got an exception to officer candidate. so when you went into that, he had to go dod. so he's worked with a lot of you guys from seal team six, and he is a joint operations task force now, and we want to thank you for having his back, and for doing such a great job. i'm at a loss for words. i think what you do over there is wonderful, and i don't know how we could have done it without you. and all your training at the joint operations task force in norfolk and all the other places, and the training basis. >> thank you for that, and thank your son for his service record like to close this out with the

question nobody asked. i get asked one question all the time and it's never, not been asked, knowing you asked. the question i get asked all the time is, how do you go from being a seal team six sniper to being a coward after taking care of people? does anybody here know that? it's the same job. you just put people out of their misery in a different way. [laughter] thank you, guys. >> chuck hagel will deliver his first major address as defense secretary did at the national defense university in washington. we will have live coverage beginning at 12:30 p.m. eastern time on c-span, and c-span.org. >> we have to take back media. independent media is what will save us. the media are the most powerful institutions on earth. more powerful than any bomb. more powerful that any missile. it is an idea that explodes onto the scene.

but it doesn't happen when it is contained by that box, the tv screen that we all teach at for so many hours a week. we need to be able to hear people speaking for themselves outside the box. we can't afford the status quo anymore. from global warming to global warming. >> amy goodman taking your calls, e-mails, facebook comments and tweets, in depth, three hours live sunday at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> actually it's significant. it has been preserved all these years. at one point there were probably about 30-40 of these mounds around the salt river valley. and only a couple of them have

survived. most of the mounds were much smaller, about a third to a quarter of the size of mesa grande a, and it's this man that survived also, pueblo grande a. a lot of those were destroyed and these survived. it is offered as an opportunity to learn about their lifestyle, and hopefully learn something about how complex their social and political organization was. i've always thought with archaeology, one of the great things when the archaeology is that when we look into the past and see what people did, like building the canal systems, a gauge of hope for the future. because if they could do this in the desert with digging sticks, what is it we can't do speak was this weekend booktv and american history tv with a history of the to read life of

mesa, arizona. including a look at the great temple mounds built between 1100-1480. saturday at noon eastern on c-span2's booktv and seven at five on american history tv on c-span3. >> now, a panel of authors have written about combat in afghanistan and iraq. reporter jake tapper has written content about one of the dead lose battles in the war in afghanistan, and iraq war veteran benjamin busch and brian castner talk about the combat experiences. this is an hour. >> first up is jake tapper who's a senior white house correspondent for abc news. 2003 he joined abc in 2003 and has reported extensively on war from both here in the u.s. and the middle east. of "the outpost: an untold story of american valor" is his third book. epeni it's an eye-opening account of one of america's most deadliest battles in afghanistan, so

please welcome jake tapper. [applause] benjamin bush, actor, photographer, director, and a marine corp. offers who served two combat tours in iraq "dust to dust" weaves together his childhood, marine training, and deployment in the worst of the war in iraq. please become benjamin bush. [applause] brian served three tours of duty in the middle east, two as the commander of an an explosive di poe sal unit in iraq. when he returned them to his wife and family, he struggled with an unshakable feeling of fear and survivor's guilt, the story of war and the life that follows shows the toll it takes on the men and women that fight it. please welcome him. [applause]

thank you so much and enjoy. >> thank you, sir. do i sit here or stand up there? i'll just sit. first of all, it's a real honor to be here at the miami book fair. i want to thank every involved, especially mitch who got me involved, a true honor to be on a pam with two veterans, benjamin with the marines, and brian with the air force. i -- i don't belong on a panel with people who actually lived through it, although, my book is about war as well, and then lastly, there are some other veterans in the book who are actually here. stan and dave roller are in the back there, and i thank you for being here. that means a lot to me that you guys are here so thank you. [applause] one of the things i'm asked is

why did i where a book about this one combat outpost in afghanistan? it's not really my area of expertise. i'm a political reporter. i'm the seep your white house -- senior white house correspondent for abc news, and the answer is i feel i didn't pick combat outpost to write about, but i felt like combat outpost picked me. on october 3rd, 2009, i was in the recovery room of the hospital with my dear wife, jennifer, and i was holding our day old son, jack, and everything was fine. she just had a baby, so that's why we were there, and on the television, i heard a story that was just harrowing of the remote outpost, combat outpost keating, that i never heard of, bottom of three steep mountains, 14 miles from the pakistan border, 5 # 3 troops facing 400 taliban.

a horrific, horrific day. i held my son, and heard about how eight other sons were taken from us that day, and i just wanted to know more, and i couldn't get it out of my head. the coverage was all along the lines, well, why would there be an outpost at the bottom of the mountains? nobody answered the question. when the military invest gaited it, which will come as no surprise to benjamin or brian, they said, yeah, there was no purpose for that to be there, sorry, and moved on. there were -- i was haunted by that. i wanted to know more and wanted to solve the mystery of why would anybody put a camp there? it was a mystery i had to solve. the more i found out about the outpost and the more i pound out about the attack on the outpost, i heard amazing feets of her

heroism, all who died there was engaging the enemy or saving a fellow soldier, every single one of the eight killed. their stories were never really told. it became a project i wanted to tell. i got a book contract to write about it. the book was going to be called "enemy in the wire" just about the last play between, -- platoon, and their experience in the attack, but then i started hearing from troopedded who served there at other times in its three and a half years. i got a call from a former intelligence officer who was with 371 camp. he wanted me to make the book bigger and more comprehensive. he wanted me to tell the stories of other troops who had served bravely and sacrificed so much. lieutenant joe, medal of honor winner jared monte and a kid from oklahoma who gave his life

to save an afghan soldier. he wanted me to tell their stories, and then i heard from dave roller, in the back of the room here, served with the group after 371, 191 camp, and they actually had a very successful year at that outpost. it started horrifically. it started with the death of two brave men, ryan and dave commander captain b awe the the year went on, there was a lot of success reaching out to the afghans, and it was not only an outpost that was a story of failure. it was an outpost that for some time from 2007 to 2008 was a success. the more that the troops contacted me, told me the stories, the more it was a call r for me to write. it felt i was out of my slumber, covered the war in afghanistan from the comfort of the north lawn of the white house, and the debates about troop levels,

10,000, 40,000, numbers, really, in retrospect seemed cold, covering the fights between mcchrystal and president obama, but it was not until i embarked upon the project that i came to any understanding of what it is our brave troops, men like those on the panel go through, what they sacrificed for us, not just them, but their wives and their moms and their friends, and what we, as the nation don't recognize enough which is we're incredibly blessed to have people like this doing this for us, serving like this for us, and their stories are actually, even though we in the media don't cover them, not as much as they should be, and n people don't want to hear think thinking the war is a bummer, that these stories are not all depressing.

they are, in many ways, inspiring, and what people do for one another and the strength and resolve and bigness of heart that our troops have, even the ones who make bad mistakes, those who screw up here and there, and that's part of the book, it's something that we, as a nation, should be thankful for. that's my eyes opened, and that's why i wrote the book. i would like to take a second if i can beforehanding over the microphone to my friends here. one brief part of the book, if that's okay, which is, you know how the book ends with the outpost overrun, and the u.s. beats back the taliban, and ultimately, the u.s. destroys combat outpost which so many soldiers had dieded to build and to maintain and serve at. this is not the spoiler alert because you know how it ends, but it's part of the book that's, to me, the most e --

it was dark now, and special forces arrived clearing the village reenforcing the post. this is after the end of the battle. captain went up to the barracks. you've done an incredible job. i'm the commander now. you're red one. as he was released as the command, he exhaled, rolled the shoulders. you did an incredible job. there were not many places to sleep, just the back racks and the eight station and the yond around them. few slept, and none slept well. october in afghanistan was chilly. the troops wearing t-shirts, shorts, woken suddenly, and lost clots to theñjr day's fire. bodies scattered throughout the camp. red platoon troops collapsed in

their barracks, huddled together, slept on armor, not all that soft, crawled in the fetal position with a day's he walked outside the back racks. the dying fires crackled in nearby buildings, glow sticks with a blue light. there was a sound. someone was singing. i ain't seen the sunshine since i don't know when. .. just one that before they're all gone to bed. surrounded by these ominous mountains here the mountains got them first. now i will send it over to my

friend here. [applause]ot b >> much built may not be reflected, we do appreciate when serious journalists takes ouror stories and brings them home. some of us never had the chancen to articulate those feelings and thoughts and those observations. r memoir. and it -- i don't think it is, in the end. "dust to dust" is really about our place in time, our place in the landscape. but because i went to war, it becomes part of that journey. and necessarily, it's part of our nature, unfortunately, this weakness for conflict that we seem to tend towards no matter how enlightened we become, no matter how far we progress as people, no matter how much hope we have that discussion can help us avoid, um, the absolute and

most definitive inability to articulate, you know, concession. which is, which is war. so i'm just going to read a little piece from this which kind of puts it all in place. i think war appears in my book to put war in context, not to describe war so much as being part of, part of our history. and for us all, especially for veterans, obviously, it's part of our individual history. we've confronted this thing. that many of us for our sins set out to seek. this is from the chapter "ash," and i'll just read this section. during my first tour, i convinced myself i was invulnerable, i was not careless, but i was unafraid

because fearlessness was required of me. my marines became accustomed to our endangerment. when we took our first casualty, we were at a loss to completely believe it and went back to our ritual of patrols as if nothing had happened. while i deployed my family worried, all of them keeping their worry from me as much as they could. my second tour was different. i expected to be killed in ramadi. after i was wounded, it was worse for my wife and parents, the mystery of my situation expanding my peril in their imagination. but the belief in immortality and the certainty of doom produced almost the same lack of anxiety in me. on june 16th we were going south to cross the railroad or tracks, a routine operation in conjunction with other combat engineers. and i'll just talk about this section, um, i had a good friend in ramadi who was a captain,

commander of a company of marines. and on june 16th we just went on what would be considered a common mission. we went out with combat engineers conducting a search mission on a tip that was a cache of explosives near the canal. the village was always bizarre, inhibited by fishermen. the people didn't mix with the city to the north, a mere 200 meters away on the other side of the tracks. we never knew who we would find there. the entire settlement sometimes abandoned to children and dogs, sometimes flush with men. we called it springfield because we thought it had a population of characters to rival that of "the simpsons." i accompanied the infantry company led by a captain who'd

become a friend during the deployment. it was to be a security patrol while engineers located around artillery rounds delivered my insurgents. while we patrolled through the town, we found it almost empty again, the streets vacant, dogs silent. to take the edge off, the captain and i exchanged lines from monty python and "the holy grail," one of us began, you're in great peril. i don't think i was. yes, you were, you were in the terrible peril. look, let me go back and face the peril. oh, no, it's too perilous. we were like-minded in how to approach the embattled city. i would spend the night protecting my friend's smoldering wreckage. i went home. i attended all the memorials. early on the night of a holy

day, and i can hear the broadcast from three nearby mosques, a voice spread out through an extended exhale of language that i cannot interpret but feel that i may understand. that's a gray of incomplete darkness, blind to the world as we see it but somehow not colliding with it. both of us recognizing what is solid and what is not. it is, then, the same world to men and to bats. they hunt insects that hunt us and hunt each other. everything is similar. everyone is hunting. i had moved through the dark defining the grainny green glow of night vision goggles. i'd been out all day patrolling and sweating and thinking that i wouldn't need them. you always brick all of your -- bring all of your gear. you have them strapped to the front of your helmet, and their awkward weight pulls your head forward, there is no depth perception. you can't see the dust, but you know that it's there.

something explodes, try running through a city like that. the phosphorous burn of tracers flashing too bright for your eyes to adjust to, gone as fast as they pass. you don't know how long you'll have to stay on the roof you've found yourself on. you've ordered the family into a room beneath you. you hope the rest of the bats in the unit know it is you on the roof. someone is shooting. watch the tracers, keep low. you may be there all night. you may be there for the rest of your life. you watch the alleys and the windows for anyone you don't know. you don't know anyone. think through the rules of engagement, positive identification of a threat is required before you can fire, reasonable certainty. you're in the middle of an urban sprawl, your friend's shattered vehicle is upside down by the road ahead, extinguishers are all expanded, and marines are throwing sand on the wreckage. the tires cannot be smothered.

you can smell the smoke, and all the while it isn't your house that you have invaded. the family beneath you is just waiting for you to leaf. someone is still shooting. you're not sure in the night vision equipment if you can see something moving. it can't be positively identified. you hold your fire, you hold your position. that can be your profession. you don't want to let anyone down. a bullet had gone out into other people's lives. we gathered some who lived there to fill in the holes left by the bombs left for us. for 215 days we threw ourselves at the city and washed back into hurricane point. as headquarters 100 meters away, our marines read our report, and the euphrates passed between us without noticing anyone. so i go into that with the book

because war is where i arrived after a life, essentially, of chasing endangerment to a certain extent. the uncertainty of it all fascinated me, as does my environment just by nature. so the book is very much about our landscape, how we perceive it as fascinating in our youth and how over time it changes. the same substance -- stone, rock, water, wood -- go from being the unknown, worthy of curiosity, to at some point being a threat. and the natural defiance of us living our lives, which is in defiance of our mortality all the way from childhood where we're immortal to our elder years where we become the thing that holds so many people we've lost and is what survives.

memory is what survives. and within that memory the afterlife of so much. so thank you. [applause] >> good afternoon. i'd also like to thank the organizers of the miami book fair for having me. when i started writing my book a year or two ago, i certainly did not expect i would end up here or seated on a panel with these gentlemen. i think what we've heard so far is that a lot of war stories represent a need to explain. why was there an outpost where there should never have been an outpost? what's the context within my own war experience? who was i before i went to war and then how did that affect me when i was actually over there? i wrote a memoir -- i didn't want realize i was writing a

memoir -- i didn't realize i was writing a memoir. i didn't realize that was going to be the little title they put on it and the shelf they put it on. i was so so naive about the publishing world, i thought i was just writing a story of what happened to me. and some of my friends that i included in it. and really it was to explain to myself how did i end up like this after my tours in iraq, explain to my children this is why daddy's crazy? but print out one copy, put it on a shelf and save for when they were older. i think there's really three kinds of war books. i think there's, you know, the top level explanation of the policy. when john keegan writes world war ii, that's what happened in world war ii. and i wasn't in a position to write that. and then there's the really

detailed recreation of what happened in a specific time and place which is what jake did, which is a gift that i was not able to do. my memories of my tour were so fragmented, they were very specific on particular days, and then there's, you know, the month of september 2006 i don't really very much there. i was -- i could not have recreated that if i wanted to. so instead what i did was i wrote the third kind of book which is, which is where you try to get the feeling right. what does it people like to be there, what does it feel like to come back, what does it feel like to get shot at, what does it feel like, um, to come home from that and be walking through the airport and realize that you're thinking about who you're going to shoot to get out of the room in case something goes wrong, to think about driving down the road and looking for ieds on the road or be putting your son in his hockey gear and

realizing that as you're putting your son in his hockey equipment, you're actually putting him in the bomb suit. be -- and you're sending him off to work on an ied. that's the book i had to write, and i had a completely average experience. so here's what my average experience was. i was an air force eod officer, explosive ordnance disposal, that's the bomb squad. as an air force guy, because we all -- army, navy, pa lean, air force -- we all go to the same school, we're interchangeable, so i was assigned to an army unit, we can all work together. so i did a tour in balad in '05, and i did a tour in kirkuk in '06. and our normal day is you're there at the base, and you get called, and you take apart one, two, three ieds a day. you take apart car bombs n.

kirkuk we had, we went through a stretch where we had a lot of car bombs. we had two a day that came every afternoon. out of the 50 something that we had over the course of those couple weeks, we managed to take apart one. 49 of them detonated. so then there's that other part of the job which is being a little bit like csi. you go, and you look at the scene, and you try to figure out what it was and who the target was and what kind of bomb they used. you just collect this evidence day by day, and you put it in the report, and nobody seemed to care, and it was groundhog day, and you did that every day until you went home. so your mission was if we can't stop the car bombs and the ieds from being put out and if all we're doing is reacting like the fire d., then our job is to everybody comes home. all 30 of us went together, and all 30 of us will come back. so i managed to do that. all of my whole unit, we all came back together.

i was very lucky. when i got home, i also had a completely average experience, i would say. and i'm not comfortable speaking for any particular veteran. everybody saw something different, everybody reacts to it differently, but my personal experience is i had trouble thinking about anything other than grief, than thinking about the fear. the fear and the grief were as much about what kind of person am i that came home as fear of being in any particular surrounding. i knew i was safe in my head, i just didn't know i was safe in my gut. and part of the grief is you come home, and i got out of the military. i only did eight years. but your friends go back, and just because your war's over doesn't mean their war's over. and so you worry form,