the book industry is actually doing very well although publishers are always bringing their hands saying that it is the end of the world. but compared with that 350,000, 700,000 books were self published. twice as many books are produced by independent authors who put them all and have something to say. now you might plame there is a lot of garbage among the several hundred thousand books about i think there's a lot of good stuff as well. so i feel that if you look to the publishing industry i don't know if you would agree we are witnessing a transformation in its structure so some of the middle intermediaries are moving out, and somehow the public is moving in in strange ways. used to be said books were written for the general reader. now they are written by the general reader.

this past week was the tenth anniversary of the start of the iraq war. for the next hour book tv brings

you several programs from the last ten years of authors who share their own of wartime experiences. we start with the west to describes the churning of thet n first marine division from kuwait f to baghdad. >> the concept of the operation over all that the general put together i think had theumns tos brilliance of common sense andtn redundancy and hedging his bets. go. that is general frank sent thefs columns to baghdad so that if one got in trouble the other could continue to go. an e this is the direction in whichnc the first marine was moving into ened ost to the left as you look at the map there was an equal army also advancing on baghdad to it i will explain briefly see what happened on the march to general baghdad and general smith will take you to baghdad.n the first thing the marines did on the lower side is security oilfields. they rushed in at night and thee

next morning in order to take a area thatt was pumpingand 2.1 million barrels of oil a day because they knew that the plan was to blow something like 400 wells and to create the largest oil spill the world had ever seen so the objective was to seize them before they could dot that and they did within twosis days. there was only one or two firesh in the oil field because thewe t marines movedhe so fast they jut pounds and the hypophysis pherae siti the iraqi is have is we hit them with a year in 91 therefore we were coming again.i that is and what she did. he came immediately on the we'rwith a we caught them out of position.co wo we were with a corporal. this is the wonderful thing i think about the american system. where were the corporal's who an orphan. he wasn't doing well, he wassahu flunking out of school int measp montana and he saw the advertisement for the course i

want to be a marine and the marine said no hour standards are such that you don't measurel up.d ok. he joined. he was doing quite well and by the time he was 20, he was a corporal. he was earning $22,000 a year. the planning began to seize the oil fields. and the american system was such that this particular pumping plant was worth about $12 billion. now, one would say that's going to go to the c.i.a., it's going to go to the commandos, etc., not in our system. in our system, that went to the marines because it was in their area and they assigned it routinely down and corporal shane and his squad were told take that pumping station which was called in the white house the crown jewel. and we have the pleasure of being with him and his squad when they seized it and they took it and they took it down. there was -- there was a lot of blood all over the place because of certain things that happened that the iraqis did just before

we got there. we tried to detail the story. they did magnificently to pay $22,000 a year, where did these people come from? where did they come from? they join the army and marine corps to be riflemen, what can they do with that skill? they can't walk out and say i'm deadly, hire me. so they do it and they sleep in the dust. i mean, they do it because somehow they're attracted to this life, this hard life and they perform to standards that we have a hard time imagining because they push eef other. -- each other and what he and other squads were doing, another squad leader was they were competing the entire campaign and we caught them all the way along because each of them wanted to be better than the other squad. and they kept pushing each other to do better and better. the oil fields were saved and the other thing that happened here was that because we moved into the oil fields, the iraqis believed that we were going to go up the tigris river so they

defended on the wrong side. they also abandoned their armor right away. now, they -- there really were two waves of abandonment. we had the first wave and later there was the second wave of abandonment of the armor because we had killed their armor before with air, they thought we were going to do it again before they got all their armor. there was a general by the name of manus and mark that name, you'll be hearing about that man in the future. he's probably the best operational commander we have. and he went to a new way of war for the marines. he bypassed five of the eight iraqi divisions that were in our area instead of taking them out. this is how we saw the armor on the first day after we had seen the oil field. they could have hit shane and his squad with this. they had perfect armor, they were scared to death and they abandoned it rather than fight. the next thing that happened instead of going up the tigris river to the right, he shifted

his force and went to the left between the euphrates and the tigris rivers where there were only two roads he could use and the iraqis thought he can't do this. he can't get up these two roads. well, he did. when he got to this place called nazarea which was really messy, we ran into a lot of confused fighting and the fog of war. that's always -- and the reason i'm bringing this up off the bat, anyone who says with our high-tech, we can avoid this hasn't been on a battlefield. no matter how good you think you are, no matter how good you think your high-tech is, if you haven't played the game before, the first time you get whacked, not everyone is going to do perfectly. this is what happened in nazarea. this is what it looked like from the highway. it was cesspools, houses set back. chaotic shooting from all different directions. unfortunately, this is the 507th maintenance company that stumbled in there at night. before it was over, you had

several of the soldiers killed. several other soldiers including jessica lynch captured. this is what we found the next morning when we rode forward, not knowing they were there. we went in buttoned up because they insisted we button up. actually that's the tack on the front of my amtrak as we we want in. inside, i had my computer and, you know, they said a lot of killing going on up there. i said whoa, whoa, whoa. so i went inside my pack because i knew it was going to get chewed up and took out my computer. now, everyone else is getting in the back, lock and load because we're only going to firefight. i walk in and the only thing i'm carrying is my little computer. i couldn't resist it. i looked at the other marines walking in and i said i understand there's an internet connection in the town and i want you to take it so i can use the internet connection. unfortunately, the other half was it was a tough fight. it was really a tough fight. then we were hit with this

hurricane dust storm you may have read about. it was as though the earth turned 90 degrees and all of a sudden, all the dirt in the world came into your face at 60 miles an hour. and we had it to the point where there was this good sergeant and we were getting, we were under fire and somebody camby in a humvee and he had had his hand shot off and it was kind of messy and you're trying to sort it all out and this sergeant guard, bless him, sergeant johnson, he said to his people, i'm going to in place you. nobody knew where they were. you couldn't see a thing. he found some wire. and he ran the wire from the amtrak and then each marine by the shoulder, walked them out to the end of the wire and set him in. said here's where you're staying. so they were sit in. then the marines began to say, whoa, you know, our weapons aren't any good, here they come. what are you talking about? your weapons aren't any good? don't you remember how to use the butt stroke and the next

thing you knew, every marine was talking about the different ways they were going to kill fed even that night. the morale was sky-high, they were finally down to where they wanted to fight, which would be with clubs. they never really came that night. they couldn't find their way either. that was a wild night and the earth turned a different color. it really did. everything looked like this. everything was orange because there was just so much dirt in the air. going up the highways, you heard a lot about a pause. there was a pause but the president said "keep your eye on the goal" you're to get to baghdad. the general was ready to do it so they kept on moving. and as we did, we discovered the fajadhenn fell apart. now we're half a there and about to turn it over to general ray smith to continue but at this particular point, the marines are on two different highways to the right and left of that red splotch. we're clearing villages that

looked like this, that the poverty in which saddam enslaved the shiites was about like a 14th century. they had nothing. i mean, nothing. we got hit with some r.p.g. fire from places like this and we had this lieutenant colonel because ray and i were jumping always with the lead unit. we had a yellow s.u.v. that had been given to us kindly by this kind, old iraqi brigadier general who was captured the first day and he allowed us how he couldn't bring it into the p.o.w. camp with him so he had to leave it by the side of the road so ray and i from then on had an s.u.v. to drive around the battlefield and we saw that they were taking fire from here and r.p.g.'s and the lieutenant colonel in charge said, you're not returning fire because it wasn't hurting us and he took one look at that and said, we just level that place. why don't we do that? instead, he dismounted his marines and they walked through.

then we started going heavier into the cities to clear the cities. and this was called the a fact drill but you can imagine how quickly the trooms turned the a fact into something else. they had to dismount and clear as they went and as we cleared block by block and got into some heavy firefights this is not what they expected. this isn't what the iraqis expected. they expected we're going to stay in our tanks or bomb from the air, the last thing they expected is they're going to bump into the marines on the ground and the difference in terms of the shooting ability of the marines vs. the iraqis was night and day. i mean, when a marine shoots, he hits you. when an iraqi shoots, if he's aiming at you, you're probably safe and that made a huge difference in the firefights. we also did discover these motorcycles everybody was talking about where these -- these soldiers were coming down and organizing these poor militia and sending them out and sure enough, we were

flabbergasted that people would allow punks to come from baghdad or some place and order them out and look at this poor guy. he -- i was with this sergeant in that particular iraqi had just died after he had been shot and the marines never wear underwear to begin with. you're out there and totally dirty, you come across some guy and he has clean underwear on and you think what is he doing out here? as he was dying, the sergeant i was with looked down and he said, you stupid son of a b. why didn't you stay home? and he was -- he was just angry that he even had to shoot them. and they were being organized by these and they died, too. then we moved into the heavy part which was really a run and gun all the way to baghdad. and the -- i'll have to tell you, no matter how people talk about the tank, it was nothing that could compare with that abe rams tank, especially with the

optics for its 7.62 machine gun. go into what actually happened in the battles, we were dispatching the fedaheen at 15 meters, 30 meters and general smith says, what really happened in this war was the moral to the physical as napoleon said when he used to go on the battlefield, maybe 40-1. in other words, psychologically, the iraqis didn't think they could stand up to us much the only place they did interestingly was in nazzreea because when they captured jessica lynch and had killed those army soldiers, they thought those were marines. and so their morale went up and they fought harder as a consequence. that was the only case. the rest of the time they just didn't think they could fight us and as a result, they didn't. once we crossed the tying riss -- tigris river, we were able to push a line of tanks and humvees that have missiles on them directly as though you had a war wagon moving and they were shooting at about 30 meters on either side of the road.

we dispatched the infantry on both sides, one of the infantry as they went by general smith and me said, not knowing that general smith had fought for 30 days. he said look at this, you know, and he's just -- he's looking at the smoke going up behind him, the firing all around and he said this is like full metal jacket in that frightful way and the army, was that i had the strength to persevere and master my own fears. when i found out i was deployed in 2003, i was nervous, but i was ready. i was part of a great unit and we were ready to serve. that's funny, when i tell people about the importance of teamwork reporters are always quick to ask me about being left behind in the deserts of iraq. they just don't get it. in the early days of the war, i

was part of this 100-mile-long convoy headed to baghdad from kuwait. i drove a five-ton water buffalo truck which had all the supplies the water necessary for the troops, and there was heavy vehicles in my convoy. the sand over there is really thick and they have a lot of sand storms. it would take us hours to go just a few miles because the sand was thick, so we'd get stuck. we would have to have the one truck pull us out. and this would happen every few inches. we would have to go back and pull another vehicle out. so it would definitely take us hours to go just a couple miles. my five-ton truck broke down during our crossing the border into iraq. but luckily, my best friend and

my roommate, laurie and firsting is at dowdy was there to pick me up. we also picked up two more soldiers on our way, the two soldiers that have from another unit, not in our same battalion or the same port that we came from. but they were there, they were the ones towing my truck across the border and during the ambush you know their truck ran out of gas so they had to jump in in the humvee that we were riding in. so the army is a big team and we were working together to complete our mission. then came the city of nasiriya. nasiriya was the day that we were ambushed. the day in the nasiriya was frightening, but our unit worked together to get out. it was a terrible day and 11 soldiers lost their life, including everyone in the humvee

that i was riding in. seven of us were taken prisoner of war. in those nine long days as i lay in that iraqi hospital, not being able to move or feel anything below my waist, i never gave up. this was difficult because my injuries were severe. i only ate a few crackers a day, and i wanted to see them open the package before they could give them to me. i only had a couple glasses of orange juice. sometimes only one per day. i had a head laceration and a broken humerus. my back was broke from my fourth and fifth lumbar. my left femur was also broke. the iraqis actually tried to repair it by doing surgery themselves. luckily, once i got back into germany, they repaired all the rods. my left tibia was also broke.

it now has a rod in it. and i cannot feel anything from my foot -- my left foot. my right foot was completely crushed and it's now healed together with pins and screws and a plate on one side, and i will have a surgery in january to refix it because of all the stress that i have been putting on it over the past almost two years. but i knew i had to get out of there to find out what happened, what happened to the rest of my fellow soldiers. what happened to laurie and what brought me to that hospital alone. april 1, american forces came in and you want to talk about teamwork, there is no greater example of teamwork than our military special forces. i was in a room, kind of locked away from everybody else in that hospital. and as i lay there, i could hear

bombs going off outside of the hospital room and then, you know it took a few minutes and i heard helicopters and then i heard a bunch of noise. well, the next thing i knew, they were outside of our door and they were yelling, you know, get down, get down, to the people outside of this locked door. and my first thought was they were, you know, the militiamen, fedayeen, any of saddam's people. but luckily, they were american soldiers and they were yelling where's private lynch? the soldiers came in -- into that room and one looked at me and he said, we're american soldiers, and we're here to take you home. and he reached out, he grabbed the american flag from his uniform and handed it to me. and, you know, i just -- the

only thing i could think of was look -- i looked up at him and i said, yeah, i'm an american soldier too. and those were my words, and i was proud to be an american soldier. i was proud of the teamwork that the special forces showed that day. while the group created a diversion, members of the special forces worked together to dig up the bodies of the 11 soldiers who died during the ambush who had been placed in shallow graves behind the hospital. as i looked back i remember the fear, i remember my strength. i remember the hand of that fellow american soldier reassuring me that i was going to be ok. what i'd like -- would i like to change parts of my story? if i had to do it all over again i would. but i find that perseverance not only got me that through those nine day, it keeps me going today. i work every day to get better.

i still go to physical therapy. when i was rescued, i weighed 70 pounds. in one year, i went from flat on my back to a wheelchair, to a walker, to two crutches, to one crutch, and finally, to this cane. i still have no feeling in my left foot. i do have bowel and bladder problems from all of the stress and from, you know, the back injuries and the nerve damage. i am now having trouble with my right foot as i mentioned earlier, but i didn't make it this far to only give up now. giving up isn't an option for me and it should never be for you. i also realized the amazing gift i have been given. i find that survival can help you succeed, but only

thin was somewhat handicapped by secretary -- defense secretary donald rumsfeld's review and theories about transforming the u.s. military into a smaller, more mobile force that depends on multipliers of forces. you get the sense in reading your book that you felt that the management theory, the ideology of transformation if you will really did handicapped what you were able to do to carry out of law and order responsibilities you felt were necessary. do i read that right?

>> let me state my own words if i can to the i remember his patriotism and i think he's a really energetic and patriotic man. i do completely support his idea of the transformation of the u.s. military. i served in europe in number of times in the diplomatic service and if you look at the military in say the year 2000, it was still largely structured to meet the ten division nestled by the army across the north german planes, not a likely ease and given the collapse of the soviet union so i was very sympathetic that rumsfeld had a transforming to make it lighter, more mobile, quicker, communication intensive and so forth and it certainly is the case that he was right about the war itself because we won the war in three short weeks shorter than anybody expected and that is without an entire division in the war plan.

so he was right about that. my concern was that the fundamental job as any government, and we were the government of iraq is to provide law and order for the citizens. law and order meant having the adequate combat ki devotee of the ground in iraq right from the start which had basically three elements people keep focusing on the american troop level that that is only one of three elements. we needed to look at the number and quality of the coalition forces and we had some problem with them and we needed to look in particular at the area that i had the most disagreement i would say with the pentagon was of the question of assessing the quality of the iraqi forces we were training in the army and the police i felt that it is going to take a long time coming and indeed it has to bring them up to a sufficient capability. i was concerned that the military in the fall of 2003 was hoping that they could use iraqi

security forces to allow us to draw down the american troops rather substantially in the spring of 2004. that was my main concern about american troops is that substituting iraqi is for americans before they were ready. >> i want to come back to that in a moment because you do deal with that at some length, the difference that you had in the military commanders on the ground there. but right at the beginning, you mentioned to secretary rumsfeld a study that said 500,000 troops there and you made the point in the bucket was picked up in a lot of the coverage of the book that he never got back to you. you mentioned the seen steady to president bush at least implicitly saw his support for more troops. did you ever hear back from the president? >> guest: let's first talk about the study. i hadn't been on the ground i saw that on may 6 for something.

probably one of the best in the country and i took it seriously when a friend showed it to me in the draft and i said it forward as you point out a summary for secretary rumsfeld i wasn't too surprised i didn't hear that i hadn't even been to iraq yet nor did i say we agreed we needed more troops i frankly didn't know. sing reaction with the president. i said there's a study. i'm a diplomat, not a military expert i don't know if it is right or wrong but it's worth looking at. president said we are getting more troops, colin powell at the time was trying to get more troops into the coalition that was his reaction and we didn't find that surprising since i didn't know myself at the time if we needed more troops. >> host: the next time you mentioned raising that issue is may 18th, 2004 as you are getting ready to go out to be a did you not raise it when you

were working with rumsfeld and -- >> the only time i suggested we needed more troops was at the very end of my time there in may. but i raised the question of combat capability frequently because i saw this as part of a broad structure as i mentioned earlier. the reason i concluded towards the end of my time that i needed to say something is that we have had a major uprising in april of the cleric where some of our coalition forces proved to be so passive that we actually had to redeploy entire division of american i think the third infantry division we had to take an entire division in this house to deal with the surprising. we had a fire fight going on in the west, we had a tax on the supply lines that became so serious that i was told i might have to impose food rationing on my staff because we couldn't get food through. so the situation as i felt very

serious we were stretched thin and i suggested in a memorandum to secretary rumsfeld that he should continue deploying another or two of the american or not american night in a specified. between the times i spoke often about my concern particularly at the quality of the iraqi forces. there was the area that concerned me. that was this desire to believe that the iraqi scud replace americans in the spring of 04 as it happened the force is essentially collapsed and the surprising we just talked about. at next we hear from the former commander of the forces that operate at the abu ghraib prison in iraq in 2003 and in 2004.o >> it's very important for people to see your book and listen to what you have to say c to understand just how little training is conducted because later onlems in it that contributed to the difficulties you see in iraq.

>> correct. >> how many drill weekends a month? and how long on saturday and sunday? >> the typical reserve soldier drills for a saturday and sunday eight hours each day. ..>> usually in the summer. they are practicing whatever their unit mission is. so for my battalion, it was a prisoner of war operations. we rarely had a full complement of soldiers and officers to participate in that training. then we did not have any prisoners to process. as it got closer and closer to the date of actual training for the two weeks, contracts would be canceled, money would not be available. >> how frequently were you able

to fire weapons? >> you really had enough ammunition to do anything but familiarize. >> later on you have the opportunity -- you are not a full colonel in the reserves. you are invited to -- you're now a full colonel in the reserves. you are invited to a luncheon. in the book, you describe all the problems that existed with the reserve system. difficulty maintaining manpower levels way beyond just training, having enough people and the right people and so forth. he turns to you and says, colonel, tell me what the readiness problems are. what do you say? >> i told him there was many. >> in the book that is not what he said. you said the book, you already know the problems. >> well, it is my recollection

that it is in the book that way. and he did have all of the briefings and he listened to battalion commanders reports. i was a colonel. the time was limited. i knew that laying it all out on the table at precisely that moment was not appropriate. or putting him on the spot, because there were other people sitting around him. >> i thought he put you on the spot. >> but he expected me to do the politically responsible -- the politically correct thing. >> so he did not leave you to put it on the table. >> i think that is part of the problem -- officers have been silenced. senior noncommissioned officers have been silenced. is that true many of those readiness briefings when he was there or his deputy was there.

for example, a company commander who is a captain trying to do the right and honest thing by presenting numbers and statistics and readiness levels is then put on the spot by somebody wearing several stars and is told, but if you have four soldiers who would otherwise be qualified for deployment but they do not have a family readiness plan, which is a showstopper -- that means they have a plan in place that it there deployed their children will be taking care of -- you can work on that before this report is submitted. a captain says, yes, sir, because if he says no, i cannot, he is replaced. >> what you're saying is there's no reward for integrity. >> there was little reward for real integrity, that is correct. >> it sounds as though you had

figured that out. you're seated next to it all colonel and the rigid -- reached a rank in the army or you should feel comfortable speaking the truth. you decided silence was the better approach in this case. >> absolutely not. >> you did not tell him everything, you said, you have had all the briefings. you already know the problems. does he? you had already decided based on your work with the institutional culture that there was no record for telling the truth. >> but i did tell him the truth. i told him he had had all the briefings and he knows all be in operation. >> you seem to think he did not want to know the truth. >> i cannot get into his head today and i'm probably less likely to be accurate than i was then. >> to think he knew the full extent of the problems in the reserves? this was long before iraq? >> absolutely. when these movements -- unit for

mobilizing, nobody believed, and i mean from that level in the national guard or reserve components, neither chief felt these soldiers were going to be gone for more than six months or even six months. they were briefed at the mobilization stations consistent with that philosophy. >> i do not know if you ever saw the covert operation plan, but the underlying assumptions are consistent with that. when the intervention was conducted in march and april, the expectation was that we would probably withdraw almost as quickly as we had entered. those assumptions are consistent. there were probably not realistic, given some of the decisions that were made subsequently. in the lead up to that, that was the assumption. >> that does not forgive them

with a portion of an event. >> so, in iraq inc. i'd like to ask entered issue to the fore major issue areas that we do with. the first one is the issue most logistics, so today i like was the past years, we actually had a company running and building the most -- they build the bases, a clean, they cook the food. this is a campaign that many people have probably heard of. the second aspect of the occupation of iraq is the reconstruction. so where the united states and the others neglect resulted in the destruction of infrastructure, companies like back tell, somebody hired to rebuild. the third area of private sector at home in iraq is that of

private security companies. and so here you have something akin to muslims old where people for money will come and guard facilities and provide even not just privacy to be but even intelligence. so the kind of things the cia, these are now things done by private companies and iraq. the final section of the book looks at the fact we have privatized the government institution itself. a private company was hired by the name of science application international corporation to plan the ministries in iraq. and institute of north carolina which had to teach iraqis about democracy. like to take this opportunity to read a little bit from each of the chapters and then take questions from you about the broader picture. the book as books tend to be coming into, take a little time to get published so the last

thing that about in this book was written in july of last ye year. the last time as kabbalah or as complex as like to be able to take the opportunity to explain how things have involved and how much more we know about especially the fraud and waste of taxpayer that is occurred in iraq. so the first chapter is called operational sweatshop iraq and it's about the company halliburton and the amount of money they made in iraq. today we know they have made $10 million in contracts called the provision of every kind of service. the reason the chapters called operation sweatshop iran is of the very nature of the way they do business. typically as much a most people see sweatshops a bad wages. sweatshops typically pay better wages that local companies offer in order to get people to work for them. that is, in fact, what's happening in iraq. so iraqis have no jobs as much a 75% of the population didn't have a job, and so the company

halliburton paid iraqis $100 a month in order to work for the. we have no job, $100 is better than nothing at all. it's not a living wage for a living wage for them come living income is $500 a month. they wanted to bring it people to do jobs they didn't trust iraqis to do, jobs such as cooking for american soldiers. because the u.s. military is afraid that iraqis might poison the soldiers. they've hired outside workers typically from india and the philippines and sri lanka, and they pay them higher wages, say $300 a month. now, for jobs they wanted americans to do, in particular driving the trucks, they need to pay more than somebody get in the united states. a guy who used to haul chickens in texas and earned $12 an outcome he was offered a job for $70,000 a year which is a really good salary for an american.

so people journeyed overseas. they went there and did these dangerous jobs because they thought they would make a lot of money. and actual practice some of them got killed. many of them didn't get paid what they expected to get a. halliburton in fact paid them $16 an hour once they worked for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. so this is the nature of most logistics of the jobs in iraq. and i wanted to read greek fully from the first chapter looking especially at one of the main things that people have been interested in iraq, which is the state of the oil fields. because iraq's principal income comes from drilling for oil in southern and northern iraq. this is from my travels in southern iraq just outside of basra. it's a description of these oil

fields. red shadows rippled across the deserts. smoke them out from a sheet of flames dancing bright orange of the 12 outstretched jimmy. isn't like a chicken just from almost a hundred feet away. if i looked into the flames i could feel my skin burn. i stepped back, glad of the cool blue sky that allowed me to rest my eyes before he gazed back into the hypnotic fire. eventually i tore my days with the walk back with a foreman for south oil company who has worked in the oil fields for 27 years of his life. he was glad to keep his job when saddam hussein's government was ousted by the u.s. invasion in the early spring of 2003. since the invasion his salary had been raised about $200 a month, almost five times his day under the baathist regime. the 200-dollar paycheck from one of the highest that local workers can earn, was a product of a long strong union struggle to maintain iraqi jobs.

they preferred to hire foreign workers despite the fact that the command much higher wages. over the turbines that pumped the oil from the wells to the port of basra, i met a crew of three indian and pakistani workers. i was able to communicate with the workers, and so they told me that this particular group of people were dressed in lieu uniforms of the al kharafi company, a kuwaiti subcontractor working for kellogg, brown and root. in 2003, they won a contract the range and cooking meals, delivering mail and building bases, to repairing iraq's oil industry. that you these contracts totaled more than $8 billion. when you think about the fact that we spend $100 billion in iraq, that, in fact, is a big chunk of the money is going to this one private company.

>> in 2009, author kimberly kagan sat down with us in our "after words" program to discuss her book, the search. we will show you a section of the program the details of the increase of u.s. troops in iraq. >> host: i want to get in to the nexus of "the surge," and provide a little context for late 2006. because as casual observers of the war at all kind of blends together and bleach together, violence is escalating. buddy to look at 2006 as the bombing occurred in february of '06, he iraq study group at home is developing a more nuanced what it deemed to be a more nuanced plan for the future of iraq.

that's a three prong question but where did it originate? how was it advocated transit over the course of 2006, because of violence in iraq was escalating and because the military operation that we deny states and iraqi security forces were conducting were not actually achieving positive affects on the ground. i think many here in washington and perhaps also those in baghdad were quite frustrated with the course of war. and we saw over the course of 2006 president bush convened a number of things to try to figure out what's the best way forward, including the meeting at camp david in june 2006, followed by a number of other discussions with his team of commanders. but it really was not until november 2006 that the result of multiple different assessments started coming to the white house. on the one hand, the iraq study group, which proposed really

withdrawing from iraq, accepting a training role for the iraqi security forces, among many other discussions it had, in the national security council also made its report i think the commanders on the ground rendered reports to president bush. and, finally, things in washington made a large contribution by thinking through the problem into an outlay of government agencies and suggesting different possibilities for success. so the surge i think was born in that environment. and became a recommendation not only to add forces, but to change strategies. and i think that the idea of adding forces and changing strategies came in part from the military. and from the development of the counterinsurgency doctrine that general petraeus had overseen at fort leavenworth, and as

importantly, the idea of the way the battlefield was developing, developed by general order you know, the second-in-command in iraq. at that time surfing -- since he was responsible for designing the operation and had as his mission built to make a rapid transition to the iraqi security forces under increasingly degrading conditions. i think that he very fundamentally saw what was needed in theater. he recommended that happened to coincide with some of the other things being developed in washington. >> host: i guess that sometimes i don't understand the complete timeline. people associate petraeus and the surge, and was a petraeus counterinsurgency manual and doctrine are coming to the top, ma or was it the search and petraeus was the right man for the job, which came first? >> guest: that's a question i'm not sure i can answer. but what i would say is it's important to remember that the army is a thinking and adapting

institution. and our armed forces at the senior level, mid grade levels and even at the senior levels understood that it was not in iraq over the course by 2006. >> host: you mentioned is for the first time, and understandable, the search is much more than it increase in troops but a change in strategy. a name, the search, do you like it being characterized as the surge? or you think is history just captured it such a vessel we will deal with because it is much more? >> guest: i'm afraid we're stuck with the surge. i'm extra stuck with it now that i've made it the title of the book your so it was a change in strategy. it was reflected in military thinking and was implemented really for the first time, beginning in january 2007 timeframe. but i think all the general petraeus was certainly the right man for the job, and the new

doctrine was important, we also have to remember that the origin of the surge in theater predated his arrival. and that general order you know is now the commander of u.s. forces in iraq was then as i said the number two in command serving general casey. and he had an important role to play them both in requesting the forces of elderly came in, the surge of five brigades. then also in figuring out how to use them in order to secure baghdad and al qaeda and iraq. spirit and now matt gallagher ring his deployment in iraq, he kept a blog detailing his experiences. upon his return the blog became "kaboom." he describes the process and his deployment up next. >> host >> i started blogging about two weeks before we deployed.

later into iraq. i think because of the time, movies, there's this image of the young green soldier being dropped off conveniently into the jungle, you know, totally clueless and trying to adapt immediately. that's not how it is in the professional military. is a very slow progression. you move from hawaii to alaska to germany to kuwait for two weeks to test all of our equipment, then into a rut, big forward operating bases, referred to as fobs. and, finally, out to the combat outpost called tops with small units like the tunes were companies are living with the iraqis. it was a big aspect of these counterinsurgency movement undertaken by general petraeus on a strategic level. we were the ones letting it on a tactical level.

so i kept updating for about the first month and it was short blurbs. my impressions of the very foreign environment. about a month in to our deployment, and i think the exact moment looking back on it where "kaboom" involved -- devolved into something else we could we got caught in the middle of a firefight between the iraqi army and the sons of iraq also known as -- which are essentially a raiders, kerry militants, whatever you want to call them, hired as extras duty guards by the united states military. a lot of these guys were former insurgents who were just not necessarily die hard for the cause but were just looking for a paycheck. and yes, if you're wondering, shouldn't they be on the same side? yes, they should be. but between sunni shia rivalry and personal rivalries, it all

got mixed up. so somehow we're on the other side of town but somehow a firefight between the two of them kicked off and we rolled straight in the middle of it. we conducted straight at the cat which effectively ended the firefight. it was much like the band of brothers when they get back behind the tank and press north. that's exactly what we did. with my staff sergeant who was three steps ahead of me and initiate in fact, that's what he got from him was the brothers. [laughter] so i guess it would be art imitating life -- i don't know. i'm not going to waste time with that, but you will lose brain cells that way. so i came back and later i get my patrol debrief, and all the paperwork stuff. you know, i was having a hard time sleeping so i just put down what i did what he been doing in the past month, and i blogged about it and i posted it. and it kind of made, help me

make sense of the situation then. it's very confusing, just trying to explain it to you now with the benefit of foresight. it's still confusing. but it helped me feel better. then i took a step back. i wouldn't have come back and called my mum or e-mail my girlfriend, like hi guys, i got shot at today. it was awesome. but effectively is have the same result. at least on a personal level. but i think at the moment i can realize maybe there is a kind of personal therapy here that's going on, and it's an old clicée but it's a cliché for a reason. some people -- i think that was the exact point where it made the transition for me. as the weeks passed out, my life became more chaos and confusing. the post reflected that in some obscure distant way, i was aware that the readership was going but it was kind of like a cool

little distraction for me coming back from missions. i went how many comments i got today? wait for me to take a step back and connect with the normal civilization that was still going on without me. concurrently, i think i started to become aware that i was feeling some kind of information gap that either the media was a provided by people were not trusting from the media. i don't know. but people were interested to hear, for whatever reason, what a punk young lieutenant in a counterinsurgency thought about the world. it was cool, but it was never anything more than a distraction. about six months in to our 15 month deployment, i got called in to my lieutenant colonel's office, and he told me that he wanted to make me an exit, executive officer which is a promotion, one and the same. i wanted to stay with my

platoon, of course and i argued even now that any leader worth a damn would have done the same thing but it doesn't mean they should win, but you get very tied to you guys. six months at war together is a lifetime, really. so i never expected to win but i tried to argue logically. serve, i'm planning on getting out of the army after my four years. i have nothing against institution, i just don't plan on it being a career. doesn't it make sense logically they should go to somebody that would make a career? of course i was arguing that selfishly because i just want to stay with my guys. he didn't say that way, and the conversation ensued that can only really occur in the military, which is me standing at attention getting yelled at, called not so nice things. with the undercurrent of you should be staying, et cetera.

so i went back. i was angry of course, but isolated and moved out. i went back and i blogged about it. it was how i handled everything for the past six months. it seemed natural i handled this way, and then i posted it, which was big, a faux pas. and so as a result, i got shut down. the internet is the area. take it back to them. i didn't think we get back to them. i was naïve. now, about a month later the "washington post" did an exposé on, and the rise and fall of "kaboom," it was dramatic and great and everything, but from my opinion even if, there's a lot of smoke and no fire. because this wasn't a big brother type of situation. this wasn't the government shutting me down. although that is a great marketing tool, so i understand sometimes why my publisher

pushes ahead. don't hold that against them ago. it was middle management. they were upset. i get that. also it wasn't a constitutional issue for my opinion, or from my vantage point because i was a soldier. we fight for those rights but we don't necessary get to live by them. so i totally was on board. i understood why they shut me down. same time, yet, i was cool and "washington post" article portrayed me. i was okay with it. so once the "washington post" article came out, the book deal followed shortly after. various literary agents and publishing houses contacted me. some of them wanted to publish a book right away but i still had nine months in iraq. listen, this is cool, great distraction but this is not something i can devote my life to a delegate that. they were willing to wait. i'm eternally grateful for them for that as a result.

so yeah, i got shut down, but i hadn't committed any security violations i just got yelled at a bunch. i didn't get a counseling statement, which is like the military version of a detention slip. just putting it on paper. got promoted to captain a month later. the lieutenant colonel larry, redbook, who i'm off, and on my bosch but he also threaten to punch me through a wall as he did, but he did hit on my bars. so, you know, it was a thin line that occurred there. but i had nine more months and iraq, so there really was far more important, just trying to keep -- just trying to get me and my guys home while -- honoring our mission. >> looking at the 10th anniversary of the start of the iraq war continues with -- taking pictures of soldiers, sailors and marines who suffered

physical injuries while deployed to iraq. have to t >> i have to tell you that i waw not prepared for the kind ofould suffering that i would see. yo when you hear, you know, peoplee just wounded today, i'm not sure what image comes into mind of my mind i kind of thought likeughtl fiall arms fire or something. that's not what we're seeing ine this war. and so the first two soldiers photographed the same weekend blind.th ranger who was blinded by an artillery shell, and he sees nothing but black, night and day. he's got titanium plates holding his brain together. he lives in western pennsylvania with his parents, now. he was a wrestling star. a college graduate. had the world ahead of him. an amazing young man, dr. jeremy selbush, and that's his picture right there.

the second soldier i photographed was specialist sam ross, who is also blind, who, when i met him he was living alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road in the poorest county in pennsylvania, 21-year-old, blind, amputee, lost his finger and one ear, has shrapnel through all of his body, he was wounded in a munitions disposal operation -- basically a bunch of mines blew up on them. so after photographing these two young men in two, three days' time i felt like i didn't know if i could continue this project. it was extremely depressing to me. but i also became increasingly incensed at the media coverage of the war. i just felt like i wasn't getting a realistic picture, and i want a realist -- realistic picture whatever that picture is so i became obsessed with the project. i found more soldiers. i went to walter ree