this, we have to understand marketing. >> yeah. >> we can't just give great affairs and expect the people to rally. we've got to target the market and all this, because this is something a whole lot of people should be made aware of just like -- [inaudible] not going to solve anything -- >> going to have to -- we thank you so much for that comment. thank you so much. [applause] >> thank you. we're talking about everything. history does repeat itself, and i want to thank you again, professor sammons and professor green. but just, one of the issues you raised was the effect, the impact of the media on the regiment and on this story. and what was fascinating to me initially reading it was when you talked about stormy weather -- >> yeah. >> -- and how that impacted on the telling of that story. can you share that with us and also share with us how the media

really misrepresented what was happening in terms of the regiment? >> well, i think -- i mentioned that the name hell fighter stuck in part because of the band being representative of the regiment. and it was, it not only was a representative of the regiment that came topsy anonymous with the regiment -- came to be synonymous with the regiment at some point. in fact, a scholarly book, this person writes that james reese europe was the leader of the 369th. not just the band, but of the 369th. ..

this character and he is supposed to be lean the warren's brother and someone mentioned he won this -- he wanted to kill me now to have improved core and she wears a and i go into a lot of detail about the symbolism of that bill that is the end of any discussion of a combat role of

the 369th. and there's a magazine bill williamson is reading that says is recognizing the great accomplishments of blacks is to the world of entertainment. that is paraphrasing but if blacks couldn't be lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. it is all about entertainment and that is what the film is about all flow the 369th introduces the film and in fact it goes from showing actual footage of the parade to this sort of sound stage view and it devolves literally in the middle of the film. a couple of black face minstrel's but the dance at the armory or whatever it is has

these black women dancing to whenever and with sunflowers on the backs they are in black face. the other interesting thing is all the black women are light skinned and the black men can be a variety of shades but black women have to be light skinned. that is the entertainment world, got you again. let me tell you about the department store, 1934 there is a boy's got -- of boycott and bernstein's department store, don't buy weekend work. they settled but guess what the agreement entails? we will hire black women -- you got it already, since before you could only be janitors, the law -- elevator operators that they have to be light skinned.

that is the truth. >> thank you everybody. professor, thank you so much and we want to thank our audience for coming out. thank you, professor green of the english department, and the director of the center for black literature and all of our senior military personnel, thank you for coming out and again, this is a pivotal moment in our history. we are able to tell our story for real. and not leave anything out, the good, the bad, the ugly. it is all in the book so you need to go and get the book, teach this to your children. we are going to bring it to our teachers so they have it as a

resource. keep this story going, keep this story alive and make it possible for other stories to be told. thank you again for coming out. we hope to join you again on another evening and thank you to c-span caretaking the time to come out. thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on facebook, like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers. watch videos and get up-to-date information on events. facebook.com/booktv. >> welcome to jackson, mississippi on booktv, named

after the nation's seventh president, andrew jackson, the city has been mississippi's capital since 1821. with the help of our comcast cable partners we highlight jackson's history with local law this and learn about its literary scene. >> she loved jackson. she felt she knew the people in here and i think she liked it here because they respected her and they gave her promise. she could go to the grocery store and they wouldn't bother her, they really liked her and she was quite -- you go into a restaurant and the the heads turn as she walked to her table. everybody would be punching everybody. >> i had one which and call me and he said i want you to know that i talked to my national office today and they want me to tell you that we don't need to make their business. these are stores that helped the white citizens council that is

dedicated to keeping you and i second-class citizens. finally, ladies and gentlemen, we will be demonstrating until freedom comes to negro's here in jackson, mississippi. >> as a child i remember vividly my mother talking about amelia evers, important to know about this, she was always dismayed that nobody had really written about him or gotten account of respect that she thought he deserved, unlike martin luther king jr. and others, didn't feel he got that recognition. >> we begin with a history of prospect hill plantation and the slaves who lived there. ♪

>> we are at prospect hill plantation which is sort of the nexus of the story of mississippi. it is a very odd story few people know about. it encompasses the u.s. and africa and freed slave colony, the largest group that came from this plantation and emigrated to liberia in the 1840s. prospect hill was found by isaac ross, a revolutionary war veteran from south carolina who came to the mississippi territory in 1808 with a group of slaves and freed blacks. some of them had fought

alongside him in the revolution and the slaves themselves were mostly of mixed race and come from several plantations in south carolina and he came here and established this plantation, arranged for the freed blacks who fought with him to buy land in the airy and he set up -- slave based standards, an egalitarian arrangement. the slaves had a certain autonomy. he was very close to them and he never bought or sold any one, and so the slaves became a tight-knit community and when he realized he was going to die and the slaves would end up being sold 0 would become common slaves he wrote in his wills that at the time of his daughter's that the plantation

would be sold and the money used to pave the way for those slaves to emigrate to liberia where a free slave colony had been established by the american colonization society. the american colonization society was comprised of two conflicting organizations or groups, one was abolition, it would make emancipation q the

slaveholders so there will this was a way to remove a large population of freed blacks, wasn't totally egalitarian in its approach. isaac ross -- it was the law to free the largest group without legislative approval which would not have been forthcoming and he felt this was the best chance they had to sort of control their quest to knee and his daughter agreed, he wanted to keep and in play until her death at which time they would be allowed to emigrate but his grandson contested the will and that is when the drama started. isaac weighed contested the bill. the young guy in his early 20s

at the time and didn't like the idea of selling the family's plantation and giving the money to the slaves and freeing them and so he contested the will, it went back and forth through all the local courts and eventually made its way to the mississippi supreme court and for a decade it was tied up. during that time, as does the we went, a group of slaves became dissatisfied, felt he was going to prevent them from migrating to liberia and they were not going to be freed so has the story went up there was an uprising and they set fire to the house one night hoping to kill him, and the house burned, a little girl died in the fire.

he was not injured but the group of 12 slaves who were lynched afterwards from a tree as i was told behind the house by one of the last descendants, so that was the highest drama of the story and after is that, the supreme court ruled in favor of the slaves essentially, that although it was the property issue the court ruled anyone has a right to do what they want with their property at the time of their deaths so no one could interfere with the freeing of the slaves, so as a rough way to regain control of the property after the state was settled and build the existing house on the site of the original that burned

and he lived here and not all the slaves immigrated. there were 300 and about 250 went to liberia, 50 states for various reasons and their descendants still live in the area. in all the documents and even today when people describe it, they call it the repatriation and talk about him going back to africa but you have to understand these people most of them were americans, they had been here four, five decorations so was not like they were just going home, they were going back to the continent their ancestors originally inhabited but it was quite a risk on their part. there were representatives of the colonization society there who said the mop and they made their way to mississippi and africana and started from

scratch basically and started farming and trading and building the houses but that first year, and i am sure, was really challenging for them and in the letters they wrote back to prospect hill, the only way they could communicate with the slaves who stayed was to write isaac ross wade and always asking for we need this or that, we have a lot of shortages, they were accustomed to being provided for and couldn't get everything they needed. q can't overestimate the challenges that they faced when they went. there were a lot of basically greek revival houses the freed slaves built in mississippi and africa and across the river was louisiana. and liberia which was settled by freed slaves from louisiana. there was georgia, virginia, kentucky, maryland counties and all of those people came from

those states in the u.s. so they took their culture, what is a new year, there. they built houses like this one because after all they are the ones who built this house so they knew how to do it. there were a few free slaves to emigrated to liberia who made bad decisions, who enslave local people, the slave trade was still going on and some of the indigenous groups were involved in the slave trade. there was hostility immediately between them and the freed slaves who arrived. so it is sort of like the colonists in the u.s. under native americans, their approach toward the indigenous people and they weren't allowed to vote, some of them were enslaved. my first effort was aimed at documentation. i went through all the court records and started to track down people and had no idea i was going to end up in a civil war in west africa.

was between descendants have the indigenous people and freed slaves who had been sort of upper-class and had ruled over them and it was like here, old times not forgotten. the story was still playing out in the 1990s when i first started this in liberia. so i thought i will wait till the war is over and then go and see if i confined these people. i found they had settled in a place they called mississippi in africa but it was a parallel universe out there. how can we not know what happened to these people, i have got to find out and eventually it became apparent that war was going to go along. the civil war went on 1990-2003 so it became apparent the 5 was going to find out how this story played out in west africa i just had to go. fortunately in the capital of fighting had moved 100 miles out from the capitol when i went and

so even though it was a war zone on wasn't really in the middle of the fighting. it just made it more complicated to do my research and lot of the people had been displaced but i found them and ultimately it paid off. i found the local people totally embraced what i was there to do. people in liberia recognized the u.s. is the old country to them. people in developing regions of the world all over, it is a possibility for advancement to have a contact in the u.s.. everybody wants to talk to you. as soon as they found out i was interested in mississippi and africa it opened doors everywhere. i remember i was in a walled compound, all of these strange

people like gun dealers and drug dealers and missionaries. it was the very weird mix of people. the first night i was there i talked to the bartender and he asked why i was here and i said i am planning to sign people who immigrated to mississippi and africana and he said where are you from? i am from mississippi. he said i am from mississippi too. that was a real eye opener to me. are you talking mississippi in africa or mississippi in the u.s.? he said both. so he felt their story, the story of prospect hill was still being told, that was their identity, that they had come and been educated, they had a little bit of money and they have a very complex history too, but everybody that i met embraced me warmly and they were very

interested, if anyone cared they know what is going on in the u.s. and they don't understand why no one in the u.s. understands who they are. they feel such a strong connection with america and most americans who couldn't tell you the difference between liberia and libya. there are people here today who are white and they see the story one way. they are fascinated by may be related by blood to it. we had groups out here that were black, related to the story in a completely different way. my whole goal was to try to include all of those versions of the story because it is a story about access to power. but you can learn about that who was denied access for so long and see what happens when they

gained access, since late voters committed atrocities against people because they could, they had the power. when you freed slaves who immigrated to liberia some did the same thing. it is human nature. some people are going to go too far but it doesn't -- i know when i would talk about this a lot of times to white groups they would look kind of smug, as they did the same thing. it is not as simple as that. it is just a story about some people going too far and some people trying to do the right thing. you have plenty of both insist we. race took on a whole new meaning through this story. i don't profess to understand it fully by any means but it made me understand there are a lot of

different ways history is told. all you should do is to ensure that everybody has the opportunity which has not been the case in mississippi history until recently. >> this weekend booktv is in jackson with the help of our local cable partner, comcast. next we sit down with the director of the -- eudora welty house, mary alice weltry white. we talk about "the optimist's daughter" please >> i take what i know for granted. the new is new in the old is old and i feel i am a judge because my eyes and been trained by experience align know where i am

as a base to see people moving in their true light. >> in jackson, mississippi at the home of eudora welty. it is a national historic landmark. eudora welty was a writer born in 1909 and died in 2001. she was a writer who won just about every literary prize there was, she studied throughout the world, really, published in many languages of law she wrote some short novels, best known for her short stories. that was the form she most valued, the short story form. she had four collections of short squeeze some of which are not that short, totaling just

under 50 stories in the collection. >> then there is a short -- actually to start eudora welty's life, she -- her publication is very entertaining. i personally love that one but also the novel "the optimist's daughter" won the pulitzer prize. most of her writing she did here. >> this home was designated a landmark in 2004 and house open to the public for tool is in 2006. i can't tell you how many times people have said to me in the tool or how they would come down here just to hear her typing away and they did. they often did.

it was an old manual typewriter. she did quite a bit of work here. >> this is much like her room when she was here writing. her typewriter -- she would make not done anything available, the back of a checkbook or scraps of paper. the address book, she would jot down things she heard, she could be in a beauty parlor or the grocery store or she would see something and think of something or hear a name and shot these names down and then she would know not to use the old name in the story because it was a real person. she loved jackson. she knew the people here and i think she liked it here because they respected her and gave her her privacy.

she could go to the grocery store and they wouldn't bother her. they really liked her. she was quite a -- she would walk into a restaurant and you to the heads turn and everybody would be staring. she knew the people, if you read the stories you see how well she worked, the way they said things -- she never wrote about anyone in jackson but she knew the people of mississippi. she was invited to go to a ryder's colony in new york. she didn't like it. there were a lot of writers there but as she said they expect you to go to your room and right. that is not how she wrote to. for example she happened to walk

into a country post office and she saw an ironing board in a post office and she thought what if someone lived here so story developed. a story about people burning everything they own, going out in the middle of the night, she hears the whistle and asks what is that and there's going to be a breeze tonight. letting farmers to note to cover their crops. everyday happenings, the story would develop. when she wrote, she would fight it out and then read it and she would decide to edits. she would read it and she would change a few words and then it

in. it was easy to move around this by penning. she saved everything she ever wrote. it is wonderful for researchers, and she changed this. throughout this process. but throughout history and all of these things, but unlike today when writers do it all on computer and do the next version and the first version is gone. and decent copies -- >> i can't say what her legacy is that to me her mastery of the short story form, particularly as it relates to dealings with

the internal life people often don't talk about but is there. her powers of description are amazing, not only the physical description of nature but also the interior dramas going on within the individuals but also between close individuals. it is extraordinary. >> also the southerner is the talk about nature but we are used to an audience, we are used to a listener and that does something to our narrative style i think. >> up next, author michael vinson williams talks about "medgar evers: mississipi martyr," the office but with booktv during a recent visit to jackson, mississippi with the help of our cable partner,

comcast. >> let's let the merchants down on capitol street feel the economic pinch. let me say this to you. i had one merchant call me and he said i want you to know that i talked to my national office today and they want me to tell you the week down needs niggard business. they helped support the white citizens council, the council that is dedicated to keeping you and i second-class citizens. finally, ladies and gentlemen we will be demonstrating here until freedom comes to negros in jackson, mississippi. >> 15 minutes past midnight evers got out of his college in a vacant lot 40 of the west never fired of single shot from lot high-powered rifle. the bullet hit him in the back, passed through his body, through a window into the house. he died within the hour and a

jackson hospital. city detectives believe the fired shot was from this rifle which was found in the bushes, they also have other clues. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> as a child, my mother, talking about medgar evers and it is important to know who he was and what he did. she was always dismayed that

nobody had really written about him when he had gone account of course respect she thought he deserved. mike and -- martin luther king jr. and others, she didn't feel he really got that kind of recognition. it is important to understand the significance of his family. his mother and father in particular because they rick teaching him that it was his responsibility not only to care for the community at large creditors responsibility to the larger community and so he grew up with this attitude, very much protected by the family. a person who talks about the importance of manhood and their responsibilities. he grew up with that. is mother as well talked to him about the brotherhood of all men. in particular their responsibilities also. he grew up with these ideas. is important, he was often times

faced with racism in terms of individuals he knew who had been lynched and what that meant for him and so child could for him was a growing experience but out of that came this idea that you have a personal responsibility. 1915s and 1960s in mississippi was very impressive and violence in terms of african-americans and their position in society at large, we talked about second class citizenship, individuals denied opportunities to vote, to have equal access to education, denied opportunities to participate fully within society. it was suppressive to say the least but most importantly for understanding the environment it was a very violent times so individuals who decided to raise the vote could be killed or beaten at a moment's notice and this was not just connected to

the right to vote. any person who exhibited any kind of attempt at demonstrating their manhood or womanhood was subjected to lynchings or be more brutality or those kinds of things. that was the environment individuals were acting upon. that was important for understanding not only what medgar evers was doing but those individuals who are activists along with him as well so you are acting against the societies and in many instances will kill you and that is the environment we were talking about. individuals also would lose their jobs. if they identified an individual trying to change the system, they may have loans they would be settling. these were the things that would go on. the employers would be notified of their participation. those kinds of things. it was really an of president zine into 1960s when he was

operating. decided at a regional council in which they were calling for volunteers to desegregate and he decided then that he would volunteer to do that and put forth his application in 1964. the importance of this is his belief that african-americans should have an opportunity just like everybody else not only to go to school but to participate in all aspects of the society in which they lived. he put an application in in january of 1964. it would go through the process but in the end he denied on a technicality that he hadn't gotten the proper support from where he lived and so he would be denied even though he said we would open again trick consideration. the important part of that is the naacp was paying very close attention to his application at

that point. because the naacp was really focused upon trying to integrate institutions on a professional graduate level so once he was denied, the secretary position to him and the naacp became this vehicle for which he then could express himself fully. the naacp field secretary was responsible for organizing naacp chapters, responsible for investigating all instances of brutality and wrongdoings throughout the state. the field secretary was responsible for regular reports. any problems or issues sent to the national health of publication as well. so the field secretary's position was not just localized in the office but more so they went all out of state speaking with individuals and courage and individuals with registers to those, encouraging lawsuits, filing affidavits, showing

individuals how and organized so the responsibility was covering the entire state. one of the more significant ones happened with the 1955 field in which his responsibility was to investigate what happened and seek out witnesses and try to get justice for the family. it was in many instances something that bothered him because a 14-year-old child -- these kind of things as well. there were several murders in mississippi. again, is responsible for investigating those and trying to get justice and with that, you have to go in in disguise to figure out what had happened, to speak to individuals who witnessed it, get a sense of

what had gone on and try to fill out affidavits and most importantly to get the word out to naacp headquarters and they publicize what was going on so these were the more prominent things that were involved. it is important to understand when we talk about many rivers and civilized activism that every day the individuals get up and leave the house, they understood full well that they may not come back home again and when they leave their families, may be the last times they seized them but they do it day in and day out and for the field secretary that is something he is constantly in that kind of fire. it will become more difficult for him after he gives a televised address in 1963 because he has to go in many instances under cover, dressed

as a sharecropper and where you can talk to people where they can't be seen and is very difficult to give his televised address, then everybody knows what he looks like so is more difficult to go undercover in that respect so it was always difficult and always trying but he understood that going in and he would often talk about the fact that even if he was killed and of process, it would be worth it if it changed the way things were and that is the mentality we are talking about here. when you start looking at the environment, when you look at what people are faced with, your job is to go into harlem and on top of that you are monitored by organizations, white citizens council, also keeping an eye on

everything you are doing, everything you are saying as much as you can. this fascination occurred on the early-morning hours of june 12th. this is june 11th, kennedy gave his presidential address on civil rights issues and medgar evers had been watching that. he gets home after 12 after leaving an naacp meeting so he gets home little laughter 12, gets out of his car and decides what he is going to bring in an decides he's going to bring some teachers with the words jim crow must go printed across them. as he gets out of his car -- his family of course is waiting on him to get home for and they

hear him pull up and they also hear the shots and when he is hit with the bullet, this is a devastating shot but he is strong enough and his wife opens the door, he's crawled to the door as if he is trying to come home and of course the neighbors hear the shots, people coming out and they see him including his wife and children. this is a very emotional time because people understand what happened to this individual who had done nothing but work toward the advancement of african-americans and to bring justice and he is shot in the back this way and also this eliminates the movement too,

people coming together to bring about positive change that the assassination is what really, i guess kind of places this into focus in terms of the severity of what is going on here. >> there was a sense i guess of bittersweet, people are happier at least relieved said that part of it was closed and the individual who had actually murdered him had been found guilty but at this same time

understand that persists person had lived his life, a long life. was the long -- an old man by the time he was convicted so he had the opportunity to see his family, opportunities to enjoy himself, things that were denied evers. when i say bittersweet that is what i mean. if you had closure that he was found guilty but the person who did the most to change society for the best, his life had been cut short and his family was denied that. more importantly the state and the nation were denied what he could have done with the rest of his life. so you had those -- overall people were happy that justice had finally been served. what i really want to do in the book is to not only talk about the life of medgar evers but the situation in the larger civil

rights discretion. i wanted to understand who he was and understand how he did the kind of work he did. i didn't just want to tell the story of an individual. i want to tell the story of a man. and what civil rights struggle actually meant on a professional level as well. the impact he demonstrated the humanity and humanness of civil rights struggle. and the cumin this -- humanness of what it means to live in a society at whatever time they are in and what your responsibilities and roles are. and so i think by looking at the life of medgar evers you release see that in great hands vivid detail even though he was an individual who was very much low key. what he did spoke volumes and

people still carry that message today. >> from booktv's recent trip to jackson, mississippi we visits lemuria bookstore, an independent bookstore specializing in first edition. >> we are in jackson, mississippi at lemuria bookstore. lemuria was a mistake city sort of like atlantis that the people, the inhabitants used telepathy and the gods became jealous and took away their gift so they started writing things down. it is ole miss of the written word. lemuria has been here since 1975. john evans opened the store and a little apartment couple miles east of here. he had the ideas that he couldn't buy books he is interested in buying in jackson at the time. there really wasn't bookstore so he opened the little books for, had it going for about two years

and started expanding in this location since the '88. this is something that is a little bit unique to >> -- lemuria. we try to stay in touch with the modern first edition collectible market. we try to buy things and say things that we only have book signings with another we think is going to be collectible in the future. we try to save those books and so we have two first edition rooms that does collections. everything from something that came out this year that won and award like the pulitzer few weeks ago to a shiny door or hemingway and a lot of our clients enjoy that and expect it

and they know they are going to find a knowledgeable person to talk to about that market which is a fun part of the industry. to sell a stack of paper bags and turnaround and have somebody want to talk about not $1,000 collectable book is fun. we have to keep his room locked because there is some expensive stuff in here. everything in here is alphabetized from here, there is some really awesome -- mccarty editions, for example, one of my favorites. this is not signed the it is

pretty rare. there is what we feature a lot of is the partner and the wealthy because mississippi author's, this is probably something you won't see in a lot of bookstores this is a signed william faulkner. we have events every week, sometimes several weeks, sometimes in the fall six seven days week. sometimes they are big national best sellers with law lines and sometimes literary first novels, 20 or 30 people in joining the getting to meet an author and talking about writing. they are local writers who have been published by national big time publishers and considers

this a fair score. they come in here. we had great big book signings with matthew gwynn, john grisham, they still make stops here. you create an authentic friendship with an author and over the years is a relationship and they keep coming back and when they write their memoirs they put they love jackson or jim harrison is one of my favorite authors. is in one of his 8 collections. john picked him up at the airport. things that happened to him or where they went to eat. that is special stuff. i always tend to think that lemuria is the center of the literary sort of community of

jackson. how many books and personal libraries when you go to someone's home you can tell it all came from lemuria? >> next from booktv's trip to jackson, mississippi, we talk to alan huffman about his book "here i am: the story of tim hetherington, war photographer". >> we just came in from how far? how far? 35 miles. there are ten of us and we just in to would a lot. >> the way the title came about was we were looking at a lot of his footage. he would often when he would show up some place i guess more

or less tag his video for his archives. he would say like you to at the beginning of any video he would do it for himself, this is tim hetherington and liberia, february of 2003, here i am and that is how he would start it and to me it summed up his approach to everything, when he was there he was there. wasn't just passing through to get a quick photograph. he was not the bank bank club guy that you hear about, the photographer that rushed in and get the quick dramatic shots and move on. that is the lot of most war photographers but tim really immersed himself wherever he went and got to know the people in these wars jones and tried to to illustrate their lives and not just get the most dramatic

image. so he was there in a very real sense beyond just passing through. what i learned as i was going through tim's work and looking closely at his riding and all his photographs and video was that focus on individuals, that is what drew him in. he didn't start as a combat photographer, he went initially to cover -- he started out covering a group of athletes from sierra leone in england that had been injured in the war in liberia. he did both. he was interested in this soccer team so he went back to liberia to try to find out their story. he wanted to tell the story of these young soccer players who had been in various ways injured by the civil war in liberia and when he got there he became

engrossed in their lives and the circumstances that had brought them to where they were. that is when he made the decision to go back and cover the civil war. he joined up with a documentary filmmaker who was already going and had been before. what he wanted to do was find out about those people's lives. is point of entry was the void so he empathized with them and he wanted to find out what it is like to be a rebel and you went back, as i said, wasn't like a member of the bank bain club where they come and go. he went back for two years. he staged in liberia after the war ended and bought a motorcycle and worked for the un researching war crimes and got to know all of these people

very, very well, got to know a female board board essentially rebel and photographed her extensively. she spoke with sebastian, the documentary, in the book, her story of how she came to be in the midst of that conflict. not just some crazy civil war in africa which 4 americans is easy to see that. is another war but these are people just like us. they are dealing with it. that is what attracted to him. when he went to cover the genocide it was the same. he was looking for those people to find out exactly what was happening to them, what they were experiencing, did that with sierra leone, he always was looking for something that was

away in to a person's life that would enable the viewer or the reader to relate to these people and show that these are not just some foreign persons fighting in an obscure work. these are people just like us, and dealing with the situation they have been dealt. that is what he did everywhere he went. the film that tim made with sebastian younger was one of the most ambitious pieces that he participated in and you can definitely see that hand of tim in that because it doesn't have the conventional voice-over narrative we associate with those sorts of documentary's. there's no voice-over of all, there's no music. it is very straight forward. tim and sebastian mostly

alternated over the course of the year spending time with an american platoon in afghanistan. so what really interested them was not the politics of the war in afghanistan or the military strategy or any of that. what is it like for these soldiers that just yum guys from america that are stuck up on this hillside in a remote valley within the taliban stronghold and what is their life like? tim comes in this tall -- they are all young american guys with tattoos and stuff. i am sure they were extremely skeptical of him at first because they're journalists and these guys are soldiers but tim had great sense of humor and he listened everybody up right away, kind of made fun of himself and got to know them so

well, they felt complete the vested in him. so that was evident, it is a very intimate, personal film even though there are battle scenes, there is a lot of violence in the backdrop and sometimes in the foreground but it is mostly about those guys. obviously sebastian had a hand in that as well, but that is also classic kim, to focus in on these people so you end up watching this story about these guys that happens to be taking place here, that is the way to approach everything. having gone through all of what tim produced as much as i love -- the piece of work that stuck with me of his, his books are great too, but he did sort of an experimental film called diary

that you can watch online. it was about grappling with going back and forth from these conflicts and with his inexperience and seeing sort of odd be replicated like in one scene you are in a firefight in monrovia, liberia and then in the next scene you are in a cab in none demand was this whole thing going back and forth where there are bombs falling and then the fourth of july celebration in new york city and was -- one of the things jim having grappled with was how to reconcile the things he was seeing in these conflicts, seeing this replication, trying -- you can imagine coming back from a war zone and everybody is like we are glad you are home and there was no fresh kayla the green grocer today. there's a challenge involved in

trying to acclimate back and forth and most conflict journalists feel more at home in conflict zones and tim spend a lot of time trying to digest that and reconcile those two things and diary was his attempt to do that and did is a really brilliant piece of work. it is short but i have watched it 20 times and never tire of it. i think going to all these war zones tormented tim. white with any feeling person and especially someone like him who became so engrossed in the lives of those individuals. you are going to see a lot of death, you're going to see all of the ugliness and full display of humanity and i think he had a hard time reconciling those things and he talked about it, sebastian in pretty good about all of his close friends, about

what does it mean that he was fair, sort of, i don't know, he said he wasn't sure some time this whether he was not falter or part of the conscience of the world. it is hard to know, when you are going in, making your living by documenting these horrible things that are happening to people. he had a hard time with that but the most traumatic experience based on what everyone told me is when he was in the corn hill valley and they got in a firefight and the guy got killed and tim kept filming and one of the guys started shouting at him to stop filming the and i think at that point, tim did, but at that point he really was wondering what is my role in this? what am i? ..

>> tim was, early on, did not attet to mask his subjectivity, and i think you see that more and more now, in more and more photographers. some people don't like it, you u know, because they think that's not their role, their role is to provide a