too. so this is my first chance to do a 3-d ingredient and i am really excited. i've done a couple talks so far, but this is like my not road reading. so i really wanted to read a couple different passages from the book for you. i have a paragraph about each of the three main characters and their new material that i haven't read from before. and then i wanted to read a little bit about their time in afghanistan and a little bit about their time in iraq. and then we will do questions. the first batter in that i am going to read about if a young woman named michelle fisher. she is kind of domain character of this book. i met her in 2010. she told me a lot about herself

and introduced me to the other two people in the boat and then we begin an amazing multiyear process of lengthy interviews and they gave me a lot of other kinds of material to rely on. letters and diaries and photographs and medical records of military records in therapy notes, facebook posed and all kinds of things like that. so this book is an attempt to reconstruct the last decade in their lives that they were serving in the national guard. so the three women are really different in age and really different in political is then that is one of the great joys of spending time with them. they are very close friends that they don't agree about the essential enterprise they are involved in together. so they have many conversations about what it all means. michelle, the youngest of the three went in was 18 years old

when she enlisted in the spring of 2001. i'm going to read a passage from the previous fall. he had just voted for ralph nader. she's very left-leaning. i'm actually going to switch to my reading glasses because i realize that age where it's really hard to read with my regular classes on. excuse me. here we go. otherwise i'd have to hold the book like five feet away. so in the fall of 2000, michelle had enrolled at the university of southern indiana, a commuter college but another part of the lloyd expressway to the west of the national guard armory. we know that she's dirty visited the armory a couple times because that's her junior prom and senior prom were during high school. she had brought the maximum

possible amount in student loans as she was paying her tuition bill by herself. as she began her college career, michelle was sharing a one bedroom apartment working as a waitress at a steakhouse called the golden corral and driving back and forth to classes in the tank. that's what she named her 1994 silver ford tempo. it had been a gift from her father, a burly rack of a man he loved michelle dearly, but he had never stuck with any of his four wives, nor had he safeguarded the economic well-being of his children. he had brought the car used for $2000 had given it to michelle in lieu of paying the $40,000 in child support he to her mother. michelle's mother he got existence of occasional welfare checks. a regular factory jobs, regular packs of marlboro lights and a steady supply of double cola. after her father bought the car, he had made her mother signed a

letter saying she would sue him for the money he owed her and then he handed michelle the keys. she liked to joke that she drove a $40,000 beater. the joke encapsulated everything about her childhood. but she had been given, what her parents had failed to provide a spark to let her laugh about it all, especially the parts that were not really funny. so you see her in the spring realized that the commuter college she's going to isn't challenging her in because it's not challenging her, she's bored and starting to party too much and she's forgetting to go to class and she really needs to do something about this and she wants to go to a better university, one that she can afford so she walks in the recruiters office and said she wants to sign up for the national guard has been explained she could get a free ride to college and she signed

up. so that was her motivation for enlisting. when 9/11 happened, she was in training and she instantly understood that her life is going to be completely different than what she had envisioned. right from the beginning, she also felt opposed to both wars. the other two women in the book have different positions on the two wars, but michelle from the very outset doesn't support either the war in afghanistan nor the war in iraq that will come later. when she deploys to afghanistan, which happens in 2004, she finds herself sharing a tent with a woman named esme burks. she has been specifically warned to stay away from brooks because this woman has trouble according

to michelle supervisor. michelle doesn't actually want to be in afghanistan, she sort of is drawn to does not burk says this troublemaker. so there's this to women getting in trouble and being a little bit rebellious, more so than some of the other women in their tent. they bond over this. does not have previously avoided michelle because she thought michelle is a college student -- she was -- she thought the shelf she was too good, so they had not previously spent a lot of time together. she didn't make it through high school. she dropped out at age 16. she had her first child at 17. she is ferociously smart. he was a colicky baby. she was reading books while rocking and, trying to get them

to sleep. she was reading gone with the wind and lots of other things. she did take the ged. she scored in the top 10%. so she's smart enough to go to college, but she's not figured out how to go to college at all. so she thought michelle was quite lucky to be a college kid. so this is a little passage before the deployment that kind of gives you a sense of her personality. so i mentioned she had one son. she does marian have two more children and then she and her children are not getting along. after her divorce became final, desma got a job at a nearby truck stop along interstate 64. a modern-day river at go the course of the nearby ohio as a cut from east to west across

southern indiana. the truck stop is near the town for the interstate cross highway 231. then the longest north-south route in indiana. desma dropped her cousin off on the way to work. at the truckstop she learned learned how to carry a big tray with the regulars. stopping by for dinner killing time as they waited for riggs to be loaded at the mail facility down beside the ohio. other drivers a bunch ate lunch while the riggs reloaded the shiny aluminum at the facility. she also got to know the truckers to work for heartland express in indiana-based trucking company that specialized in short to medium halls. she knew the drivers better handle. bone holler carried steel. bald men worked for heartland express, scatterbrain amount budgeted repo work. the truckers appreciated the outgoing waitress with the

classic manner. you could walk in looking pretty rough and you wouldn't phase desma. desma mentioned in a cold night in november 2002. he was delivering greater ricks to truckers all over indiana, iowa, ohio. he sat down to one of the tables of the group telling jokes that got dirtier as the sky darkened. jimmy grew chagrined after spotting a plastic reset on the wrist that said what would jesus do. her son had brought it home from bible school. should we assume she was churchgoing instead they better start telling such bad jokes. with screws like a tiger and winks asked to desma. what's the jimmy? rohrer said asthma and she winked. the other truckers left until their place junk. also in afghanistan, michelle

finds herself working alongside a woman named debbie helton. debbie is 30 years her senior. debbie will become a grandmother during the deployment. she's in her early fit these while they're in afghanistan. she was really proud to help serve in the military and when she learned that she was not going to go into the afghanistan deployment, she did ultimately go. when she was told she couldn't go up first, she was devastated because she always had wanted to serve her country overseas. she wholeheartedly believed in the war in afghanistan. she didn't have the internal conflict that michelle did about whether it was a good war or not. she felt that it was a cause she

believed in and she really wanted to be with her unit. the baton and should want to be deployed without her was really devastating. she talked her way and it joins the unit when they were partway through their training and ultimately did get to go to afghanistan. so the parthenon going to read, i did read the tattered cover and i know it will be a repeat for you. i'm not sure if there are other people who also heard it. it is sort of the funniest moment in this chapter and it really gives you a sense of who she is. so what is the spring of 1988 at this particular moment in time, early in debbie's time and the 113 support battalion, which she is joining and she walks in and she's just one of a handful of women in this otherwise mail-in ira mack, very male dominated

culture. her response is that she loved it. once she walked into a late-night game of cards were a bunch of guys had been discussing the merits of various pairs and were suddenly confronted by an individual bearing them herself and were thrown into a state of confusion. debbie was awkwardness by saying she considered a certain man to be especially well hung. they looked like they were about to drop their teeth she recalled later. debbie did not have trouble discerning which men would prove accepting. some of them didn't want females. some of them only wanted to talk to her for one reason. others made a point to come up and shake her hand. welcome aboard one of these men told her. you're going to do just fine. don't worry about being a female. so she adopts their language and starts calling herself a female, to which a sake is short for a

female soldier. but anyway, that is the lingo and she's fine with that and she sits in seamlessly. she describes herself as a daddy's girl and she is really had wanted to join the regular army and was turned away at a younger age. for getting to join the national guard was a huge accomplishment. said these three very different women, different in terms of age and who they voted for her. michelle if i mentioned had voted for nader. desma burks had voted for george bush. debbie never goes because she thinks politicians are no good and she doesn't like any of them at all. deployed together. once they are in afghanistan, the differences between men don't seem as important anymore. what becomes important is more the question of what are their

personalities like and how did they get along and whether they going to make their time -- how will they use their time they are and how well they interact with each other? debbie takes michelle under her way and of mothers serve. his mother in everybody. he's especially trying to affirm. looking for a very tense testy ax murdering any super frustrated with michelle who was wiring and the wars about idea and you see him up one point make a bet with another ex-marine about whether they can turn this young woman into a good soldier. it is bound and determined that will never happen. she's trying to show her this is not the easiest way to go about things. so there they are.

in afghanistan serving on camp phoenix. the armament team, which michelle and debbie, the youngest and the oldest of the three women are both on the armament team. they are both weapons mechanics. the team runs out of american weapons to fix. they are in a support battalion. they do maintenance work. they're supporting infantry soldiers and the weapons are not breaking often enough for the armament team to really have anything to do. they're very driven men and superior, but the atf why don't they work on this really interesting project? united nations has facilitated the collection of a lot of old propionate k. 47, which are going to be repurposed and given out to afghan national army soldiers and the idea is if they

help arm the afghan national army, they can save the army money and they can help the process of building a viable army that could defend democracy in afghanistan and ideally the u.s. soldiers would be able to leave in the near future is what they're thinking. so i wanted to read a little bit about what is happening in afghanistan but these have been. there's a huge contract between michelle's idea of what it means to be working on this weapons and debbie's idea, but i would get to that after this passage. michelle and debbie worked at a methodical system for documenting the stream of ak-47s that were passing through their hands. they work on 20,000 ak-47s over the course of the year. miller turned into a soldiers they need to be able to account for everything will ak-47, but be a case for hard to identify.

michelle and debbie took over the task of deciphering the frequently wrote it are real numbers on the sides of the weapons and reporting the identity of each gun they repaired. if the team got a difficult foxtail concentrated on disassembly memory assembly and broken weapons and debbie and michelle documented the weapons after the repairs had been completed. they got a box that was easier in one patrick focus on repairing while debian michelle wrote on every symbol they could find. over time they grew fluent in the language of ak-47s. it seems to know which countries had made more reliable version and which had made versions that were more likely to be broken. the chinese models for the worst and they discarded large numbers of them. others held up astonishingly well over time. some of the guns had been manufactured in the 1950s. those weapons last forever michelle with day later. typically the size to be missing and the mechanics would replace

them. making sure would strike the ball at the trigger didn't feel right, they would replace the entire mechanism. the safety off and wasn't working. they replaced those many times michelle have old brings pop out and hit her in the face. she asked them i got her fingers caught in various parts of the gun, too. but they were not terribly hard to fix. that's the beauty of an ak-47 michelle would say later. it really sent a machine. we just got better as the year would not. you practice and then you can do it in your sleep. breathe, eat, sleep, a case. so for michelle, this is kind of a nightmare because she is worrying about every gun she works on. who's going to use it, will it, will it be an afghan soldier? will it stay in that soldier's hands? is it going to go to somebody else? who's going to get shot? is she responsible?

the sheep to blame? this is all the thoughts going through your mind. working right alongside her, this incredibly warm, affirming maternal woman who has befriended her and is helping her get through every day, debbie is thinking it is so cool to get to work on soviet weapons. i never thought it would get to do this. so the deployment to afghanistan you kind of see in the book how we should the women struggles to figure out how to get through that year away from home and what a strain it puts on man and their part nurse at home. in desma's case on her children. you see worrying about the daughter, but does get pregnant while she's away and actually has the baby before they make it

home. she gets the news that her daughter is pregnant while she's in afghanistan and that she get the news the baby is born and she still in afghanistan. when they come back, they had several years back home in indiana and you get to see them supporting each other through that return home and it's bumpy for each of them. later they will come to appreciate the first appointment was relatively easy compared to other deployments like the second one, which was much harder. the second deployment happens in 2008, two years go by from the time they get home until they get orders. at the moment of the members of the support of time get orders to deploy to iraq, michelle has just decided -- she didn't

reenlist, so she has just left the national guard and she misses the deployment by two weeks. so for two weeks, michelle is incredibly rupees am happy to leave the guard just knowing that it didn't suit her well and she didn't ever want to do a second deployment, but as soon as the rest of her battalion gets their orders, she is thinking how can i stay at home and debbie who is a grandmother and a desma was a mom with three kids have to deploy, i should be going. they should be going. there is something wrong with this and she feels guilty she doesn't go on the second deployment, which she could spare her front the experience. i'm going to close everyman little bit about the work that desma does in iraq because i think it is really remarkable to watch the evolution and the kind

of work she does. so desma is what is known as an automated logistics specialist. so she's been asked her on spam software, the military software the military uses to track maintenance on vehicles and night vision goggles and weapons so she can order parts, track where those rings are, which in the house is right now. desma is a whiz at anything technical. she can extraneous other people can't fix their she can order things via the software other people have a hard time ordering. but in iraq, she is not doing a desk job anymore. so in iraq, what the army needed was people to drive trucks. so instead of staying on the post in a relatively safe desk job -- she had done when they

were in afghanistan, while michelle and debbie were repairing weapons, desma is certain that the motor pool tracking maintenance primarily on vehicles. in the second deployment, instead she's going to be doing convoy security. she has transferred into an all-male unit. she is one of a handful of women. the ratio is not being like out of 100 individuals there's three women roughly. she is transferred into a field artillery regiment that she cannot technically belong to accept they are not acting in a field artillery capacity. they are there and support capacity will be doing convoy security. it is a second previously all-male units issue of transferring two. the first one is so hostile she requested to leave.

this when she makes lifelong friends and particularly becomes close friends with a man named josh stone record as a prison guard in western indiana. he goes by the nickname stony here. talking over the radio from a separate vehicles during missions for 12, 16 hours, they dropped into the habit of referring to each other by nicknames they found in the iraqi desert. going to refer to charity alia. desma and cherry alley, they are actually in the same trap. charity became mojo mama. stony became popular. they called the desma burke c. for, a term of endearment. the names became who they were. back in kuwait. now they were mama and.

as always an elite scout position. if he was working at orders at the wheel while angry beaver was on the radio. his job was to shoot you that he thought i to be shot and present a visual guide. the second vehicle was the assistant scout track down patapsco for short. backing stony have come a spot in any bombs he failed to notice and be ready to fire if there was an ambush. the tracks ran ahead of the rest of the supply convoy hunting for wires, boxes, mounds of trash, anything that could signify the possibility of death. charity and desma wrote in the convoy's third year goal. there were the navigation team.

desma drove all charity who's in charge of the vehicle sat beside her man in the radio. it was usually a guy they called peaches. the navigation team followed at a slight but maintained communication, even if they could no longer see them. i am going to skip forward a little bit. one day they were driving south with sons applied shocks and had just left the green zone. stony, ford and angry beaver were out front. desma and charity were two tracks behind running navigation. they had already defended out of the new mountains and were surrounded by beautiful swelling hills. desma watched the truck disappeared behind one hill and a few minutes later she saw a big part of dust. they felt the vibration first and then they heard the explosion. desma could not move or reason.

they will hear that sound of the voice. miss me mother fokker. the truck was speckled with shrapnel, but everybody inside was fine. it was ford who found a second bomb. they drove out to meet them. the second bomb made a huge white/detonated. the rest of the trip was quiet. none of the usual chatter. so i think i will stop reading and take questions and switch classes and see what parts of the book would be most interesting to talk about from your point of view. yes. you know why, there is a gentleman with a microphone.

he is going to calm. right here, yeah. i think if you talk it will be fine. >> so how did you find these women in the first place? there's kind of a quantum leap as to the process to actually find these women in order to follow them. so how did you get to the point? >> absolutely. when i was starting this project, i just began knowing that i wanted to understand more about the experience of veterans coming back from iraq and afghanistan and i interviewed a lot of people. probably two dozen individuals, men and women. i wasn't looking for this particular story.

i didn't know i wanted to write about women. i actually remember going to new york and describing this story to my editor there and also telling him about a man who would in a sniper in iraq and had come home from that experience and had kind of a transformation and started working with iraq veterans against the war. i found his journey really interesting, too and started debating which way to go. my editor very wisely said i haven't read a book about women like this one so i think that sounds really unusual to me whereas he had edited some other books about iraq and afghanistan both. he said the other story sound a little more familiar to me so you sort of steered me in this direction. i met a young woman living in

denver. so all three women served out of indiana. they served in the indiana national guard. but she had moved to denver after leaving the guard after finishing college. i really -- at our first meeting i was very struck by her. she remembered all kinds of details that not everybody would recall. she told me about journals and letters and it just seemed like there was a lot there. and she was also telling me about this friend of hers, the single mom with three kids were deployed in another woman became a grandmother. i thought that was fascinating the idea three women in three different stages of life. one with no children, one with three children and a grandmother deployed together. so then i met desma macs because

she was coming to colorado to visit family. she had some relatives here and she was stopping by to see michelle in the shell introduced us. desma met me one time and came back to colorado with her military style commend ea, all her medical records come out her therapy notes and handed everything over to me and say here is your story. so i was really taken aback i had and i couldn't make any sense out of the military record which she had explained so i could understand all the terms. she had to walk me through it all. that is really a character for desma. shall make a snap judgment about somebody right away. either somebody she was to spend time with her you're not. if she likes you she's incredibly generous. she's thinking 10 steps ahead of everybody all the time.

she could already see how is going to need this up at some point. idea of my >> i did start at the va in denver. the people at the va would not introduce me to one single veteran because of course their job is to protect veterans, not to feel them out for interviews. so i've made some friends at the va, but that is not how i found these individuals. michelle is working with a woman. her name is linda as it turns out who is taking a writing class for my friend lisa johnson is taking the same writing class. gimli says writing class i'm a linda and i met. i explained i was interviewed better is. when the sun i some people you should interview and give me a

list of people and michelle is i'm not list. that was how i found her. they were colleagues. they were working together, linda and michelle. >> did you travel to these countries? >> i did not. i did not. i thought about it a lot. i got all the paperwork i would need to go to afghanistan. we were already out of the rack at the point i began traveling and it was not necessarily going to be a great idea to go there. afghanistan was still possible, but the situation was really deteriorating. i am a mom. my son is here tonight and so i chose not to go, which was hard for me to make that decision because previously i've always gone where i thought i needed to go. i thought i should go as a mom,

so i didn't. i did read a lot. there's a holistic books in the acknowledgment. the forever war is an amazing book about afghanistan. it's written by somebody who was there, who's deployed there and come back. i read you know when the men are gone. i would've for sure brad no man's for. then i read a lot of books about the two wars and the narrative of the wars themselves. those books are all listed in there, too.

the good soldiers who said unbelievable book about infantry soldiers in iraq. by a guy who writes for the "washington post." he actually spent eight months in iraq reporting the book it is unbelievable. so i was relying on photographs and news stories and novels photographs that these women to a military stay wrote to people and marathon interview session instead. idea of my [inaudible]

i found that these women were the veterans who really wanted to talk to me, who open up the mouse. i am looking for people who want to open out. maybe i have an easier report with women when i am interviewing. i don't know. the men that i interviewed who were coming back, i just don't think is the right person for them to talk to. my sense was they were going to share their story with me in a way that would need the full story where they would make themselves former bull. i think they felt like i had to really have a stiff upper lip and not her talk about things that were difficult or hard. so it didn't feel to me that it was going to be a really good use of anybody's time.

so i do think that it's not an accident that both books have multiple female yours in the end. i think i really like the way female friendships are central to both books. this book really, more than any thing it is about the relationships between these three women and how their friendships, you know, survive various other relationships that, go because they can't sustain romantic just throughout the deployment they are doing. i think having multiple characters i really like because it gives you these different vantage points on a subject. i don't think there is one truth, so i don't think anyone of these women has the right perspective on the wars or the right answer to things. i think another different points of view is fascinating. sometimes they think they

learned a lot from each other, too, and they come to respect each other and unfold. maybe that is how i would answer that question. bmg and the woman behind eng have questions in the back. >> i gave this book to them in manuscript form. so they had really shared more than i was even expecting them to share about their personal lives. they had given me of letters that were incredibly intimate. they had given me diaries. so first of all it wanted to be sure they understood all the material was going in the book and that they are comfortable with that. but also, i mean, i am a civilian and i wasn't in iraq or afghanistan. i really needed them to look

over my shoulder and see if this was correct in their opinion. did i get the story right as far as they were concerned? so it is not an authorized graffiti. if they didn't like something that the power to strike it from the manuscript. in fact, because it is a work of journalism, my publisher required i get these letters from them saying i understand you are sharing this manuscript with me, but you have control and will decide what is in it. in the end what they were accountable with, none of them was uncomfortable with anything about themselves that they had shared, big daddy was uncomfortable with something she had shared about her daughter, which he felt was too revealing and her daughter would he have said. the show was uncomfortable with something that pertain to one of her boyfriends and wanted that removes.

there is nothing they were uncomfortable with that i kept in. so everything they felt uncomfortable with wes about somebody who was more of a minor character that they were trying to protect. so we did made changes after i heard back from them. you now, they shared aloud. ec debbie read a lot -- on the military opposed overseas, and their alcohol been disproven. you see her writing in her diary that she wants a cocktail in the evening and she figures out how to have one. you also see her become dependent on having that cocktail regularly and then you see her write a little bit as she races she could find another form of release because maybe this is becoming too much of a habit. and i didn't know how she would

think about all that material being in the book. but she just was -- she says, you know, i might have an issue they are and i think my own opinion is as long as i can hold a job and i'm not hurting other people it is my business and it's okay. so she didn't mind that was in the book. she didn't object to it, which i thought was really brave of her because she's nick and herself extremely vulnerable. but she also said that she knows those are issues a lot of veterans deal with and so she wanted to share her story fully so other people would realize they are not alone with whatever they are grappling with in dealing with. >> t. have time for one more question? >> okay.

>> once that is done i ask you all don't rush forward and get your books signed, but rather go back and past history, past science-fiction and up to the desk and she will sign your book. >> hi. i am so interested in what the women are doing now. can you tell us anything about what they are doing, how they are doing and if they are still friends? >> i think the question was you are interested in what the women are doing now and if they are still friends what they are doing and how they are doing, right? so they are very much still friends. i actually think what motivation for working on this book project for them was to get to spend a lot of time together again. they have become so close. so michelle as i mentioned last the national guard in 2007.

debbie retired after she came home around. she was 59 and never supposed to be another deployment coming in the next year or two. she didn't want to deploy in her 60s but it left a huge hole in her heart. she had been in the guard for 20 years give or take at this point and it was, she described going to look at her calendar and wondered what her true weekend was that she would remember i am not drilling any more. so she really, really missed it. desma, her last day in uniform was about a week ago, a week a half ago. very recent. she got a medical retirement, which is still facing in. once debbie retired in the shotgun, the three worked together much anymore.

working on this book gave them a reason to get together and i think that was like this ancillary benefit them were one of the reasons they enjoyed doing this. they -- they are really motivated by kind of wanting to explain to two different ideas is, to a civilian audience what the deployments were like because they felt the mate came home people didn't understand what they have lived through, but they also felt they had each had struggles that were hard and desma in particular comes back with an industry on trade injury and posttraumatic stress disorder and they want veterans who are dealing with those issues to understand they are not alone and other people of similar struggles. those were there to meditations.

favor with me together at one event were they choose to speak. that was really wonderful. michelle, i don't know how to talk about what michelle is doing in her life without giving away some key developments in the book. she is in graduate school right now. and doing really well. you kind of see towards the end of the book her finding her calling thanks to that appointment in afghanistan that she thought she didn't want to go on, but now she looks on as a meaningful experience. so she is still opposed to the eight s-sierra of the war, but she feels her time in afghanistan to send and she values. debbie, you know for her, the afghanistan deployment was just no holds by the highlight of her as a civilian to life had meaning by comparison and she is

actually spending a lot of her time volunteering at the vfw these days for she is working as a bartender and hanging out with mostly vietnam and world war ii at this point. so desma d.c. has a job on a military base, which is a member of the national guard she's able to hold it now that she's transitioning out, not wearing a uniform anymore, she is a two month when you were she could hold the job. so she will be looking for another job. she won't go to keep working on that job on the base and she's no longer a member of the military. so she's very much in transition right at this moment. the she's so good with technology she heard he has a friend recruiting her to come market is tech