[inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/booktv or a comment on our facebook page facebook.com/booktv. rory fanning a former army ranger who served with pat tillman in afghanistan and left the army as a conscientious objector a few days after tillman's death, sits down with anand gopal author of "no good men among the living" about the afghan war through the eyes of the afghan people. it's about an hour ten. >> okay everyone thanks for coming.

my name is jason i work with haymarket books. i have the privilege of -- [inaudible] for these gentlemen -- [inaudible] like to take the opportunity to thank everybody for coming and introduce the event a little bit. we've had a number of events like this, and there'll a few more, and they've all been really exciting to be a part of and i just want to say a few things about why i think events like these are so important particularly today. you know, it strikes me just you know, walking through the world how lonely it can be and isolating it can be to be an anti-war activist. there's an anti-war movement out there, it's certainly receded away from vision. it's harder to see. any sort of organized action. and what we're left with is, you know is the mainstream media that to the extent they have any debates on any of the wars that we're currently engaged in, it's usually someone who is pro-war on one side debating someone who is pro-war on the other side, and the content is how to best

execute u.s. empire and not whether we should be or not. so it can often feel like we're sort of alone thinking about these things and feeling crazy because maybe no one else shares those opinions. and so it's been really exciting for me to see these two -- the reception to the work of these two gentlemen has been in different ways really kind of exciting. for instance anand's work has been debated in "the new york times," for instance, where people are certainly engaged and a whole bunch of other publications, but it was recently short listed for the national book award which was a huge distinction that put him up on a national stage and those arguments that we don't otherwise get to hear. rory fanning recently wrote a number of columns around veterans day for time-dispatch and for the guardian which were shared up yards of 12-19,000 -- upwards of 12-19,000 times. it's exciting that while at the moment the level of anti-war activism is not matching the

level of anti-war sentiment right now, there are people who are sort of bringing these arguments, keeping them alive, bringing them out from place to place, and it's really kind of a pleasure to read these books after so many years of sort of silence. particularly tonight i'm reminded of, you know the additional way in which kind of talking about afghanistan can be particularly isolating. even when there was an anti-war movement, at the height -- [inaudible] afghanistan is a good war and that's where we're bringing freedom to. we can't really talk about that, and, you know, on an evening in which we're awaiting to find out whether an indictment is going to come down in ferguson which seems to my mind, at least, highly unlikely it seems highly suspect that the u.s. is bringing democracy anywhere. so it's important we can be talking about the reality of afghanistan both in terms of the impact it has on the actual people who live there which was brought to life brilliantly in

the book "no good men among the living," and actually -- [inaudible] in worth fighting for and essentially refused to serve any more claimed conscientious objector status which he'll talk about in his portion. he was also served in the same unit as pat tillman, and after he was killed walked across the country to raise money and awareness for the pat tillman foundation. the book is full of stories about his decision and the aftermath, the journey across. anand gopal covered afghanistan for a number of outlets including the "wall street journal." the book that he's produced represents just years and dozens and dozens of interviews. it's really several stories but for the first time actually the stories are of the people who are occupied in afghanistan and brings to life the different aspect of the u.s. occupation in ways that make it clear what we're doing there is far from bringing freedom. it's really a huge privilege to

be able to introduce these two men. i think anand will go first, and then we'll hear from rory, and then we'll open it up for questions, and i look forward to the discussion. thank you all for coming out, and -- [inaudible] anand gopal. >> thank you so much. privilege to be here in what is, i guess, my favorite bookstore in new york city. i've been coming here for years so it's really great to come and speak in front of all of you. i went to afghanistan for the first time in 2008 and at time that i went -- [inaudible] one of the questions they asked me why afghanistan -- [inaudible] and what i found since coming back since coming back people have still asked me that question, why afghanistan? and it really struck me as a strange question to ask because our country was at war there. maybe also because i had tunnel vision since i was focused so much on the country to the exclusion of everything else. but what i want to do today is

two things. one is to try to impart upon you why i think afghanistan is really important and something that we should all care about and, two is to set the stage for rory fanning whose incredible book i admire and whose courage i i really aspire to. but first on the question of why afghanistan, afghanistan today has been at war for 35 years. so that's longer than i've been alive, and it's probably longer than most afghans have been alive. so just on a human level the suffering that is ongoing in afghanistan is something that we should pay attention to. not just that, also the fact that our government has been complicit not since 2001, but since 1979 when the war started in a way in this violence is something i think a lot of americans don't know and need to know about. so that's on a human level. on a moral level why i think we should care about afghanistan, but we should also care about

afghanistan because afghanistan in many ways was the or is the laboratory for the way the u.s. prosecutes wars around the world. so i'll give you a few examples. drone strikes, the reliance on special forces to the exclusion of other types of forces, the reliance on private security contractors, the use of massive proxy armies. all of that is the way u.s. militarism works today, and that's pretty much the default way the u.s. militarism works. all of that was tried and tested first in afghanistan before it was exported else where to iraq to yemen, to somalia, to dozens of countries around the world. and so afghanistan occupies a very special place in the war on terror. and, you know, that's sort of why, one of the reasons why i was so interested when i got there first in 2008. when i got there, i was knew to journal -- new to journalism. i was a freelancer, and so --

[inaudible] you'd have a press conference from some military general or some afghan official, and they would come and they would tell you, they'd give you a rundown of what was happening out on the countryside. i was living in kabul, in the capital city, which was relatively safe. the war was taking place out in the countryside, and they would say today 25 terrorists were killed 35 insurgents were killed and we would be left to take this information down and report it. the reason was because it was dangerous or difficult to get out into these areas where the fighting was taking place. so i very quickly got frustrated with this. not just me, all of us got frustrated with this, you know with this means of getting information. and so at one point i decided to grow out my beard and get a motorcycle get -- [inaudible] learn the language and hit the road go down south into the countryside where the war was being fought to see if i could actually get at the war get at the people who were caught in it

in a way i couldn't back in kabul. so i spent months going from one village to the next. i relied on the hospitality of tribal elders. sometimes i would just show up and say, hey, i'm here and, you know, people would take me in, and i would say there for weeks on end and go to another village. and i had many memorable moments throughout the process but there was one village in particular which still sticks out in my mind. this is in the southern province of kandahar, and when i rode into this village in some ways it was like every other village because it was mud-built houses, one-room shops goats wandering around. but there was something different about this village which as i looked around, there were no grown-ups. there were no adults, there were only children. so there was a pushcart vendor, he was probably 10 or 11 years old, there was somebody selling juice, 12-year-old boy. everywhere i went, they were only children. and i thought at the time this is like, you know the lord of the flies but on the frontier.

and then i pushed on to another village after that and in this village there were not any children. there was nobody. it was completely empty. there was houses that were left wide open. so i went back to the village and i asked some of the children there what had happened and they told me that most of them were orphans, many of their families their parents had been killed in the fighting between the taliban and the u.s. military. some of their parents had gone and joined the taliban, some of their fathers were off in the mountains, others had fled the country. and it all that was left were the children mostly boys trying to eke out a living. this village happened to be the sort of epicenter of the taliban in southern afghanistan. it was sort of the epicenter of the insurgency against the united states military. so i took all this in, i had all my notes, and i went back home to kabul, and i just became really interested in like, how does a village become like this right? this is so bizarre.

i went back through the archives the historical archives i found tribal elders who had fled from that village, and i began to reconstruct the story of the village. and it turned out that back in 2001, which is when the u.s. invasion was that this village was actually a pro-american stronghold. this village actually had welcomed the u.s. military with open arms because they had suffered so greatly under the taliban. and something had happened between 2001 and 2008 when i had visited that had completely turned it on its head. and so i became obsessed with this idea of trying to understand how things could have gone so wrong. and so what i did for the next three years is i went back down into the countryside and started interviewing people and asking this very question, you know when did things go badly? when did the war come back? and the result, essentially, is the book which has interviews with hundreds of people. i focus predominantly on the lives of three afghans and trace

their lives from 2001 to today. one is a taliban fighter. his name is mullah cable, and he gets his -- [inaudible] from the fact that back in the 1990s when the taliban was in power, he used to wield a metal whip and go around and whip his detainees. and he he's, he was very interesting because he's somebody who obviously, was a brutal member of the taliban but then he quit the taliban and tried to blend into civilian life only to be drawn back into the fighting. the second person is a warlord, a very powerful warlord named john mohamed khan, and the americans used to call him jmk for short because he was closely allied with the u.s. military. he was somebody who rose from obscurity. back in the '70s he was a high school janitor, and when the soviet union invaded in 1979 the cia flooded afghanistan with guns and money and he was one of the recipients of this, and

he grew to wealth and power became a major warlord. and after 2001 became one of the closest allies to the u.s. military and particularly to the special forces. and the third person i follow is a housewife named hila. she was, she is somebody who grew up in kabul and was forced to flee to the countryside during the civil war, and what she found was a world that was very different from what she had grown up with. and what i found in interviewing her was the sort of simplistic narrative that i had that the taliban oppressed women and, you know that otherwise women would be free or liberated was actually not accurate. it was much more complicated than that. i learned that through her story. and in all of their stories, the theme that sort of tied it together was the fact that the foughtinging -- the fighting the war, the brutality that we see today wasn't necessarily

preordained. and to understand that, we should go back to 2001, back at the eve of the u.s. invasion. at the time the taliban government was controlling afghanistan, they had tens of thousands of fighters. the u.s. invaded in october, october 6, 2001, and in two short months succeeded in overthrowing the taliban. and by december after the taliban were toppled every single -- almost every single member of the taliban from the rank and file all the way up to the senior leadership essentially surrendered. they threw their weapons down, and they tried to switch sides including the taliban commander that i describe in my book. and, you know, this seemed surprising to me when i found this out, but actually if you look at afghan history, it's actually not that surprising because, again, this is a country that's been at war for 35 years. when the soviet union left in 1989, a lot of the afghans who called themselves communists switched sides and joined the

islamists, the mujahideen the holy warriors. so people have been switching sides as a way to survive as a way to, you know, protect their families. and this is no different in 2001. the taliban, almost to a person, surrendered and tried to switch sides. at the same time, al-qaeda the enemy of the united states and the reason why they invaded -- [inaudible] they went to pakistan they went to iran. and so what you had in early 2002 was a situation where you had thousands of u.s. troops mostly special forces, on the ground in afghanistan and no enemy to fight. no taliban and no al-qaeda. and so this was a contradiction because at the root of it these soldiers were there to fight a war on terror. and what the war on terror meant at the time was that the united states was going to go and have regime change in afghanistan put in a pliant regime which was the karzai regime in power in

afghanistan and very quickly move on to iraq, have regime change in iraq and then move on to iran. so this was really a project of remaking the middle east and south asia in the image of the united states or the bush administration. so that's what we had. and so you had tens -- maybe let's say thousands of soldiers special forces on the ground with that mandate. and yet they had no enemy to fight. and the way this contradiction was resolved really explains how violence returned to afghanistan. and the explanation is that the u.s. allied with a series of warlords and strongmen and power brokers. and so the enemies of the warlords became the enemies of the u.s. at the time there used to be u.s. planes flying over kandahar province and dropping leaflets saying things like get wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, help us catch terrorist and in this way the u.s. incentivized the creation of enemies. so i want to give you a few

examples of that. and the first example is somebody who i know quite well because he was a baker, and he lived across the street from me when i was living in kandahar province. and this is back when i met him in 2008 or 2009. he was at the time in his 80s. he had been mujahideen, a holy warrior who fought against the soviets in the '80s. the soviet union withdrew its troops and he retired and, basically, kneaded dough for the rest of his life. that's what he did. so one morning in 2002, early morning a few humvees rolled up to his bakery and some afghan militia minnesota got out. these -- militiamen got out. they were being paid and armed by the u.s. as a proxy for us to fight against terror, to find these enemies. and the militiamen said are you -- [inaudible] and he said, yes. okay, you're coming with us. why? you're a terrorist. before he could protest they hit him, they slapped him, and

they sented him to -- sent him to kandahar airfield which was the hub of operations for southern afghanistan. so they went him to kandahar airfield where he was interrogated by special forces soldiers. they inserted hooks into his mouth and twisted until he screamed they applied electric shocks they beat him and it was all in an effort to get him to admit to being an al-qaeda mastermind and, of course he wasn't. he pleaded his innocence and said he's just a baker, and they continued to torture him for days, but he continued to plead his innocence, and finally they handed him back over to the militiamen who had captured him. the militiamen took him to kandahar city to a private prison that was underneath a bank, and in that private jail they hung him upside down for 20 out of 24 hours a day. and he was hung alongside dozens of other prisoners, all of whom were not taliban or al-qaeda,

but had run afoul of these militias. in fact, the person who was hanging next to him was beaten so often that he died of his wounds. so this man was beaten as well. twice a day somebody would come in with a big metal whip and whip him. and he insisted and pleaded and eventually they realized he wasn't a member of al-qaeda or he wasn't a member of the taliban. what they actually wanted was money. so he got his family to raise money in selling a lot of their goods, and he, essentially bought his release, and he was freed. the problem is, of course, once he, once you do that, you're now marked as somebody who can pay. and so a couple of months later he was arrested again, he was sent to the special forces again, he was tortured again, electrocuted again, sent back to the militiamen who hung him upside down again and whipped him again. and, again, he raised money and bought his freedom. and he would do this every two or three months. he told me i would put money away from my torture the way you

might for buying a new car and that's what he did. and that returned until 2005, so we're talking three years until the taliban by then reconstituted, sent a suicide bomber and killed the head of the militia that was interrogating him. so there's hundreds upon hundreds of stories like this of people -- a lot of them which are cataloged in the book. and, you know, in addition to the torture the use, the sort of paying people for information or intelligence, this led to loads of innocent people being sent to bagram, which is the main prison in afghanistan or to began tap mow. i'll give you -- guantanamo. i'll give you an example of somebody who was sent to guantanamo. there was a syrian child, a boy who grew up in dubai, and he fled an abusive home. now, we're talking in the mid 990s okay -- 1990s, okay? and he heard that if you flee to

afghanistan, which was at the time still controlled by the taliban, if you go to afghanistan and then make your way to a western embassy, you can declare asylum. you can say you're fleeing from the taliban. he was 16, 17 at the time. basically, he thought he could to this. he got to afghanistan but moment he got there the taliban saw him as an arab, and they were very suspicious. who sent you, why are you here so they arrested him and turned him over to al-qaeda. al-qaeda then tortured him did simulated drownings electrocuted him videotaped all the torture until in what was obviously a forced confession he confessed of being an agent of mossad the israeli intelligence agency, and the cia sent to kill bin laden. so they had this on video and then they turned him over to the taliban who imprisoned him. fast forward to 2001, the taliban is toppled, and you have him and about five or six others

like him, arabs who are imprisoned by the taliban and the locals didn't know what to do with him because they weren't afghan. so they went over to the americans and said, hey, we've got these five or six guys, what do you want to do with them? the u.s. took all of them and sent them straight to guantanamo. so he spent six or seven years in guantanamo. meanwhile, in 2002 after all the al-qaeda safehouses had been bombed, you know, u.s. troops were shifting through the rubble and they found the videotape of his torture. at the hands of al-qaeda. john ashcroft played this video with the audio off in 2002 to reporters as evidence of the u.s.' progress that it was making in the war on terror. so with these kinds of stories, and like i said, there are so many of them, and i could only get to a fraction of them in the book, and that was actually one of the things that upset me the most, was that i couldn't include all of them in the book. in one community after the next

you began to have people turning against the american presence. not because afghans are opposed to foreign invaders, not because it's a graveyard of empires, it's because of the action of the united states military and the consequences of the war on terror. and so you had communities turning against the u.s. presence turning against the afghan government. in that milieu okay, that is how the taliban was able to reconstitute itself. now, if you remember, when we last left the taliban they had surrendered and tried to switch sides. what happened was the taliban tried to switch sides, but the ideology of the war on terror did not allow the u.s., the u.s. military to accept these surrenders. so i'll just give you one example of such a case, and that's an example of somebody else whom i e know. whom i know. he's from kandahar province in the south. he was a taliban commander, mid-level taliban commander who fought in the '90s against the northern alliance, and after

2001 he -- like all of his come raids -- essentially, put down his weapon and switched sides. in early 2002 in a public ceremony, he handed over his weapons to the afghan government. reporters came to this, they took photographs, and he basically swore loyalty to hamid karzai and to the new i order. he gave up his weapons but nonetheless militiamen -- paid for and armed by the united states -- came to him one day in april or may of 2002 and said, hey, you didn't turn over all your weapons, you're still hiding some. he said no, i don't have any weapons. they arrested him hung him upside down, tortured him, beat him, etc., and they kept him there for so long that his family had to actually sell their livestock to raise money to go buy weapons on the black market and happened it over and say, here are the weapons. let him go. so they finally let him go. but, again as in the case of the baker, once you pay you're marked for life and that's what happened to him, so he was

arrested again a few months later and then again three months later until the point where his family was reduced to penniless because they repeatedly had to pay to buy his freedom. case in point where he recognized what the game was and he fled to pakistan. this is 2004 where -- 2003-2004 where he fled to pakistan. and at that point there were already many other disaffected taliban commanders who were undergoing similar experiences who came from communities that had tribal elders sent to guantanamo or killed in night raids. and in that process the taliban reconstituted themself and became the insurgency that it is today. and by 2004 the war that we talk about in afghanistan was for the united states already lost. and since 2004 we've been, essentially, fighting that struggle. the taliban entrenched in the countryside, u.s.-backed forces entrenched in the cities with no end in sight. and when i say u.s.-backed forces, i'd like you to actually

picture what that means because well, for the taliban we have, i don't know, maybe 20, 30 40,000 taliban fighters. nobody really knows, but something of that order. on the u.s. side you have the afghan national army, the afghan national police, private security forces, afghan private security forces and ad hoc militias that are paid for by the special forces or the cia. and i added it all up a while back and the number i got was close to 350,000 men under arms fighting in afghanistan on behalf of the united states. at the same time, they're arrayed against 40 or 30,000 taliban who are being supported by pakistan. so what we have essentially is a proxy war. one side entrenched in the cities entrenched in major or infrastructural areas, one side entrenched in the deep south, in the countryside, neither side able to dislodge the other. the taliban aren't strong enough

to march into kabul and overthrow the government, the government and u.s. forces are not strong enough to dislodge the taliban from all the little villages they're in. if you heard president obama the other day or the news came out that he was extending the american troop presence in afghanistan. so we're looking at a proxy war. and, you know, you think proxy wars, you think central america but this is writ large. this is, you know a grander scale with no end in sight, essentially going in perpetuity. and that, more than anything else, i think, is the ultimate reason why we should care about afghanistan, and we should think about afghanistan in, you know in your activist work and all the other work you do because when we talk about u.s. or aced broad, afghanistan still -- or abroad, afghanistan still figures centrally in that project. i could go on, i be really my experiences pale in comparison to what rory fanning has seen and done so i'm really honored to be able to hand it over to him. >> thanks anand. that's not true --

[laughter] well this has been my ninth stop in 12 days. when i'm not speaking with anand, i spend a good 10, 15 minutes just talking about "no good men among the living." it is the most important book written on afghanistan since 2011. i encourage everyone to pick up a copy. i actually encourage you to pick up two copies, one for yourself and one for a friend, because everybody needs to read it. okay. so i actually didn't roll out of the womb with a completed world view. i had a lot of things i had yet to resolve growing up. and i was a person who thought the u.s. military was a force for good in the world. i thought you had to turn to religion if you were to understand injustice in the world. and this is who i wrote the book to. i wrote the book to the person i was ten years ago. i wrote the book to the person -- [inaudible] and when i was walking across the country i met a lot of people who thought like i did ten years ago or five years ago,

and they still think like i do ten or five years ago. so it is in that spirit that i tried to write the book. i think people are really used to other people telling them what is wrong with their perspective on the world. what i realized walking across the country is that every single -- [inaudible] extraordinary story to tell. everybody is trying to do the best with the education that they have access to the information they have access to and the very little free time that they can afford. and everybody wants to make the world a better place under those , with the options that they have. with that, i kept that in mind as well. i think if people understand that you see them as good, you see them as doing the best with what they have access to, they're more likely to listen to your perspective and open up. so that's, you know in general the spirit i tried to write the book in. >> dick cheney? >> all right.

so 9/11 happens. i just recently graduated college. i had a bunch of student loans to pay off, i was looking for a little bit of meaning looking for a little bit of adventure. i also thought 18-year-olds of the world shouldn't be the only ones that go off to fight this in afghanistan which was clearly kind of a pivot point in history when we saw the twin towers collapse. i thought people who were experienced, 22-year-olds like myself -- [laughter] with some real life experience under their belt should go off and fight this war. and we couldn't have, you know, a 9/11 happen again in this country, you know? i thought this thing, you know, we had to prevent it. so i enlisted in the military. i became a member of u.s. army rangers. training was fairly intense, and i was quickly sent over to afghanistan. once i got over to afghanistan i quickly realized that i was not fighting for freedom or

democracy, i was actually creating more conditions that would lead to other 9/11s. to give some specific examples we rolled in -- the second army ranger battalion -- into a school probably about 6,000 feet in the middle of nowhere in afghanistan. the middle of nowhere in afghanistan has about 30,000 people in it. you'd be surprised at where people live and the density of populations in afghanistan. and we decided we were going to occupy a school. classes were canceled indefinitely, and we were going to stage our missions there a school. from a school. we had absolutely no idea what we were doing there. we invented missionings. we looked -- missions. we looked for anybody who was suspicious. and i guess anybody who was suspicious was a male or someone who didn't smile when they walked by the school. we grabbed two boys, two men you know, 20 years old, threw

one boy in one room, threw another boy in another room. the person in one of the rooms would hear a gunshot go off, they would think their friend was killed. what were we trying to do? is extract a confession of some sort, you know? uncover a plot, you know, for the next 9/11. identify where osama bin laden is. we were grasping at straws and it was really clear that we were acting not like liberators but like bullies. i mean, we were the most military -- militarily the most powerful military the world has ever seen. history has ever seen. and we were going into the poorest place on the planet. i remember watching a woman, you know, before we left for a mission digging this shrub, this bush with no leaves on it. we got back a few hours later she was still digging. she was using that shrub for firewood to cook her food that night. the poverty in afghanistan it's next to impossible to wrap your

mind around. we would go in, we would look into these clay, dusty huts with our night vision on, with our weapons pointed, and if you haven't had night vision on the entire world lights up before you. and if you don't have night vision on, everything is black. everything is quiet. and we'd stare at these people with our weapons and they had no idea that that's what we were doing. and we'd run into a house, we'd grab a male from the household, throw a bag over their head and take them to bagram or guantanamo or whatever. obviously, with no due process, no idea when that person would be returned home. i i really tarted to grow embarrassed. i mean, this was, this was not impressive. this was bullying. so i decided i couldn't be a part of this anymore. i had to lay my weapon down and leave the military. and it was a fairly exhausting,

challenging process. this was about 2004. there hadn't been a conscientious objector in my unit, in the rangers. there's a fairly long vetting process to get, become a ranger so it's fairly rare to have a ranger actually leave. so it was about six months. i was expecting to be sent to jail or the big army to be what the rangers called the bullet stopper. so i wasn't expecting a positive outcome. but it took them a while to figure out what was going to happen. then one day i was called down to formation and told pat tillman was killed last night in an enemy ambush. he died a hero. you know, i was banished, i was isolated i'd been ignored by my chain of command, absorbed insults for six months, so there was really nobody i could talk to in ranger battalion about what i thought was an incredible loss. pat and his brother kevin were the only two people that talked to me during this six month

period. they actually respected my decision. they encouraged me to think critically in a place that discouraged critical thought. they actually said it's actually the most important time to be thinking critically in a place that only really encourages you to say yes to your orders. so quick story on how i met pat and kevin. i was headed out to a bar after a training mission and i walked past the coffee shop, and as i walked by i saw pat and kevin drinking coffee. i walked in introduced myself and realized that they were exchanging papers that they had written, five-page paper on the israeli/palestinian conflict. everybody else was out getting wasted anding these guys were exchanging papers. my mind was blown. and so we started chatting. it was about two hours many that coffee shop, and i really felt like a different person after i left.

so i get ushered out of the military within three days of pat's death. they wanted nothing to do with me. i would later find out that he didn't die in the an enemy ambush, he died at the hands of other rangers in a quote-unquote, friendly fire incident. it was horrifying. and the military didn't want to deal with the conscientious objector, second ranger battalion, and the cover-up of pat's death. and i think that's what allowed me to leave the military a -- military. i left the military and for about five years i kept really quiet about my time in the military. i came from a right-wing family, conservative family, fairly religious family who was just proud of the fact that i went and served my country. but i felt like i was only half a person during that five years. i couldn't live my whole life as a half a person. i needed to be complete. so sitting behind a computer screen in some cubicle wasn't going the take me to the place i

needed to go, so i decided i was going to fly to virginia beach and walk to san diego california for about -- google maps said three months, but it turned out to be eight months, about 3000 miles across the united states. and i was going to raise the $3.6 million that pat gave up when he left the arizona cardinals to join the military. my walk was large hi apolitical. -- largely apolitical. i didn't talk about anything that happened to me in the military. i was trying to get confidence and i was also trying to appeal -- naively, i now realize -- to that 1% of the population that controls the military, that controls the wealth. and i was going to ask them to make similar decisions to the discussion pat made for the greater good. i raised about $50,000 during the walk but i met some amazing, amazing people. i mean after i'd walk into a town and talk to people for about two hours and they would invite me to stay not just for a night, but for a week.

i would spend christmas, new year's at -- in people's homes. i had some wonderful conversations. one conversation was with this guy by the name of max and he was about 80 years old and he was running donald's doughnuts. and donald's doughnuts was owned by a cambodian family, and donald was working out -- actually giving his pension, his military pension to the children of this cambodian family and then working for free to help keep donald's doughnuts open. and he could tell when i walked in that i wasn't telling my whole story. he hadn't told his whole story. and it wasn't until his latter years that he was able to kind of realize that he, you know, he had repressed a lot of things. and i think that came out in his work at donald's doughnuts. there was guilt that drove him, and he didn't want to see that happen to me. so he encouraged me to talk more about my story. and that was just one of, you

know dozens and dozens of stories. tameka who worked at the gas station who had two jobs was going to school to become a v.a. nurse. i asked her if she wanted to walk with me for a day she said, you know what? i have too much responsibility to do what you're doing right now. all these kind of things built up and really inspired me to, like i said, realize that people do the absolute best with the time that they have and with the education they have access to. i finished the walk. i feel, again like it did a lot for me in a lot of ways but i didn't talk about my military experience. what i decided to do was go with back and retrace my steps and go to all the places there were other conscientious objectors in our country. conscientious objectors of a different sort. people who had stood up for injustice, people who had made

sacrifices far greater than anything i'd ever done. nat turner had his uprising, where ida b. wells wrote her antilynching papers outside of ithaca, mississippi. i worked where the san patricio rebellion, a group of irish immigrants said we're not going to fight mexicans in order to increase u.s. land mass. all these kind of people are peppered throughout the book, and i use them to draw inspiration to tell my story about what it was like to be a conscientious objector. quickly, there are -- we are going into the 14th year of the global war on terror. there are 668 military u.s. military bases around the world. we've invaded 100 -- we've had military action in 134 countries since 9/11. that's two-thirds of the world's countries.

we have a three-quarters of a trillion dollar military budget that we're spending on all of this stuff. sovereignty does not exist for any other country on this planet except the united states. ..

encourage them to put down the weapons have the same kinds of enthusiasm for these soldiers. i think that is the way to end it and we are long past the.of you know, -- long past the.of not -- ignoring the fact that we are not fighting for freedom or democracy. we are fighting for control of natural resources. i am honored honored to have this opportunity to talk with you guys here. like. like i said by his book, give it to a friend. it is the only book written

from the afghan perspective. i encourage you to buy it and thank you for coming out. i appreciate it. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> certainly obviously this country is obsessed with military, etc. my question is, given the fact that we are not the only aggressive power in the world china, cambodia an army that in terms of numbers of soldiers they have and have made it clear that sometimes things

require military intervention. how do you deal with that reality? setting aside the reality of imperialist adventures when china faces -- maybe they will invade taiwan or moving on the philippines or those little islands out there. how do you deal with that? >> first of all, the us spends more than the next 13 countries combined, and china is included in that, on its military. military. we have 11 aircraft carriers. china has one use that they just bought from the ukraine. a lot of this is manufactured. we have to figure out how to keep spending on our

military. we are excellent at creating threads in this country that serve no immediate existential threat to the united states. we could talk about all of the potential enemies. what we what we have realized -- [inaudible question] >> what we have realized is our military is not the solution. we are currently fighting isis, an enemy that did not exist before we invaded iraq. we are not protecting anything. we are not saving anything. we we could go on about it but i think their are other things. >> i really appreciate hearing both of you. it sounds similar to what

happened with the amount -- what happened with the about. you were able to see the horror of what was being done. what is your feeling about the military establishment? are they so blinded by ideology that they are not willing to admit their policies and actions are creating the total opposite of what they would like to happen? it sounds insane. it just sounds insane to

think about what is going on and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. all the pentagon big boys want to do is spend more money and kill more people. >> it is one of the few growth industries in our country that an presence i think. when you are spending $750 billion a year on something you look for every opportunity to use that to justify the expense. so it is insane short-term thinking but we are seeing people realize we are not fighting for freedom or democracy. and that is why we see in lisman requirements drop as well.

you can be much more overweight before you could in 2,001. you can actually where a swastika on your arm. they are desperate. people are not necessarily buying the company line anymore. >> a couple of questions actually. the secretary of defense resigned today. i was wondering do either of you guys see a change in policy coming out of that? possibly getting someone who is much more much more in tune with fighting and other

war in iraq and syria? you know, just that open question. the other is, i mean, i spent four years of my early life fighting to keep the chinese from coming into vietnam. the vietnamese never wanted the chinese in vietnam ever. you know, i lost a number of friends. by the by the time my enlistment was up we went from being a force that was relatively patriotic, relatively gung ho relatively into the war to a force that was killing its officers. there were hundreds of

people i mean, there were hundreds of tracking incidents. people do not realize that about the vietnam war. the reason why they had to stop that war is because we were killing officers, and there were people in my unit -- i was leaving. i got on plane and went home , but people were planning on killing a kernel it was that serious. but what i am interested in is if in your experience in the military is there that kind of -- yeah is there that kind of dissatisfaction from the level of wanting to

stop it? >> so the 1st question, i do not think we will see a major policy change. rely upon military solutions, and we will see more of the same. your previous question ideologically they are unable to see these things. while there is a great degree of cynicism on behalf of people who may have otherwise enlisted the fact is the military has been forced to confront the reality of what they have done. there is no movement like vietnam in this country or

in the military. obama announced -- he did not announced, but announced, but it came out that troops would be staying on in afghanistan. which is absurd absurd because what has happened over the last 13 years has not made a difference. the fact of the matter is they can get away with doing that because they have not been forced to confront the reality. >> yes the military has learned a lot from vietnam. we do not have that same kind of infighting like they did in vietnam. i do think the way forward

is to figure out how to get more soldiers to put their weapons down and come home. that is the easiest thing to do. it is not easy to do. there do. there is a lot of indoctrination, promilitary propaganda and they need to take every opportunity to feed their family when they get home. if they are threatened with jail or banishment from future jobs, they are thinking twice about it which is why it is important to create a culture at home that supports war resisters. i think that is the only way we will and these unending wars, for our soldiers to decide to stop fighting. [inaudible question] >> my name is thomas. i do a newsletter newsletter for veterans and members of the armed forces against the war

two months ago a poll found 70 percent of members of the army were opposed to one more soldier going to iraq. so let's understand, there is no more the military then there is the society. there there is a command structure on top that fits in washington, and at the extreme bottom the enlisted ranks who week after week send then scathing, mocking ridicule of obama and the government for this idiocy. they send them to a publication of there own satirical articles about the idiocy of the continuing war in iraq and afghanistan. so please don't low rate the ability of people enlisted

in the serving ranks to understand it. the question therefore, becomes, what do people opposed to these wars due to reach out to the armed forces? the e-mails we have gotten say, we have to organize in united action together, not act as isolated individuals so that they can crack down on us and that is the way to move forward therefore defending everyone who rejects the army for reasons of conscious and defend them but they say the way forward is organization within the armed forces and when as

they put it, the it, the time comes we we will do what we have to do the armed forces is not sitting at the edge of rebellion, but resistance is growing, getting organized and the tragedy of a right-wing organization like the oath leaders they are eating our lunch. >> it is a good. you hit the nail on the head we have to get organized. the new york times had a surprising obit for a man who went into the military for vietnam for the sole purpose of organizing soldiers. yeah, i yeah, i think you are speaking the truth.

>> this morning kathy kelly and antiwar activist 82% of the american public opposed the war in afghanistan 82 percent. the other.was they.to this book. we give this out free to soldiers. the rebellion and vietnam was led led, not by draftees but enlisted felt betrayed by the military and they took the lead in the rebellion. >> you are right. right. it is a great book. kathy kelly we will

possibly speak with her at some time on the tour. [inaudible question] >> no not yet. as far as the actual book, i have not heard anything yet. we know -- exactly. good question. [inaudible question] >> your religion either one of you, your own personal experience a positive thing in helping you in coming to your decision of being a conscientious objector? >> absolutely. a a source of meaning for people during difficult times. it is not a complete

coincidence that the expression of fighting against the taliban and other groups. >> at a certain time in my life i was quite religious. i used that as an excuse to leave the military but as far as it being a reason, it was just a question of conscience being embarrassed by the mission. there was no voice speaking to me saying, this was the time to leave. it was pretty much just common sense. >> just a follow-up. in terms of your personal experience in 2,004 would

you say that the us military more and more troops to memorial more soldiers are becoming more and more aware of the position? >> enlistment rates are going down. the military is trying to figure out how to do more with less. that is in part what drives the drone operations to a certain regard while we are seeing special forces fight -- spike. we now have 60,000 members were at one time it was quite small. it is hard to sustain the morale of these military members. i have not been in the military for a while, so i

cannot speak exactly. i can only assume that people are dissatisfied with the mission. [inaudible question] >> i cannot predict that. the vietnam draft was very unpopular and implies that everyone has to fight. there there is a certain demographic that we will not fight. but they figure out how to get out of it. i have no idea what the future holds. yes. not sure. >> any antiwar groups or movements that you keep track of that you feel has been doing intelligent work right now?

>> yes, of the 700 -- i'm sorry. [laughter] yes, surprisingly of that 750 billion that is spent there spent, there is very little that goes towards proper healthcare. particularly mental health. a veteran suicide once every 65 minutes, 22 a day. a lot of groups are trying to deal with that and make the most out of what they have. because there is a need to look inward to take care of each other groups are having a harder time projecting outward and being more political. there is a long way to go in terms of veterans groups being political and challenge these wars.

you know hopefully one day we will see that. [inaudible question] >> well, the most important thing to know about the afghan people is, they are like any other people anywhere in the world. we are told afghanistan is a warlike culture.

it is because of corruption. no afghans want what all of us want. you know they are caught in a difficult situation. they are caught between a rock and a hard place insurgent forces and warlords and have to make difficult choices to survive the us ideology of the war on terror tends to categorize people as terrorists. from the afghan.of view it is people who want security and the peaceful life and

because of the wars and occupations have not been able to achieve that. >> time for two more questions. [inaudible question] >> could you repeat the question? >> why don't you repeat it because i don't -- >> how will it go if nothing changes? [laughter] >> actually one