affirmation exchanged between the publisher and author there is no record. the same as with photographs. we of photographs 70 years old imperfect condition but now we get digital images. i am afraid of some of those will be lost. . .

i dedicated the book to her and my folks are here and lots of friendly faces in the audience from various communities from buffalo so i appreciate that. thank you all for coming. what i hope to do was talk a little bit first about the book and didn't do it if short reading. i recorded the audio book. i was lucky enough to do that so if you really want to hear my voice through the whole thing you can do that. i will do a short section and then we will do question and answer at the end if that works. where i wanted to start was talking about a trip that i made in may. the first weekend in may every year is the d.o.t. memorial down in florida. i'm going to say that a lot. that's explosive ordinance does oso, the bomb squad, what i did in my career field.

every year we have a ceremony to put the names on the wall of all of the men and women who died in that last year. we have a memorial wall. there are four panels to that wall one for each of the services and it's just a list of names and dates of who they were and their rank and when they died. so every year in may if they died in the last year, we would go down there and honor them and read every name. and then they say something about the folks that died that last year. i went down in may because i had a very good friend that died in january. the closest of close friends. his wife, so close to my wife and my kids were the same age as his kids. so really important to us. i had not been for a couple of years but we went down this year. we put 18 names on the wall this

year. so that was the most since 1945. it was a really really bad year and when they read all the names it took them 22 minutes to read all the names this year. of everybody on the wall from the first in the 1940s all the way to the last one. so, i start by talking about that for a couple of reasons. one is, there were a thousand people they came to that. active duty servicemembers, whose -- guys who got out like me, veterans, but family members. when i wrote the book i'm think about them and when i think about you know, when i lie awake at night thinking about how the book is going to be received, i don't think about the critics in new york or the coverage i'm going to get in the paper or whatever else. that's all wonderful and nice

and it's wonderful to see and it's great he gratifying but i really think about is how are those guys going to feel about my book? and will it feel right to them and will it make sense to them? there is an old tradition in the eod world that if your name appears in the paper or if you are on tv you owe case of beer to the unit. there are a couple of reasons for this. one is guys like to drink beer. we are not afraid on a friday to pop if you open and kind of be done. the other reason is, if -- it's an encouragement to really just keep your mouth shut. nobody needs to know what you are doing. just do your job and go home and everybody in that community knows what you are doing but you don't need to talk to anybody else about it. i wrote that role. i wrote a whole book so i have

accepted that i hope beer everywhere i go from now on. so i wrote that rule so it's really important to me that i've, the feedback that i get back from guys and i'm extremely lucky and i feel fortunate in really very grateful that everything i've heard so far has just been overwhelmingly positive. the guys in the book are saying thank you for putting us in the book. we are honored to be in the book. they are saying things like we feel the same way and you just made it okay to say so and that is just the most overwhelmingly you know, i am just overcome by that. i feel like it should go the other way. i feel like i'm honored and thankful that they let me tell just a little bit of their story. the other thing i wanted to start with the memorial is because it reminds me how grateful i am that my tours were

so -- and you know just what an average experience i had, what they really -- you know it's not like we lost a whole bunch of guys. it's not like we got caught on some afghan mountaintop and i was the only survivor or something like that, nothing like that. i had an average to her. i did my job and i came home and when i look around at that group a number of missing arms and legs and burns and everything else, if you know it brings that all home. so what was my average experience? i was a bomb tech which means that we take apart the ieds and we go to blast teams, places where car bomb or an ied has arctics on often we collect the audience to figure out -- the evidence and we try to blow up as much weapons caches as we can

possibly find so they can't make an ied to begin with. i did all of that. i did a couple of tours and i did three total, one in saudi arabia over 2001 when i was not on tech and two in iraq, one in pelot and one in kirkuk. came back and move to buffalo in 2007 i thought everything was fine and i got a job and everything was fine for a couple of years until one day when it wasn't find any more. i guess that is what i wrote the book about which was the struggle to figure out what was wrong when i got home and the things i did over there. something was happening to me physically that i didn't understand. i had a physical reaction. i didn't feel worried or stressed and i wasn't having nightmares and i wasn't jumping a car doors and i wasn't doing all the stereotypical things that they tell you is what ptsd is going to look like or any of those coming home issues are going to be like.

i had a physical feeling in my chest that i had no name for so i went to the emergency room for a heart attack. and i went back a couple of times. it was never a heart attack and they hooked me up to all the monitors and an ekg and everything else and no, there's nothing physically wrong with you. so then i got referred, i guess the system worked a little bit. i would not have put myself on the right office. they referred me to the right office and i eventually ended up in the mental health clinic which once again helped me with a lot of this. i refer, or i remember i should say, the day that i realized that i could write a book or a maybe writing a book. i was scribbling things from the therapist. it was one of the few things that help this feeling go away because i was so tired, didn't have time to feel bad and i dropped my son off at a soccer game or soccer practice and then

i ran from his school down like he even wrote to the river and back which is about eight miles. on the eight-mile run i remember the moment where he said, maybe this was something i needed to do so i took a year and i wrote the book. i had written before. when i move back to buffalo in 2007 i wrote this little thing for "newsweek" about how strange it was to be moving from las vegas to buffalo and you know so i guess i had written before that i was so down deep in whatever i was in writing about it, didn't really make sense as a thing to do and tell until my therapist recommended it that day when i was running. so i'm going i am going to talk about or i'm going to read now kind of a couple of those different kinds of sections. when i thought about what to read, had a couple of considerations, one of which is that this book doesn't really go in chronological order.

it doesn't start in iraq and then move through. everything is all mixed together because that is how it felt to me. it felt like i was over there and back here all of the same time. to organize my thoughts i have this giant sheet of butcher paper that i put on the wall in the color-coded all the different sections and vignettes in different colors. one color for things in the past in the war and a different color for the present-day things and what was going on now and then with a crazy feeling which is what i call it, crazy with the c. and the fina one for the therapy and how some of my recovery and there wasn't a lot of that color. it was mostly the other two colors. so i'm going to kind of read one of each of those. the other thing that i need to think about, as you might have already noticed, i don't have that much of a filter any more. one of the issues with -- i have

very mild, very mild traumatic brain injury kind of an occupational exposure issue. you can't blow stuff up for years and have it not affect your head. so i have some long-term memory loss and i have a couple of things. i also have no filter, so it's just the way i'm wired. i get emotional pretty easily. i'm not really embarrassed about it. it is just the way i work now. but, you know i got emotional while writing the book and crying while i was writing. i figured i was doing a good job. that was assigned to me that what i was writing was working. so the benefits of television and everybody else, i'm going to try to get through this. the first part that i want to read is from chapter 4, which is titled the daily grind. this is kind of an introduction to what things were like, what

things were like over there. it began when a call came in. bombs god doesn't drive around searching for ieds any more than firefighters patrol the city streets looking for plumes of smoke on the horizon. instead the compound waited in perpetual anticipation. one year train for the phone muscle and concrete in preparation, a coiled spring. armored trucks lay in wait in the yard goes astray the gate robots floating exposes doors open with body armor and helmets at the ready. gear packed and repacked, check and recheck. brigade exposes were inventoried and refresh. per day the robot batteries were swapped with a triple charger and every day the jammer wes turned on cycle. every day that bond -- my came out to inspect and suspenders and spine guard, zipper and ties, the diaper this wobbles

your grind, the heavy overcoat and kevlar plate pick release tabs, helmet and air snorkel, microphone and electrically neck actions, and a two-inch thick visor for everyone had a different picture will. no one started the task they could not put aside. some clean their rifles over and over again. others fretted over their last e-mail from their wife or girlfriend. many slept with one eye open and a black watch cap even in heat of summer. eubanks looked on wide sunglasses and hugh hefner silk rope proper lounge where lunch where he called it. a cup a specially prepared coffee and magnum p. i reruns. gina port oversupply and the tories and complained that no one completed her paperwork right. mitchell and chris black-and-white partners in crime, smoked and choked the minutes away in front of them. i endlessly wrote reports rewrote reports and justified

not having to write reports. it filled the time between phonecalls and beat the slow death waiting. the staff continuously manned exist for somebody to answer that phone for a call. sometimes there was a warning of a call, thunder in the distance on a clear day, black cloud hanging over the city. usually we were not so fortunate. the monotony of task, the long wait and then piercingly quiet a ring, the ring, time to go on a call. i close my eyes found that my mind drift i can see every ritualized movement every inch of concrete cross every step between my desk and awaiting armored truck. the paper's thumbtacks to the plywood wall and computer the prints maps of the location of each call, the dust on the gray floor, the place on the gunn, and where my body armor hung, the contents of every pocket.

my brain has been torn and ripped by explosions. memories of my children stolen or faded blown apart in each blast. how do i remember every inch, every second of a move to a call? i'm surrounded by reminders. they spring into mind. every pair of boots i own are sandy. my rifle is always waiting for me. by children's first steps are my walk to the truck. when the phone rang and we knew note with the khalid began to write. out of the office he shared with the phone in the office desk the big map of kirkuk on the wall. the team on standby time to wake up, time to do the job. to the gun rack wearing buckled my pants and tucked in my long desert camouflage blouse to get it out of the way. 9-mm pistol first stuck in the back of my trousers, rifle nests out of the rack, in in my hand and out of the ramshackle workspace and into the wide-open covered aircraft shelter reuses our base. across the 30 floor spare robots

and radios .50 caliber sniper will -- sniper rifles. body armor on first, latched across shoulder armor strapped in place. tactical vests on top covered in pouches and pockets continuing six rifle magazines, it extra pistol mags, flashlight, whether material, knife, a note from my for my wife begging me to come home. the rosary for my dead aunt mary and a scapular. when i died i was not going to help. no matter what i had done on the call. it comes all the time now. a helmet on my head, gloves on come earplugs in and sunglasses, rifle magazine in, round in the chamber. i could do it today. i do it every day.

then back to the ops. where was the ied, the car bomb the blast that hit one of our convoys? map in hand the talk. hey we were just there yesterday. t. remember the second actuary device? that is where eubank got hit. that is the third truck bomb in that neighborhood this week. they reminded us of each call. the calls come all day and night. rockets in the morning and car bombs all afternoon. in between prayer time and after dinner as darkness sets in, after curfew when all average citizen should be home snug in their beds. only trouble awaits on patrol. trey said it's not a daintily sleep. sometimes when the calls pileup you can go from yesterday to tomorrow and never get to sleep. don wake up to tepid mushy oatmeal.

hardened hamburgers on drysdale funds for the reg of afternoon suicide car bomb downtown, in the school or playstation. the weekly serving of a suspicious looking white trash bag call them buy a house or hauser petrova turns out to be nothing. midnight shower, rubbery pancakes and endless drive out and back at 20 miles per hour to a cell phone multi-frequency decoder board set up discovered by long-haul convoy in the dark and distant desert, gone. wreck for so spicy sausage patties and cold ama to take down of weapons cache, more hardened hamburgers and finally exhausted and delirious sleep. it was never today. it was only yesterday and tomorrow. the worst calls are the ones just after midnight in the earliest predawn. sometimes you just know a call is coming. you can feel it in the air. your spine tingle's. maybe it was a quiet day. maybe it was good weather.

a long hot quiet day means as long hot busy night. when you know a call is coming you stay up late waiting for. no point in going to sleep if you're just going to be woken up but then i call doesn't come. 2200, 20 to 30. do you think we are getting any calls tonight you ask? why don't you hit the rack answers price a hovering mother hen and a linebacker's body mass of black arms the size of your thighs crossed over his chest while reading intel reports. price guards the phone each night and suffers worse insomnia than you. i will stay up longer and see. you wander over to the adjacent room and play a little halo. every alien is that guy who needs to die and is so refreshingly simple. now it's 2300, 2330 and still no call but you can't hang out any longer. your eyes are closing on their own. i am giving up for the night.

sounds good, sir. a half hour later banging on your door with a call a pressure switch contacts and to 122 and -- but so you roll off your and start the ritual, gear on, rather sugar and caffeine energy drink, hop in a humvee, slam the sickening concoction in one gulp and the stomach rumble, open the door, on the awaiting third and you're ready to run all might long on a half hours sleep. out you go out of your compound, outside past the guards and spotlights and blast barriers and gates and into the unknown. so that is what things were like over there on a typical day. when i got back here, i am going to read a really short section about what it's like to walk into the va hospital and that would be the va hospital three

bought -- blocks from here, i guess for blocks. i spend more and more of my time at the va hospital now, tall, gray and four wings with a skull cap at the top buffalos veterans hospital for monolith to sorrow and loss. that mausoleum could double in size and it still wouldn't be big enough to detain the misery at houses. i started as a patient emergency room for heart trouble but it turns out i was crazy, not cardiac so now i go to mental-health on the tenth floor instead of internal medicine on the eighth. the longer elevator ride kitchen momentary relief to compare yourself with the other patients. decrypted world war ii veterans, and titis from combat or diabetes slumped in their wheelchairs and dressed in flimsy gowns in baseball hats denoting their last shipper unit. >> vietnam veterans and insulated jackets keeping out the chill covered in patches

that read, these colors don't run. and never forget the p.o.w.s and mias. younger guys, taking a trip with me. one guy was in a tanned teacher with a comic book style drawing of a soldier, hand on his rifle. the amputated right leg with an ergonomic flexible running prosthetic alongside is written, you should've killed mean when you you have the chance. you look at the floor and so today. you check your rifle. so today. you walk up to the same check-in counter and said in the same waiting room. you wait for your turn to talk about your crazy in silence. and then i have got one more here, which is, and mentioned i mentioned that there were three, three sections so i have done the wartime section and the last one i would call labeled

undertreatment i guess. one more of kind of what it felt like day-to-day. let me kind of work through this one a little bit, i guess. i am alone in my full bed, bone with the crazy in a bed where the spiders crawl out of my head. always bubbling, always boiling always intolerable. i'm crawling out of my skin. it's been three and a half months now. the crazy has not let up yet. my wife rolls over and pretends to be a sleep. we have gone to bed without speaking again. she is wearing a yellow t-shirt is a nightgown, the words kirkuk iraq emblazoned across the front, emblazoned across the front in bold black letters. you get a t-shirt for a rethink nowadays, running a race, opening a bank account, giving blood, helping your neighbor to catch a shot from a minor baseball game.

a t-shirt for a forest fire. why not one for fighting a war? my wife is alone and are full bed too. her husband the father of her children never came back from iraq. she tells me that i didn't laugh, not once for an entire year after i got back. crazy was like dead to her. i know she is strong enough to handle it. the girl i met their senior year, future emergency room nurse, college swim team, was strong enough. strong enough to deal with my deployment and time away. strong enough to wait for the knock on the door while watching the carnage on the evening news. strong enough to raise her sons by herself. strong enough if called upon to open the letter i wrote before i left to be read to her boys if i came home in a bag explaining why their father went away to die in some city they can't bind on a map. to this day that letter sits in a small safe inches away from

right now sit and type. it sits in that safe unopened and undistorted because i don't remember what i wrote and i can't bear to look now to find out. my wife could have done it. she is strong enough. she is not scared of the soft sand so if she needs to cry herself to sleep next to me in bed, then she just needs to cry. if she does not speak she will stay silent as she needs to replan her life, then she will do what she needs to do. she can hack it. she is just going to have to. what can i do about it now lying in bed alone and crazy? our marriage counselor, fingers intertwined in resting on the shelf of his enormous stomach diagnose the situation. why is the war still in your house he hopped? get it out of your bed. too late. we are in a bed full of rifles, helicopters and twitching eyes

and a foot in the box. my wife sleeps next to the shade of the dead man every night. i sleep alone with the crazy and its gray spidery angers take the top of my head off and as i stare at the ceiling in my solitary bed. thank you. [applause] that could have been a lot worse so thank you for bearing with me. i would like to do questions now, so i've got a microphone and of course john is going to help out with that. and i wrote a book about everything so there's literally not a topic that you cannot ask about. please ask whatever while i get my water here. >> when you consider that you

were involved in 120 countries in covert action, going into the horn of africa and there was an article by david vine yesterday and talked about the increasing bases in the lily pads that you engaged in. there will be many other men like you. what does it take from your perspective for the american people to understand that this is all lies and even intelligently the nation of iraq would create more terrorists? >> i guess the important part from my perspective is that the people that i was with -- you know i served with republicans and democrats and people that supported going in and people that didn't support going in and at the end of the day at the level we are at, none of it matters because nobody is picking up a rifle or not

because of some speech given in washington the week before. you are there for your friends, guys who maybe don't even support the war. they re-up and reenlist because their friends are going back or their friends are going -- they want to go and because you want to be their perches -- to protect the people that you are with. i have often asked myself, i guess, a very similar question which i got back in my first job was to train, my first and only was consulting and training guys before they deployed, before they went to iraq and afghanistan. i felt like we were doing the best we could. we were training them as well as we could in all of technical procedures, but we just couldn't train them on the most important part which was how does it feel to get shot at?

and maybe more importantly, how does it feel to shoot back? and how does it feel to naturally put someone in your crosshairs of first-time? first-time? not just somebody with a gun but a woman or a child for the first time and you really intend to pull the trigger. in order to feel like walking through piles of people while you are picking up the pieces of a car bomb? i cannot teach them what that feels like. we were teaching them the technical parts to get them home. i don't know what we could have done to actually impart that and if you can impart that to a soldier that is about to deploy, i don't know how the average u.s. citizen, what the actual implications are to take some military action. who is next?

>> he so many of the suicide bombings and the ieds, i don't know it intentionally or inadvertently, kill iraqis or afghans. i mean in some ways it seems just insane as a strategy for terrorists to try to -- the country. so i guess to questions if i may. one is, in interacting with native iraqis and i was curious as to if you gleaned any perspective from them of this strategy and what was your and your fellow soldiers take on this as she saw this craziness as an approach?

>> i think the first part of that is it's easy to say a terrorist but a terrorist is 20, 50, 120 different groups depending on what tribe against which tribe and all politics is local and the whole world is local so in kirkuk it was the kurds and the arabs fighting mostly over the control of that city and then down in baghdad is shia and sunni and another place it's different so sometimes you which is caught in the middle. it wasn't that they were inadvertently killing iraqis accidentally. it is that they were purposely killing each other and you happen to be their there caught in the middle. so the perspective was, talking to -- and you know part of my tour and

part of the frustrating thing or something that i learned later is just how insulated we were from the average. i would talk to the iraqi army and iraqi police and it was interaction but it was mostly talking to people officially and the kurds in the arabs have been fighting each other for a very long time. so this was just one more step, whether we were there or not wasn't really, wasn't really as -- just not relevant i guess. we would leave eventually and you know we did. i really hesitate to speak for the average guy. i can speak for myself, but i know that we felt like, or i shouldn't say we. i should say i felt like we are trying to help but you really don't know what helping looks like and you are trying to stop

them from killing each other and getting them to stop killing each other so it turns into a, why am i coming out to do this? a lot of these car bombs we would get a coordinate and a casualty number and we would say yes it was a car bomb and nobody wants to talk and we would go to the next one. after collecting a ton of evidence. what i told myself was every day, we took apart every ied no matter what. it's your job, no matter who is targeting u.s. forces, iraqis, kurds, school combo i'd whatever the case maybe you may be you take them all apart. it doesn't matter if the target is. if you are just doing -- you cannot solve the whole problem. you can just take care of this ied right now. the kids playing over there won't step on it and your

worldview -- all those other things don't matter so much i guess. >> i haven't gotten the chance to read your book but i understand it's written in a nonlinear fashion, jumping back and forth between your deployment in your return home. when i read that in every view what immediately came to mind was kurt vonnegut's slaughterhouse five which is written presumably with the same kind of format. i'm wondering if you have ever read that and also that book starts with the line billy pilgrim has come unstuck in time and i'm wondering when you talk about the crazy with the c. doesn't ever feel like you have become -- become unstuck in time

drifting back and forth between the two places? >> yes, i am a huge vonnegut fan and i am loath to admit that the cause it makes me uncomfortable. there something about -- going on there but i definitely read it before i wrote the book. i didn't intentionally model it there but the sentiment, absolutely. i guess i look on books a little bit differently than i used to. i see a lot of war stories where he didn't see war stories before. there are a lot of examples but he had to go to based upon the awful bombing of dresden. lots of other writers who experienced something terrible, they go even further out and to two of the best examples in

modern popular culture are actually c.s. lewis and j.r.r. tolkien. maybe they are not what you expect but they both served in the trenches in world war i. i think they both fought and i'm going to get, i might get the facts wrong a little bit there. they were wounded and they saw the green dragon which is the clouds of chlorine s that come across the landscape and settle into the trenches. i read something originally that tolkien said by 1918 every single one of his friends was dead. how did he deal with that? well, 25 years later, he writes the story to make sense of it, maybe too much in his head that involves come he needs to develop this fantastic world where things work out right again. c.s. lewis did the same thing. in the chronicles of narnia,

lots of terrible things happened and all of his characters. by book seven but not necessarily in the way you were expecting. so i think a lot of, a lot of authors are a lot of writers, the war happens to them and they need to make sense of it somehow and reach to become unstuck in time. that makes a lot of sense to me. >> ignatius loyola was also a wounded warrior and it was after his wounds were recovering from the wounds that he started thinking about the society of jesus and the spiritual exercises and he also wrote or ticked david and autobiography and i wonder if you have looked at the autobiography of st. ignatius? >> it's sitting on my shelf and all of my former jesuit

professors at marquette and some of the current ones wish that i had written more than just sitting on my shelf and i had actually read it. [laughter] when i talked, that whole thing about how you take apart every ied no matter what, the word i used with social justice but that is the word i used in my head at the time which of course is you know, which is a huge part of the jesuit tradition depending on how you want to put that. i will pick it up, promise. it will go to the top of my list now that i have intimated that. >> among your comrades and your rank did they expect any feelings against the people who created the war on -- [inaudible] >> no because like i said when you sit around the fire pit at

the end of the day, it's just not what you talk about. you talk about living through that day. you talk about what you need to do, what you need to do the next day. you know, maybe afterwards when it's done and there are a lot of veterans to get politically active afterwards and i guess, i can understand that that that's a natural outgrowth. i did this and i want to make sure doesn't happen again. when we were actually there, we talked about whether the robot batteries were charged and yet your rifle clean. hey we have a rate tomorrow and those kinds of things. >> i have a cousin who unfortunately came back from vietnam and didn't receive the help that he really needed mentally and emotionally and even physically and ended up

murdering his fiancée, did 11 years in prison and after six attempts, on the seventh attempt committed suicide. we as a family, i as a churchmen have always wandered in from your standpoint is there anything that people like ourselves who are gathered here tonight whether we have relatives are not involved with the war like in iraq or afghanistan, can do whether it veterans hospital, church groups, civic groups, neighborhood it organizations, individuals? anything you can say? why don't you try this for why don't you visit here and not just for the individual but for the husband or the wife or the children of? any ideas that you might have for as? >> i didn't write a happy book and i didn't write a self-help luck and i wish starting on chapter 10 it turned into now you to do all the steps. what worked for me, i shouldn't

even say what worked for me because i'm not cured. you kind of put things in a better place, put it, excuse me, you just choose not to look at it every day may be a better way to put it. so, i would say that maybe a couple of pieces from my experience are one, it was a physical sensation and it -- i didn't know that the war was a problem, was the problem. it was a couple of years later and i had marriage and kids and all the normal stuff that everybody has so why is that this and not something else? i didn't still prefer. i needed somebody to get me there and i think partly that comes from in my particular job, you are just going to get the

job every done -- every day done and get the kids up and get them to school and you know, make dinner and do what you need to do. you do that every single day because that traded one mission for another. i didn't get myself to the right place and i am not sure i would have gotten myself to the right place. so i guess i'm not advocating anything in particular. not like an intervention on every case but maybe the perspective that the average ptsd warning signs which he seen you see in the media are becoming more popular, aren't necessarily it. you have to have these things to have it and you can have a whole bunch of other things that are on different, that fall into different categories. so, it may not be obvious to them and it may not be obvious

to you but maybe helping them get to the right place. for me it was i had one more doctors appointment and i showed up to go to the doctor's appointment. other questions? >> i was struck by you saying the word social justice in the same almost sentence in which you are talking about the here and now. we are all living in the here and now and social justice is up there somewhere. and, the question of how you articulate this with this depends on how deeply and completely immersed in water and the here and now. and i think you were deeply immersed and you know, some of us are in some of us are not but that is another story.

just the difference, that's all. >> i guess i would say two things. i guess i agree with you that there is social justice doesn't mean much until you decide to do something today. not think about doing something today but actually -- so you do something specific. the other part is just in general about being present, i had to learn to be present again and running helped make me present. i do yoga now. i do a lot of yoga. when you are contorted into various positions you don't have time to think about everything else and you become very present. it helps you become more present on a regular basis. everybody has a different thing that maybe helps them do that but i guess i agree with the general sense of what you were getting at. other questions?

>> i know the crazy is what you are calling it but i call it the same. i think your condition right now is more normal and sane then many many americans who would never gone to war. i would say the crazy is expecting men and women like this to go to war and come back and not acknowledge what just happened. i can't imagine any of that. and i would say the crazy as anyone in this country who doesn't advocate mental health. my question would need, i would imagine that everyone who goes to war could benefit from counseling and benefit from care. and, i also want to say however that i think your reactions and your feelings and your loss of filters is one of the best things about you.

i call that normal and sane. >> well thank you. you know my sister-in-law is a psychologist, ph.d. psychologist and we talked a little bit when i got back her guy would tell her something that would happen. well you know this happened. well, did you get together for a group session and then you do have individual and you should go back to the group. she was laying out everything that should happen. i was like well, we are talking about -- we did four of those days. the military is getting a lot better about recognizing what is needed and it's getting a lot better about the time afterwards, recognizing the signs and getting the best about reducing the stigma. i said it may i was down the

memorial and of course talking to a lot of guys who are in now and what is going on. a guy told me about a story about his team. he had a really bad week in one of this team his team in percentages really need to chill out for a couple of days and he did. they took them him off the team and plug somebody else in and they made it work. he did nothing but sleep and go to the chow hall and the check back in and he said okay i am feeling a little bit better. that might not have been okay before but it's better now. i guess the last thing i would want to say and only because i meant to say this before. it's about the relationship, about how to deal with family members and everything else. the best compliment i have gotten from the book has been from a friend of mine another eod tech who said he wanted to buy 12, give them to his family and say this is why i am the way i am and that's i hesitate to

speak for anyone but if somebody else wants to say i feel the same way too, then i guess that makes me feel a little bit veteran think it makes them feel a little bit that are. the eod is a brotherhood and maybe that is one more aspect of it. >> a quick question or comment to amplify several of those. a couple of weeks ago you were here for an event with a novelist who has written a book about the afghan war, about a fictional episode in the afghan war but ryan came to hear him and read a bit of his book. another soldier's book came in one of the things that he told us was that the hardest thing for all of these guys coming back is that everything is normal when they come back. everyone treats them as if it's

normal so i wanted to ask you about that. his argument seems to be, if people realized we are not the same people when we come back as when is when we left that would help a lot but they treat us as if we are the same people. and let me -- because i will forget the rest of it. the other part, like he you said that beginning the secrecy or at the insularity of the group. we always hear about how world war ii veterans never talk. they came home and they never talked about the war so it seems to me there is a connection between those things. i guess what i'm trying to see what you think is how we can sort of break those things down. part of the thing is that you guys don't talk obviously because of the difficulty of it but then you are treated as if you are the same person you were when you left. we have to recognize a. >> i'm not sure you want to be treated with kid loves or be

treated totally different or kind of like, you are the warrior and you don't need to be taken by the hand and shown where the bathroom is. you don't want that. so i guess i'm going to answer with a couple. one is you don't necessarily know that anything is wrong. you came back and you did your job and i put it away for a while and some world war ii veterans put it away for 40 years and never take it out. and i think that the culture is changing to make it, it's more okay for me to write the book and more okay for me to talk about it and more okay for the average guy to talk about it. hopefully it's more okay for the average citizen to talk to the veteran about it. but you know, the perspective is so different.

i don't want the average citizen in the kent to have a perspective because it means something horrible has happened to this country. i am jealous of what i used to have. i am not, i don't wish it on anyone. what kind of perspective is required from everybody to treat the veteran correct league when they get home? i don't know. you are different person. i don't know how you can go there and not be a different person. i will say it again, i hesitate to speak or anyone else specifically. everyone is different and somewhat want to talk and somewhat and i'm not really sure i answered your question. >> yes, you did and i guess the issue, the other issue you can ask is how we deal with our loved ones when they come back? it seems to me we have to understand, even if you are acting the same, that there --

if we are trying to figure out something rather than just pretending like there isn't an that is what they seem to be saying is there's this pretense of everything except with the same. >> i read something very recently where the veteran said and i wish i could remember who it was. america didn't go to war. america went to the mall. so there's the country that wanted to get back to everything being normal as quickly as possible and that was one of those things but so i hesitate to put words into the veteran's mouths. i really hesitate to put words in my wife's mouth. in fact when i wrote the book she was hardly in there at all and my editor jerry howard said you need 5% more jesse and there. we put a little bit in there and mostly what i read from was not in the first draft of the book at all.

i put in based upon his edits and recommendations. i don't want to speak for her but i would say she was incredibly patient and incredibly loyal and had a lot of opportunities to not stick with me and still good. and so if you can be patient and loyal with your loved one that is not the same person, they would be really lucky because that is what i had. >> yes think we probably have time for one more here. >> it's not really a question but i want to commend you for coming out with your story. it was very brave. i know you're a warrior but this was probably scarier than what you had to deal with back there. >> at a very specific thing that i knew how to do back there. >> also what i want to say was you are not crazy. what you are experiencing is a perfectly normal reaction to a very abnormal situation that you

were in. >> you know i know that now but i did not know that before. i needed somebody to tell me that in the first time i heard that, i went through military training. officially post-traumatic stress disorders defined as a normal response to an abnormal situation. you can hear that over and over again but it doesn't fairly make sense to you. this is how it all made sense to me and you know kind of put it in the right perspective i guess but i appreciate that. thank you. so i think we will call it good with that. thank you very much. [applause] >> booktv has over 150,000 twitter followers. follow booktv on twitter to

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>> now on booktv on c-span2, we want to introduce you to the editorial chair of new press publishing and that is mark favreau. mr. favreau we wanted to get from you some of the titles that are coming out from "the new press" in the fall of 2012. and we'll start with the howard zinn but. >> this is a huge book for us and we are incredibly excited about it because we have had a long-standing relationship with howard zinn which is most people know this best selling people's historian and activist and a man who taught people differently giving about the past and their role in the present. when howard died in 2010, the legendary biographer mark cooperman developed a proposal and was given exclusive access to this in papers by his heirs of his estate and this really

amazing biography is the result. we are thrilled to be launching it. it's a biography in the classic world. he goes back to the beginning, to the child had any touches on the signal events in his life and the reason these are interesting is they are significant events over the past century. world war ii, the civil rights movement and the world war ii and well into the present. interweaving history, the kind of nuance of the untold story of howard's life and also of how he developed as a historian and how he came to have this perspective on the world. and you know as you may know, his best-selling book, the sales on that book grew and grew well into howard's later years and the audience grew and grew. we think there are people that are ready for this book two years after his death and i thinks it's an exciting launch

for definitely. >> another new book i want to ask you about is a studs terkel book coming out? >> studds was you know, studs terkel, we were his great supporter and he was our great supporter and we miss him dearly. we edited and illustrated hard times, his great landmark history of the great depression we illustrated it with wonderful photos from the dorothea lange photos, the walker evans photos and others and it's really a great tribute to this man. it meant so much to us in so many americans. >> mark favreau from "the new press" is coming out with food awfully. >> foot offaly, and incredibly important and timely book. the author is just amazing. she is the executive director of food and water watch which is one of the leading watchdog groups on food and water safety. she is also interesting link

running the several hundred organic -- several acre organic form so she knows on both sides of the equation when it means to provide a healthy alternative to our unhealthy food system. this is a book that is a sympathetic answer to michael collins who said famously that people need to vote with their forks. what winona argues is given the kind of corporate control of food that people need to do more than act as consumers. they need to act as citizen so this is a clinical guide to understanding food and how it is produced in understanding the realistic alternative to it and all the things that people can do politically to change it. she is just an amazing speaker, platform and this will be a really kind of top-notch press the coming years. >> mark favreau does new press come from a political point of view and what is your history? >> i think definitely we regard ourselves s