trying to make sense of his life. he got back home divorced, broke, he didn't really have anywhere to go, no family that was supportive of him or sort of willing to understand the circumstances he'd been through. and he started having terrible nightmares about his dead can friends coming back. -- dead friends coming back. they were in his bedroom at night, and he said he was followed around by a figure called the black thing. and what brought me to this soldier, his name is caleb daniels, started with an article i read about a man named sergeant brian rand who, basically, killed an iraqi, and the iraqi was in his room at night, and they were talking. at least that's what he was telling his sister, these stories about this ghost. and so i was really interested in this dialogue that was happening and trying to understand traumatic memory and, you know, if we think of a

traumatic memory as sort of one that can't be fully assimilated by the mind and that happens over and over again and that follows you and haunts you, and that's coming from a past that's difficult and painful, then what does that mean to still inhabit the present when it's sort of fully taken over by the past? and going off what ken said just about a refusal to understand, i think that's a really important word and a word i kept running into over and over again when i was reading about ptsd and learning more about its history. and it's pretty much a history of our refusal to accept many things; capacity for violence, capacity for evil, our willingness to understand difficult circumstances, the fact that war can be, you know, purposeless at times. the symbolic value and the glory we give to it might not be, you

know, may not fully follow through for homecoming always. and how to make sense of that discrepancy. and caleb was interesting because he sort of refused to accept traditional definitions of post-traumatic stress which, you know, is sort of a difficult history to follow anyway because the terms are changing year after year in the dsm. so we're constantly revising our understanding of what it is anyway. but i think i what's -- i think what's most important is to understand it is a very normal reaction, a very normal, you know, part of the human condition and that as civilians or as a society we don't tend to give, you know,ptsd that kind of space. and so part of my sort of attempt in this book is to sort of close that civilian divide and try to inhabit someone who

is still living in a might mare. and caleb, you know, is certainly not, you know, a representative example necessarily at all, but he's, you know, someone that was in afghanistan and came back and wasn't able to fully, you know, be part of the world again. and i think one of my main interests became really like the language we used to make sense of trauma, too, and sort of the words we can use to conceal or sort of cloak meaning with language and then what happens when that is undone. and so the it's a narrative that we were -- if the narrative we were giving to ptsd weren't working for this guy, so it was his attempt to redefine what was happening to him. and i was going to read a quick section to start. i might read another one if there's time.

so this is the first time i met caleb. caleb told me a story about his ex-wife, allison. while he was deployed, their dog got pregnant and miscarried. the miscarried puppies were in a pile on the floor, and allison had to call him in iraq to ask what to do. finish he told her to put the dead dogs in the trash, but she wouldn't do it. when he got home, he found them everywhere, rotten solid. that's the kind of shit i had to come home to, he said. we were at mi casa, a mexican strip mall eating cheese that here thats and drinking cokes out of plastic cups. his hands folded into its curves, the white clean existence his skin. against his skin. in the army, his nickname was dapper dan because no matter what the conditions after

combat, after his helmet had been in his head for days in the middle eastern heat, his hair was always immaculate, brushed and molded finely with his favorite gel. he served in iraq two months, afghanistan four years. he was a machine gunner for the 160th special operations aviation regiment, one of the army's most elite and well trained units. on june 28, 2005, his entire aviation crew, eight men, died in a chinook helicopter crash on a rescue mission in the kunar province of eastern afghanistan. caleb wasn't on the flight because his superior, trey ponder, kicked him off for no other reason than he wanted to fly that day. caleb was back at the base listening to the radio when the chopper was gunned down and everyone burned alive. when i asked caleb about his missions, he formed his copenhagen snuff into a fine ball and told me he didn't want to talk about special forces or ragheads or saddam, he didn't

want to talk about his buddy who got his skull blown off or about fluffy, the cat he peeled and ate dead off the side of the road. he wanted to talk about the day his entire unit died. have you heard their falling, burning voices from an empty room, how his ex-wife called him a murderer and made him take out the trash. he wanted to talk about how all of it was still there every day, the blood in his mouth, the screaming of his dead buddies. he wanted to talk about after the war. when i got home three years ago, he said, i had this thing come visit me in the middle of the night, and you could hear it coming down the hallway. caleb stood up in the booth, hunched his shoulders and started walking apishly in place. a few customers turn their heads. this thing, he told me, a big, dark figure, opened my door. it was so tall, it had to lean

down to get its head through, and in this really deep voice it said i will kill you if you proceed. it almost sounded like it wanted an answer back from me, and i started laughing at this thing and said you've got to be face fucking me. caleb finished his coke and spit his chew into the empty cup. but it came back every night. one time i'm sitting in my room, it walks in and shuts the door, comes after me. i'm physically choking. my dead buddy comes in and wrestles it off me. it chokes him too. kip was taking punishment for me, so i'm watching this, and full time freaking out. freaking out. punishment for what, i asked. for killing, he said, and for living. the air conditioner groaned and strings of dust swirled in the grated air. caleb turned sideways and rested his legs on the booth. i asked if he'd ever gone to the

v.a. for help, and he said he waited in line for two days and came home chewing painkillers. 140 vets are dead every week because of shit like this, he said, and the v.a. doesn't do anything. i dug an article out of my purse about 26-year-old sergeant brian rand who shot himself after being followed night after night by the ghost of the iraqi man he'd killed. brian had been stationed at a checkpoint in fallujah with his buddy, chris. the guys were board, not much happening that day until a white van started coming up the road towards them, picking up speed. brian turned to chris and asked him what he thought they should do. chris replied, shoot him, i guess, and so brian shot him. the dead iraqi man visited brian in north carolina. he came mostly at night. he choked brian while he slept. he demanded that brian apologize for the killing. and when brian said i'm sorry, the dead man wouldn't listen. he said, no, brian, you need to join me.

caleb read the article slowly, scrunched it into a ball and threw it at me. this is the same thing that visited me, he said. everything from how it's talking to him, to how his friends think he's talking to himself to how he thinks he needs to die. i've heard this story thousands of time. it's no different than mine. so you don't think hallucinations are part of ptsd, i said? caleb switched the chew from one side of his mouth to the other. he looked at the waitress. i know this is going to sound crazy to you, he said, but this isn't ptsd. so i was a little bit shocked by his story and wasn't expecting him to sort of have -- he didn't tell me that he believed that ptsd was, as he slowly reveals to me, caused by demons instead of anything going on in the brain or psychology. and so i followed him to a town

called portal, georgia, and he was bringing -- starting a program where he was trying to bring veterans through a deliverance or exorcisms to try to get their demons out from the war. so i hung out there for a while, and it was really interesting to look at how it was really helping caleb and others and looking at sort of how similar the language was they were using for psychology and for religion. trauma can transfer, and they talk about the demons transferring from one person to the other. and so in the book i end up, you know, sort of immersing in this group and trying to get as close as i can to caleb's psychology. you know, a lot of it, a lot of the book's free academic language, it sort of reads like a novel, it's very descriptive and a lot of dialogue between caleb and i where we talk about, you know, his belief system and how he's coming to terms with

his past. and in the end, it's a belief system where he continues to fight, and it's not sort of, you know, a quick solution, just sort of makes sense, so he doesn't actually ever recover, he just continues to fight these apparitions every day. so i'll stop there. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. those are two tough acts to follow. to any service members or veterans in the room, i want to say welcome home, and to any military family members in the room, i want to say thank you for your service. my name is kayla williams. i enlisted in the army back in 2000, and in that year it didn't seem terribly likely that i would go to war. i mean, i had read the fine print, i understood that armies went to war, but it just didn't seem likely that i would go to war. i joined for a lot of reasons, like most people. yes, i wanted to serve my country, but i was also looking

for money to go on to graduate school, i wasn'ted the g.i. bill. i'd grown up were poor, so i felt the country had invested in me, and i wanted to repay that. so i was also looking to get out of the rut that i had carefully dug for myself. i wanted a challenge, and i was looking for a way to develop some emotional self-control. i thought maybe i could get that in basic training because i'd cried at work a few times, doesn't really help you with professional success. i figured a drill sergeant screaming in my face would teach me. that worked, by the way. so i chose to become a linguist. i thought it was really cool that the military was willing to pay me to learn a foreign language, and it was random computer-generated number that a i ended up being assigned arabic as opposed to, say, korean or chinese. and -- chinese. and i was in monterey, california, on 9/11. it was immediately apparent that my military career was going to be very different than i might have otherwise imagined. it was no longer a question of

whether or not i would go to war, just when and where. i was assigned to the 101st airborne division which is just up the road and took part of the initial invasion of iraq in 2003. this was in the era of you go to the war with the army you have, so as a woman who by regulation was barred from direct ground combat arms jobs or units, the expectation was that i would not necessarily need the same level of protection that some of my infantry comrades might need, so i was not issued plates for my flak vest. but we also did not have nearly enough arabic language speakers, and so i ended up going out on combat foot patrols with infantry in baghdad with no plates in my flak vest which was, in retrospect, the most rewarding thing i did in my military career. i got to see how the infantry did their job. i was trained to do signals intelligence, you call up reports on the enemy communications that, hopefully,

you've intercepted. and you may not get any feedback on whether or not it did any good, whether or not you made a difference. but going out and translating for infantrymen in baghdad, i knew right away that i was making a difference. i was able to translate between local people and my fellow soldiers, and i could see the immediate impact of me being good at my job or bad at my job as the case may be. and it was very rewarding. it was dangerous, and there were some traumatic experiences, but it was something that i felt i could feel very proud of. we pushed farther north from baghdad up to mosul and beyond, you may have heard of that in the news lately. things haven't been going so well. and out to sinjar mountain where i lived among the yazidis and got to spend a lot of time with the locals in the middle of nowhere on the side of a mountain. i was one of about an

eight-person listening post/observation post, and i was the only woman for months at a time. we later moved to another site on the same mountain where i was the only woman still with 20 or 30 men. at that point we had a lot more down time than during major combat operations, and tensions kind of rose on people at that point. the brigade i was with had come back from afghanistan not long before we turned around and went to iraq, so a lot of them had been -- this was their second deployment for many of them or some even their third if they'd been to bosnia or kosovo before that. so for some of them it was starting to wear on them, maybe dealing with trauma from afghanistan that they had never processed, but we weren't yet talking about those things that early back in 2003. while i was out there i met another young soldier, tall, handsome, staff sergeant. he was funny and smart and

witty, sarcastic. it was his third deployment, and he was angry in a lot of ways, but he was a soldier's soldier, a kind of soldier that finish the kind of nco that junior enlisted soldiers respected and officers mistrusted. and i was immediately drawn to him. but it was iraq. it's not like we could go out clubbing or anything. we couldn't go out to a nice dinner. at one point i confessed to him i really want to get to know you better someday. and he said, don't worry, there's plenty of time for that when we get home. and a couple months later, the convoy he was on coming back from leave was hit by one of the first insurgent attacks. it took small arms fire and rpg fire and was hit by an ied or roadside bomb, and shrapnel from the roadside bomb entered the back of his skull and exited near his right eye. we were told not to expect him to live. he was medically evacuated by helicopter down to baghdad where he had neurosurgery, from there

evacuated back to -- [inaudible] after about three days they cautiously upgraded the assessment and said he would probably survive, but not to expect much. he was then evacuated back to walter reed army medical center in the united states. my team got tossed around a lot and eventually i was moved off the mountain down to mosul which was great in some ways. we had flush toilets, pretty exciting after many, many months without running water. and access to the internet, and that was pretty great, being able to actually use e-mail. at the same time, the insurgents were mortaring us all the time. up on the side of the mountain, the yazidis loved us and wanted us to stay forever. they built our fighting positions for us which felt bizarre and not quite right. while i was in mosul, i got an e-mail from brian saying, hey, i wanted you to know that i survived and looks like everything is okay. i didn't know anything about brain injuries. he sends me an e-mail saying he's going to be fine.

so we struck up this very cautious flirtation, and he was released from walter reed and sent back to fort campbell around the same time that the rest of the division got back from the middle east. we started dating at that point. i got a block of, block leave, a whole month of vacation, and we just hung out all the time. if there were hints that he had psychological or cognitive problems, i was either too drunk to notice them or willfully ignored them. and it wasn't until i went back to work that i started to notice that things were wrong. i had to start training to go back to war if we were to redeploy. i had to start doing pt again, and his unit did not make him start coming back to work. he still couldn't wear his head gear because the wound was too fresh, and the army's really big on people wearing their hats outside. he couldn't carry a weapon because he was developing ptsd.

he couldn't do his job anymore, and his chain of command said you're bringing the new guys down. the guys who have just shown up from training, you're freaking them out about what might happen to them, so why don't you just stay home. so he just stayed home and self-medicated with jack daniel's which is not an effective treatment for ptsd, in case you were curious. i'm going to read a brief excerpt of what some of that time was like for us. you want to watch a movie, i asked? i brought over this french film. brian shrugged. i guess. i don't really like foreign movies, they're boring. this one's different, i said. i'll make popcorn. 20 minutes into it, he turned off the television. what's the matter, i asked, disappointed. i can't, he said, then paused. sighed. started again. i can't follow what's going on. i can't read the subtitles and watch the action. it's frustrating. he downed his beer, opened another one immediately. and that book you lent me that you wanted me to read, i can't

keep track of who the characters are. every time i put it down, the next time i open it up, i have to reread the previous chapter. it's driving me crazy. he got up and starts pacing the room, lit a cigarette. what the fuck am i supposed to do? i can't even read this book. i read "war and peace" before we deployed. because i got blown up i can't pay my bills, i can't do my job. i was going to make a career of the army, now what? i'm broke and i'm fucked up. he opened the door and threw his empty beer bottle into the dumpster still in miss front yard. you're not broken, i was sure the cognitive deficits were temporary and would heal the way a broken bone would, knitting back together over time. we just had to be patient. he pushed me away. you don't understand. you'll never understand. i don't even know who i am anymore. i'm not what i used to be. my head, it doesn't work right anymore. i have a god damn brain injury, and i can't do anything anymore.

he punched the wall. i have no fucking future, none. my heart ached for him. we can have a future together, i offered. get the fuck out, he said. what, i asked, astonished. i don't want to see you, i don't want to talk to you. brian was yelling. he took a deep draw from the bottle of whiskey. just leave me the fuck alone. shaken and confused, i left. as i drove home, my heart pounded and my mind raced. this is my fault, my fault. i tried to get him to watch a stupid foreign movie. it's hard for lots of people to manage subtitles. i should have known. he has a brain injury. we'll be okay. i tried calling him. he wouldn't answer. tried again. he'd turned off his phone. i didn't hear from him for two days. then he called as if nothing had happened. you want to go get something to eat? i tried to be calm. what the fuck, man. look, sometimes i just get really angry. sometimes i need my space.

well, can't you just tell me instead of screaming at me and then refusing to talk to me? maybe. next time i feel it coming on, i'll tell you code black, and you'll know to just give me some time. i could sometimes see it coming. usually it happened when he was drinking heavily. i started to get nervous every time he switched from beer to liquor. his expressive face would harden into an angry mask. invariably he said you don't understand, shutting me out. sometimes i could still reach him, find a way to get past the wall and convince him to soften again. but more often than not once brian hit that point, there was no turning back. he would be oblivious to my pain, indifferent to my tears, lost in his own rage and suffering, headed for a code black meltdown followed by days of isolation. so in the first half of the book, i talk about this downward spiral that we went on where

every bad thing fed on every other. so because of the ptsd he couldn't sleep, and i don't know about you, i but when i don't get any sleep, my brain doesn't work as well. so the lack of sleep hurt his cognitive function. the worsened cognitive function made him more depressed about the lack of future that he saw shrinking in front of him which made him drink more which made him angrier which made him lose his them her -- temper more, so it just got worse and worse and worse until eventually we hit a real rock bottom. and then i detail our slow climb back upwards as we were able eventually and gradually to reverse that spiral and have good things build on good things. he started working again after he'd been finally medically retired, got some treatment, and we were able to very slowly form a community of our fellow veterannings and find some meaning in the suffering that we

had experienced in trying to improve things for those continuing to come home after us. and very slowly and gradually we were able to find that there is a flip to post-traumatic stress disorder which is post-traumatic growth, that not despite, but because of our traumatic experiences we were able to feel a deeper level of connection to our fellow man, a deeper sense of responsibility to our country and to continue serving our communities in new ways. and the message that i really hope to convey to people is that with the right services and supports that all of us as citizens have an obligation to provide for those who have been severely wounded physically or mentally by the wars, we have an obligation to provide those supports, to help them on that journey home. but it can be navigated for most people. there can be a new normal where you can continue to serve your

community, you can continue to have fulfilling relationships and find that way home. and i also want to share with fellow caregivers a word i hadn't even heard of until i'd been one for several years, that it's okay to not be perfect. i had this feeling that even when brian was being a real asshole, that i wasn't allowed to be angry at him. he's a war hero. how can you be angry at a war hero? and it took a long time for me to realize that it was okay for me to have a lot of complicated and sometimes ugly emotions about what was going on. what mattered was what i did. what mattered was my ability to stay with him and support him while caring for myself. because if i didn't take care of myself, i would have burned out and not be there to support him either. and i also want to commune candidate that there are resources that help both for service members, for veterans and for military family members.

and for post people ptsd is a treatable condition. it isn't easy for people to find something that works for them. i know a lot of people who have said, oh, i went to a psychiatrist, and they gave me meds, and i didn't like the way they felt, so i never went back. if you bought toothpaste and hated the flavor, would you quit brushing your teeth forever or try a new flavor? if you have not clicked with a psychiatrist, try a psychologist. try equine therapy. i'm not sure i would suggest exorcism, but keep searching until you find a treatment modality or a support system that helps you be able to live a functional and fulfilling life. thank you all very much for coming. [applause] are you our moderator? all right. we have a moderator. and i'll warn you all if you don't ask questions, i have back-up topics. >> hey, guys. hi. i'm zachary bell.

i'm an outreach specialist here in town. amazing group of people. wow. it's just all different -- like, when i got all the books, everything was sent to me this past week. i started to go through it and try to learn more about all of this, and i myself as a marine corps veteran actively tried to, like, reassess and constantly dig and try and make this puddle of the man that i am into an ocean. and i'm somewhere between a pond and a lake, i think, most days. so i was trying to reassess and find these things out, but all these perspectives and these different stories have just been amazing, so i just wanted to thank all of you for doing that. but, yeah. so i've got a few questions here, we're going to open it up as well, and there's also going to be a signing immediately following. but i was going to start here with kenneth. why did you want to do this?

like, what made you, for instance, like me, i've been in the marines, i've been to afghanistan twice. i'm anxious to help veterans because, i mean, i fall into that category. what about you? >> well, thanks for those kind words and for that question. so i finished undergrad in spring of 2001 knowing that i wanted to go to grad school, knowing that i was -- knowing that i was interested in social science and anthropology, knowing that i was really interested in these questions about war and violence. and then, you know, six months later 9/11 -- or five, four months later 9/11 happened, and the entire, the entire sort of public discourse, everything that everyone was talking about was trauma and devastation and war.

and what both of those things should mean for all of us as a country. and there was, and there was so much sort of packed into a lot of what people were saying that there was -- but there was really not a lot of room to talk about what does it mean to actually go to war, what's the nature of doing this work, what are the effects that it has on the people, on the people who do it, on the people who live in the places where it's being done, what does can it -- what are the, you know, what are the consequences down the road, what is the relationship of civilians, of citizens to military service and war? and i have my own strong feelings about this, but so much of what frustrated me was just the challenge of finding language to say something that wasn't already being said, that didn't already seem completely, completely obvious or just sort of fall to one side or another

of really, really contentious and difficult public debates that were going on. and at the same time, i'd also been spending some time reading military memoir and biographies and journalistic accounts, and i started a couple years later i started to read some of the first, the first generation of memoirs that came from the wars in iraq and afghanistan including kayla's first book, including a lot of other really excellent literature that a sort of came from this first generation of contemporary war memoirs and reporters and just started to have this sense of the activities that war actually consists of are often, often bare of strange, of stranger or sort of -- i can't find the word. they often don't relate in any

sort of direct way to the things that we tend to talk about war as being about. .. so, that was the spirit in which i did this on and it's something

that i still find myself thinking about a lot but thanks for the question. >> i hear that question mark especially since i have a military background. and i mentioned before reading some articles and being interested in trying to understand that and it's also around the time in the newspapers starting to release reports about the suicide epidemic among soldiers. a kid killed himself not far from where i was living so i felt strangely complicit and yet having no power to understand what was going on, you know for the people that were walking around me so not able to understand their background or their pain or why this was happening. and i guess i would define if i have to categorize as we so

often do, i would say this is a book like sa. when i say that i just mean going back to the word to try. a series of attempts to emphasize his life is different though my own and i think one thing that frustrates me in the world generally generally is when we are dismissive of other people's realities and our ow own -- but her own experience and reality on a pedestal and i thought you know what reality is so easy to dismiss but what if we try to take it to heart and try to understand what are the operations and embodiments of what they are representing. there's no way to really say it. i'm not moving from one hallucination to another throughout my whole life where reality is necessarily the wrong one. i think we can also kind of see that disparity happening when we

look at soldiers corpses. people get angry but if we really look at the complicated world that existed prior to that moment most likely you'd be able to. a moment of empathy in the chaos and lack of sleep. all of that can contribute to moments where the morals we apply to our world and the world over there i think is very complicated and too easily categorized as understood in a way that is black-and-white. so i wanted to get a really nuanced look at a mind that was experiencing, and interiority. one thing i say in my book is once we label ptsd it's sort of gives us permission to dismiss it because we feel like we are the understand it. oh here's a label. we love nice boxes. really the experiences are so

varied that i'm not sure everyone fits in those neat categories all the time. and so trying to break up that box and leave room for experiences and push away some of the language that's out there that might be actually limiting our understanding of human beings that have gone through difficult experiences in war. >> when i came home from iraq, i felt invisible as a woman that. we would go out, groups of us would go out to get beers and somebody would buy the guys around the free beers because they had just gotten back from the poor and they literally meant the guys. they assumed that the women who showed up were just wives or girlfriends or hangers on. people don't look at me and think combat veteran. so i wrote my first book to try to show a little bit more port it means to be a woman in today's military. i did not want jessica lynch and libby england to be the only women that most people could

think up when i heard about a woman soldier and i wanted to give more nuance and depth to it. but i had written terrible poetry when i was in high school and i didn't quite understand that writing a book in letting it be published would mean i'd have to talk about in public with people with journalists saying what's it like to watch someone bleed to death on live television. i was not emotionally prepared for that and that was a challenging experience for me. and so when i reached the point where i knew that i wanted to tell my husband story and our family story of that journey from war trauma to healing i knew i had to wait. so i had processed processed what i'd been through instead of trying to process it by writing it in the middle of it. i wanted to be able to pull back and see the arc of his recovery and put things in a bigger context. so i waited a lot longer to write the second book compared to when the first one came out and i'm glad that i did. the other thing i think it's interesting you both touched on that gap between what civilians

understand in and what they don't and still who is on a panel of ripe for this one, he wrote an essay and i think "the new york times" that really struck me about the failure of imagination that relates to what we think of as the civil military divide. it really struck me to read that because so many people have said to me i just can't imagine what you went through. i just can't imagine going to war. i can't imagine that and i'm like you and i we go see the movie avatar. we imagine blue aliens. we are willing to emotionally put ourselves there. we are willing to watch cartoo cartoons, we are willing to imagine that but we aren't willing to imagine what it's like to be a soldier and go to war anymore. why is that? as servicemembers and is veteran somehow we expect that. we let people say i can imagine what that's like and where like

nope, you can't. you have to have been there and that's a failure on our part too. i think i'm trying to do my part to say here is what it was like and i would like civilians to take it and to try to put themselves there and have the willingness to imagine. >> yeah you will touched on something i felt so fascinating is very rarely just bubbles of empathy and that's what able to find briefly in the smallest amount of time. it's just that it's fascinating to me like you said veterans as a culture we are our own worst enemy. like you said you can imagine. we keep everyone at arms

distance and when they start coming, no, no you were not there and yet we don't understand why people don't understand us. so it tends to go around and around and around. but also to say that the circumstances you talk about with a good friend of mine, robert and it's just that you are not just joe the family guy over there and that's the disconnect trying to understand where the rubber meets the road but when you pull the veil back you have to understand that it's really messed up and it's unjustifiable. so i guess one of the questions i would like to ask people is what do you feel, if you describe it i have my own definition of that. people say it's like the scarlet letter and it's a badge of honor.

it's a true sense of enlightenment because i know what it takes to be able to live in the worst and best side of humanity and i'm very blessed by it. >> if you could define it from what you have seen with families and soldiers and stuff but would you put onto it? >> i will start my answer with a philosophical qualification which is that so there's this philosopher of science who writes about the history of mental illness and one of the things, so he has this great wine he's writing about the different disorder about multiple personality disorder where he says you know people ask if this diagnosis is real or if this condition is real and when people ask is a thing real, one of the important follow-up

questions is well a real what? real according to holmes, real for home, real in what ways? so in that sense like i would never, i would never argue that ptsd is not real. it is a name. it's a diagnosis that's encoded in dsm dsm. something described by a set of experiences. it is a label that a lot of people use to understand their experiences. it's a label that a lot of health care providers use to understand the experiences of their patients as a label that families used to understand the experiences of their loved one. it's a diagnosis that's because of its peculiar history if you get it gives you access to certain kinds of treatment and benefits that you would not have access to if you are diagnosed with a similar disorder that is not as easily linked to military service or exposure to violence.

so all of those things, all of those things make ptsd real and very particular kinds of ways. and so one of the ways that it was originally described in the third edition of dsm which was the first time it was formalized as a psychiatric diagnosis and early 1980s was to sort of paraphrase the wording in the diagnosis as a normal reaction to extreme circumstances. and i think there's a tremendous amount of value in describing dramatic post-traumatic stress in that way. there is a lot of language of normalcy that people invoke when they i talk about post-traumatic stress to be able to say that yes, to feel these particular

ways after going through difficult experiences as normal. at the same time that can help people. it can be very reassuring. it can normalize their experiences and they can remove the -- from their experiences but at the same time the meat not seem normal to people around you and so just to sort of label something normal or not normal it's easy to forget that demands a whole lot of other work that has to follow very much along the lines of what kayla was describing a moment ago. and so, and i guess one last thing i will say about it is that because of how we tend to think about mental illness diagnoses in the contemporary u.s. there are sort of this notion that either you have something or you don't and especially with something like ptsd which is post-traumatic

stress which in many ways and for many folks is regarded as a normal response to extreme circumstances but a response that many people may not suffer. ptsd is a disorder version of that normal stress and the threshold at which it becomes disordered has been changed multiple times over the last 30 years. people don't look whether it changes with the people around them. and so there's this way of being attentive, of being attentive and imaginative and apathetic to people's experience as the dynamism and complexity of that experience i think is also, that's actually maybe an invitation that ptsd gives us that we may not realize that we are receiving. because it sounds straightforward. it sounds transparent and it sounds authority of medicine and

it could potentially be an opportunity to constitute an explanation in itself. and so one of the things that i think when you look at folks actually experiences what you find is the opposite of that, but that label is the middle of something or the beginning of something rather than the end of something. so i will stop my answer. >> that was perfect. he said something about a ptsd space. what exactly did you mean by that? >> it has to do with this idea of giving a space to imagine and empathize with soldiers coming home with ptsd but also more literally space. after homecoming there is just sort of, i was doing a little bit of research into other cultures and how they respond to the soldiers and quite a few have -- not for example in mozambique they have soldiers go

away from the village for many weeks and if they killed someone or did something that has been bothering them and giving them flashbacks or nightmares they have to re-enact that a event over and over again. they are not separate from now. they are in dialogue with it and interacting with the soldiers experience. so it doesn't seem like americans of allow for that kind of transition or even want to really have it. it's more of a let's go back back to the sum public celebration of heroism that we sent you off with when you get home. so i don't think there's space space for mourning in this culture at all. i think we have a problem with being said and i think it's ok okay. i really clung to this definition that ken was talking about that is a very normal life experience to an abnormal

extraordinary event. unfortunately we could say war is always happening so as part of our, certainly part of my entire adult life now and you know it's a foreign war. so somehow i'm going to have to take that step to engage more thoroughly but yeah ptsd is whatever the dsm wanted to be on a more technical level. health insurance you know cultural taboos play a part in the definition. jonathan shea has a new definition, moral injury which i could talk about a little more which is sort of looking at it as an intrusion into civilian life based on actions that would be considered immoral on the ground here. so yeah it's a question of if you decided definition they

could break apart and you would have to go to another definition so it's slippery. >> yeah, he talked about the caregiver -- caregivers in the narrow sense of feeling that it's just for the guys and is quite liberal but i always say my job was simple. it really was. i just walked around in a circle in afghanistan. i didn't -- bin laden are anything but no one ever trained were told were taught how to wait for three months for a phonecall or giving birth to two children were all the while thinking she may be a widow. and if it's a character trait of pure honest trade of love and caring is the fact that there are so many people who are able to love people like me who don't

love themselves anymore and it's hard. i don't understand. at any given point i would have been upset. as someone who has been through that, i felt it was just a real hidden part of the military culture, spouses and kids and everyone. >> yeah. so military women who are married, half are married to other servicemembers. it's a shockingly high percentage and so for me i had my transition, my reintegration from iraq, i went from a war zone to america which was weird and then i got out of the army and went from being a sergeant to being a civilian and went from being a soldier to being a spouse and that was weird.

the first time i went to the pf with my salmon i.d. card instead of my white cat i felt this obligation to tell the people checking i.d.s that i was at that. i was in the army before, like they care. like the ridiculous sibling would care that i was in the army. i remember that time of transition and it took me a long time to find my way as a military self. i never felt connected to the military community and that was tough for me. didn't feel like i had anything in common with them because i have been to war. when i got home and i saw these stickers on cars at the commissary parking lot that said army wife, toughest job in the army, i wanted to keep their cars. nobody's shooting at you. it can't be that hard. i was not empathetic at all. you have free health insurance compared to how many other

americans and if you have a family readiness group that's here just for you i had known that before them at all until way down the road until probably have my own kids. my husband had become a volunteer firefighter getting back to the community and he gave gone from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.. i'm here with two kids under age two and there are women who do this for a year or 15 months. okay, yeah i'm developing empathy for them. it took time for that for me to develop that. i also, i wonder sometimes about whether my own military service helped or hurt us as a couple. in some ways i think having been in the army part of the reason i stayed during the worst parts the worst part of brian's recovery was because of the warrior ethos and that ingrained in you message of leave no fallen comrade behind. if he had been wanted on the

battlefield just because we were on the homefront i felt i can't leave him in the death of his injury but at the same time i was imbued with that message of there's plenty of time when you are dead. i didn't ask for help when i should have because i was so full of that mentality myself and i wonder if i have been a civilian what i have broken sooner and said please help us we cannot do this on our own which complicates it as well. but it wasn't actually until calm and this is so weird and embarrassing to admit but it wasn't until i had been home from the war for probably eight years, then married, had two children and when i was in iraq i lived with just the constant day-to-day knowledge that i could die at any moment and i didn't care. it did not bother me.

everybody dies. what are you so upset about especially if you believe in heaven. shouldn't you be actively excited about this? i did not understand. its death, we all die, deal with it. when my kids, they are 18 months apart so one time my son was two and my daughter was six months old. they were playing with each other and they were being really sweet. he was tickling her and she was laughing and it hit me, i'll calm by god when i die and never get to see that megan and i freaked out. it wasn't until that moment eight years after i came home but i suddenly realized that i don't want to die. that was a shocking realization that it took you eight years before i was open to that level of feeling and that level of empathy and that level of connection to my spouse, to a man that i chose to marry but i still wouldn't have that all the way.

so i feel like i still don't fully understand what it's like to be a military spouse who has never served and never goes through that closing off point who is always that open and use for somebody who comes home close to. i think that's got to be incredibly difficult challenge. >> thank you so much for that. that was amazing. so i just want to ask another question. we are also going to have a signing afterwards. if you could say and this is for all of you, if you could, what was the one thing that you gained the most from this in the sense that just giving someone a the time of day just to be heard. it's also another problem that we have feeling marginalized as a whole and it's tough to be able to find a way to stand out in the crowd and to be an

individual and not just a voice for others. >> that's a tough one but i guess your comment makes me think that one of the things that was the most rewarding and incredible to me about doing this project was what people's willingness to share their experiences and sometimes in the really intense ways and sometimes with minimal preamble, to sit down with someone with a tape recorder and my list of questions and say okay well the first question i really like to ask is tell me about your service in iraq and that is where just about everyone i was talking to have been. they would start talking and

wouldn't stop talking for two hours. and to know that, to know that i was, to know that i was being trusted with stories that people felt like were worth sharing and that was something that thinking about all these problems of apathy and communication and representation, like you know it takes, it seems like it takes a lot of trust. it takes a lot of showing up. it takes a lot of willingness just to sort of you know, to open your mouth and tell a really difficult or complicated or intense or violent or awful story that means something to you but that you may not know what it's going to look like or

sound like to the other person on the other end. so actually that's a big part of where my original sentiments that jen and cable have also expressed in other ways, the sense that there is this artificially constructed divide. the fact that so many folks that i talked to were even as they might have claimed, even as they might have asserted the existence of that divide were willing to share these intense and difficult stories with someone who didn't share that experience and who they trusted to do right with the stories. and so i think that also strongly informed by science of what is possible and hopefully

why it's important and why it matters to people. >> i have so many different answers to that question but a couple of things. first it made me really to stress language and that it changes culture to culture and changes every generation and tracking that history really helped me sort of undo some of the stereotypes and narratives that we are relying on today to understand war and american foreign policy and psychiatric studies. so that was really wonderful and here is someone who you know, who dropped out of high school. he didn't care about any of that language anyway and to hear him talk about it in such a raw manner whatever language was available to him was really beautiful and poetic and it seemed to make sense of the

world. i really like giving someone a chance to speak and show me the world as opposed to relying on others people's language to construct the world. and in the terms of this question representing suffering which is other people, there's a constant question that comes up when you are writing about grief from other people. one thing that got me early on when i have this reaction is well, your trauma is the same as my trauma. he didn't try to put this experience on a hierarchy of grief. he was trying to close that divide right away. he didn't label it as a civilian military divide. he was kind of saying you can understand this easily etc. so i really like that invitation to his world and trying to sort of write about experiences like the military atrocity, anything that

is outside the normal relative experience in making it not just about the topic but about how humans react to violence or love and grief and all these human emotions and trying to create a portrait that was nuanced enough to transcend the topic. and that was really fulfilling to me as a writer to try to fully envision him as a human being on the page and not just sort of a cliché in that language. >> for me i have gotten e-mails from people saying i read your book or heard your interview on the radio and i'm going for mental health treatment. that for me has been the most rewarding thing about this book. >> yes sir.

>> i came in a little bit late and i missed your presentation but i'm interested in what you have had to say. i came enduring jennifer's. i have tremendous respect for all of you for the work you do and have done to put a human face on what war does to people and i think i'm coming from a little different perspective. i'm a vietnam veteran. i'm a member of an organization called veterans for peace. you may or may not be aware of it but i have met a lot of iraqi veterans of that organization although we tend to be overly represented by old folks like me. but i just want to say our

perspective is really that we can't allow ourselves to say war is normal and that's acceptable. no one knows better than a veteran what the cost of war really is. unfortunately we have a country where that's 1% of the population at this point that i've experienced it. our mission is really to educate the american people are ultimately accountable for sending you guys wherever you went and for people to understand it. we have to find alternatives to wars as an instrument of our national policy. if anyone is interested in learning more about the organization veterans for peace you can google it and get our web site.

he just wanted to let people know that there are veterans who are i think finding some healing in trying to prevent their kids from having to live through what they have lived through. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> we have a few more minutes if anyone has any more questions. >> very quickly, air force that vietnam, the father of a daughter who spent eight years in the navy who is married to a marine who is currently in baghdad working as a contractor. some of this sounds familiar. i myself write civil war history and i'm just wondering, all of you folks, knowing what you know and have found out all that you have found out in the experience do you ever look back a little bit and begin to think hey i

kind of understand now some of these people that go back to vietnam and world war ii and all the way back to the civil war. we have had a whole of people that came out of that war. they didn't know what to call it. because this kind of informed your view of what you thought you knew about history? >> jennifer mentioned jonathan shea and his books have been very important for me and helping me to contextualize trauma. he wrote achilles in vietnam

exploring post-traumatic stress through the lens of american soldiers experiences in vietnam and with homecoming and similarly exploring those together and showing very clearly that what we now call ptsd existed back then. i have seen the persians put it on and you see clearly the trauma at war is something we have always experienced that we didn't label it for a long time. that's important to me partly because i have heard from some people like what's wrong with your generation and all these guys came back from world war ii. they were just fine and they were not fine. it was like don't bother dad while he is sitting in his chair with his whiskey. they weren't fine. we just didn't talk about it and vietnam vets had to fight so hard to get recognized even though yeah after the civil war

and george carlin did a great bit talking about there was shellshocked in world war i and it was battle fatigue and world war ii and they talked about how it in the beginning you could picture what i caused. shell shock, like a shell goes off and it shocks you and it gets more and more clinical and tele sounds like something may have happened to a vehicle and it's a really terrific fit. learning more about it in historical terms helping both understand my own family's experience better understand history a little better and the challenges for people who were not allowed to talk about this. my dad wrote to my great uncle when i came home and was having trouble in my great uncle wrote back and said oh my god i had no idea but i have ptsd. reading about what your daughter is going good now i know what's wrong with me. he never talked about as i think it's helpful for everyone to be able to ground this in a circle in a global context and see there are different ways to

conceive of how to come back for more in time and space. >> i would just add to that both the cross-cultural element and one of the things that is striking to me in thinking about this in historical terms is the way that, the way that these efforts do individually and collectively negotiate and deal with the intense and potentially devastating experiences of war, is that something that is perennial and widespread? somehow, and i think it's historian ben shepard who make some version of this argument who says every time i go to war

we actually are surprised by the fact this happened and in a way going back to the previous gentleman's comment the way th that, we imagine war as though it is always the same thing every time it happens when in fact the circumstances that give rise to it and people who are participating in it the circumstances under which it happened the diagnoses that we apply to it to make sense of it, all of those things give us stories to tell about what people's experiences mean when they come through to the other side. those stories can potentially be tremendously productive and useful and healing and they can also be tremendously restrictive or confining or even stigmatizing or damaging. and so just trying to sort of be attentive and giving particular

names to things conveys all sorts of meaning on its own. and so it's worth thinking carefully and often critically about what the names are that we want to give to particular experiences and what stories they do and don't help us tell but thanks for that question. >> i thank all of you for coming and thank you so much for the panel. it's been amazing. [applause] >> they will be signing books immediately after. thank you all so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations]

>> thank you for attending this session. >> wait for the mic. >> good afternoon everyone. thanks for coming to the southern festival of books and i'm glad to be hosting this session exploring the impact of inequality. we have three great offers on the panel which i will introduce in just a minute. before we begin the session just some housekeeping duties. the session is scheduled to end at 5:00 so we will wrap the session a few minutes before then. after the session is over all of the books, although the authors will sign the books. the books will be for sale in the book sales area. a portion of every book sold directly benefits as great festival so i encourage you to

do that and come and get your book signed by the author by the authors but as far as the format will introduce each other to start the session with some questions about the current books and how they became interested in the topic. we want the session to be as interactive as possible and we encourage you to ask questions. their mics on both sides of the room so at any time if you have a question please feel free to give up -- come up and come to the microphone and give a question. first, i will briefly introduce the offers and we will get to the questions. here are my left is alice goffman an assistant professor at the university of wisconsin-madison. her new book on the run fugitive like an american city investigates the war on drugs has had on one philadelphia community she calls sixth street. after 40 years the war on drugs

has done little to prevent drug from being sold or used but it has created a little-known surveillance state and america's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. alice spent six years living in the sixth street neighborhood and focuses on an unforgettable task of young african-american men caught up in the threat of surveillance and warrants. next we have chris tomlinson who is the author of tomlinson hill. as the great great grandson of texas slaveholders award-winning journalist chris tomlinson wanted to find out what crimes his ancestors had committed to maintain their power and privilege. in his new book tomlinson hill he writes about the slaveowning part of his family history. he also writes about the slaves who kept the thomason -- tomlinson name after they were freed and traces their family

tree. chris tomlinson is a columnist for "the houston chronicle" in a fifth generation texan. he spent 14 years as a foreign correspondent with the "associated press" covering africa, the middle east and south asia. he's has reported nine conflicts raging from the end of apartheid in south africa post-genocide rwanda fighting in somalia and afghanistan and iraq. and then we have dr. ellen griffith spears who teaches environmental history and interdisciplinary nick which program and the department of american studies at the university of alabama. earning a ph.d. in american studies from emory university her research focuses on environmental and civil rights history as a u.s. spouse in a global context with the emphasis on social studies and science technology and environmental public health. she has spoken on these themes

around the u.s. and internationally and has authored numerous articles and essays including contributions in the american south in the global world emerging msn society negotiating the public health agenda and where we stand voices of southern dissent. her book, baptized in pcb, race pollution injustice in an all-american town has received the arthur j. -- price and public health history from the american public health association. thank you all three authors for attending the session today. i just want to start first to give each one of you an overview of your book and how you became interested in the subject and the research process so we will start with alice in the corner. >> thank you so much for moderating. hi everybody. how are you doing?

up until the 1970s the u.s. had a stable incarceration rate very flat and in 1970 it started climbing up and leveling off in the 2007 extremely high rate. we now present five times more people per-capita than we did four years ago. seven to nine times more than any western european nation, more than china. only the forced labor camps under stalin and the former ussr have approached these levels of penal confinement. so the book that i wrote i guess it's an underground look at look at america's prison boom and i think for many people in this country it affects many citizens not at all. many citizens don't even realize that is happening because this is a pretty targeted effort in

the african-american neighborhoods in poor neighborhoods white neighborhoods and latino neighborhoods but particularly african-american neighborhoods. so when i was a freshman in college i got a job working at the cafeteria on campus where i was in college at the university of pennsylvania and then i started tutoring the grandchildren of my boss at the cafeteria who was an african-american woman in her 60s who lived in a mixed african-american neighborhood near the university and then i you show one of the young women i was tutoring introduced me to her cousin ronnie ... come home from a juvenile detention center and from ronnie, run he introduced me to mike who was his older cousin and mike and i became friends. a few weeks after mike and i met his uncle's house which was the

last known address was raided by the police and they said he was wanted on a shooting charge. mike mike had not done any shooting to his knowledge but he now had a warrant out for his arrest for a shooting charge, very serious charge. he lived on the run for a number of weeks until he scrape the money together to pay a lawyer and then he turned himself in. then he was in the county jail and after a couple of weeks i started to visit him in the county jail. that was the first time i'd ever been to a jail. he was thrown and a whole which is solitary confinement and that his relatives but the money together to make his bail. then he came home with this case hanging over his head. he had to go to court every month. so i started going to the court dates with him and the first

court date he had was in this local courthouse in the neighborhood. as we walked in he shared a cigarette with a guy standing outside outside who we happen to know when i thought that's funny he happen to know a guy standing outside. then when we walked in he created half of the men and there he knew them from the neighborhood and i started to realize what was happening. the other young men in the courtroom that day weren't there just for violent charges. they would therefore unpaid court fees and probation and parole violations like failure to pass an alcohol test or make curfew. they weren't in school. they were sitting in court. at the time i didn't know about the prison raid and that we were incarcerating 6% of african-american young men who

aren't graduating from high school. i had no idea as a sophomore in college and a white woman coming from a very middle-class background. that point i asked mike if i could write about his life for what was then my senior thesis. he said yeah great. i spent the next six years living in that neighborhood and getting to know his friends and relatives and writing this book. >> i was about seven years old in dallas texas and i knew school busing was about to begin. dallas was finally going to desegregate their schools. i'm not that old. i was about 1972 or 73 and i became very well aware of race. then my grandfather said to me, our family once held slaves and

they loved us so much they took tomlinson as their last name. even then i thought wow, that's a great story. there are black tomlinson's and their white tomlinson sent me come from the same place, the same slave plantation called of course, to the hill. now like most southerners i grew up with this idea of aristocra aristocracy, that being the descendent of slaveholders meant that we were upper-class and we were in the same ilk as scarlett o'hara and rhett butler and this made us, this made us special and southern culture and we would go to school and think chico that would reinforce that idea and a -- even more. now i didn't come from means. my father drilled holes and

bowling for a living and we lived in a horrible apartment and we were on the poor side of town. but, that's why i think i grasped onto this idea of this great southern heritage to somehow make me feel better about where i was in the world. and it wasn't until i was a journalist in south africa in 1993 covering township violence and then i went on to watch nelson mandela be sworn into office. they had something called the truth and records -- reconciliation where suddenly you have had these perpetrators of white privilege and apartheid sitting in the same room in front of a mixed race panel justifying their actions. you have the victims up there in the same room in the same place having that same conversation saying what they had seen in the south. i thought wow this is very

powerful because even desmond tutu, the archbishop, knew that we could throw people in jail and we could throw them into prison for the crimes against humanity for the things they had done during apartheid. but that wasn't going to solve the larger societal problem of coming together and have some sort of community. i also covered the end of the genocide in rwanda and i lived in rwanda for two and a half years. i watch them struggle with this problem of defamation where 10% of the population was eliminated through genocide. and again i visited the prisons. there were a million people in prison in a prison system that was only 209,000 people and the conditions were horrible. why we could keep these people in jail and prison for murder,

that rwanda have the death penalty but you can't execute a million people. we have to have the new process and it needs to be truth and reconciliation. they set up the good court system where again we have perpetrators and victims sitting together in the same place confronting their past and that's when i realized we had never done that in this country. we talk about race every day. race is a big part of our lives to think about. but we don't think about how we got here. we haven't had a reckoning of what did our ancestors know and what did they do. what can we hold them responsible for? i knew i knew when i came home from africa in 2007 that there was no such thing as a

slaveholder and that is a revolutionary thought for still a lot of people with my background living in the south. so tomlinson hill -- "tomlinson hill" tries to have that reckoning. i follow to families of to families comments and one white woman black from the slave days to the present days where my contemporaries the most successful tomlinson of all names ladainian who made a lot of money and gathered a lot of fame as a football player for the san diego chargers. so that's what i try to do is look at what happens, why it happens, what people did and what they knew and have that accounting of my family history. so that's "tomlinson hill." >> "baptized in pcbs" examines these questions of race, place and inequality from the standpoint of alabama were

chemical contamination fell squarely on the african-american neighborhoods and surrounded the town's chemical plants. people may know and as the dust is starkly in the civil rights movement and the site of the fire bombing of the bus. but aniston was also the place where for nearly 40 years the chemical company, the monsanto chemical company made pcbs or poly-chlorinated biphenyls hence the title "baptized in pcbs." local people who lived in the neighborhood come african-americans who lived east and north of the plant and the working-class whites who lived south into the west were subject to what one health expert testified at an outrageously high body burden of pcbs that they carried in their blood.

so i decided to write this book for two reasons. one is i was working at the time initially for the civil rights research institute in atlanta, the southern regional council and i was interested in historically how these inequalities were produced. a lot of people were doing cross sectional maps looking at the distribution of pollution, showing the cross-section in time. i was interested in how did this come to be? aniston was known in its founding in the post-civil war south as the model city of the new south and it was an industrial utopia characterized. so how did it become to call than 2002 by 60 minutes a toxic town usa? how did this conceivably have

been? the other reason i wrote the book is that i met the people locally who were involved in this fight. as you can imagine when people find out. it turns out that the producing companies, monsanto chemical and its corporate partners had known since 1937, they were told by the dean at the harvard school of public health that these chemicals that they were producing cause possible systemic toxic effects. several of the workers had broken out in severe acne. one of the companies using these chemicals and their processes, three workers had died. that's when they called in the research to figure out what was going on. so if the chemical company knew as early as 1937 and if the world really new in 1966 when a researcher working in sweden

identified pcbs as pervasive persistent and toxic, then why did it take until the 1990s that the people who were living near this plant came to find out? so i've met the local people who were involved, people like cassandra roberts who was the leader of the sweet valley cop town environmental task force. cassandra had grown up in sweet valley and when she learned that the area was so polluted that several dozen families were going to need to be immediately relocated as she said to me, that's one i went to fighting. i also met -- actually her granddaddy worked at the plant of the 1930s. she was come to the plant gate

and on the way home holding his hand and she wondered if that simple act contributed to the pcb body burden that she carried in her body. and in 2003, 2002 and 2003, people may have heard of this. there was an enormous settlement. folks locally took monsanto to court and won $600 billion, very successful litigation. it was an enormous victory by any account. oprah said to me afterwards money wonk lead to our health. she said that we are left with is contaminated houses, contaminated bodies, contaminated soil with no cure. and so those were the compelling reasons that led me to want to tell this account. health studies have since shown

that anniston residents, you know we all carry a little bit of pcb in our bodies around the globe. it's really a global problem that we are dealing with, global ecological problem. i was in massachusetts at a meeting. rick harper has been closed since 1983 because of pcb contamination and they are doing remediation but it won't reopen for the foreseeable future. it's a richer source of livelihood for people in that area. this whole meeting focused on pcbs and schools. researchers are now finding places from new york city to the california coast pcbs were not only is an electrical insulating equipment, that was their manias but they are also found in building called and so high levels of pcbs were found in

the school buildings and parents were trying to figure out what can we do. this is not a remote problem. it's not something back in history, something that we need to be thinking about and dealing with now. pcbs were associated with a wide range, actually 209 chemicals associated with a wide array of problems from immune disorders to severe acne to liver disease to fx and developing children. and the international agency for research found recently declared that pcbs because of their association with melanoma are a chemical of top concern for cancer. epa rates them as a top carcinogen.

so those are the compelling reasons why i chose to write this story. >> to various degrees all of you are outsiders to pcbs. you didn't necessarily live in an inner-city neighborhood and ellen you didn't live in aniston are corrupt in this community and chris even though it was your family history there's a whole side of it the black, and sends that you had no connection with. how did you get people to open up to you? you were a stranger coming in asking questions. these are painful memories for some people or embarrassing stories. how do you establish that relationship and connection for them to open up in trust you to tell the story?

>> i don't know what trust can exist in a caste society like we have today. i really don't know. i think you have to be fooling yourself to think that you can create that kind of trust when you're on the other side of that line. so i guess that would be my short answer. people had all kinds of stories about what i was doing in the neighborhood. even when, first it was my senior thesis. it was very collaborative in a lot of ways. i wrote notes all the time and when i was roommates with mike and chuck who are the main characters in the book through college they would just look at my notes.

they would be open on my laptop and they would be like oh yeah he really did get everything that has happened or you miss that thing or that's not what i said or this kind of thing. i also got a lot of help in writing particularly from reggie who is chuck's. a lot of the book is about the taylor family. a family of three brothers and their mom and grandfather and reggie the middle son, when he was locked up. he was locked up from 11 to 26 and he would come home for a few months and then go back. he was in juvenile attempt -- detention the county jail. when he was locked up he would talk about writing all the time so his big advice to me about the book was don't make it boring. my life is interesting. my life is really interesting. don't make it a boring academic

thing that people don't want to read. don't do that to me so i think anybody who reads it outside of the sociologists that is read -- readable, if it is. >> well i can say that going to foss county texas where my family's plantation was, i mean i didn't visit, to "the hill" until i was 42 years old. and it was only slightly more difficult than interviewing a force to. i'm glad i did the picking first because it made this a lot easier. because i mean i'm a journalist. i have spent 25 years walking up to people and saying tell me your story. the fact that my last name matched the african-americans that i was reaching out to added

a new and exciting difficult dimension. i think primarily because you know i will be honest with you. the african-americans who are still in false county who knew some of my cousins before they died were a lot easier to talk to then say ladainian or his brother and sister lavar and landry because they had none quite tomlinson. they were intimately aware of where their background came from and it was something they were far more comfortable talking about than the younger generation who had moved away when they were in middle school who had never met a white tomlinson. so actually lavar in ladainian were the last two people interviewed for the book. because as they explained it o one, they didn't want to really

talk about how their father was a drug addict into cup they didn't know if i was neo-confederate looking to glorify my family history and somehow justify it by claiming them as friends. and third and what i found most interesting is they didn't want to know what their ancestors had suffered. i mean levoir is like i don't want to know if your ancestors cut off my ancestors feed for running away. i don't want to know if one of my ancestors was, or lynched or something bad happen to them. and i think on the white side of the family people don't want to know that my great-grandfather lynched people. so breaking through that just in time. it took six years of reporting and writing and reaching out and

frankly sharing information with them about their families that they didn't know. and as a reporter generally i know that the most important thing i can do is to be honest about my intentions and authentic about who i am. i'm not going to roll up to their house playing rap music out of my windows because that's not what i do every day so that's not what i'm going to do outside of lavar's apartment. i think that is how i earn that trust. >> i started interviewing for this book in 2003 while the trials, two of the major trials were still ongoing. i anticipated this. i didn't know how much people would want to talk to me. i was aware of the racial dynamics that people might not want to tell me the whole story of what had happened.

i think were anticipated reticence is i found people very forthcoming because it was at a moment where people were wanting to say i don't want this to happen to any other community. if telling my story can keep this from happening anywhere else i'm happy to talk to you. i also didn't know how the book would be received. when i went to spring after it came out, not sure how local people would respond. i guess the most satisfying comment that i received from anyone about the book was saying he told it just like it was. to me, that's really high praise. there will be things that peop people, there are always more stories to tell but i felt it

was an extraordinary opportunity and privilege that people trusted me enough to share. i think they were thinking about the larger picture. they were thinking about other people to be only two places in the country to produce these chemicals. there is not going to be too many other communities that are exactly the same way but they were aware of people in false river wisconsin and people in new york state. i was just up on lake superior with the newly identified pcb plant there, a power plant so there are local people all over the place. it's wonderful that they were willing to talk and to share and to make the story not an academic account of environmental injustice but the real personal account.

>> if you haven't read any of the books yet all three books involve an incredible amount of research. the reference reference section in the back there are a lot of notes and references for that. a lot of time and commitment. i guess i learned a little bit more about the process of writing the book in the research and how long it took you. how do you keep all of this organized over such a long time? i can imagine how you kept everything structured to be able to write the book. >> well to 31 boxes that are in my basement are still there. my husband says you know al and they don't have to have a the library of congress method of saving things. but, it was difficult because there are so many different

facets to the story. it's not just personal interviews. it's for health studies. there are more than 18,000 health studies of pcbs of which i read only a small fraction. there are 7000 pages of court documents at least and so just the sheer challenge. you will see in the credits i had a lot of help from some wonderful graduate students and others who helped keep that all organized. i was also standing on the shoulders of people who went before me in the field and all of us have done that i'm sure, people who had looked into the aspects of the story and experts and historians who were kind to share their experiences. >> for me, i didn't want to write a genealogy book and what

i wanted to do was talk about race in the united states. i wanted to talk about this lack of understanding of our shared past and to shine a light on it. so in that way, two families are a vehicle to talk about something much larger. so i had two systems basically. i knew i was going to write the book chronologically so i would have one file that is the family file. on this date this happened and these are the quotes that i gathered along the way. i mean there's a documentary film that goes with my book also called "tomlinson hill" are we equal yet to that concentrates on present-day marlin texas which is the nearest community to the family plantation. and so many of the interviews were videotaped and some are audio recorded. all of them were transcribed. all of them were used to build

this chronological masterfile telling a story of these two families. on the other hand we have this american history community history files of the idea ideas to weave three things together, the two families and the greater things that were happening in society that were impacting the two families. and in that way you can see how the jim crow laws in the legislature immediately impacted benson tomlinson ladainian's great-grandfather and his ability to go to school and his ability to have economic powers to stop sharecropping and start a new business, which he couldn't because the system was stacked against him. we can talk about the segregation of the schools and fighting desegregation of schools while my father is going to one of the nicest elementary schools in dallas and ladainian's father is going to school in a one-room sharecroppers shaq that has an

outhouse and no electricity. that is how i did my structure. and it was a combination of a lot of intense archival work. sometimes driving up to marlin texas from my home in austin, it's about an hour away and seeing who i ran into on the sidewalk and the stories they wanted to tell me. >> i'm so privileged to be on a panel with you both. to me, when i was coming into this work, the reading that i had done about the prison boom and mass incarceration with the idea that you start off free. you go to prison and you come home with a felony conviction and that automatically reduces your chances in the world.

so you can't get housing. you can't get education funding. you lose your right to vote in a lot of states. you are massively discriminated against in the labor market particularly if you are african-american. so it was this idea of prison that removes people from the community, saddles people with a criminal record and returns people home. what i was seeing in this neighborhood was this much less understood or written about policing and surveillance. in the first year and a half i was there i would search people and run people's names for warrants, conduct body searches, chase people through the streets every day just in the four block radius. 15 times in the first 18 months i saw the police punch stomp on

choke young men after they had caught them. young men were living with probation parole pending court cases to what it was was this kind of counterpoint for incarceration this neighborhood side and ultimately what i came to was that this is a fugitive existence. people are worried at any moment they will go outside or just in our house and they will be beaten in the streets. so one of the problems in terms of the notes and doing the research was everything i was writing i was worried that would put people at risk. so from the young men that i was spending most of the time with and their girlfriends one of the things the police do to roundup, they have is a rest-based quota system police in many places where what becomes an indication of a great performance for the

place was how many arrests they have made. one of the things they do to round up enough people to make their stats would turn to mothers and girlfriends and sisters to provide information, kind of a creation of informants on a large scale. so i was worried that the police would find my notes, would find more reasons to arrest people and you to use the information against people because this is what they would do routinely. also the pseudonyms that changed every couple of weeks and then all kinds of protections and i had everything on one laptop. when i was interrogated by the police or stop by the police i never told them that i was a researcher. they called me whatever names they were going to call me. i didn't say like hey i'm a ph.d. student.

so there was that and then before the book came out i destroyed thousands and thousands of pages of notes because i was so worried the police or prosecutor would calm and try to use them in court. i actually just did a talk where some people from city hall in philadelphia came and i was terrified. i really didn't know what they were going to say and their attitude was kind of like one gentleman said i don't dispute any of the facts in this book but let me tell you what we are doing to change things. so to me that was like really? the paranoia went down a little bit after that. but yeah you want to be writing about major moral issues of the

day. you are writing about people who are legally precarious but don't really have a right to their own freedom in this country. it becomes very ethically challenging. >> if i could play off what you are saying because i made a commitment that i was going to treat everyone the same white, black, living, dead. some of the black common sense to have criminal records. they got caught up in what you are talking about in waco texas, the small town of waco. >> is a continuation of everything you are writing about. equality in this country after slavery and jim crow. >> exactly. there is a correlation between the civil rights act of 1950 -- 1965 in the war on drugs and the effort to put african-americans in prison or placed them in a

position where they are going to be economically inferior position where they have to do labor that we need to have done that we don't want to do ourselves. it was very hard for me because levoir is like i really wish you hadn't been there my felony conviction for assault when i beat up that guy who grabs my girlfriend inappropriately at a party. i was like well it's public record. i've got to be honest about everything that has happened and this is an important part of the story. at least i could tell him that just about everyone in my family on the white side of the family is unhappy about what i said to them too. i'm an equal opportunity offender but it struck me and i just wanted to add that. >> you are talking about the common themes in this book and when i first saw the combination that these books were about very

different topics i think there really is a common threat of violence that runs through all of them. that is the brutality of plantation slavery and its fruits. the violence of the war on crime in the war on drugs and in this book i relied on a concept from a literary scholar actually rob nixon who talks about slow violence and i think pollution is a form of small violence. it's another way in which communities of color and low-income communities have violence done to their physical bodies. people now carry with them this kind of toxic knowledge that they have within their bodies within their blood and tissues. they have chemical exposure that has been linked on a societal scale and on a population basis with a whole variety of

potential illness and they don't know how that's going to play out in their own lives. i think that is where the violence concept is a very powerful one and there's a linking threat with all of that. >> is really interesting that you talk about putting things in the book that people don't necessarily want you to put in. i think sociology and journali journalism, it will be interesting to talk about the differences but for me i didn't want to put in anything that people didn't want in their and ie then t. identify the police officers and that they would be protected just as much as the people on the side i was on. but some people, so mike was best friends with alex who had a drug charge when he was younger and came home and worked for his

dad's heating and air-conditioning repair store and was working a steady job and had a son. when i first talked to him about the book he was extremely suspicious that made and didn't want to be in it. he was basically don't know anything about this and you have no right to be writing about this. i said okay. i won't be in either field notes. we can still hang out but you won't be in the notes. that was our understanding. years later when it was much closer to being done he called me and said i just heard i'm not in the book. [laughter] and i was like don't you remember 17 years ago, don't you remember five and half years ago we had this whole conversation he was like what do you mean? i've got so many things that can be in the book. so he's like oh my -- you are going to be on the first page i will be right there so the book

opens with the story of alex. it's this night where chuck and i are shooting dice on the wall at an elementary school. mike and i go to get cheesecakes and alex walks home by foot and gets pistol whipped by a guy who mistakes him for his brother. then because he has a couple of weeks left on parole he refuses to go to the hospital because one of the major places in philadelphia where you can get arrested so he breaks his jaw and we spent many hours in my apartment waiting for someone to come with medical expertise. he refused to go to the hospital and he was determined to finish parole. that's the opening of the book now. if this ongoing story. >> again if anyone has any questions feel free to come to the microphone and asked them at

any time during the session. otherwise we will be back for questions. >> alice i don't know when this book was published but michelle alexander's book the new jim crow mass incarceration and a era of colorblindness, you know my age and skin color i was totally unaware of what you experienced with their african-american friends. but it certainly opened my eyes to what we were totally unaware of and i look forward to reading your book. i would like to have the personal stories to go along with the statistical intellectual analysis of the book. but if anyone here in the audience has not read either

alice's booker michelle alexander's book i encourage you to read it because it is eye-opening as to what is happening in a large part of a society that we as white people have no idea what's going on. thank you very much for your book and the other two authors for being here. i look forward to it also. i heard your book tomlinson hill being interviewed and it's very good. >> after 40 years of growth we are in this exciting moment of criminal justice reform where the president and the attorney general have come out very strongly on racial disparities and incarceration have been pushing sentencing reform. california has propositioned 40 7-up in november that basically takes a lot of felony convictions and turns them into misdemeanors.

.. lucky to be in that conversation. i'm grateful to. he i want to say that. >> i wanted to ask ellen real quick, did the $600 million settlement do any good? >> well, this was in the two

largest or multiple lawsuits, toxic tort lawsuits, nuisance suits against monsanto and the corporate partners. the 600 million was split between two of the major lawsuits. the lawyers had contracts that gave them 40% of that amount, which was the subject of no small consternation, and there have been demonstrations and such at the lawyers' offices in one cases there were 18,000 plaintiffs and that meant that the individual average was $7,725 per person. that many people got more, most people got less. that is not enough to start a new mortgage for an elderly person who needs to move from their home. and so there was -- people hoped the settlement would allow this