself standing in the desert, composed of sand and the sad realization, of course, is that this is stone. these are mountains. yes, much like the book says, we are brief in some ways. nothing is permanent. in some ways, we also never disappear. even our fashion carbon. it goes back into life. stone blows from mountains to deserts which go to see, it is

turned, pressed down, and becomes stone again. stone actually does endure, it's just not that stone. so i think there is introductory. >> each chapter recapitulates growth and growth and decay, which is how nature, unfortunately works. but the book also has a trajectory, which leads toward a kind of wisdom, but also a recognition. it is trite to say it, a recognition of mortality. he began as this boy was solitary and feels this. if he is not fearless, you are convinced that you can write out anything that comes your way. it is part of testing yourself. it must've been part of what led you to join the marine corps straight out of vassar.

toward the end of the book, death asserts itself more and more and more. so there must've been an organizing in your mind of those chapters and episodes from the elements that allowed you to stay in the protective world of a child toward the world of the adults who is surrounded by death by the end of the book. that is the last element of the book. >> what else can you and with? you know, throughout the book is the power of the believe of the child. we have beliefs as children. which we encourage in some ways. one of them is immortality. something you're not concerned what. death happens to other people and it happens by errors or by a

failure of prowess. also, your parents are protecting your. the idea of our continuation is not one we question at that time. our parents survival is not something that we question. these are permanent truths were a child. you cannot convince a five year old-year-old that their parents are going to die. it is absurd. see it in their face. they will disbelieve you. >> although they will want to know all about that, at least in my experience. maybe even 4-year-olds. >> right, but at the same time, they don't imagine that it will happen in real life. >> only to nixon. >> is he dead? [applause] >> i had to tell my son that he is. >> is he a big nixon fan? >> no, he just saw his paper

unsent picture in the paper and wanted to know if we could have them over to dinner. >> i think you are hitting on something which is essential in the book. i had gone to iraq, which was thick with death, and i had have lost friends there, had been wounded there, and it was a very violent time in that war in a place that was most committed to continuing in some ways. there is my daughter, and she didn't know who i was. i dropped back into fatherhood and i was beginning to grapple with what that really meant. immediately, my father died, it followed very closely within a year by my mother. in that process, of course, i went from being a child to an

orphan. to being a father and having a child, and the cycle was just very rapid and i was immersed in the sudden realization that everything could be lost. but even in my late 30s, i thought it impossible. the child in me does believe in my parent's death. and i was there. there was no question. i cannot restore them or bring them back. but the child does believe it and fiercely. even though there is a clothing aggression over that, which is, you know, this is what happens, this is the realization of mortality. and i think the book began to be born at that moment. it was then that i realized in trying to remember and follow this defines to its source, that of course, going back to the child that i had been, but

here's were still there. that is what memory was. their life was there, their interest was there. i think that is important. >> he became a father just in time to know that your child is going to see and have the same experience of you as a parent. which is bittersweet to say the least. >> it is. >> convergence of events. >> it makes me realize the importance of the moments that i have at them, because i know that those moments will echo. things that i say will matter. in telling them stories and things like that that will someday come back to them. >> can you have conversations like this in the marine corps? i know in army corps in vietnam, and he said he tucked talked to soloway, basically, to get

through and to be a good commander and to be a leader of soldiers. he stopped being a writer and stop thinking about writing. he put it away in order to get through it because the two were going to get in each other's way. did you do that? >> well, i always had my mind ,-com,-com ma and you can get away with anything in there. believe me, i have never been caught. i think you are saying you have to be an entirely different person, you have to separate yourself from the intellectual creature that has endless curiosity, and i was an artist. i was an artist at work. which was a strange, nation to many people. for me, it was always

intertwined. well, -- >> you were known as the guy who went to a girl's college, right? >> i had my moment of pride in my vassar background and i've paid dearly for, but they didn't call in a girls school anymore, they call it a woman's college. >> you consider that, yeah -- >> yes, i considered it a promotion. i will take that. [laughter] >> the fascination of the world how the world around me is the artist fascination. i curiosity you can trace all the way to the child. it is how i make work, photographs, and films, and in the end, i find language.

and that benefited me to immensely when i was in a rack. we were trying to find the nuances in a place we did not understand. it was because of that heightened -- fascination, i think, that i was able to watch instead of talk over a lot of that. for what effectiveness i could have had if i had any, that is what it was born from, was the artist going what is really going on here, pay attention rather than just acting? two i'm not a big fan of the template, which is often associated with the military. they say it accomplished where it does fit. i didn't compromise really who i

was. >> did you share this with other greens? did the men under your command know that you took pictures and made things and bought these things? >> well, i would not say there was an open forum discussing mortality in the war, but, you know, in my first tour, i carried myself like i couldn't be killed because that was what was expected for me. that may sound careless, but i was not concerned for my life. >> there is a wonderful scene that ben didn't read that you really must read when you read his book, in which he said -- he is at a town council meeting in southern iraq and is trying to work out early government in this town. the first question that comes to him as can we plug up this hole whole and euphrates, right? >> that's correct. >> this hole that had been dug

in order to air date the field of saddam's wife. and the mother of his two psychopathic children. everyone in the town, you know, is determined to plug this thing up, but they are bringing it to the marine major in charge who holds a vote and it is a great little set piece of early democracy in iraq, maybe not to be repeated or a match. there is unanimous vote come up there going to plug it up. and there was a note from central boy. how does it go work for word? >> major busch will die tonight by the lion of iraq. >> i'm not going to give away what happens next, but it's an incredible scene. >> they didn't get me. >> they didn't get him.

it is kind of a perfect scene of a guy who had fought through the situation in a moment where most people would have freaked out. >> is important because in iraq, everything was carried on faces. you can leave anything that anyone said. culturally, there is not a lot of truth in a question and answer session and a lot of those places. you have to ask the question from all the way around the subject to get the different lies in order and find a small piece of truth in each lie and begin to put together what is, in some ways, true. there was some truth in there.

we just were not equipped. that is why we were endlessly frustrated. americans are fond of a very simple end product. if i say i'm going to pay you $10 to paint this today and we will do it at 10:00 o'clock. and the paint will be here. wonderful. you leave, you come back the next day and they renegotiate. and you say, no, i'm the one with money and it's 10:00 o'clock, here is the paint. $10 to paint that. we had a deal yesterday. this would have been seven days in a row. we would end up at $10 again every time, but the work wouldn't be done. i could not be offended, because that would be offensive. this was me constantly putting myself in my little black box. covering that box up.

it was frustrating. i understood that was how things are. allow things to be as they are, and allow native solutions to arrive in the form, and make that effective by encouraging it. but it was mind-boggling for me because i came from a culture which was so different. not because mine was right, and that's what i had to keep reminding myself. it is not that i'm right and they're wrong. it is that i am in the wrong place for my solution at this time. >> i remember once sitting in on a meeting with an army captain and three local tribal leaders in baghdad. after a long circuitous discussion about why they were not stopping guys from planting ied's on the road, one of the iraqis finally said to the american, you really should look at how the british did this. you guys don't know how to do this. and i think what he was saying

was we need to have a more complicated and elaborate conversation than the one you are capable of having. you want a straightforward, i agree to do this, it's a deal, we shook hands. it didn't work that way. >> to allow yourself to be frustrated, which would make you an effective, and it would push you away from any potential discussion, which was necessary at that time. they are entirely oral people, and there was nothing written except a note to kill me. i understood also at that time the power of story. you could do a lot on a border by telling a story. i told in effect to sheepherders and it had an interesting effect. it was endlessly fascinating to me. i have 1800 pages of finely written notes that are useless

to the earth now, but i was trying to figure out family trees and towns relationships by way of family, and why this group was angry at this group and why they wouldn't cooperate on this certain point. >> you were trying to be an anthropologist. >> that is how you had to handle it. it was an anthropological situation as well as an ethnic, religious, issue. with us being ideologically irrelevant. we were just there, but the rack was still going to be what it was we didn't have that realization of the time. we thought we would introduce democracy, atwater and the flowers will bloom. we thought, it would turn down our way? it is so great.

this is the travel culture that has been taught for 30 years. the best we could do was restore the corruption that had existed before. do you still go back to? >> i want to see my first count. i want to see a town near the iranian border at some point, as long as i'm not going to get any more notes. [laughter] i had a much better line of defense than me with a camera and a pad of paper. but i would be interested to do so. i knew it was dangerous enough. as it is everywhere in afghanistan. you know, you want to put a positive spin on things, the

merger of people and ideas. even if it is we think, wrong. you know, we are big trading partners with vietnam, and you have to assume at some point, because of our presence, some for worse in some for better, but some things that we thought and introduced was preferred. i cannot check those moments, and i cannot give us credit for anything in vietnam other than this terrible destruction. at the same time, it is a different place now. they think differently the place thinks differently and iraq has in some ways changed just by the introduction of things. we didn't introduce the greatest that because we didn't introduce it confidently. but we did show another way.

that is the most hopeful thing i've heard about iraq in a really long time. >> you are not putting any optimistic -- excuse me, it says things that people haven't heard for a long time. and i think your book is a weight or people to go back to iraq without having to do it head-on. i think that americans are going to want to forget about this for a long time. >> we forgot about it while i was there. >> we did. we didn't know about it when we are their. >> there. >> there were so many that came home and found after the first few minutes, no one had a clue and no one wanted it now. >> now, it is more active. your book, because it is something so different from

anyone's point of view from anyone who wore a uniform at in that conflict, it will allow readers back there without generating the resistance -- the mental resistance the books and movies about iraq are not generated. >> well, you know, there is a lot of tough stuff about iraq in there. there's a lot of stuff in there about the united states and iraq in their infancy together. there is also the aftermath of conflict, which was cool and you can't help but wonder the point. >> there is a line in your book were where you reach the point of pointlessness. it is a little bit despairing.

>> yeah, almost no matter what the conflict is borne out, that is the result. loose things about extremity. people you know. you wonder exactly how you can account, how can you reckon not with something which we essentially considered that point to be an unjust mission entered in for the wrong reasons. justified after a long period of occupation. people were still dying. there was a complacency at home because we support the troops, but they didn't and the war. there was the strange conflict between those two feelings. you couldn't tell which was a real feeling. no one forced it to end. in fact, it was increased as time went on.

it was a time for confusion. a lot of people, well, i signed up to fight. hopefully i would go on to a noble mission. and that was the hope. >> in 2004, and in 2006 in hammadi, it was pretty hard to see there. >> i want to bring in the audience before we close out. >> we have gone on a bit. >> it has been a wonderful conversation. questions for ben? >> should i ask something of myself? >> nothing? >> this is going to be good. >> i think very highly of the

writing. it is tangible and your work outside the memoir was so thoroughly based in fiction. the memoir is so striking because there is not anything in it that is not true. every word. [inaudible question] everything in your book is real. a new work, outside of war our memoirs, it is the opposite. could you talk about the fiction? >> how many hours do you have? that is a fantastic question. the question is, you know, what is my approach and what is my thinking about the difference between writing the absolute

truth of nonfiction and writing fiction, of course. i write films. and also a preeminent editor is here, frank reynolds. he cut my new film, "bright." i wrote that film while i was finishing the book. it is about the possible escape from childhood for some characters. life always erupts into your work, it gives you your best material because it comes from something that you know. not just -- my father had this poster in his bedroom that had a hemingway quote. all you have to do is write one true sentence, and that justifies everything.

in conclusion, all is well that ends well. that idea that life is always pushing into your heart, it is part of the gathering, i think that artists are all gatherers. we are picking up images and ideas, we are picking up baskets and that is some of my best work in fiction, which i haven't done much of. most of my work has been nonfiction. you are right to point out that the book has very little dialogue. if i couldn't remember exactly what was said, i wouldn't write the conversation. you see a lot of memoir with tons of dialogue. they have better memories than i do i have a better memory for

places i can recount visual locations very accurately, but i can't remember what was said in some particular circumstances. that is where dialogue comes up in my book. i remember very clearly what was said. it is so limiting. there are a number of scenes that i had to give away because i know i can only get the spirit of them and i didn't have the power -- i didn't have the wind of my father said. i can remember around the line and the point of the line, but i couldn't remember language. do not quote someone so particular and articulate in language is an offense that i could not commit. i did that kind of with everybody. writing fiction is liberating because i can say anything i want. if i want a conversation to exist, i just write it and i can

change the words, i can keep on crafting it for the book. i crafted and retracted every sentence, really. but they were towards a particular and that i couldn't escape. the conditions were -- they were the conditions. and i had to describe them. it was the constant hunt for the right words that i thought a reader would be able to see what i was saying. but that is what is important to me is that readers could actually travel through their own imagination of similar landscapes to the one that i really grew up in and that we would be journeying together throughout the book.

it's a really great question. >> [inaudible question] on the other hand, your father had a powerful worldview about the sake of a man. what a good man he was, your father. he was the father that was great. in writing about this book, some of your childhood seems to be a rebellion in response to the intellectual or your father was.

.. to explain what that was, whereas i would run out of the field. talk about a bail of hay, go left one. carry it around. i would talk about rocks, stack them. so we were very different that way and how we explore the world. it is also a constant observer, a gatherer. and i appear throughout his fiction is, with kids building balls in his fiction, follow me

through 27 books, i meant there. he made up what i said, probably. but, you know, i adhere briefly as a child because he is drawing from watching me, and this is what a kid does in the country. i'm watching him from a distance. ideas about masculinity, i wanted to be a night. that wasn't the job for me. i wanted to be a night in an archaeologist, kind of a fighting archaeologist that way. i think it's a line from master and commander. be a fighting botanist or something. >> indiana jones type. >> yeah, that's a dream right there. missing the hats. yeah, those are the things i wanted. and when i was in england were i finally thought i would be embraced, i thought i could get a job as a squire, and we were surrounded by all these weapons and knighthood was just thick.

we are in a castle. the queen was right down the road. so went to one of the beefeaters, red uniform on a black lace and i said, you know, and i tried to be british i said i should like to be a squire. and he said, he could tell i was american. and he said, american, aren't you? yes. i'm afraid i don't have any work of that sort for you. you have to be british. and i was crushed. i would home and i was like dad, we got to do something about my passport. i can't be a night unless i'm british, so i have to be british. i can just imagine what my father was going through, oh, god. of course, he's a fiction writer so i can remember the story he told me about how this wasn't going to work out, but maybe down the line i could be a night. we just had to deal with this issue later which would often to if he did have a good story right away.

an idea of how my father dealt with my strange obsession to get obsessed with building a plane, and he eventually would have to curb my enthusiasm by something. he would have to come up with a story and it would have to be real. and i would for the rest of my life believe that story, which is the thing about childhood. the plane i couldn't finish in the alley, i want to get out of england because i think issues being a yankee. so yeah, i just, my impulses were clear, and the marines were as close as i could get there so it didn't surprise anyone who knew me really, even though when i thought i went to vassar and does doing stuff, i was past that phase of my life. and then i went into the marine

corps officer candidate school. bastard is still shocked, but my parents found peace with that. briefly afterwards. and were very proud of that. but it took them a period of shock that they have finally come -- a parents job is the hardest one in the world. as many of you know. it's to protect the child, always. to keep the child from harm's way. i was a child who was just chasing it. if there was a line, you know, between safety and risk, i had one foot on the line and one foot in risk, and my parents were just out of reach. i knew they were reaching. i was maybe overconfident, but they also couldn't get me. and that's what made them crazy. how we approach masculinity, you know spin can i ask you a question to follow up on that? since you became an orphan, as you say, have you moved over towards the safety side of the line since they are no longer

there to reach 40? >> i left the marine corps. after the second door i came back and i left, 16 years, no retirement, no benefits. i walked cold. i walked cold. that was because i knew that i would continue to go back until they brought me back, you know, in a bag probably, just because afghanistan was next for me. and i wanted to go, and it's hard for me to see marines deployed now. it's really hard for me, personally pulls at me, and they feel a certain level of betrayal because i feel responsible always our marines. it's just that thing they breed into marine leadership, which i think every marine will tell you this family, all the way down to lance corporal. they have a responsibility, is one of the hardest steps they'll ever take its the hardest decision i ever made was to

leave. and the marine corps didn't care. i know the organization -- with a whole lieutenant colonel ranks, don't worry, put another one there. it did notice me coming. it didn't notice me going because that's what the organization is. it's much like the earth, you know? the rise and you fall here your the earth continues to turn. but for me it was dramatic in some ways. insync and deployed there now is really hard for me. not because i think they're not being well led, but i wonder. you know? we all have different ways of seeing our environment. >> and you became a father at the same time. that must have something to do with its? >> that's exactly. that was the decision i had to make. will i be father to people who aren't really my children, which is the job of a marine commander, or will i be a father to this little girl, and all she had to do was look at me.

so she one pretty easily but it doesn't change the feeling of that decision, which will forever be regret, even if it's not reasonable. much like everything i believe which is unreasonable. i believe it fiercely and enthusiastically. >> thank you so much, benjamin. i hope everyone will buy your book and read it. and learn from it. thank you so much. >> thank you. [applause] >> this event was hosted by the strand bookstore in new york city. to find out more visit strand books.com. >> what are you reading this summer, booktv wants to know. >> this summer i want to read the book, do not -- [inaudible] it's sort of an inside look at

how speaker john bennett and the way he managed freshmen in his conference. this great lines i heard, i read in articles about the book that show just how crazy it can get in there with a lot of these freshmen are put in, who arguably are controlling the way that the house is running, even though their freshmen and john bennett is in charge but there's one line i have right here. apparently in a meeting with his conference, boehner told people get your ass in line. i think this has been so polarizing and so unaffected a book like this would be great for some summer reading to just kick back and figure out some of the traumas that are actually going on behind the scenes as we watch and nothing happen. another book i would like to read on a totally different note is called love is a mixed ape.

it's written by someone who works for rolling stone but it's a personal story about somebody, about how he felt in love with some of who also fell in love with him, they were very unlikely pair, and from what i understand she died and he's devastated but then they use to make each other mixed tapes, which is something i did for years and years and years to all my exes, you know? but he basically writes a book that is essentially a mixed tape to her in her honor because he loved her and she is gone, and he's devastated. it sounds like with his mixed tapes, his final mixed tape for her is love songs, and it sounds, i can't wait to read that one so that's what i'm hoping to read this summer. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists this a booktv.org. >> if we look at the 18th century, journalism start off in

this country in 1704 as a very puny and unimpressive kind of enterprise. the very first newspapers were very small and circulations in the dozens and then maybe in the low hundreds. and they were really intimidated by the other institutions in that society, especially church and state, and compared to them these newspapers were not at all important, and very much under their thumbs. but what you see over the course of the next couple of decades is a process by which those newspapers become increasingly political in what they focus on, and they get to be bolder and bolder, for reasons i go into in the book, so that by the 1760s, and certainly by 1770, they are in bold throat, expressing themselves on all kind of the political issues of the day, on independence from britain, or reconciliation from

the mother country on if we break them what kind of the government should we have? all these huge questions. it's often the products that people are reading are often produced anonymously or synonymously at people who don't want to be known as you pseudo-anonymously. and that's the nature of the press that the founders were familiar. that press was very local. it was small-scale. it was very political. most of those newspapers had very little, what we would think of as original reporting, you know, nonfiction material that the staff to generate. that was not really in the cards.

we see a different style today in journalism. it's not something that is unanticipated or it doesn't fit into this constitutional scheme. >> who invented reporters? we need to think of reporters and journalists as synonym, but that was not -- >> not at all. no, no, no. it really wasn't until about the 1830s, begin here in new york city, another really inventive journalist named in gym and a created the first so-called penny press newspaper, sold african a copy so he was going way down market trying to reach the broadest possible audience. and to do that he needed to fill it up with surprising, amazing things every day. fires, news from the police stations, dockings of ships, anything like that that he could find. and he wore himself out trying

to fill the paper, and so he hired the first full-time reporter, a man named george, who regrettably obscure figure in american journalism history but i'm going to try to do something about that. >> when did journalism become a business? that is, the period you are describing in the colonial period, it doesn't sound like -- how did it support itself? >> most of those newspapers were created by people who are really in another trade. that is, they were printers. and in order to keep their print shop busy and in order to bring their customers into the shop, to pick up the papers, so that they could sell them some stationary on the site or sell them a book while they were in there, they hit upon the idea of a newspaper as the perfect device. it expires every e