emotions hadn't really gone deep enough as i say examined my own fear it gradually dawned on me that fear was the underlying issue, multiform fear. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> well, good evening, i'm bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose along with my wife and on behalf of the entire staff here at p and p, thank you very much for coming. so in just a few weeks the u.s. will be marking the 17th anniversary of the 911 attacks, we have been a nation at war ever since nearly 17 years in

afghanistan, more than 15 years in iraq. in that time as cj notes in his book, more than 2.7 million americans have served in afghanistan or iraq and many have fought in both wars, nearly 7,000 of them have died and tens of thousands more were wounded. in the fighters chris tells the story of the grossly mismanaged and terribly costly conflicts. he tells the story not from the advantage of generals and admirals and civilian policymakers but from the perspectives of those who have done the bulk of the fighting, the grunt as they call themselves in the lower and middle ranks. chris focuses on six individuals but each belongs to a different

military service and their tours occurred at different times and at different places, the idea is that these individuals represent the experiences as chris puts it a significant portion of those who fought. chris is particularly well qualified to present this intense compelling and unsettling account of americans at war, he served in the marines during persian gulf war and for nearly 20 years now he's been a journalist with "the new york times". if you're familiar with his reporting, you'll know he writes about military affairs with the authority and informed eye for detail of a veteran and with the clarity and punch of a talented wordsman, much of chris' reporting over time has occurred i don't ever seas as correspondent in afghanistan, iraq, syria, israel and palestinian territory, libya, russia and elsewhere on a wide range of assignments.

nowadays he writes for "the new york times" magazine and the newspapers investigation desk, the stories have been part of two pulitzers awarded at the time, in 2002 for public service and in 2009 for international reporting, last year received for writing that lead release of afghan war veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. he's also the author of a previous book, the gun, a history published eight years ago of automatic weapons and the consequences of mass distribution seen through the development of the ak47. a review of the fighters in the wall street journal said the book provides, quote, a dark and honest reckoning end quote of u.s. military involvement in iraq since 9/11 attacks and in

toork times review called the fighters, quote, classic of war reporting saying, quote, it could be the most powerful indictment yet of america's recent middle east wars, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming chris chivers. [applause] >> i'm looking for -- can you hear me? i have a hearing aid. aye always sound loud to myself. i'm looking for a few friends, i see them. there are people in this room who are in this book, i'm not going to embarrass them now with introductions. after this talk, i think we will go over to comment ping-pong

pizza which i guess is around the corner, i will be here a bit after but if you want to talk one-on-one we can do it later because we don't want to stay here all night and i will stay as late as you'd like there. i'm going say a few remarks only a few, i'm going read a few paragraphs. one thing a lot of writers do is we read our passages out loud to untangle, find the right rhythm, where the wrong rhythm exists and i did that and i had to stop in my house because my family couldn't take it, the book is pretty raw. i will read a few paragraphs from some of the milder sections and then i will take questions,

i think it's my fourth talk at every one of them people with personal connections to the book have shown up, people have deep personal connections to the wars have shown up. so we have a lot to talk about so you'll probably find your participation, the q&a is more interesting than what i have here on my pad. i have to do it as clearing and declaration of point of view because the book is written with a point of view. the history of wars in my view have too much general and not sergeants, the book we are discussing tonight is about sergeants and people near sergeants, the war on officers, specialists, privates, first class, lieutenants and the like who actually fight america's wars and covers them with a very simple idea, that they're human and that their human experiences what they did and what they

suffered can help us understand wars that have been waged for 15 years with in end in sight. those of you who know me know my position on the wars. for those of you who don't know i will be full throated and clear, i'm a skeptic, the wars in my view have achieved almost nothing like the organizers promised no matter the party in power or the commanding general of the moment, in one area after another, they failed by their own measures, we will just list a few, reduction of terrorism, the islamic state as a consequence of the invasion of iraq, protection of populations, we can argue about numbers but the estimates are hundreds and thousands of civilians killed. development of afghan and iraqi

security forces, they stand at a fraction to those we issue weapons to and put in uniforms. replacement of opium poppy with alternative crops, afghanistan has produced more than poppy in most of the years in occupation than before we arrived. i can go on but i will stop, the big picture talk now, i just thought it was important that you hear my skeptical view so you understand the book you're about to read assort of act of public honesty i'm not going to sit here and be wishy washy about what i think but i will start there because this work in the book that i hope you'll read is about people and to me that work about people is urgent and it's necessary because the country is separate from its fighting class. there's reasons for this. with the end of subscription

came to population those to fight, you gave the statistics already, something like 1%, less than 1% to have country has shown up for these wars. much of that 1% showed up for both of the wars. that's obviously not all of the population that's immediately affected and we can expand that percentage out to include immediate family and perhaps we reached 10%, i'm not going to do but the proportion is very small. if we expand those numbers and include the family, this country has had almost no familiar stake in the wars and for many of the families they've only had it for a few years, not the entire 16 or 17 or whatever our tally is now. the people who fight for us are not known to us, this book tries

to remedy some of that with the idea that if you understand the people maybe you'll take an interest in the war and maybe we can have a fuller discussion about the wars and where they are headed and why and what they are or not achieving and what might be done differently, people ask me and maybe one of you will so i'm going preempt you with your question, what do i think we should do, my only answer to that is i do description not prescription, i don't pretend to know, there are many better minds than mine on the questions. i'm not a strategists or policy setter or recommender, the only thing i recommend is a discussion of what we are doing and that might became engaged and have you a better course than we have now.

i'm phoning to read a little, a brief section, the book is as i mentioned is graphic and raw in places i felt it was necessary for it to be for you to understand some of what the characters experience and i'm not able to read much of it out loud so i won't try so i am going to read a section about the burdens of doubt and moral freight that people can carry after participation in combat. the context for this is it's a navy corman. think medic, it's the navy's version of army medic and they provide trauma care to marines and this corman had saved his former roommate's life, he had been shot through the head. and it's about the doubts that

attended him almost instantly. the marines loaded smith, lifted him and rushed to the aircraft, it was a gun ship not a a medevac, he was breathing, his job was done and had to hand over his friend. over the roar of the engine he shouted life-saving steps and tapped him on the leg and ran clear, the blades swept up and scatter in pink wisk, helicopter was gone. suddenly there was nothing for curby to do, he ran back to his truck, the company began moving. someone said a car had sped away after the shot heading to a house that weapon's company would now search. curby sat on the front seat,

hands wet with his friend's blood, sticky, still warm, he turned it over to look at where the bullet passed through. the bullet rolled inside, it was an arm or piercing 7.6 by 54 inrondequoit, zipped through the front of the helmet and in the top of smith's head, curby lifted it out and inspecting it rolling it in his hand, kept its shape, he put it in his pocket. nausea came in waves.

tears ran down his face. he shook uncontrol bli and rocked back and forth on the seat. never before had he saved a life. he felt guilty. he had a sense of what was missing, some of it was inside the helmet on his lap if smith survived and transfer to germany, what kind of life would he expect? now emotions broke free. hoafs not sure what saving a

life meant, did i do that for me? curby wondered or for him, he did not know whether smith was even still alive. there was no medic on, he might die on the way. curby had done what he had tried to do and tried not to vomit, i will jump ahead, smith survived and is still alive and remained friends and that for about a week or more, i have to check my notes, probably it's in the book, i can check there, curby was walking almost like you can imagine zombie fashion unsure waiting for word of smith and how his neurology and there came a moment later in the book where he gets a phone call from

smith's father who says to him basically as long as i'm alive you'll always have a father in ohio. so that's the outcome of that scene. brad asked me to talk a little bit about process and that scene provides an opportunity for that. a lot of the book serves as an antimemoir. i'm not in it except for the preface where you can hear words that i hope here but in many scenes i was present. that played out next to me. but i found being present is never enough, what you see and what you hear and what you think see and what you think you hear usually aren't enough to make a coherent and sturdy account and so what followed for year for the last six years or so was i was going back to each of these

characters, those who remain alive and trying to download their brains, some of them -- i don't think we have any of the primary characters in the room but we have people in the room who are secondary characters or sources and they'll tell you i'm kind of a pain in the ass and there are many long nights where we would be talking and i would be taking notes, hours of notes at a time and once i thought i had downloaded each person's brain at the same incident until i could make more coherent account of it i would then make a map of people around them, a social map, their families members, their friends, others who might not have been at the scene but were later connected to it perhaps those who gave them medical care or like matt is in the back of the room, he picked up one of the characters in black hawk helicopter on long flight, four pilots, two aircrafts that went to go get a

fellow pilot who had been shot and then after we get a draft of a chapter together, i would warn the characters that we were now going to start the real work, fact-checking, because you can't write a draft without having errors in it, it's impossible if it's multiple people's accounts, some facts are easy to check, many characters gave me e-mail records or their journals or their dairies or not going to name names, records they have taken with them when they left commands, military service, so i had official records, i had, you know, powerpoint presentations or what they call story boards. i had dairies, those are easy to check because you have them, but many other things are difficult and so working with the fact-checker we went back through every passage with the

characters and the secondary characters, that's why i took so long, if my publisher is watching, they know i'm 3 years' late. people would say when is your deadline and i would say today is my deadline. every day is my deadline, my deadline was two years ago or a year ago. but we finally finished what turned out to be a pretty emersed process and once we published everybody in the book know that they participated in it fully and that we would say we need to make it, i don't know if we achieved it and if we didn't it's my fault. who wants to ask questions? do you want to talk or get

pizza? [laughter] >> there's a standing mic, if you can't see it it's behind the post. >> young photographer, can you talk about how you managed risk, where you decide where you're going to go to see these scenes that you've captured. >> the question, with my hearing aids i can never tell what i'm hearing and what i'm missing, the question is about risk management. so risk mitigation really is about self-management, one of the weaknesses that journalists have who do this kind of work is

they tend to be excitable or worse, excitable and competitive and so people often will get into circumstances very hastily that they shouldn't be in and so like when i was first working with brian which was 7 or 8 years ago, brian had some experience, he was not absolutely a boot, he worked in afghanistan in a little bit and the beginnings of the arab spring, brian has really good sense which makes it much easier with someone who has very good sense but i would say to brian and we kind of had a reputation of going pretty far forward regularly, have a reason for everything you do. taking risks is fine but it needs to be attached to gain, journalistic gain, we are not here for the ride, we are here

for the readers so anything we take on should have a purpose in the research that informs or in brian's cases who call them those looking at photography, viewers, and that was something that, you know, we tried to apply every morning when we went out and then there's like a methodology, like when i was in the military there's so-called intelligence that tells you where to go and not to go but the real intelligence mostly is the gut instincts of nco's, experienced marines who are out there and you try to develop a gut and ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing and, you know, i would often tell them new people, you may get shot today, are you okay with that, do you have a story to get shot and when you're laying get shot

and people have to run out and get you, are you doing it for journalism or are you doing it for the ride? when you're laying there shot or hit, you better be able to articulate a journalistic reason for that last step you took before you got hit, i would definitely try to build brakes in people's heads so they will process which in all of your thinking, even if you do that it's still a blood lottery, you do everything right and things can still go terrible for you. did i answer your question? >> yes. >> hi, if you were given four options as to why we went into the middle east, just prior to the intervention in iraq specifically, and i said was it ideological, was it militarily a means of redefining the poor

structure and giving a sense of mission to the military or the weapons of mass destructions, among these which one do you think held credibility and it could be any one of a combination of them but i was interested in your specific take on what you think were the main reasons? >> so i have to say my lenses look lower, i'm not able to answer your question. i haven't tried to download the brains of the people at the top. i have a almost crippling allergy to authority. [laughter] >> so i'm not going to be a person who is ever going the take that roll on -- role on and if i did i wouldn't succeed at it. i don't know. i lived to try and understand about the people who are stuck in the policy not the people who make it. i'm sorry. >> you may not answer this one

either, but it seems like this is an age-old universal from my perspective problem that there's a disconnect between the policymakers and the people who actually have to do the grunt work and get out there and do that and over the course of history particularly our history but almost human history, there's sort of a tendency to take advantage of youth so to speak, their sense of wanting manhood, their sense of glory often financial situations and i guess what i'm trying to get at which, again, you might not feel comfortable with is if this is a species problem, if this is a problem that's -- i'm not saying there isn't a good reason to

fight some wars and use force in some nature but how is humanity going to step forward and take a greater responsibility from the top for the level of violence we place our youth in because they're almost deniedia use this not in derogatory way but almost suckered into getting into the horrible situations. >> so you're right, i'm not going to give you much of an answer, i will take a stab, yeah, some of it is that the kool-aid is really sweet and people are really thirsty for it. so, yeah, people who can find a war and they are often the ones who go fight, the ones who volunteer for infantry whether it's wise and just and not and most societies that i've passed through have people, young people like this.

you called it humanity, so is it wired into us, probably, so i look for what would be the steps of mitigation and, you know, one of my own, you know, the scope of kool-aid that spins on your eyes, when i joined the marine corps in the 80's, i signed up after the bombing that influenced me, it was 1983 and i was a freshman in college and the attack on the marines which killed 241 marines and sailors, i think i have the number right, that drew me to -- i won't call it attraction, but drew me in and a few years later i was in the corps and infantry and the kool-aid that we were drinking about how great we were, we were a volunteered force, we were trained, many people in this room who served back then or

before were trained by draftees not just but many draftees that stuck around and they told us, they told me two things about why the marine corps was so much better, one was all the young people had volunteered, a lot easier to lead somebody who asked to be there and the other was they had the drugs under control, people weren't also stoned anymore as they had been for a number of years and i believed all of this, wow, the marine corps right now is the marine corps, has all of the experience from vietnam, has all of the volunteers and they've fed us this line about how great we were and, you know, really intense can do attitude, can do attitude is also a curse, it's not really good to have can do

attitude when assigned to possible task. i've come over, i guess about 30 years or more to look at it much differently. i lament that we don't have a draft because of this disconnect that exists so these people, you say their inhumanity, these people who are inclined to go to war, we don't have brakes really on sending them anymore because if we hook the country up to a male lottery where everybody who has a child or a grandchild has to wonder if their household will have to provide a son or daughter for war, the citizens would be paying attention, right? people would be asking questions like why, to answer your question, why are we in iraq, well, we probably would have sorted that out to a larger degree if more than 1% of the population was affected by it directly. i didn't answer your question, i gave a rambling set of answers. >> no, actually you did. i want to say as far as the draft goes, some people have

spurs where they're unable to serve in the draft. >> true. >> that's true in both parties. [laughter] .. .. >> connection to the troops in terms of generationally what they have been raised and what

they have experienced. then, say, a high school senior does to a school district superintendent. they are that far apart in age. and you know, we see this all the time. you know, the military is basically a hierarchal organization run by age, how many years you have is basically where you will occupy in the chain of command. in the marines united scandal, it really looked like the generals didn't even know what facebook was, right? i mean, it did. not across the board, but many of them. and that's that same generational thing. i'm not -- i mean, i have five kids and the oldest is 18. i know next to nothing about that guy's life, you know. even though it's playing out right in front of me, i can't.

i mean, we're from different times. so that was the analogy i was talking about. who's next? >> recognize some of the karkh er -- some of the characters in your book from the previous writing, and was wondering you talk about the decision to write the book, was it something that you had previous to meeting these individuals or something you felt needed to be done after interacting with them? >> so it was after. let me back your question up, though, to talk about character selection. so i selected six primary characters, but you could really say it's seven, a pair of cousins in there, or you could say eight, because there's a mom who is the protagonist of the last chapter, so six, seven, eight characters.

i chose them to operate kind of like an ensemble, each one is playing a different instrument, if you will, to make together something more complete. so they are from different phases and places and times in the war. they are from different doctrines or periods of doctrinal organization in the wars. they have different periods of equipment, different enemies. the enemies changed. you could compare the intelligence threats that, you know, a marine in 2003 had to, say, a soldier in 2006, they are completely different foes that they were fighting. and then i wanted within that different what they call mos's in the marine corps, different jobs, so up got the rotary wing pilot. you have got the strike fighter pilot. i wanted to show how fighter pilots' careers had changed

because these pilots mostly show up thinking they are going to dogfight and almost all of them across the period of my life have been in exactly zero dogfights, and they're involved in -- i mean they are essentially attack aircraft now, in the role that we have used them, air to ground warfare. i chose people who were career servicemembers, who had joined during the cold war period. and then people who were compelled into the military after the 2001 attacks in washington and new york. so together i created a mix. from that, i did choose a couple of characters who i already knew pretty well because i thought their stories were interesting, and i wanted to follow them across time. in the case of the doctor, who is probably the one i read from here, who you might be referring to, his mother really chewed me out one night. i mean, she was harsh.

she's an amazing woman. people who have a chance of surviving the after war, when they come home, usually have someone like gayle in their life. gayle said you know you are a real hot shot doing all this stuff you do. it looks really cool. it's full of adrenaline, and i hope it works for you, and she said you're missing the whole story. the adrenaline ends. they come home. they are not in their units anymore, and that's when it really starts and you don't know anything about it. she was not exactly right, and she will be listening, and she'd back that up, but she was almost exactly right. i knew very little bit about that, and it didn't really hit me until i stopped going out and came home and suddenly felt completely mal adjusted for civilian life. i was with -- i had -- the remarks i wrote about 15 minutes before i showed up, when i was

with matt, the pilot in the back. can i tell her what you said? >> sure. >> matt was talking about his own adjustment more than 2,000 hours flying back hawks in afghanistan and iraq, he said, you know, i came home and i went from like 900 miles-an-hour to standing on a parking brake, you know. it is really hard. and over the years that i was writing this book, i was trying to navigate my own feelings of coming home, and learning a lot often from the veterans who i was working with, and so i chose characters who i thought might be good guides for readers for that experience as well. who's next? every platoon has a guy just

like you. [laughter] >> thank goodness. [laughter] >> what did you find out from asking those that you spoke with about their feelings about what they did? in other words, the morality of the situation and the sacrifice. >> okay, so i don't know how many people i know who are veterans of these wars. i mean, that's an unaccountable sum. obviously i know some much better than others. the characters in the book purposely represent a range of views about the wars and about their own actions, just like any squad. there are people who have different feelings about what they did, individually, as a unit, all the way up to the national level. and without telling you which character is which, one of them still believes the invasion of iraq was justified.

another i think quite clearly believes we should not have invaded iraq, and they would have been better, everyone involved, the troops, the iraqis, both countries, governments, had we not done that. one is not disappointed. he's disgusted, absolutely disgusted. and there's another who didn't think at that level. he had squads to run, and every day he ran his squads. he had marines to bring home. and he didn't have the bandwidth and maybe not also the inclination to try to think through another level of the puzzle. he stayed at his level. i think these are fairly common frameworks among this big population, but what i did not do was select six sock puppets who sound like each other, either red state, blue state,

like me, unlike me. i tried to present their views as those views inhabit their own heads. they are a mix. i'm not going to tell you that i have sitting on any sort of formal survey data and speak for the entire class. i won't do it. it is a mix. i think sorrow and disappointment run thick through this cohort of our citizens. but they are certainly not universally held feelings. i'm sorry. you're next, yeah. >> you talked a little bit about the disconnect between the broader public and these wars that was created by the end of universal -- i think all of us have watched the networks and a lot of our favorite newspapers stopped staffing these conflicts. could you talk a little bit

about the state of war journalism in america now and how that impacts our ability to make good decisions about each of these conflicts. >> how many hours you got? i mean, so before we would talk about the state of war journalism, we probably need to talk about the state of journalism because in 2001 was a very different financial market climate for newspapers and tv stations. that was pretty much prestart-up; right? the internet was around, but it had not done the damage to the business model, or if it had done it, people hadn't caught on to it yet. and so newspapers arrived at the wars -- the big journalist organizations arrived at the wars heady with the energy of a nation that had been attacked but also thick with cash. so after several years, the

business environment for journalism virtually print journalism had dramatically changed and we saw big declines in staff reporting on the ground in these wars. some of that was financial. some of it was also fatigue. you know, as we became more digital, and i mean, i'm not a click counter. my peers were vouch for that. i haven't looked at the clicks on one of my stories -- i wasn't taught how until this spring and for about a week i kind of looked at a few stories, and i haven't looked since. but i hear from the people who count the clicks that, you know, you write an informed exclusive interesting story about syria, you get almost no traffic; right? i mean, newspapers i think should serve you your vegetables.

so i don't really care about the traffic, but i know we have to care at some level. it can't be all vegetables. we have to have other stuff there to survive. but the war coverage is in part market driven and you the market -- i mean not you personally, but you're here to pay some respect to a war book or you wouldn't be in the room, but the larger public doesn't care; right? i hear we can see it in the data. you know, the entertainment stories will get way more attention than the stories about the wars. the state of war journalism i think is pretty grim. it is also especially moraling frightening because as we have cut back staffs, there still exists enough interest that many organizations are running war stories, and we run them with freelancers that may not have the experience or the safety net.

i work for a legit employer. i have healthcare. i have retirement. i have mental health counselling, a phone call away, if i want it. i have a support network of coworkers who have worked in all sorts of traumatic situations here in the united states and abroad. we really at the new york times i think have things in place to mostly look out for the well being of our staff. a freelancer has almost none of that. some of have a little more than a facebook group or a drinking circle. and there's not much worse in my view for someone dealing with war a drinking circle, just about the worse thing you can have. and yet these are a number of the people who are providing a significant fraction of the war coverage, and they are a number of the people who are captured in syria and past -- either captured by isis or passed off to isis and who paid with their lives. i'd like to see different

models, but remember, i'm the guy who covers the bottom, not the top, so i'm not going to tell you what the model is. at a minimum, you know, i salute people like sebastian younger who when he lost his friend, did more than grieve, he took steps to provide training to freelancers, basic first aid life-saving steps training and simple equipment that can add minutes to a life because tim died -- i mean, i don't have a map in front of me, so don't hold me to the distance, if i had the map, i could tell you exactly a few minute drive from a vascular surgeon who would have been able to put clamps on him and perhaps -- i'm not going to say it would have saved his life, but we will never know because many of the people at the scene didn't have the life-saving steps or the life-saving skills to save him. and sebastian has been working on that.

i think many of the employers now are being much more careful about giving assignments to people who are going to hop a fence, cross a border and show up at a war and think they are going to dash back and write a story for $400. i can tell you that's not worth it. that's not a good model. and it's in some ways it is my industry's betrayal on the good heart and good intentions of many people who want to cover real stories and do real things. >> hi. it's my feeling that there will be no significant change in what we've been doing unless the significant pushback by the enlisted side of the mass of young people we've treated like this, and the officers that

you're talking about, who now lead our services have all grown up in the all volunteer environment. they have never had to answer to communities in any significant way. it's my feeling that the only way that they would have to answer that, those kinds of questions, there's been no after actions. there's been no -- just like in vietnam, there's been no after action about how this happened. just from the military standpoint, you don't have to talk about the political -- >> can i take two things you said and answer back to you? >> yes, go ahead. >> the first thing you said the enlisted have to push back. i would argue with that. it is not the military's rank and file job to guide the military, at least not much above the patrol level. but that's our job. that's -- >> i'm talking about the enlisted -- veterans

>> veterans, okay, yes. the citizens, absolutely. i look around and i see a number of veterans i know in the room who are trying to do exactly that, but they are small in number. the second thing i would do is agree with you on your other point about the leadership now has never had to answer for it. and i have like a quip for that which i will say is this, if we had a draft, it would not be enough for jim mattis to make chuck norris lines and call it a national strategy; right? i mean you wouldn't get away with that if these wars were connected to what i say often, you know, a lottery that determined who was going to have to go fight them. you are right. i call it uninformed consent. >> so do you feel that -- i know you have outlined your objectives. but do you feel that the way you presented these young men -- and i haven't gotten into your book

yet, i will, what has happened to them, do you think that that is capable of supporting the organization to push back -- >> no. >> all right. >> no, i'm very big about managing expectations. i mean, every now and then, i write something and there's some outcome that people would say objectively is good. i've been writing, you know, most of my adult life. it's happened a handful of times. i'm not -- i don't sit here and think that we're going to have any impact, that there will be much change. yeah, i'm a pessimist. are we done? >> i don't have any more. [laughter] >> this is the point where if you are in a platoon, you would

be stealing chow or fuel. [laughter] >> go ahead. >> you made about a comment about how some guys have the bandwidth to look at the big picture and some are just running a squad. only a few chapters in, so maybe it is later on in the book, anything in your thoughts, advice, comments, ramblings, you would want to give to those junior ranking officers who are there with them -- >> is that you? >> we will see what happens next week in north korea. >> so it's often hard to know what's the right thing to do, but usually you know what's the wrong thing, and that sort of a baseline thing that it took in my life to figure out, like 50 years. usually you know what's the wrong thing to do, that's probably the thing to avoid. there's often a lot of pretty good options and you won't know which one -- whether it was going to work out until after you have tried it. that's just the nature of life

around violence. i mean the main thing i would say to any officer, young officer is serve your ideals, not your commander. and listen to your nco's. i mean really listen to your nco's. sometimes the best thing you can say is nothing. >> later follow up might be, did you get paid for -- [inaudible]. >> no, that's a whole other story. i haven't seen the movie, but i heard i'm in it. >> i have a question around the talk around about the idea we should privatize the war in afghanistan, and i would like to hear what you think about that as a way of dealing with what seems to be an unwillingness to maybe walk away. >> i'm careful to talk about

things i haven't studied. i can give you a general answer without talking about the specifics that have been in the news for the last couple of days, roughly. anything that takes the wars -- let me back up. wars are a public act. they're waged by our government with our uninformed consent and our money and our credibility and our blood. as public acts, i think they should be publicly understood. anything that removes them further from the public eyes i think is a grave risk that the wars will risk becoming more immoral and less effective. that's not to speak to the specifics of whatever is on the table at the moment, but i'm for more transparency, more discourse, more thoughtful, careful examination of any violent aspects organized under

our foreign policy, and if we make it more private, we make it less visible, so i think i would show up, you know, capital s, capital k, skeptical, capitals all the way across and probably more than skeptical. >> [inaudible]. let me ask you a simple question, why did you join the marines? >> freud says all actions are overmotivat overmotivated; right? i had a lot of reasons. i grew up on the edge of the rust belt, in kind of a dumpy town and wanted to get out of

town and the marine corps was a way to do that. i was more than startled by the attack in 1983 on the marine barracks and thought that there was a new war on and i was curious about it, and i thought the only way to be curious is to get close and perhaps participate. i believed then and i believe now, even though i consider myself a humanitarian, almost a pacifist, but not quite, because i believe this, and i'm going to look you in the eye when i say it. i think there's people in this world who do need to be shot. the problem with wars i've come to learn is we shoot the wrong ones the bulk of the time. so what i just said i've come to learn came to me later. i didn't know these things when i was 18 or 19 and decided to go. >> was it more economics or peer

pressure >> >> there was no peer pressure. i have the opposite. my father was a vietnam vet and pleaded with me not to join the marine corps, made me want to go more. >> [inaudible]. >> i didn't hear you. >> [inaudible]. -- nothing to interview. >> who is next? are we done, brad? >> so nothing's more humbling for a reporter to go back and do a book like treatment on a beat he or she's been covering for years. it is humbling because you

realize how much deeper -- or how much maybe you missed and the pressures particularly of daily journalism. so i wonder what you learned about your beat, about the military beat. i know you write about many other things as well. and how going forward -- i mean, i assume you intend to continue to report on these wars, and so what will you be doing differently? how will the experience of writing a book now influence the kind of stories or how you'll go about doing these stories? >> so one of the many reasons i had for writing the book is i thought that it would be cathartic and might be a release for some of my anger. just made me more angry, didn't work. that's what i learned. i learned it was worse than i knew, bigger than i knew, uglier than i knew, had far more victims than i could count, that the rings of people around the

immediately affected were far more extensive than i had even imagined. what i will do differently? well i don't know how much of that is related to the book. i'm at a phase in my career, my life, people used to read me pretty regularly because i was in the paper all the time. that's not me now. i'm involved in a number of long slow developing projects. and that's what i'm going to keep doing. we have a number of them on the list that are in various stages of incubation. we have more that we will add soon. so i'm working with other reporters, including two veterans who are in this room, some alone that i will do. but i intend to keep doing sort of long form, deep dives, slow

build journalism, and i've got to find some place to put this anger besides twitter; right? [laughter] >> so that's where it will go. [applause] >> copies of chris's book are available at the checkout desk at the front. he will be up here signing. please form a line to the right of the table, and please fold up your chairs. thank you. >> here's a look at some authors recently featured on book tv's after words, our weekly author interview program that includes best-selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers.

comedian and actor dj hughly looked at race issues in america. >> on my watch, during my 7 1/2 years on average, we lost a child every two weeks due to gun violence. not in one of our schools, thank god, but on the block, on the bus going home after school. >> in their homes. >> 7:30 in the morning in her

living room getting ready to go to school, shot by an ak-47, yards away through the window, dead. and going to those homes, going to those funerals, going to those classrooms, there was an empty desk and trying to make sense of the senseless, that was by far the hardest thing i did and nothing came close. in hindsight, very very naively when our family left chicago in 09 to come to d.c., i thought we were at rock bottom. it felt like it couldn't get any worse, for a whole host of reasons, for seven years, we were here in d.c., things unfortunately got a lot worse in chicago. so coming home, leaving d.c., and just thinking of all the, you know, professional and educational and athletic and -- just all the opportunities chicago had given me, i wanted to go back and help out. this is the crisis facing the city. and to go back and not work in this didn't feel right. and to work now with the young

men who are most likely to shoot and be shot, unfortunately that profile is one in the same, this is some of the hardest, some of the most heart breaking also some of the most inspiring and definitely the most humbling work i have ever done. >> after words airs saturdays at 10:00 p.m. and sundayses at 9:00 p.m. eastern and pacific time on book tv on c-span 2. all previous after words are available to watch on-line at book tv.org. >> hi everyone. now it's the real deal. we're going to go ahead and start. welcome to the book room at the strand bookstore, where books have been loved for 91 years and counting.