>> you can watch this and other booktv program from the past 20 years at booktv.org. type the author's name and the word book in the search bar at the top of the page. .. on behalf of the entire staff here at p and p, thank you very much for coming. so in just a few weeks, the us will be marking the17th anniversary of the 9/11 attack . we've been a nation at war ever since.

nearly 17 years in afghanistan, more than 15 years in a rack . in that time as c.j. chivers notes in his new book, more than 2.7 alien americans have served in afghanistan or iraq , many have fought in both wars. nearly 7000 of them have died and tens of thousands more wounded . in "the fighters", chris tells the story of these ongoing, ill-fated, hopefully mismanaged and terribly costly conflict.he tells the story not fromthe vantage of generals and admirals and civilian policymakers but from the perspective of those who've done the bulk of the fighting . the grunts, as they call themselves, in the lower and middle ranks. his focus is on six individuals that each belong

to a different military service and their tours that occurred in different times and in differentplaces. the idea is that these individuals represent the experiences of 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 the 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 will know he writes about military affairs, the authority and informed i-4 detail of a veteran and with the clarity of a talented wordsmith. much of chris's reporting for the times has occurred overseas as a correspondent in afghanistan, iraq, syria,

israel and the palestinian territories and elsewhere with a wide range of assignments. nowadays he writes for the new york times magazine and the newspapers investigation staff. his stories have been part of two pulitzers awarding to the times in 2002 for public service and in 2009 for international reporting. last year chris received a pulitzer for feature writing for his times magazine story that led to the release from an illinois prison of an afghan war veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder . and also the author of the previous book the guns: a history published eight years ago of automatic weapons and the consequences of their mass distribution seemed through the development of the ak-47. for a few of the fighters in the wall street journal said the book provides a dark and honest reckoning of us military involvement in afghanistan and iraq is the 9/11 attacks.

in the new york times review called the fighters a 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 welcome me in welcoming c.j. chivers. [applause] >> i'm looking for -- can you hear me? can you hear me now? i have a hearing aid so i always sound loud to myself. microphone is working? good. i'm looking for a friend. i see there are people inthis room who are in this book . i'm not going to embarrass them now with introductions after this talk , we will all go over to: ping-pong pizza which is around the corner.

i'll be here after for anyone who wants to stay. but we don't want to stay here all night so i'll stay as late as you'd like they are. i'm going to say a few remarks, only a few. i'm going to read a few paragraphs, only a few. i have trouble reading the book, i havetrouble writing it, i have trouble reading it out loud .when i was going through the editing process and the line editing process, one thing moderators do is we read our passages back allowed to untangle syntax, defined the right rhythm, where rhythm exists and try to improve the pros and i did that and i had to stop at my house because my family couldn't take it . the book is pretty raw so i'll read a few paragraphs from some of the milder sections and i'll take questions. this i think is my fourth

fourth talk, every one of them people with personal collections to the book have shown up, people who have the personal connections to the wars have shown up so we have a lot to talk about butyou'll probably find your participation in the q&a more interesting than what i have in my pad . when i had to do i guess sort of as an act of throat clearing and declaration of point of view because the book is written from a point of view. the history of the war in my view as too much general and notenough sergeants . the book we're discussing tonight is about sergeants and people near sergeants. the warrant officers, specialists, private first class, lieutenants and the like who actually fight america's wars. and it covers them with a very simple idea. that they are human and that their human experiences, what they did, what they suffered can help us understand wars

that have been waged for more than 15 years with no clear end in sight. those of you who know me know my position on the wars. those of you who don't know me, i'll be full throated and clear . i am a skeptic. the wars in my view have achieved almost nothing like what their organizers promised, no matter the party inpower or the commanding general of the moment . in one area after another, they failed their ownmeasures . i'll just list a few. reduction of terrorism. the islamic state as a consequence of the invasion of iraq. the protection of populations, we can argue about numbers but the conservativeestimates are hundreds of thousands of civilians killed . development of afghan and iraqi security forces, they

stand now at afraction of those we issued weapons to and put in uniforms . replacement of opium poppy with alternative crops. afghanistan has produced more poppy in most of the years of occupation that i did before we arrived . i can go on but i'll stop the big picture talk now. i just thought it was important that you hear my indelibly skeptical of you so you understand the book you're about to read . as sort of an act of public honesty, i'm not going to sit here and be wishy-washy about what i think . but i'll stop there because this war 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 .

the reasons for this, with the end of conscription came the end of our populations connection to those we sent to fight. i gave the statisticsalready. something like about less than one percent of the country as shown up for these wars . much of that one percent showed upfor both of the wars . that's obviously not all of the population that immediately affected. we can expand that percentage out to include immediate family and perhaps we reach 10 percent. i'm not going to do the demography but the proportion is very small . if we expand those numbers, and include the family, this country has had almost no familial stake in these wars. for many of the families they only had it for a few years, not the entire 16 or 17 or whatever our tally is. the people who fight for us are not known to us.

this book tries to remedysome of that . with the idea that if you understand the people, maybe you will take an interest in the war . maybe we can have a fuller discussion about the wars. and where they're headed and why and what they are or are not achieving and what might be done differently. people ask me and maybe one of you will so i'm going to 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 these questions. i'm not a strategist or a policy center or even a policy recommender. the only thing i recommend is a full discussion about what we're doing and that the national hive mind if you want to call it that might become engaged and have a better course than we have now. i'm going to read a little, a

brief section. the book as i mentioned is very graphic and raw in places. i felt it was necessary for it to be her you to understand, what the characters experienced. and i'm not able to read much of it allowed so i will try but 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 a navy corpsman, most of you probably know what a corpsman is but think medic, it's the navy's version of an army medic that provides trauma care to marines and this corpsman had just saved his formerroommates life . he was shot through the head. and it's about the doubts that attended him almost

instantly . the marines loaded smith onto a sweater, lifted him and rushed to the aircraft. it was a q. week gunship,not a medevac bird . he was still breathing when they laid him inside. the opera was done, he had the handle for his friend, over the roar of the engine he shouted life saving steps for the door gunner, tapped smith on the leg and ran clear. they swept up dust and grass and let the smoke away, scattered in in pink wisps and the helicopter would blow over the field gaining elevation and was gone . suddenly, there was nothing that occurred he could do. he ran back to his truck and hopped into the right front seat. the company began moving. someone said a car and sped away after the shot, adding to a house the weapons company would now search.

kirby sat in the front seat, his hands and arms and legs went with his friends blood. it was clotting and sticky and still warm. he held smith's helmet. he turned it over to look at where the bullet passed through. the bullet still inside, it was an armor piercing 7.62 by five for round . it zipped through the front of the helmet and the top of smith's head. kirby inspected it, rolling it in his hand. he put it in his pocket. nausea came in waves. outside his company marines were rushing to the house thatthey had heard the sniper might have hidden . kirby had not been ordered out. he stayed in his seat, listening to the radio report, rating waiting to be called, traveling with an energy he could neither channel nor contain. tears streamed down his face.

he stared at his blood he hands and at the stains on his leg in the lab where he had cradled smith's head . he shook uncontrollably. he rocked back and forth in hisseat . never before had he saved the life . he had thought it would be cool. instead, he felt guilty. he had seen the entrance and exit wounds on the torn brain matter and had a sense of what was missing. some of it was inside the helmet on his lap. kirby could visualize half of the steel bullet through his friends go. smith survived the trip to the first hospital, if he made it through stabilization and surgery and transferred to germany , what kind of life could he expect? kirby had acted inthe moment , holding them emotions in check so he could do his job. now his emotions broke free. he had a chance to think past the second bysecond sequence of the tasks of life saving steps . he was not sure what saving a life meant .

could i do that for me? kirby wondered? or for him. he did not know whether smith was even still alive. there was no medic on the hugh e. you might die on the way. kirby had done what he had most wanted to do. and was trying not to vomit. i'll jump ahead and say smith survived. and he's still alive. the doctor, kirby and the collins thoughts went to kirby's friend and for about a week more,, i'll have to go and check my notes, kirby was basically an insomniac. you can imagine the zombie fashion, unsure, waiting for word of smith and how his neurology wasfailing .

there's an area in the book where he gets a phone call from smith's father and says basically as long as i'm alive, you'll always have a father in ohio. that's the outcome of that scene . brad asked me to talk alittle bit about process in that scene . that provides an opportunity for that. a lot of the book serves as an anti-memoir i'm not in it, except for the preface when you can hear words like what i opened with here . but in many of the scenes i was present including that one. played out right next to me. but i found being present is never enough. what you see and what you hear or what you think you see and what you think you hear usually aren't enough to make a coherent account and if so what followed for years over the last six years or so was i was going back to each of these characters, those who remained alive to try to

download their brains. i don't think we have any of the primary characters but we have people in the room who are secondary characters or horses and they will note that i am a kind of a pain in the. [bleep] and we had many long nights where we would be talking and i would just be takingnotes, hours of notes at a time . and once i thought i had downloaded each person's brain, i have the same incidentuntil i can make it more coherent account, i would then make a map of the people around them, a social map of their family members , their friends , others who might not have been at the scene but were later connected to it, perhaps gave them medical care or mats in the back of the room, he picked up one of the characters, a black helicopter, one of four pilots, twoaircraft .

there was a fellow pilot who had been shot and then after i would get a draft of the chapter together, i would warn the characters that we were now going to startthe real work, fact checking because you can't write a draft without having errorsin it, it's impossible, particularly the multiple accounts . some acts are easy to check . many of the characters gave me their email records or their journals or their diaries or, i'm not going to namenames. records they took with them when they left their command for military service . so i had official records, i had powerpoint presentations orwhat they call storyboards. i had diaries, those are easy to check . but many other things are difficult, so working with the fact checker we went back through every passage. with the characters and

secondary characters. that's why it took so long. my publisher is watching,they know i'm three years late with this book . people would say when your deadline and i'd say today is my deadline. every day is my deadline. my deadline was two yearsago or a year ago . but we finally finished what turned out to be a pretty immersive process, but one in which i think by the time we published all the people in the book, they know that they participated in fully and we would say we need to make it and i don't know if we achieved this but we would say we've got to make it so you could hit any paragraph with a hammer and a word will move. so who wants to ask questions? anybody want to talk or do you want to go get pizza?

>> there is a standing mac mike, you probably can't see it from your angle but it's right behind you. >> just to say not only are you a fantastic reporter and writer but my family is grateful to you for mentoring brian denton, my nephew and godson who came out of as a small young photographer and learned so much. can you talk about how you managerisk , where you decide where you're going to go to see these scenes that you captured? >> did you all hear it? with my hearing aid, i can never tell what i'm hearing and what i'm missing. there's questions about risk management so risk mitigation really is about self-management. one of the weaknesses that journalists have is that who did this work as they tend to be excitable or worse,

excitable and competitive. so people often will get into circumstances very hastily that they shouldn'tbe in . so when i was first working with brian which was seven or eight years ago and brian had some experience, he was not absolutely a neophyte. he worked in afghanistan a little already and he had worked at the beginnings of the era of spring. brian has really good sense, he's much easier to work with someone when they have good sense , but i would say to brian and we kind of had a reputation or going for forward. regularly. i 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're here for the readers so anything we take on should have a purpose, a research that can inform what you're later going togive to readers . or in brian's case, what you look at. and that was something that we tried to apply to every morning when we went out. and then there's amethodology . when i was in the military, there's intelligence that tells you where to go or not to go but the real intelligence mostly is thegut instincts of ncos, experienced marines . who are out there to develop a gut and you haveto ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing . and i would often tell people when i worked with them, you may get shot today. are you okay with that? you have a story reason to get shot because when you're

laying there shot and people have to get you, are you doing it for journalism or are you doing it for the ride? when you're laying there shot or in the chapel, you'd better be able to articulate a journalistic reason for that last step you took before you got hit so i would basically try to build rakes in people's head so that they would process that and even if you do that, there's still a blood lottery. you can do everything right and things could still go terribly for you. does that answer your question? >> you were given for reasons as to why we wentinto 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 fourth structure and giving a sense of mission to the military?

or the weapons of mass destruction? 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 on what you think were the main reasons. >> 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 an almost crippling allergy to authority. so i'm not going to be a person who's ever going to take that role on or if i did, iwouldn't succeed . so i don't know. i live to try to understand and write 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 what almost human history, there's sort of a tendency to take advantage of nothing, so to speak. there's a sense of wanting manhood, a 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 been, and i'm not saying there isn't a good reason to fight wars and use force and things of that nature , but how is you

manatee going to step forward and take a greater responsibility from the top for the level of violence because they are almost, and i use this not in a derogatory way they are almost suckered into getting into thesehorrible situations . >> you're right, i'm not going to be able to give you much of an answer but i'll take a stab at the edge of it. some it of it is that the kool-aid is really sweet and people are thirsty for it. yes, there are people who are inclined to war and the ones who fight what the volunteer for the end infantry whether the war iswise and just or not . and most societies that i passed through have young people like this. you called it humanity, so is

it wired into us? probably. i look for what would be the steps steps of mitigation. one of my own kaleidoscope of kool-aid that's been found in our eyes when we were marines , when i joined the marine corps in the 80s, i signed up after the beirut bombing. that influenced me. it was 1983. i was a freshman in college and the attack which killed 241 marines andsailors , that drew me to, i won't call it an attraction but it drew me in and a few years later i was in the core, in the infantry and the kool-aid was that we were drinking was about how great we were because we were an all volunteer force . we weretrained , many people in this room served back then or before were trained by draftees, not across the

board, even in the construction military you had many bombers but there were a lot of draftees who stuck around and when i was in the 80s they were still around and they told us, they told me two things about why we were so much better. one was all the young people hadvolunteered , it's a lot easier to lead someone who asked to be there and the other was they had the drugs undercontrol . people weren't all stoned anymore. which they had been for a number of years. and i believe all this. i thought wow, the marine corps. right now it's sort of the marine corps. it's got all this experience from vietnam, got all these volunteers and they fed us this line about how great we were . this really intense can-do attitude, it's not really good to have a can-do attitude when you are implied to impossible tasks. i've come over to about 30

years now or more and i look at it muchdifferently. i lament that we don't have a draft . there is this disconnect that exists from these people, who you say they are in humanity and these people inclined to go to war, we don't have brakes for where we are sending them anymore because it's up to a male lottery where anybody who has a child or grandchild has to wonder if their household will have to provide a son or daughter for war, will be paying attention. people would be asking questions and to answer your questionwhy are we in iraq , we probably would have sorted that out to a large degree if more thanone percent of the population was affected by it . i didn't answer yourquestion, i gave you a rambling set of answers . >> some people have put spurs orthey are unable to serve .

>> true, but that's true of both parties. >> i heard your appearance on w mnu and you made the terrific analogy between the soldier and the civilian population as being similar to students and a school superintendent. the want to go further with that? >> that's, so the disconnect between the senior officer class, the general within the military. people think the generals speak for the military or for the young militarymembers, they certainly try to put my experience they don't . the general my age, she's in her 50s and they have no more real connection to the troops in terms of generationally what they've been raised in, what they've experienced then

say a high school's senior does to a school district superintendent. there thatfar apart . and we see this all the time. the military is basically a hierarchal organization run by age. how many years you have and determines what stage you're likely tooccupy in the chain of command and people at the top have a lot of military experience but don't have nearly as much life experience as someone who is younger, we saw that with the marines united scandal where it looked like , it really looked like the generals didn't even know what facebook was. i mean, it did. not across the board many of them and at that same generational thing . i havefive kids and the oldest is 18 and i know next to nothing about that guys life . you know? even though it's playing out right in front of me, i can't . it's just we are from different times.

so that was the analogy i was talking about. who's next? >> i recognize some of the characters in the book from your previous writing and i was wondering if you could talk about the process or the decision to write about something that you had previous meeting these individuals or something you felt needed to be done after interacting with them? >> it was after. let me back your question up and talk about character selection. iselected six primary characters but you could really say it's seven . you could aggregate that there's a mom who is the protagonist of thelast chapter . so six, seven, eight characters.i chose them to operate kind of like an

ensemble, each one playing a different instrument if you will do make together something more complete. so there from different phases and places and times in the war. there from different doctrines or period's in the war. they have different period of equipment, different enemies. the enemies change so you can compare the threats to a marine in 2003 back to say a soldier in 2006 and they are completelydifferent foes that they were fighting . and then i wanted within that different what they call mos is in the marine corps. you've got a rotary pilot, a strike fighter pilot and we wanted to show how strike fighter pilots careers had changed because these pilots most show up in a dogfight,

almost all of them across the period in my life have been in zero dogfights and their essentially attacking aircraft now. in the role that we've used them. i chose people who are career servicemembers, joined during the cold war period and people who are compelled into the military after the 2001 attack on washington and new york so taken together i created a mix . from that i did choose characters who i already knew pretty well . because i thought their stories were interesting andi wanted to follow them across time . in the case of doctor b who is the one i read from here who you might be referring to, his mother really chewed me out one morning. i mean, she was harsh.

gail is an amazing woman. the people who have a chance surviving war or the afterwards, they usually have someone like gail in their life. and gail said you know, you're a real hotshot with all this stuff that you do. it looks really cool and full of adrenaline and i hope it works for you and your missing the whole story. the adrenaline ends, they come home and they're not in your their units anymore and that's when the real shift starts and you don't know anything about it. and she was not exactly right and she was listening, then she back that up but she was almost exactly right, i knew very little about that and it didn't hit me until i stopped going out home and suddenly felt completely maladjusted for civilian life. i wrote this remark in the dubliner 15 minutes ago and i was mad at the pilot in the back.

matt was talking about his own adjustment more than 2000 hours flying blackhawks in afghanistan and iran. and when i went home i went from 900 miles per hour to standing on a parking brake. you know? it's really hard. and over the years when i was writing this book i was trying to navigate my own feelings about it. and learning a lot often from the veterans who i was working with. so i chose characters who i thought might be good guides for readers for that experience as well. >> who's next? >> every platoon has got a guy just like you. thank goodness.

>> what did you find out from asking those that you spoke with about their feelings about what they did? in other words, themorality of the situation . >> so i don't know how many people i know who areveterans in these wars . it's an uncountable sum and obviously i know some much better than others . the characters in the book purposefully represent a range of views about the war 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, there's one of them still believes the invasion of iraqwas justified . another, i think quite clearly believes we should

not have invaded iraq. and it would have been better for everyone involved, the troops, the iraqis had we not done that. one is not disappointed, he's disgusted. absolutely disgusted. and there's another didn't think at that level. he had squad to run and every day he ran his squad, 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 population but what i did not do was select six sock puppets who sound like each other. either they were blue state, like me, unlike me.

i tried to present their views as those views and have their own heads. they are a mix and i'm not going to tell you that i have sitting on any sort of formal survey data and can speak for the entire class. i won't do it. it's a mix. like sarah, disappointment run that through this cohort of our citizens . but they're certainly not universally. >> i'm sorry, you are next. >> you talked about the disconnect between the broader public and these wars that was created by the end of universal conscription. i think all of us have watched the networks and a lot of her neighbor and newspapers stop after these conflicts. can you talk 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? >> before we talk about the state of war journalism we need to talk about the state of journalism because in 2001 , it was a very different market climate for newspapers and tv stations. that was pretty much pre-start up. the internet was around, what it had not done the damage to the business model or if it had done it, people hadn't caught on to it yet. so newspapers arrived at the wars, the big journalist organizations arrived at the wars heady with the energy of the nation that had been attacked, but also flush with cash. so after several years, the business environment in

journalism, particularly print journalism at changed. and we saw a big decline in staff reporting, on the ground and in these wars. some of that was financial. some of it was alsofatigue . you know, as we became more digital and i'm not a click counter and my peers will bounce for that, i haven't looked at clips from my stories, i thought how until this bring in for about a week i kind of look at a few stories and i have looked since. when i hear from people who count the clips, you write an informed, exclusive story about syria. you get almost no traffic. right? newspapers i think should serve you your vegetables so i don't care about the traffic but i know we have to care some level.

it can't be all vegetables. we have to have other stuff they are to survive but the war coverage is market-driven and you, the market, not you personally because you're here to talk and pay some respect to a war book or you wouldn't be in the room of the larger public doesn't give a damn. i hear we can see it in the data . you know? entertainment stories will get way more attention than the stories about the wars. the state of war journalism i think is pretty grim. it's also especially morally frightening becauseas we backstab , there still exists in the interest that many organizations are running war stories and we run them with freelancers who might not have theexperience for the safety net . i work for a legit employer. i have healthcare. i haveretirement .

i have mental health counseling a phone call away if i want. i have a support network of coworkers who worked in all sorts of traumatic situations here inthe united states and abroad . we really the new york times i think have things in place to mostly look out for the well-being of our staff. freelancers have some of that , some have a will more than a facebook group or a drinking circle and there's not much worse in my view or someone dealing with a war than a drinking circle, it's the worst thing you can have and yet these are a number of the people are providing a significant fraction of the war coverage and they are a number of the people who were captured in syria in the past, either by isis or by isis and you paid with their lives.

i'd like to see different models but remember, i'm aguy who covers the bottom, not the top so i'm not going to tell you what the model is . at a minimum, maybe people like sebastian younger when he lost his friend was more than aggrieved, he took to provide training to freelancers, basic first aid, like stating steps training and civil equipment that can add minutes to a life because he died, i don't have the map in front of me so don't hold me to the distance . if i have the map i could tell you exactly but a few minutes drive from the italian vascular surgery would have been able to put clamps on him and perhaps, i'm not going to say would have saved his life but will never know because many of the people at the scene didn't have the light saving steps or skills to save him and sebastian has been working on that and i think many of the employers now are being much more careful about

giving assignments to people who are going to hop the fence, cross the border and show up in a war and think they're going to ãback and write a story for $400. that's not a good model and its in some ways in my industry as a betrayal on the good heart and intentions of many people who want to cover real stories and do real things. >> it's my feeling that there will be no significant change in what we've been doing unless the significant push back by the enlisted by the mass of young people we've treated like this. and the officers you're talking about who now lead

our services, they've all grown up in the all volunteer environment. they've never had to answer to communities in any significant way. it's my feeling that the only way they will have to answer that, those kind of questions , there's been no adverse actions, just like vietnam there's been no after actions about this happened. just from a military standpoint, -- >> can i take two things you said? you said theenlisted have to push back. i'd argue with that. insurrection is not the answer. it's not the rank-and-file's guide to job the military . that's our job. >> i'm talking about the veterans.

>> veterans, citizens, absolutely. i see a number of veterans i know in the room who are trying to do that but they are small in number. 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 a quick 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 and he wouldn't get away with that if wars were connected to what i say often is a male lottery that determined whowas going to have to go fight them . but you're right, i call it an informed consent. >> do you feel that, i know you've outlined your executives but do you feel that the way you presented these young men, and i haven't gotten to the book,

what has happened to them, do you think that is capable of supporting the organization and its pushback? >> know, i'm very big about managing expectations. every now and then i write something and there's some outcome that people would say objectively is good. i've been writing most of my adult life, i handful of times. i don't sit here and trumpet that we are going to have any impact, thatthere will be much change . yes, i'm a pessimist. are we done? >> this is the point where if you were in a platoon you'd be stealing child? or fuel.

go ahead. >> you say you don't have the bandwidth to look at the big picture, i'm only a few chapters in so maybe later on in the book , is there any thoughts, comments, ramblings you can give to those ranking officers who are there with them ? >> i'm on the current billet but it would happen next week in north korea. >> so it's often hard to know what's the right thing to do but you usually know what's the wrong thing . that's sort of a baseline took me a long time to figure out, like 50 years. the wrong thing to do, that's probably the thing to avoid. there's also a lot of good options and you won't know which ones that are going to work out until after you've 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. really listen to your nco. sometimes the best thing you can say is nothing. >> a lighter follow-up would be did you get paid for your likeness and dogs of war? >> i haven't seen the movie but i've heard i'm in it. >> you have a question about the talk around the idea that 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 thingsi haven't studied so i

can only give you a general answer . without talking about the specifics that have been in the news for the last couple of days . anything that takes the wars, wars are a public act. they are based 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 eye i think is a grave risk that the wars will risk becoming more and less effective, if not to the specifics of whatever is on the table at the moment, what i'm for is more transparency, more discourse, more awful, careful examination of any violent aspects organized under our foreign hospices.

if we make it more private, we make it less physical so i think i would show up with a k skeptical all the way across and probably more than skeptical . >>. [inaudible] >> let me ask a simple question, why did you join the marines?>> freud says all actions are over motivated. i had a lot of reasons. i grew up on the edge of the rustbelt in kind of a dumpy town andwanted 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. i thought there was a new war on and i was curious about it and thought the only way to be curious was to get close and perhaps participate. i believed then and i believe now, even though i consider myself a humanitarian, almost a pacifist, not quite as i believe this, i'll 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 and i was 18 or 19 anddecided to go . >> was it more economics or pressure? >> there was no pure pressure, there was the

opposite. i have irish blood, my father was a vietnam that and pleaded with me notto join the marine corps and it made me want to go more . >>. [inaudible] >> i didn't hear you. >> yom kippur, people were cooked, not killed. >> who's next? are we done, brad? >> nothings more humbling for a reporter than to go back into a booklength treatment of what you've been covering for years . it's humbling because you realize how much deeper or how much maybe you missed and

the pressures of daily journalism so i wonder if you learned about your be about the military beat. i know you write about it with many other things as well and how going forward, i assume you intend to continue to report on these wars so what will you be doing differently and how will the experience of writing the book influence the kind of stories or how you go about doing these stories? >> so one of the many reasons after writing the book as i thought that it would be cathartic and be release for some of my anger. just made me more angry. it didn't work, that's what i learned. i learned it was worsethan i knew . bigger than i knew, uglier than i knew. i had four more victims than i could count, that the rings of people around and immediately affected were far

more extensive than i had even imagined. what i'll do differently, i don't know how much of thatis related to the book . those of you, there's probably a few people here who used to readme regularly but i was in the paper all the time. it's not me now, i work for the magazine . i work for allnumber of long, slow developing projects . and that's what i'm going to keep doing. i have a few on the list that are in various stages of incubation and the more that we are going to add soon. so i'm working with other reporters including two veterans who are in this room . some alone, but i intend to keep doing long form, deep dive, slow build journalism and i've got to find someplace to put this anger

besides twitter, right? so that's where it will go. >> you want to sign some books? >> sure. [applause] so copies of chris's book are available at the checkout desk at the front. he will be up here signing. formal line to the right of the table and please. your chair, thank you. >> c-span launched book tv 20 years ago on cspan2 and a sense then we've covered thousands of authors and book festivals totaling 50,000

hours of programming. sociology professor michael dyson has appeared on tv more than 25 times. in 2008 he was a guest on our monthly call in program in-depth. >> we told david halverson i used to think we should change a little bit here and there and now we have to have a complete overhaul to have a revolution of values. so that's martin luther king jr. was at the nadir of his popularity in mainstream white america, he had become a pariah but the stench and followed her of martin luther king jr.'s resistance was swept away in the sweet smell of marxism and that has defined him as a great american and part of the pantheon of our re-founding fathers of this nation. >> watch this and all other book tv programs from the past 20 years at booktv.org. type the authors name of the word at the search bar at the top of the page. you're watching tv on cspan2,

television for serious readers. at 7:15 p.m. eastern, pulitzer prize winning biographer david lewis recalled the life of wendell wilkie, a midwestern businessman turned politician who was the republican nominee or president in 1940 bennett 815, mary jo mcconnaughhay provides a history of latin american involvement in world war ii as both allied and axis powers i-4 influence. on book tvs afterwards at nine, emory university's carol anderson chronicles the changes to voting requirements following the 2013 ruling shelby versus holder. at 10 pm, new york times columnist anthony appia explores the role identity plays in politics and society and we wrap up our prime time programming beginning at 11: 10 pm eastern with the wall street journal's matthew hennessey examining the role adoration next will play in america's future. that happens tonight on

cspan2's book tv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. our on either this weekend's fall schedule is available on our website, booktv.org. >> .. then we left jeffrey lewis reading from his new book. on saturday at 4 p.m., lewis miller, the author of the late bloomers club will be here to read from her book and she will also be a to help us judge our send