i need to test that every reader and know every platform and understand the features people are playing with so i go back and forth between the two. >> host: the web site? >> guest: publishersmarketplace.com. >> host: we have been talking with michael cader. thank you. >> guest: thanks for having me. >> in 1942 bill manbo and his family were relocated from their hollywood home to heart mountain relocation center. japanese-american internment camp. mr. manbo took numerous photographs to document the day-to-day life of japanese-americans held there. eric muller the legal editor of "colors of confinement" present photographs from the late bill manbo's collection while speaking at heart mountain interpretive learning center in wyoming. this is 45 minutes.

[applause] >> thanks and good afternoon. i want you to take a minute and conjured up in your mind and image of world war ii. try to get an image in your mind from world war ii. i make a couple suggestions. you might try picturing a burning u.s. warship at pearl harbor. or if he would rather do unhappier image how about a man kissing a woman, leaning over and kissing a woman in times square in new york on victory day. or maybe you prefer politics. pictured churchill, stalin and roosevelt sitting down together. maybe that image. or maybe you would rather think of something from the america of that 0 roughly. may be little earlier.

the great depression. try to get an image in your mind of the great depression. if you are having trouble, think of a tired, worried looking young mother staring into the distance with a ragamuffin child leaning on each shoulder. can you find that famous iconic image in your mind? the iconic photograph that we have come to call my grandmother that has come to symbolize the great depression. it is very likely as i have done this with you just now that the images you conjured up have been in black-and-white. very likely. now i would like you to do the same exercise the think about the imprisonment of japanese-americans during world war ii. try to find an image that represents the imprisonment of japanese-americans during the war. what are you pick during?

does it look like this? a bunch of young japanese american girls in kimonos dancing? this is a photograph taken by a government photographer at the granada up relocation center in eastern colorado in august of 1943. if this isn't what you had in mind what is different about it? it is a photo of young american citizens dancing, celebrating the spirits of their ancestors in a summertime buddhist ritual. does it surprise you that japanese americans would have a engage in such open displays of japanese culture while detained in a prison camp? maybe it wasn't so open because after all it was that night. this is happening at night.

there's a surreptitious quality to this. this is a photograph at heart mountain taken either in july of 1943 or july of 1944. we can't be sure which. it is a time. nothing suspicious about it. nothing surreptitious about it. the barracks in the background. you can see it is taking place in an open public space within the residential area of the camp itself. check this image out. there we go. there is something else special about this image. it is in color. it is actually in color. brilliant beautiful color.

take this photograph for a moment. it is another shot of the same event at heart mountain and it was taken not by government photographer but one of the internees in camp. check that out. and then look at that. with the, restored. i have taken color photographs and removed the color so that you can see them the way we are accustomed to seeing this year and then see the way it was shot by the photographer. i wanted to take a moment and ask you what the impact is. i would love to hear comments from you. what is the impact of seeing this historical moment in color rather than in black and white? what is the difference of seeing it in color versus black-and-white? >> when i saw the color -- it

felt warm. >> any other reactions? to, rather than black and white? >> color makes it seem a little more present time. the black-and-white you have a sense that it happened long ago. >> the suggestion is there is something about black and white when looking at historical photographs there's something about it that marks it as history whereas the color, you said, makes it feel little more current. any other suggestions? >> gives you a feeling of happiness that everything is fine. >> it gives you a feeling of happiness that everything is fine. >> in black it looks black and white -- bleak. kind of dangerous. >> dangerous.

somber. stock versus real. >> spontaneous versus staged. the black-and-white propaganda images are faced by something that seems authentic and at that moment. >> wonderful suggestions. let's hold on to all of these because it is important theme of this project. this book called "colors of confinement" of this this is a presentation. not just the episode we are treating. the incarceration of japanese-americans during world war ii but the way we interact with it. the way we see it and the way these representations communicate meaning to us. let me say a few things. i want to volunteer a few observations about what is striking about this photograph. one of them is the beauty of the subject. the beauty of the subject. i am not just talking about the

kimonos which are gorgeous. i am talking about their energy. there is a beautiful energy to these young women. there is a light. the lighting is not perfect but the woman in the red kimono with white flowers is turned to her left in a look of what could only be described as gleeful amusement. obviously something very funny has just been said when this photograph was snapped in this group of young women. let's spend a moment on that. the light and tumor. there's a playfulness in the interaction in this group. this is unusual. what we are accustomed to seeing is images of dreariness. images of bleakness. depictions that on the surface communicate in justice. if you are familiar with it,

think of the very famous photograph of three boys standing and and looking across wistfully across a barbed wire fence, black-and-white image. that is the classic image of japanese american incarceration. this is something quite different. notice the contrast between the beauty of the subject and the bleakness of the backdrop. the dry parched ground they are standing on. the chimney of the communal mess hall where they ate their meals. notice again something i suggested in the earlier photographs the openness of japanese culture. this is something we are not accustomed to in the imagery of this era. this is hard to see in this light. don't miss -- looked at the young lady in the purple facing to the left of the woman who is

laughing, smiling. she is wearing saddle shoes. look at the bottom. she has saddle shoes. this is not a depiction only of japanese culture. there is something culturally complicated going on here. given the ages of these subjects we can be certain that if we could listen in on their conversation they would be speaking unaccented american english. there is something culturally complicated being documented here. i love this photograph. this one shows that cultural blend i am talking about. in a beautiful and humorous way. same event, the summer time buddhist ritual of celebration of ancestors and we have a young woman dancing and to her right shoulder a man with a headband dancing and over her left

shoulder is a man or a woman who has pressed him or herself up as some sort of fantastic bird or dragon. they see what they used to make the costume? they used cereal boxes from the mess hall kitchen. the white plate in front is a race christie's box and the one above it is from a cereal that i believe has not survived. i have never seen it. something called wheat0 max. there is something actually -- layers of cultural complexity here because you have a japanese american cancer engaging in a japanese stance in an american prison camp making a costume out of boxes of american cereals and

the american cereal they chose is rice christie's which is a concoction based on the staple of the japanese diet. so there's one other thing about this photograph that is a little surprising. besides the fact they are in color or and showed japanese cultural activities rather than american cultural activities, but i want to give you a hint. it is not in a frame. there is something a little bit startling about the photograph and is not in the frame. any idea what i might be referring to? >> it surprised me people were allowed to bring cameras with them. there was such security involved. >> exactly. the thing that i am alluding to is what is outside the frame is the photographer. somebody was taking this

photograph with a camera and he was a japanese american prisoner at this camp. so that is worth noting too. we are usually led to believe and it was true that certain points that cameras were contraband. y with japanese-american have had a camera? why would he have felt comfortable shooting photographs out in the open like this under the eyes of the camp administration? i will say more about that later but for right now remember somebody is taking these photographs and there's a lot more going on in this place of confinement than what you see in these photographs. the photographs are a snapshot of a subject but there is an entire world surrounding that subject. what i would like to do for a little while today is share with you, introduce you to this very

rare collection of kodachrome faller -- color photographs of ordinary life inside the camp. i also want to introduce you to the photographer and his family and give you some sense of what was going on outside of the camera's frame. this is the photographer, bill manbo. bill manbo was born in riverside, california in 1908. american citizen. he was born in the united states and under the fourteenth amendment a citizen by birth. he went to hollywood high school. he was in the class of 1921 at hollywood high. u.n. to the frank williams trade school to be an auto mechanic. graduated in 1923 and opened the garage in hollywood. he liked model race cars and he loved photography.

he was an amateur photographer. he developed an alias for himself that he is that times. his name was at the 11. he developed a french version of his name that he would use. you referred to himself as the air manbeau. >> the son the misspelling of the last name. he built a little for a with plywood in front of the door and artistically across this entryway is the name pierre manbeaux. he was a bit of a character. this is his family. in the middle is two older folks

on the middle. his father in law, and next to him his wife, and his mother-in-law. they were both immigrants from japan. he was a mechanical draftsman but did a number of different jobs when he came to the united states and took up farming in the mid 1920s in norwalk, california in downtown los angeles. they had three children. on the right is the youngest child, eunice. she was 16 or 17 in this photograph. on the other end, on the left is mary who became mary manbo. on the left is the photographer's wife.

in front is bill and mary's son billy. he was called billy in the family. billy came along in early 1940. this is probably shot some time in 1943 so he is 3 years old clutching his little full airplane. mary went to the franc wigan's trade school where she met bill. she was studying to become a seamstress. there was the third child because the playboy. sammy is not pictured in this photograph but we will meet him later. he was in the rotc program in 1941. eunice as i say was in high school. junto did some accounting work

for japanese language school. and a consequence of the accounting work, was arrested in march of 1942 and he was held in may of 1942. when franklin roosevelt signed executive order 9066 sammy came back to help his mother in the absence of junto who was locked up. led one of the most viable crops was rhubarb. it was not ready to harvest.

rhubarb is a perennial plant and its roots are very valuable so sammy, getting ready to be excluded, negotiated the contract, signed a contract with a white landlord of their farm. they were tenants of the farm. strikes again agreement that the landlord will care for the rhubarb. market the harvest and the rhubarb and share in the process with the ataya family. for the duration of the war and that the end the contract was terminated at the end when the family returned. that was the arrangement they struck with the landlord. there were some buildings on the property they own as well when the landlord agreed to take care of those. they are forced out in march of 42 and they go through the assembly center where they spend summer of 1942 living in horse

stables. this is a photograph bill manbo took of his wife mary ann little billy with hart mountain to their backs looking out across the camp. looking across the site where we are today. you should know that the first trainload of internees arrive 70 years ago yesterday. august 10th, 1942. hart mountain was run by the war relocation authority. a civilian agency set up specifically for the purpose of running these camps. [inaudible] >> executive order 9066. the civil liberties act of 1918

was signed on that date--1938 was signed on that date. during the time when hart mountain was open, maximum population of 11,000, it was the third largest city in wyoming. what an unfamiliar place it must have been from people from temperatures calif.. check out the icicles on the right. there was a day in january of 1943, i dug out the meteorological records. the high temperature was 13 below 0. the high for that day. bill manbo was a hobby photographer and he used not a professional, not a documentarian, he used his camera the way you and i use cameras. he tried to capture is things that struck him as beautiful or interesting. here he has got a rainbow.

in better lighting you would see it more vividly. the sy rainbow ending anna latrine building where all rainbows end of course. a pot of gold or a pot anyway. thank you very much. remember i told you here is a man with a camera. the reason he had a camera was the location authority which unlike the military was people in the context of their time was progressive. they figured out cameras would be a good thing for japanese americans -- is a way of feeling

normal and doing what we all do. document your experience and take pictures of your families. taking pictures of your children. taking pictures of events. the relocation authority recognized with an instrument of adjustments for the incarcerated community. after about march of 1943 japanese americans off the west coast at the camp outside the defense command were allowed to reclaim their cameras. that is why bill manbo had a camera and was comfortable walking around with it in public. so he shot parades'. the boy scouts very active at heart mountain where you have a boy scout and the head of the parade with the american flag and the drum majorettes with the baton just behind. classic american image and then maybe not so classic american

image. sumo wrestling was practiced openly at camp. very much -- japanese culture being practiced with the permission of the war relocation authority. you can see the faces of the folks behind. this is a very light moment in this particular match. looks like the older gentleman has been successfully pushed out of the ring by the younger guy. there might be interesting comic relief because there was an unspoken intergenerational conflict at the camp between the immigrant generation and the citizen generation. there is a way in which the young man pushing the old man out of the ring may have had a certain kind of tension breaking humor to it. little billy gets ice-cream. people would order this from

montgomery ward and sears roebuck catalog where they got a lot of belongings they couldn't find in the camp. ice skating became a very popular activity. swimming holes. this flash of a diver having come off of a diving platform. this swimming hole was built after a young boy drowned swimming illegally in one of the irrigation canals. one of hard mountain's two movie theaters people lined up for what must have been a matinee showing. look carefully at the photograph on the right side of the barracks you can see black curtains that have been hung in the windows so the film can be shown and film that was shown that day there is a sign down to the right of the big sign that says theater. the film is so well preserved you can read if you look closely

what film was being shown somewhat ironically, they were showing how green was my valley that particular day. bill manbo used his camera to document newsworthy events like a fire in a mess hall. this is a fire. jeter men on the roof trying to control the mess hall plays. all sorts of layers of meaning in photograph but one thing that is noteworthy is house self sustaining the community needed to be. it was in turn eased to provide fire protection with the cooperation of the relocation authority but they provided that. internal policeing was an intern run enterprise. one of my favorite photographs. bill manbo loved the landscape that he loved using his camera to capture the various moods of

the camp. this is a shot at dawn. a single light on. hard to see in this light but the second barracks on the right there is a single a illuminated window and if that is the only light you see other than those dangling from the light post. smoke from the chimney and the gorgeous sky. if any of you are photographers you will be impressed to know that the speed of the film was 10. to capture a photograph like this at dawn with a can a as a film, he was not a bad photographer. heten a as a film, he was not a bad photographer. he loved to shoot portraits. that is sammy ataya. very striking, handsome photographs of his wife and

brother-in-law. he especially loved shooting photographs of children as we all do. that is believed, his little son. the military cap kind of meaning to one side. it is hard to tell. they are playing with something. maybe marvels or something else. this is a little group of children. a little bit ragtag looking it must be said but adorable standing in front of the barracks. that is billy on the right with his blue calf and galoshes and little baseball p and galoshes little baseball bat. that is believed. one thing we see at the 11 doing with his color film and his camera is what most japanese-americans were not able to do which was to use the camera to create and bring

together a normal family life. taking pictures of their children is a staple of normal family life. that is what he was doing with his camera. this is the family album that many japanese-americans of this time don't have. this is another portrait of bill day. kind of different. what would you describe as the difference between the last portrait and this one? desolation i am hearing. survival i am hearing. monochromatic. it is a bit better with the lighting. it is fairly monochromatic for a color image. what i am trying to get at is did -- bill manbo mostly used his camera in ordinary ways that

there was something else going on. he was at times documenting something -- he was commenting on the bleakness, the isolation. the enormity of the surroundings and seclusion of the surroundings and it is unmistakable in an image like this of little billy walking up the avenue past piles of coal and the barracks. how about that image? what is this a picture of? it is a guard tower. he could have taken any number of photographs of barracks structures around camp. it is impossible to read a photographer's mind but hard for me to believe he was not commenting on surveillance. that is the central image of this photograph. that is the focus. the guard tower on the hill looking down on all of them. that is the mess hall.

how about this portrait of childhood? this is not exactly the way i have taken fortress of my children clinging to barbwire fences. bill manbo had documentary instincts. you can see the keen awareness of surveillance and confinement. there's only one image in the collection that is a shot of an overtly political moment and it is this one. there is hart mountain in the background. that is the high school building on the left and an enormous crowd has gathered on a september afternoon in 1943. we see folks protecting themselves from the sun with umbrellas or parasols. this is the moment when the people who have failed the government's loyalty tests that you may have heard about, so-called loyalty questionnaire that was administered in spring

of 1943. those who failed the test were shipped off from hart mountain and the other camps and sent to one camp that was being converted to a segregation camp in california. this was a gathering to send off those from hart mountain who were being put on trains to be shipped off. these loyalty questionnaires were a disaster. they produced far more -- they caused what 1 official called the mortality of loyalty. they ended up undermining the very thing they ever intended to gauge by asking all manner of insulting question. i was able to find bill and mary manbo's loyalty questions and there a anger and disaffection jumps off the page.

when asked for their citizenship they report american, question mark. when asked if they will swear loyalty to the united states one of them said only if my rights are restored. mary manbo said japanese, and i am not ashamed of it. you can sense on these forms that they are bristling at what they have been asked to indoor. it got them in some trouble. their answers on those forms were insufficiently suspect that they were submitted. and the transcript in the national archives, there a anger is palpable. but the w. r. a understood better than the military did that japanese-americans often had good reasons to be angry and disaffected so ultimately bill

and mary manbo were adjudicated loyal, not disloyal. heading off. there are junto and rio ataya. let me tell you how they went toward the end. eunice ataya when she turned 18 left camp, went to the midwest and took a secretarial job. sammy left to agricultural work and volunteered into the united states army. bill, the photographer left for cleveland to find work in a factory. for the end of 1944, junto ataya decides he wantss to see if he can get work in new jersey at

seabrook farm which was a farming enterprise recruiting japanese americans so junto leaves camp in fall, october '44 and goes to new jersey to scope the situation out and sammy is gone, bill is gone, eunice is gone. the only people left in camp are rio and mary and whittle billy. rio suffers a nervous breakdown. she ends and the camp hospital and for the rest of her time in camp which is another nearly year in camp rio ataya is suffering greatly and really unable to work, barely able to leave the barracks. something of an invalid. junto comes to find his wife in

the hospital so decides not to take the family to new jersey but stay in camp and care for his wife. mary and billy leave for cleveland. the only ones left are rio and junto. they finally leave in september of 1943 -- 45. a month or two before the camp closes and they end to california to find the cruelest blow. they discover when they get back that the landlord a few months after they left in 1942 plowed under their crop, carted off the buildings, they are gone. they have nothing left. the cruelest blow of all, turns out that the landlord didn't

even own the land. he had been collecting rent from the ataya family since 1937 but the property had gone to the states in 1937 because the landlord had been paying his taxes. the state had an come in and taken possession but the landlord had no right to their ranch from 1937 all the way through when they were forced out in 1942. bill in cleveland injures his back at the factory and returns to the west coast with mary and little billy and decides to reopen his raja in hollywood. bill manbo 18, his father-in-law tinkers. he is an inventor and creates something that gets installed in a store in little tokyo in los angeles but he never really returns to productive economic life. what about little billy?

billy is now 72. he lives in anaheim. he became a recreational parachutist. more than 1100 free-fall in his career until he finally stopped because of injury. he went to work in the aviation industry. he designed exit systems for airplanes and ultimately went into operation for several major -- these photographs. these color slides were slides, not prints set boxed up in bill manbo's clause that for decades which is why they look so great. kodachrome has enormous staying power particularly slides if treated properly. they have been remarkably well preserved.

the colors are extraordinarily brilliant. as you will see. they really sat there until i learned of them when working on the exhibits in this museum. they sent a few color photographs including one of young women, i did a triple take. i have no idea this existed. with bill jr.'s permission about a third of these photographs, the collection is 130 photos. the third of them announced in this new book bill manbo one with interpretive essays by several scholars, myself, the university of southern california cultural historian, and an art historian. and a lovely essay about what it was like to be a youngster in

camp. i want to conclude with the image of the cover of the book. you will see this book i chose, the image of the young women in their kimonos and i want to share with you that i struggled to with what the image on the cover of the book should be. i went back and forth between this image and the image now on the back of the book which is the image of little billy clinging to the barbwire fence. i decided to go with this image with trepidation because when i asked about color and people said things about warmth and happiness -- [cellphone ringing] >> people said something about warmth and happiness.

there certainly is warmth and happiness in that photo. no question. those smiles are not fake. they're not even smiling for the camera. they probably know the photographer is there. this is and anything like a classic portrait. i was concerned that this image could lead people to think that these were happy places. that these were places of boy and frivolous this and that these people were really japanese rather than americans, repeating of the very categorizing mistake that got the country into this problem in the first place. i ultimately decided that if you allow yourself to reflect on these images and inform yourself a little bit about the tragic part of the manbo and ataya story which is representative of

so many japanese-american families that you will see that any concern that these were places of july oy is no thickern the paper on which the photographs are printed. thank you. [applause] >> i will look at our time keeper. do we have time for a few questions? if there are some questions or comments we have time for that. [inaudible] >> they had to be shipped back to california. one thing little billy had is the mailer in which the envelope in which the slides came back from the photo lab in california

and they are addressed to pierre manbeaux. >> when i saw that slide and the word kodachrome i thought of paul simon's song and i have it here on my phone. the first to verses are appropriate. when you talk about the political context of the one photograph. when i think on all the crap i learned in high school it is a wonder i can think at all. now my lack of education hasn't hurt me much. i can read the writing on wall. kodachrome you give us those night bright colors, the cleanest summer, makes you think the world is a sunny day. i got a night kind of camera and love to take photographs so don't take my kodachrome away. >> glad you mentioned that. my as a in the book tells the

back story of the manbo and ataya families that open with paul simon's kodachrome. i open with that very lyric. because what i say is kodachrome does make you think all the world is a sunny day but what if the story isn't so sunny? that is the central problem and the central challenge and the central delight of these color photographs. >> how did you find personality? a great job -- allow him to have a world of wonderment in a confined space? >> very perceptive observations. billy was 4 when he left camp. he doesn't remember any of this. he has very fleeting memories. his family. , among japanese-american

families, never talked about this episode at all. he has no memories of this. he has no evidence of bitterness. he remembers going around looking for rocks with his grandmother. he remembers little things like that but he has no bitterness. he is a very quiet gentleman. a very reticent man and doesn't speak extensively about any of these subjects that he is extremely happy that his father's photographs are coming to the public's attention. one more and we can wrap things up. >> the colors after 60 years, did you make a decision not to restore them to what they would have a regionally been? almost like colorized. >> i encourage you to look at the images in the book itself because part of what you are

seeing is bleeding from the fluorescent lights. the colors are more vivid. u.s. the great question. the only thing we did, work in conjunction. the book is published by university of north carolina press and the center for documentary studies at duke university. i had the photograph scan, the stance stand at high resolution and using a computer dust was removed and not from the original slides the scanned images and for a dozen of the photographs the center for documentary studies people altered ever so slightly a little bit of the contrast. in that photograph of the of movie theater there was an enormous shadow in a front and the backdrop in the brilliant sunlight there were slight adjustments made to bring before ground out and tone the background down a tiny bit but mostly you see them away they

would appear in one of those old-fashioned slide projectors we are looking at pictures from. we should bring things to a close so we can keep the program moving. >> this event took place at the heart mountain interpretive learning center. for more information visit heartmountain.org. >> i am going to tell you a personal story today. something that i normally don't do. the story i am going to tell you is in large part what motivated me to write the second book "what it's like to go to war". one of the things i talk about in the second book is our culture has basically got an agreement, a code of silence about what really goes on in combat. what really goes on when our

nation asks our kids to go out and killed some other kids. i think we tend to want to not think about it very much. in my family it is the same as all families. i was 50 years old when i found out my father had fought in the battle of the bulge. wasn't that a big deal? i would get all kinds of stories about getting drunk and that sort of stuff. what it is is our culture is -- don't whine. you don't brag. any combat veteran with the united 5% of the time things to wine and complain about a 4% is things you want to brag about. that doesn't leave you much to talk about. one of the things i was hoping to do in this book was start

breaking that down a little bit. a little personal history. i grew up in a very small town in oregon. a logging town called seaside oregon and when i grew up virtually all the fathers had been world war ii and we called it the service back then. that was when your uncle was in the service. our culture is starting to make a change. i don't hear the service any more. i hear it called the military. that is an interesting switch in language that is happening that we should think about. i got a scholarship to yale and joined the marines because that was the thing to do. guys on my high school football team would join the marines when we go down there and joins something called the plc program which is a marine -- they run

through boot camp in the summer and people who survive that go to college as a reservist. you don't get paid to be a marine. then i got a road scholarship and thought i would be able to go if i wrote a letter to the marine corps. that is fine. take it. i was there six weeks and started to feel guilty because the guys i served with, kids from my own counsel lost five from my high school and there i am drinking beer and have a wonderful time with the english girls and feel i was hiding so i went to the war and went to the fourth marines and we were stationed in the jumble in the mountains way up at the ocean

border and eventually the executive officer of the company and after i got shot a couple times he is too stupid or too unlucky so we have to pull him out so put me in the back seat of one of the spotter planes where the air medals came from. had you get air medals in the infantry? i wrote this book what it -- "what it's like to go to war" for several reasons. the audience was young people who are considering making the military a career. i wanted to reach them because i don't want any romantics joining the united states military or armed forces. i want them to join with clear heads and clear eyes about what they're getting into. i wrote it for veterans because i had to struggle with a lot of things. of aiken struggle with these and give clarity someone reading it might be helped by it. also wants to write it for the

general public and particularly -- it is important that we understand that we are involved very deeply in our wars but we tend to think we are not. i open the book with a quote from bismarck. one of my favorite quotes. any fool, learn from their own mistakes. i prefer to learn from other people's mistakes. i thought if i can put some mistakes down by learned the hard way maybe someone else would do it. here is where i launch into this story. we were on an assault going up a very steep hill and it had broken down into chaos. as soon as the first shots fired at the plan goes hoof and the way it gets done is individual 18 or 19-year-old marines know the objective and figure out how

to get there and how it really works. two hand grenades came off of the top of the hole. and it was sort of a mess and functioning. two more grenades came flying. we were scrambling up hill to get under them. and finally we only have two grenades and this is not very smart. next time you throw the grenade i will be around the side and hope you will be in position to shoot these guys when they stand up to throw grenades at us. i worked my way around the side of the hole. the other one was like us. you was a kid, we teens.

he rose to throw the grenades. this is a good thing in combat. you never lock eyes with people you are about to kill and he was further away in the third or fourth row. i remember whispering, wishing i could speak vietnamese. don't throw it. if you don't throw it won't pull the trigger. he snarled at me and threw it and pulled the trigger. at that moment i didn't feel a thing. i remember being chagrined because i didn't anticipate what was in a rifle. drill sergeant kicking the rear end for bucking year shot and it hit the dirt slightly in front of the guy. and of course the battle was

still going on. ten years later i was in one of these california groups, all this stuff about getting in touch with your feelings. no one had heard of psc --ptsd. my wife had brought me there. finally the leader turns on me and -- i understand you were in the vietnam war and she said how do you feel about that? a typical answer. she said why don't we start talking about it and asked me to apologize to this kid that i shot. i said okay. i will do that. i started to think about that

kid. i started to cry and i started crying so hard that my ribs 8. i couldn't stop for three days i couldn't stop crying. i would go to work and suck it up and had to leave to go outside to walk around. i managed to shove that down again. i got five kids coin. everything is cool again. in 1990 i am driving down i 5 that 2:00 in the morning. wonderful veterans day you are all by yourself. country music on the radio and no one can touch you and you are doing something to get somewhere. two eyes appeared on the windshield in front of me and you are going to have to deal

with this. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> two wonderful books out now about al qaeda and the taliban. seth jones from the rand corporation working on the other one. david maraniss is working on another biography at this time. there are lots of great books that come out every year by serious journalists/historians that are worth reading. walter isaacson's book on steve jobs is a perfect example of that. was an international phenomenon because all the things we could learn from it. >> what you currently reading? >> i read an eclectic we. i read a wonderful book written

by -- blood not. i love that. and the 48 campaign which if you think this is wild that was really wild. harry truman and henry wallace and strom thurmond and tom do we first election after the war. terry anderson, book about georgia bush and how he decided to go to war. my wife finish catherine the great. i have got to go back and get involved in that. i read a lot of magazine stuff. a lot of essays. i opened up a correspondence with donald hall as a result of something he wrote about growing old. we had a little exchange. i am in awe of great writers. i don't pretend to be a great writer. i am energetic and i am pretty good sometimes the great writers move me in ways nothing else in

life does. >> more information on this and other summer reading lists visit booktv.org. >> your government and mine. it can be as powerful as these governments want to be. sometimes we talk about the un, distancing ourselves. by doing that we fared giving the governments to are ultimately responsible for action or inaction. an alibi. one of my predecessors used to say that we go to the second region for short. and a scapegoat. >> the world's they go in chief. >> exactly.