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it's. it's just. good afternoon, everyone please take your seats so that we can continue with this afternoon's programing reflecting upon the vietnam era from the vantage point which is ours years later. i'm christopher bracey, pearl provost and executive vice president for academic affairs here at the george university and is my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce our third moderator for today, tom shanker. tom is the director of our project for and national security in the of media and public affairs, which is part of our columbian college of arts and sciences. tom was named to his position in

june of 2021. after nearly a quarter century with the new york times, including 13 years as a pentagon correspond and in covering the depart department of defense overseas combat operations and national security, he most recently as the deputy washington editor, the times managing coverage of the military diplomacy and veterans affairs early in the war in afghanistan, tom was embedded with army special forces at kandahar and subsequently conducted of reporting trips to afghanistan and in iraq. tom's new book is entitled age of danger keeping safe in an era of new superpowers, new and new threats. it will be published on may 9th. tom we look forward to your panel. beyond the war. and it's my pleasure to you to the stage. thank you so much for that very generous reaction.

thanks of you for returning after lunch. that's always, you know, a moderator's concern, just one point to be made. the authority of the chair of the provost was kind enough to speak about the project for media and national that i am honored to direct. we talked all morning about the of vietnam to today the project for media and national security was founded just after the end of the war in vietnam by two reporters who were deeply concerned about the horrible state of military media relations, something that we'll talk about later. and since all those years, the project convenes small meetings, large group meetings between senior military, national committee officials and the washington press corps to try to reestablish at least some level of trust in an adversarial environment and to help educate the american public about these very important things. so legacy that we've been talking about lives today here

at gw, at the school of media and public affairs. so i am honored to be moderating just a really outstanding panel of, distinguished journalists and authors. elizabeth becker is former correspondent for the washington post, npr and the new york times, where we first met. among her many books on and cambodia is you don't belong here how three women rewrote the story of the war. next to her is david maraniss. he currently serves as associate editor the washington post. and even though i'm a former times man, there's no macy's. gimbel competition today will will be okay. among his many books is, they marched into sunlight war and peace, vietnam and america. october 1967. and on the forehead is jim starbuck. he was a war correspondent for the new york times in in 1969 and 1970. his include nature wars, the incredible of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds.

so thank all three of you for joining us today. and i am honored to be your moderator. our mission today is to talk about the cultural impact of the and beyond. and i know all three of you have thought about vietnam and its cultural impact through those years to today in very different ways. and i just love to hear each of you speak about it. jim, i'd like to start with you, please. one of the problems that has up in the 50 years is that the since all volunteer army, which is the result of the war was, is that the the the military the army has gotten very estranged. the civilian population. they're they can't recruit enough. something like at last figure i believe was something like 85% of the people in the military have had had relatives that had fathers and grandfathers in the

military and that a huge of all the recruits for the army come from a five or six states along the southern. and so a lot of the people in the other parts of the country have less and less do no less and less. the the military and that that's having an enormous on. i think the term viability, the military. i was at a conference at fort benning when the ken burns. lynn novick vietnam documentary came out in the recruiting general was there talking what ought to be done about this and and there were about 600 current officers and retired military officers that conference. and he asked at the end, what should we do? and almost everybody said there ought to be a national service input now we ought to have at

least one or two years of everybody serving in either the military, the peace, the teacher corps, some kind of form of national service, kind of coalesce the country around the notion of that kind of service. that's one of the problems. but you also see a disconnect in our national security policy. the case has been made that, you know, when we had a draft army, every family or most families or many families felt the impact of the war. now, the military is drawn from this 1%. the nation can go to war without the nation really to war. right. and do you see that as a danger for our our society today? i think that if the question is national service, be a danger no no would in somehow getting more of the population involved in national national security policy because few serve. isn't that a danger because it

separates the vast majority of our population from important national security. questions. yes, i think that's true. and i think we ought to involve. more people, more americans in in this whole process. mm hmm. david, you've looked at much more a domestic question. can you talk about some of your reporting and in particular, the book i mentioned? well the reason i wrote the book is because the cultural impact of the vietnam war. i am a baby boomer. i was born in 1949. i had already written books about vince lombardi and bill two completely opposite figures in american history. but both of whom the central years, the 1960s. and that was the defining decade for me as well. and so i in both of those books, one, i start when was writing them. when i got to the sixties, i sort of slowed down and became more obsessed and realized that's why i had write about that decade and chose the vietnam or as the vehicle for

that. i was a freshman at the university of wisconsin and in 1967, when the first violent police action against students took place in the commerce building against when there was a sit down protest against dow chemical company, ironically, and so that was sort of a defining moment for. me, i was wearing my first blue jean jacket. i was in the edge of the crowd watching that happened. but i decided should start there because 1967 is when everything was still up in the air. you know, it was before you didn't know what was going to happen. it seemed like the culture was every week, you know, like a week would be a year. and so i went to the the morgue at the washington post and said what was going on in vietnam that day and found this battle that happened where 60 men were killed, 60 wounded out of 140. and it was just a two paragraph story in the papers, you know, so different from the wars that would follow that.

and the only reason it was even a story is because the son of a famous world war two, general terry, was killed in the battle as an all-american player. donald hollander, for whom the holocaust center at west is named. anyway, so i, i thought, you know, there's there was terrific literature about the war in vietnam. you know, frankie fitzgerald, so many, you know, as great shining light. but i hadn't seen a and not as much about the antiwar movement was norman mailer's armies of the night. but that's norman mailer. and it can't be repeated. but i wanted to try to put those two very different worlds together to explore the how, the culture changed because of of those moments. so i juxtaposed the with with the protested vietnam in wisconsin and saw from that changes that reverberate all way through the decades. you know the chancellor at the university william sewell, a great social who had studied the

effects of of saturation bombing on tokyo world war two, who the first teach in it against the war in vietnam was the chancellor. when this protest he froze and didn't know how to control the police and he was haunted by that for the rest of his life. a tragic shakespearean figure. on the other side, you'd have someone like a young soldier named tom coburn, who is a baby son, because he was so and in the where all everybody was being killed. he was hiding behind a tree and saw one of his comrades ten feet away in the sunlight. and tom knew that if he went to try to help him, he would get killed. and he didn't do it. he couldn't do it if he froze. and that haunted him for the rest his life. by the time i interviewed 35 years later at a reunion in las vegas, i started talking to him and he was holding a glass of water and was shaking. so much was spilling all over the floor.

and, you know, it's a moment that can never get past no other soldiers would get past it in various. but the ramifications of that, the point is that that war's really never end for who are involved in them in different ways. thank you very much, elizabeth. well, where to start? i went to cambodia to cover the war when finished my first year in graduate school. i wrote a book that included frank is one of the three women who paved the way for me. so just being here, i'm a cultural a culture oddity because thanks to frank and some other women during the vietnam war broke through the barrier and became and were able to cover wars from the battlefields for the first time and forever. it's a fabulous story that has a lot to do with coincidence, but mostly to do with the fact that president johnson refused to

declare vietnam a war, which meant the war. the rules for media were suspended. so the media's a bunch, mostly white guys. they they felt like they had the equivalent of a year rail card show to get a commander to to come. and then they could go on the helicopter truck, whatever. well, incidentally, there is space for women because there's not that barrier wasn't there. and lo and behold, general westmoreland was was inspecting some troops, saw a woman he knew who was the daughter, his wife's tennis partner back in honolulu. and he said, denby, what are you doing here? she said, i'm covering the war. how long have you been here? a few nights. he goes back to psychoanalysis, going on. women do not cover the battlefield and the suits of the defense department called them down. they came up with a solution, a

temporary solution to say, okay women can cover the battlefield just like the and that's history. and from then on, next war, desert storm women went as staff correspondents. and with medium. and so here i am. i'm a grateful grateful cultural example. that's fantastic. and when secretary rumsfeld was making his first trip into kabul early december 2001, he tried to call the pentagon press pool, and one of his categories was, women reporters who had children. and of course, they just revolted and everybody flew into kabul with them. but that mindset lasted until june 2000. right. thank you. one of the signature cultural elements of a war is the end of the war. when the veterans come home and i know we've talked about this a little bit today, jim, when you and i were chatting on the phone, you mentioned you've spoken to a lot of vets, tried to go back to vietnam and try to understand that that experience.

can you share? it's a great story. there are now several companies you google the most. some of them run veterans who offer tours to vietnam for veterans specifically and, they go they'll make them as easy, as difficult as you want. but but this started quite early after. the end of the war that people, soldiers wanted to go back and and see vietnam, not see vietnam, but see where they fought. and the hanoi quite sort of suspicious about this sort of had had a security officials take the americans around because they thought there doing some spying or something. later they realized that this was a source of hard currency and they should be encouraged to come back and on. and so various people got involved in giving these veterans. and one of them was a translator for, frankie and me, when we

went back to vietnam and halberstam and others named control. and in in danang and mr. cohn told us this wonderful story. he early in the early days, we would take these groups of veterans and they would say, okay, we just don't want to go to the sun valley. we want to go to hill for 52, which is where we during that battle, this or this month or and so these guys were getting a little bit older these veterans and they were getting little more out of shape and so contra and and the other guys would sometimes sort of cheat a little bit they'd take them to the coast sun valley. but they'd drive to where there was a sort of a slightly less arduous hill. they'd say, okay, this is your hill, and you can go up this hill. this is where you fought. well, several years later, when the veterans are even more out of shape and and this is a

vietnam humidity heat issue and they to vietnam, except time they had gypsies. and so mr. cong would these people up to his hill where they he said they fought and they'd say, no, not where we fought. we fought six kilometers that way. let's go. and this set up a whole system of where strokes, heart attacks for these guys and. vietnam didn't kill them the first time, but it might the second time, right? so anyway that's that's the best record story. fantastic. what do you think they were looking for i'm not a pop psycho democracy closure but they go back on these journeys. what do you think they're hoping to find? hoping to see, hoping to learn? well, i think it's a nostalgia thing. i mean, you know know, most people who spent a year in

vietnam and and or two and in combat, especially, i mean, those are the most the most impressionable days of their lives. i mean, i still remember where i was in august of 1969. i can't remember anything that happened in the 30 years between after that but i know exactly where i maybe he doesn't mean that they so these you know these are very important milestones in a person's especially if you've been in the war especially even you've seen combat right. david i know you specialize in these conversations. tell us some of your thoughts. yeah, well, i did go back to vietnam with clark welch, who was a company commander in the battle, survived. it had hit up in the hills of colorado for decades after the war ended because so many of his boys were killed in the battle. and he was afraid that a daughter or wife or mother of

one of those would blame him for it, when in fact he had fought valiantly and tried to talk the brass out of walking into that ambush that day. so i went back him and also with consuelo allen, who was the daughter of terry allen, who was killed in the battle that the battalion commander and clark had had written letters to his wife, lacy, during the war that he gave me all of the letters and several of them. he talked about the beauty of flying over it on a helicopter and seeing the gorgeous and in valleys and that he hoped to go back someday after the war when everything was a piece. and so he that's why he went back with me and also to find the battlefield and we find it and we not only found the but we found the viet cong first division commander who had fought against that day and had won in the battle. and that day going to the battlefield, which was 44 miles

northwest of saigon toward the cambodian border, was the most unforgettable day of my life, because we we drove out there. kyle horst was my interpreter he's in the audience today. he's brilliant, vietnam and we we walked about a mile after we all the rutted roads which by the way by the way now are all paved according to kyle found a farmhouse near the battlefield. we were with the military the commander and clerk well, jenkins low. we got into this little farmhouse house. and when vietnam was the farmer and he had fought in that battle any environmental threat recognized him and and noticed that he that he had ten children. and for chet was in charge of population control saigon, and he chewed him out having ten kids. but anyway, then we walked toward the battlefield. clark well, he had a g.p.s.

i had all of the the i knew exactly where where we should be going. and walking toward the battlefield. unbelievable. because vietnam being and well, it's these two old soldiers who tried to kill each all those decades ago were together, pointing out they were, you. everything was. they were they just veterans together at that point. and clark welch finally said, if we go 50 yards towards that direction, that's where and he pointed to a trail. that's where your was killed. terry allen the commander who had been hiding an aerial when he was killed, you anthills of vietnam could be four or five feet high. we walk through there it's a beautiful dappled day. and in early february with trees, with leaves and we get to that spot and there's another

anthill and just standing there with clark welch and tread consuelo allen and thinking about how time compressed you know into that moment was just the most unforgettable moment of my life at that that's my experience going back with veteran very powerful elizabeth going back well well, i covered the war in cambodia and it's memories of extraordinary pain and anguish that i don't think we've discussed quite quite enough to see a country destroyed front of your eyes when you're in your mid-twenties it was unforgettable. i went back to washington, worked at the washington post i it to me next to him and couldn't forget. so i my going back was to go back to cambodia under pol pot first and last journalists to go there with another journalist

richard dudman. so i had the incredibly. experience and challenge of trying make sense of cambodia when. you're under the equivalent of house arrest being taken around by the khmer rouge. two weeks of this i wrote what i didn't see because that's what you do. that's what i thought i should do because i was not allowed to interview anybody i wanted to. we were taken around as one group and the last day i we were allowed to pol pot. so 2 hours with pol pot, who who already knew that the vietnamese had responded to his border war. and we're crossing the border. keith mentioned it, but this the hard thing get across to the american audience was that the whole story of dominos was standing it was put upside the communists did not invade, not a

communist. they invaded each other. so i was there as. the vietnamese were invading cambodia, we heard a lecture, pol pot for 2 hours that he expected naito to come to his rescue because he presumed the war world warsaw pact would come to the rescue of vietnam. this is insane. i mean, khmer rouge land is completely cut off in a way that north korea had never even imagined. go back last night thrilled we're getting out of this insanity and. that night we were attacked by a cambodian. cambodians and they murdered the professor with us and threatened both me and dudman left the next day and vietnamese were in phnom penh within weeks. and the chinese had invaded vietnam. and we had a reference from that film length. so you had communists against

communists, and asean was home free. so that really led to my first book when the war was over because i had to figure out what in the world my country was doing in all of this, as well as explaining cambodia immediately china comes to the fore. this president carter, who was valiant with human rights in many respects, took the advice of. brzezinski and supported china and which means pol pot. so pol pot was overthrown. the united states, europe and other countries supported pol pot to try take back cambodia because vietnam always, always is wrong. so in i interview brzezinski, who said pol pot's an abomination but china can support him, president carter said exactly to me, and he wrote it down on a piece of paper, this is for china.

this is all to do that. so this country cambodia finally gets rid of the khmer rouge and they are under extreme restrictions so that no aid could go australia was the only country that went in to help them. and it took the vietnamese finally left. but because of policies on p.o.w. media was mentioned, the league of families did not want them so. all of a sudden the vietnamese were gone and along the border were the khmer rouge poised take back cambodia in the late 1980s. all of a sudden, secretary james baker said are we fell into a trap and so we finally got a peace treaty in paris. in 92. so that's a hard thing to figure out. it's geopolitical. it's also what was your country's role? how did how did this loss in

vietnam so pervert our sense of what's important that we could overlook the khmer rouge. and so there's much, much more to it the whole history but anyway that that first trip back was an amazing trip back right. i mean it is so important for us to remember the war in vietnam had this incredibly dynamic and damaging second third order effect in the other countries. one of the things that's come up several times, starting with the early panel, with senators hagel and carrying general eaton, is the lessons vietnam for the post-9-11 wars, iraq and afghanistan and talking about veterans. it just to me that you know the symbol of vietnam veterans coming back is being spat upon and from vietnam and the veterans coming back from afghanistan are lauded and think

most veterans i know, of course, think that neither works because, of course, the ones came back from vietnam were there following lawful orders. they didn't start the war. and those coming back from afghanistan or iraq they were following orders doing the sort of thank for your service rings hollow. so reflecting on these three sets of wars and elizabeth can tell you disagree with me, which i love what should be what should be this nation stance toward returning? well, first of all, these on veterans is right up there in urban lands. the veterans will rejected by the establishment. you know, when the veterans came back, the american legion vfw didn't want to have anything do with them. they were called hippies and losers they had to create their own vietnam veterans association and they did a brilliant job lobbying for congress. they created their own monument memorial, the great vietnam

memorial. and that was so many years, though. no, it wasn't that many years. i mean, that was eighties. but it took a while to raise the money. and but even then, president would not go to the opening because it was not patriotic enough. and only the chairman of the joint, general vessey, who was a real hero in my book, he went and that was the and i bring this up because was the first parade that those veterans had in the eighties. and if you spent time with them, there's some out here. if you spent time with them that's what they talk about the the established the no mirrors had had praise for them, so on and so forth so i think that that's one thing to learn is that they were rejected by the people who sent them. right but. i guess my point is that just as that rejection wrong, so is this blind and rather superficial? thank for your service. not really enough either, david. well, i think the what really in

the most important part of it is that that you have to tell the truth and the government lied about and the soldiers knew they were lying about it. it just in in the small example of of the battle that i write about in the when it happened the government declared it a victory for the united states. that's the way it was portrayed. they made up a body and a great oral military historian named johnny cash was sent to the battlefield the next day because terry own son had been killed in pentagon, wanted to know what happened. so we interviewed all of the soldiers who survived it. and he discovered that what the government, what the military had done at the time of the battle was say, well, how many dead vietcong did you see? and somebody would say, ten. how many did you see, john? i mean, you see 11. there was the same bodies, but they edited them all up and made it sound like they destroyed the

vietcong and. only cash coming in there to discover the lie which was buried and i found it 40 years later. his reports. so the soldiers in that battle, the ones who survived went to a evacuation hospital and it was such a big that westmoreland came to visit them and he he went to a sergeant, first sergeant, and said, what happened? and barrow said well, we were ambushed. and westmoreland said, oh, no, no, you couldn't been ambushed because this is right. a point when westmoreland was trying to raise the troop levels and win the war by battles of attrition and had to made every battle look like a victory. and barrow said, well, i don't know. i mean, you were there. i saw i don't know what it was if it wasn't a an ambush. and so all of soldiers, when i interviewed them decades, whether they went on to support the war and think it was

worthwhile or they went on to oppose it and there were men on both sides of that question. all of them said, oh, want is the truth. and i think every soldier wants that. yeah, every citizen deserves that as well. jim, what are your thoughts on the sort of pendulum swing in how we treat our veterans? i really can't i really don't know much about this one. one little sort of anecdote that i can sort of offer is that in later years there were i came across a people who weren't in vietnam who not soldiers in vietnam who claimed be there was a certain amount of braggadocio about this. they wanted to let people know they were veterans, but they really weren't veterans and there were and then and there were some even some reporters that i knew who didn't get to vietnam who who wanted to who

thought that this was really something that they missed in their careers that that how could you go through one of the greatest go through the period in which we had this enormous this enormous war that had such an effect on the country and you didn't go and see it and you know i don't know how big was but i do know that it happened and there's a the american military even today, has a problem with stolen valor for the war. since 911, people, people claiming the medals are served, places that they didn't. so that that's still problem. now i wanted it slightly turn the topic a little bit to the notion of a lost war. how is this nation dealt with the loss of war in vietnam and? of course, there are many constituencies in that the american military. the average citizen, etc. and how do you think that's to affect the country today having,

dare i say it lost, to more wars in iraq and afghanistan? well, i would say in terms of lost war, it, the i was covering this as a reporter and all of a sudden you couldn't even use the word and the indochina desk in in the state department was known as very lost causes. and that's all very funny. but what it meant turning your back on, the damage we had done and it's extraordinary. i mean, i think everybody here knows that vietnam laos and cambodia and we have to say laos several times because they suffered as well the most bombed countries on earth per capita. and i think also by tonnage we never did reparation. i mean, now we're doing aid, but the the whole the whole issue keith and others were talking about in terms of of not being able to come to a diplomatic

recognition of each other is there had been aside cortisol to the 1973 peace accords that wasn't nailed down the vietnamese thought it promised them reparations and the americans said no. and that's when vietnam invades cambodia, blah, blah, blah goes on. but the result is the people who suffer from agent and from from all the chemicals in those countries, particularly vietnam. it's because we did not want to admit that we had lost and did not want to admit what we had done to them. so that's and i already talked about the effect i think it had on on thing. and then we can go into the diplomatic but that would be a little more boring. but i think it's when those of us who go regularly, you just say, i wish we had recognized accepted and gotten to work and we wouldn't have had to wait 20 years to have relations with

vietnam. i think the to me, the most dangerous aspect of the lost war idea is that it led to iraq and i could make a direct connection to through my book, which is that in 1967 at the university of wisconsin was a young graduate student, -- cheney living with lynne cheney in eagle heights, the student housing there. and were so i interviewed them both for the book and they were so upset and agitated by the anti-war movement that it really affected their entire political perspective and. i just make that direct connection between them watching what was happening in vietnam, then cheney being determined that that not be repeated. a war, not be lost again, and thinking that, ignoring all of the other aspects of that, and thinking that you know through shock and awe and everything, they could just easily make sure that this war was won and falling. that same trap right from

vietnam to iraq in direct connection. when you heard those debates two years ago with the fall of afghanistan and withdraw from iraq, that oh, we should have stayed the course. we could have done more. let's let's invade both countries a third time. so that narrative holds. jim, i know this is a topic that's very near and dear to you, which is did the american media lose the war in vietnam? well, that's part of it. but a lot of the military said but i my view is that is is is is twofold number when i was there 69 and 70, there were more than 400, almost 500 reporters registered with mccaffrey. in other you could you get a press card and you could travel on helicopters. you could go wherever you wanted so on and and but most of those were sort of tied down in saigon. why were they tied down in

saigon? because if you were a single reporter for a newspaper or a radio or some some anyway, your editor who had spent a lot of money get you there, wanted you to file a lot of copy and you couldn't wander around vietnam and and file two stories a week or. you you had to sort of stay where you could get a story every day or every other day and where was that was going to the 5:00 follies, the 5:00 follies, the and the american and the vietnamese handed out sheets of what happened. what they said happened during the war in the 24 hours, what units were doing and so on and you could put that together and could pleasure editor back home and file five or 600 words for

for him to do so there was there weren't a lot of reporters, though there were hundreds of reporters accredited there weren't all that out in the field looking for the new york times had four reporters when i was there. so we had the luxury of being able to let people go out, spend time doing stories. and we one of the interesting things and i think that was a pretty good strategy for the military they kept a lot of people tied in saigon and. so all what's really what was really to me is that several of the really good from the village are not good but big stories from the vietnam war, the my lai massacre, the green beret double agent murder case, which happened. i was there, the secret bombing of cambodia, all those stories these were found out by people outside of vietnam, people the

united states and and so and so the pentagon did a did a i thought a pretty good job in retrospect of some of and in fact, somebody did a study of cbs news. we all morley safer his report about the marines the with the zippo lighters lighting the hookers and the village but a study of cbs coverage for a certain i think a one or two or three year period found that something like 85 to 90% of their coverage was quote positive for the for the military. it wasn't it wasn't negative or supposedly negative and that in effect. i think most of the story, even the stories i wrote a lot of stories about vietnam ization and i would quote people say

how, you know, this is really working. this is to turn the tide. we're going teach these guys how to do and we're going to support them. and this is really doesn't work. but after war, the american military decided that the press could just wander around. willy nilly and find stuff out on their own. and so that for the gulf war, the first gulf war, norman schwarzkopf's navy assistant wrote a on press coverage for that called annex foxtrot. and what it said was that thou shall not allow to wander around. they should escorted at all times and and this reminded me a story that we used to tell the vietnam when when occasionally there would be escorts leading going out with american reporters. and the story goes something

like this. the reporter. but the escort in back of him goes up to the sergeant and says, okay, sarge, what happened? and the search says, well, we saw those little less old bs. we heard them coming down the trail. and so we all got ready. and when they were in the right position, we blew our claim orders and we put our f-16s rock and roll. we just blew those away. you should have seen the arms and legs fly. it was really something. what the escort then says is what the sergeant means to say is that this unit engaged gauged an unknown size force with their organic with unknown result classic doublespeak. but to me it's sort of the central canard of that accurate, honest news reporting either wins or loses wars. that's not what it is. i remember in 2005 when iraq was really swirling down the toilet a of the officers with whom i embedded would say, shankar,

what's wrong with you? what can't you write? you know good stories about what we're doing? and then after the surge in 2006, which was really well and very effective and they did the war around the same officer. well, we see you've come along, you're writing good stories. now, i would say, sir, you're doing good missions. that's a difference. you do good missions, you get good stories. you do bad missions, you get bad stories. the implication of that comment. the press could lose a war is that you don't want the public to know what's going on. and that's it means and that's essentially what what the government tried to in future wars. you know i mean from the iraq war even not letting the press see the bodies coming back to dover air base. right. right. i mean, in every possible way, they tried to control what the public could see. right. so are the lessons for military media relations the thought that i opened this panel with, i've often thought that the relationship between the military and the media is like a

marriage. it's a dysfunctional marriage. but we stay together for the kids right. i mean, we sort of have to because the media has a first crucial role in democracy and the military of course is, you know, raised by congress and commanded by the president. so how can these two sides serve our nation's interests always in an adversarial situation? elizabeth, you've been so deep in this. what are your thoughts? i it's hard to to everything sounds like a cliche, but it's mostly very important now, after donald trump was our president and called the press the enemy and that pervades through pervaded through his administration and sure, there's still people who very much picked up on it and preferred to believe it. so it's not simply military media. we now have a significant political group within, the

republican party, that does view the press as the enemy. so i would just expand it. it's it's it's so frightening be for journalism right now. and obviously everybody covering the pentagon i think the relations seem to okay but i'm worried i'm passing the buck. but i'm really worried about what is going on in of politicians trying to use the media not just for scapegoat a war, but scapegoat in our current country. i would add to that that that because of the way that that the trump administration and others have politicized that question that the military is actually more progressive and more open than the government in many of those ways. mm interesting. jim any thoughts? i just remember the green beret murder case happened and, and and we got a cable somebody in washington that said there's a guy tommy middleton, there's

been thrown into the long been jail according to a lawyer in south carolina could you please look into and let us know and and so i called you sorry the army. yeah long been black. and i said, why is tommy middleton in the long in jail? and they said, we'll get back to you. and the next morning, in the morning, the press release that turned it out, it it said at the bottom the following seven individuals are being held in the long been jail and they and they they gave their ranks and but didn't say what units or colonel thomas b were all major thomas c middleton also and took us about 10 minutes to figure out this was the whole command structure of the fifth special forces and you call them up and you say what in the world is going on and there answer is we can't, sorry, we can't com on

comment on this until the the conclusion of an 32 investigation hang the phone and i've got this little switch or i did have in this right over here that said they've got a great story and they're not going to tell me what it is and a lot reporters including bob kaiser who got on an airplane flew to the train and by the end of a month or two, we knew more about special forces operations, the border in cambodia and, all sorts of other places than than we would have had they just been honest with us and said, here's happened when abrams got really ticked off at colonel ro because he lied to them and but but i mean, just a little give take would have solved the problem, that case, right? because we're on a college campus and i see some college students here. why don't you reflect on the cultural lessons of the anti war protests and what students today

might might learn from them as far as black lives matter environmental campaigns, other things because there is a sense of really sincere and smart activism among college students today. they don't think about the vietnam war very much. there's kind of a benign because it's so long ago. but if you were to talk to some college students as you have a chance to today, what would you tell them that they should think about as they choose a life of political and activism? it's deja vu all over again. a woman i have been out there with my placard since roe v wade was overturned, meaning young women who age in background ground and. one once said posted recently, i wished the women's magazines had been talking how to protect my my reproductive rights rather than how to lose 10 pounds. it's as if there's this there

was a gap in just understanding what is a right, what has to be done to protect it and just how deep those rights loss would feel so on women's life black lives matter civil rights it's it seems like we're through another and just like before or there's going to be serious pushback. the pushback here is of a different order and i think the one to let them know that there were victories before there can be victories again, understand your rights and and exercise them, but it's formidable. formidable. thank you, david. well, i teach students at university every other year, and i find those young students today incredibly and totally committed. i think that that every movement is a combination of idealism and

self-interest. and that's a difference in the anti-war of modern times, is that there's no draft, you know, in the period of the late 1960s, every young man there, peer, their girlfriends were all by what do you do? do you do you enlist? do you try go to canada, you go to prison. you know what choices do that. and that constantly fueled the thinking and antiwar movement. what's there became an all volunteer army that but other movements the women's movement and the and the black lives matter movement are both motivated by idealism, self-interest. and that's why those are so much more powerful right now. thank you, jim. the only point that i can add to what david said, is that as you you sort of sense in talks with the younger people about, climate change, you you, you

geezers did this to us. we've got to pay the price. we've got us. and you're not solving the problem. give you permission to laugh at us geezers. okay. that's anyway, that's that's my point, right? that's a great you know, it's interesting. you're talking about you're all three of you are journalists and authors. and there's incredible library and it's interesting to me, the officers who went off to iraq usually were reading halberstam's the best and the brightest and h.r. mcmaster, dereliction duty, brad graham of politics and prose has a terrific table of books out there. but but if you were recommending students that every military officer, if you could recommend books that every military officer should read excluding your own, what would they be? elizabeth well, i'm in a book, a great book, david. i would say maybe the sorrow of. yeah, i do. yeah, yeah. the the the well, the vietnam

book was my wife's fire in the lake. there's a wonderful article if you can get it on, you can find it by major dan schuster who was a west point instructor who who, who wrote a piece about how the current military leadership petraeus mcmaster jim mattis even have on shelves the wrong books about vietnam and they're falling two categories the bomb hanoi to the parking lot invade the north a kind of more better bigger stronger. and then the second group lewis sorley and so on the hearts and minds group. if we had just done more of that a one war in any case, way to we'd have won the war not, that this was a colonial struggle that had we still stayed there, we'd still be there, and we'd still not winning the war. thank you. okay, so i'm trying to remember

the one that before i ever wrote and the book that really it to me and i think would be good is all quiet on the western front and then as a pentagon reporter i discovered through my husband that the military's favorite was once an eagle, which is a vietnam book. and i recommend that to you all because it ends up being an anti-war war book. and i tell you the the chairman of the joint chiefs commander of the marines, i can't remember all of them they said they picked up the phone for me, which they never did on the first ring and said, oh, what's an eagle? and we recommend it to all of the you know, graduating this and etc., etc. so that was the big surprise. once an eagle. right. thank you. the one, please, david. you know, i was i was not a soldier so but i but i studied enough to know that that when you're an individual soldier in a battle, everything is chaos. and the best description, chaos

in a battle i ever read was in the charterhouse of palm oil, which really amazing right in the few minutes. really, i have a big question and then a small question and the big question is about the wounds that are less seen and less less visible. i know that agent orange, one of the big veterans, heartfelt, tragic from afghanistan and iraq, have traumatic brain injuries. you have burn pit problems. how do you assess how this country has dealt with veterans and has the country learned anything from vietnam veterans experience that might or might not help care and treatment for today's veterans veterans? i don't know. okay. i don't know. david i think it was a long, hard fight to get even any recognition of the damage. agent orange on both the vietnamese, which was most extent of and on the american soldiers i know that of the of the many soldiers in the black alliance battalion that i dealt

with so many of them in the last 8 to 5 years have died of bladder cancer and almost all of them that to the fact that they were fighting in zone that was heavily differentiated. and so that's still right. this is this is a wound that's not for veterans. but can i mention it? well, of course. can the collateral the what it meant for the united states to be supporting a war and then fighting a war from the mid-fifties through 1975 had a direct effect on the neighboring countries and in particular the country that i follow the most. cambodia, it was never evident that there would be a civil war in cambodia when president johnson was on the verge of signing peace treaty in 1968. but we had the the the nixon go around. if that you could you could make a strong argument that if that had signed, sihanouk would still be the head of that government.

there would not have been an insurgency insurgency because sihanouk made a deal with the communists not support the khmer rouge. so it's still i still wake up in the middle of the night saying, why did we keep fighting? because one of the big collateral damage is cambodia and the khmer rouge. and that's a wound that hasn't healed. right? and i don't what it will take. but but just to be cognizant that those wars have consequence and you have to be completely aware of right. and that's a little i mean, if i could abuse the authority of the chair just to offer an answer to my own question, to me, it comes down not just to national will or the money in congress, but leadership. donald rumsfeld famously was speaking to troops about to cross the berm into iraq who were complaining they didn't have armored vehicles and they were, you know, scavenging steel to nailed to the side of their humvees. they called it hillbilly. and rumsfeld said, you go to war

with the army, you have not the army you might want or might have. and while that may be a fact, that's not what you say to troops that you are sending into harm's way, you say, i'll do everything i can to get you what you need. he was replaced by robert m gates who signature initiatives were spending billions of dollars on up armored vehicles to protect those lives and putting helicopters more into the war zone to guarantee the golden hour between wound and definitive care. such an example of where a single leader can. change how we treat our soldiers and our veterans. last question for the three of you before we take a brief break and move on to our final outstanding panel. you know, i spent most of my adult life in combat zones covering frontline war. and what i've learned, they don't teach you in journalism schools that if you go off to cover a war, the war covers you. and you can never really scrub it off. and so whether you were covering the war there or here at home,

david i'd like for the three of you to reflect for just a moment how these experiences have changed you as a person and changed you as a journalist, a writer. well, you're right. i did not participate or cover the war, but writing book was the most powerful psychological thing that happened in my life. and because the soldiers invested a lot of their trust in me to tell the truth about what happened and i became one of them, you know, an honorary black lion of all of their psychological traumas were visited upon me. i mean, i was trying to deal with them. and my wife would talk to them as well. and so that lasts for the rest of my life. and to, you know, i mean, i've lost several them in the last few years, but but the the bond of that and to understand what they went through and to carry that affected me deeply.

jim, i remember out in the field and hanging out with some grunts and and and and they would sort of look me over when i first got there and then we'd sort of become talkative and so on and they'd say, well, what are you doing here? and said, oh, i'm a reporter. well. you mean you're, you're, you're here for your reporting. the war, right? somebody told you you had to do it is a no. i'm here to do it because i want to do. you mean you don't have to be? and they knew i nuts because i mean, they, they i could get it on a chopper and be back in saigon in an hour. so and i remember during the invasion of cambodia happened, i was at the battle of snore. there was a 11 day c.r. colonel

wounded. i got on a chopper, a medevac back to quinlan, got a c-47 charter back to saigon, wrote my story, gave my film to horse fighters, took a shower, got it. i was having a a grilled buffalo water buffalo steak and a good bottle of wine at a french restaurant by seventh 30. right. that's how that's how lucky and easy we had it compared to what the guys who couldn't get out of the field, elizabeth, in the last minute. your thoughts? well, it's for me and for a lot of us it's it's it's the deepest coming of age. you could when you you're around. everything matters every you can't turn the corner that is not part of a story. i've never i've never. everything was part of the story. and every time i thought, okay, this is the last time i'm going back. is it i'm in the middle of another project or two with

cambodia and it's never ending. of course, it had it's beyond deep. it's beyond. and the funniest thing was when my not that long, my daughter said she's the mother. and she said, mom, it took me forever to realize that. the other kids weren't raised thinking. that it's really scary to. be around the khmer rouge and i had no idea that my son once said, that's my pop's idea of a great summer vacation. auschwitz. the only time for more formal thanks later but incredible thanks to the panel. thanks to all you for being here. special thanks for me to the carnegie corporation in new york that makes so much of this work possible. thank you all for being here. and.

the.

great institution of. our. network. thank you. okay. okay. so i'm just going to say so this talking sure thing, which is not craig is other one. dave bradley yeah, i, i. could technique. yeah. oh. the first and yeah, yeah, yeah.

they're trying. to. do yeah. thank.

i have heard through, i don't know, maybe 80 or 90 of you that we should be louder. so we're going to be louder and thank so much we can do that we apologize but we will, we want to make sure everyone can hear the proceedings. so we begin now. the fifth panel. and this one is dedicated to the

sounds and images of an era. and i think most of us would agree if we can acknowledge that vietnam war was in many ways tragic and a failure in a whole host of ways, i think most of us would also acknowledge that something terribly right happened around cultural production that the music of that era continues to stay with us. we're going to talk about why that what is it about the enduring value, quality of of cultural production during the vietnam years that has been so important and of enduring value in our society? today, our panelists consists of experts and people who have points of view on issues related to poetry, photography and music so rather than as the other in the panels, we mixed it up a bit. we're going to stay more each person a little bit longer because want to talk about those subjects. and that's why the format of the will be a little bit different. let introduce our panelists and we'll get started our first panelist is john balaban, who is

professor emeritus of english at nc state. john is the award winning author of 13 books of poetry and prose, a translate later of vietnamese poetry and co-founder of the vietnamese, now preserved asian foundation. a remarkable story he'll tell us about own engagement in vietnam and how it came. mark godfrey, photojournalist for ap life and time magazine's. mark covered the war in vietnam and cambodia and later worked for numerous international magazines on that included coverage of the first gulf war. loren on key director of the corcoran school of arts and design and professor of music at the george washington university, and in an earlier incarnation in her career, she was at the rock and roll hall of and knows a lot about the music. we're going to talk about and then my good friend marcus sullivan, vietnam vet and close friend of michael o'donnell, was himself the subject of in that time michael o'donnell in the tragic era of vietnam. mark has served in vietnam.

marcus was, a musician, still is. and through that experience and can talk to us about that as well. so i'd like to begin by talking imagery. vietnam was the first war that was televised. most of us who lived through it remember seeing on television every day that was different from other wars. it was not movietone news that we were experiencing, but something much more direct and profound. and mark, you're an image maker. you spent your time during this period capturing images. can you talk a little bit about your own work as a photographer? what drew you to this kind of work and how saw images in forming public opinion about the war? well, first of all, let me say i feel to be on these panels with all these people who are just you, such experts. this. i'm just a photographer. i'm not an expert on the vietnam war. i was there from the summer of 69 until the end of 72, and then i returned 75 and covered the

fall of cambodia and, then the fall of vietnam. i'm not one of when i was young, a young newspaper photographer. and for me, the war actually started in 1968 when i got clubbed by the chicago police covering the democratic convention. and so this is interesting. let's see what was going on in the world and decide to go to vietnam 69 and freelance. i wasn't one of the naive young photographers had a number of years newspaper experience who believed that pictures were going to. still, pictures are going to end wars, although i thought that they needed to be documented. and certainly vietnam was most documented war. this country's ever fought. a couple of reasons for that. one was just total access photographers had to vietnam. all you have to do is arrive there with a letter from your newspaper or from some agency and go to b and pow and get a credential. then you could go out and work

your way, a helicopter or, you know, a truck, a jeep, or whatever it took to get some action. the photographers. and there were hundreds of photographers who covered vietnam. photographers were basically the grunts of the news media. you know, you couldn't cover it if you you could take pictures sitting in saigon, going to the going to the follies. you had to get out of the field and cover the cover, the operations, and you had to depend upon journalists to tell you give you some sort of idea what was going on in the field, what maybe those operations were. and then you would try and figure out how to get there. and when you'd get there, you tried to get support from the local field commander or whatever. and oftentimes go into a battle zone on a medevac because going in, they were empty coming out. they were full. so getting sometimes is a little more difficult. and so that's basically how you it. my when i originally went there

i was freelancing i did some work for the new york times sunday magazine, vietnamization, covering the harbin three army of south vietnam training. and in there action in the trying to get some idea of what was going on there. and then i also covered nixon's trip to thailand. but at the same time and then i came back and horse fast approached me and asked if i wanted to join the photo staff for the ap and and i must say, i had a great admiration for. the work that the wire services did in. vietnam. i followed the work of photographers like ari hewitt and kiyoshi sawada of upi and horace foss and others with the wires seeing, their work not only published in newspapers a daily basis, but also in life magazine and some others. and so i accepted that. and for about a year and a half i was with the ap in the saigon bureau covering things during that period, as been talked

about. sihanouk was overthrown by long haul in cambodia. so i merely snuck into cambodia. you see him right. and for three months covered the cambodia war which was really a wake up for me because was such an incredibly dangerous situation. the khmer rouge ruthless, you got caught by the khmer rouge. you weren't coming back. and so and the only way to cover the war was to drive down some road and figure out where something was going on or find some unit action that was happening. there was no advisors. there was nobody telling you, well, go here, we're going to have this going to do this battle. we're going to do that. and so you go down that road, sometimes you'd run into a roadblock that wasn't friendly. and if you were quick, you got out of there. was there any direct oversight or control of of what you were able to see and do as a photographer and your bosses care? i mean, did they. there was no censorship. you were free to do what you

wanted to do or what you were dumb enough to do or smart enough to do. and so you did. and hard. and that was that's why that was so well documented by all those photographers. and i have to admit, there's some great photography for you've covered that war. i mean, i think you know, i mentioned fosse and andre was sort of of course, we all remember the i images from the war, starting with malcolm browne's picture of the monks burning himself to death in saigon early on. and then later john alston's picture, life showing the wounded in soldiers coming out of the caisson battle on top of a tank. but then, particularly the eddie adams picture of long shooting the viet cong suspect, which was a kind sticks out of mine and that after that there good picture of the napalm with the girl who had been burned by napalm. what i find interesting about, iconic pictures that oftentimes

they happen at a moment which resonate with public opinion. and so during a up till 68, public opinion, i think was of mixed. in fact, i think a lot of press corps was not necessarily anti-war a lot of them were not necessarily pro-war either, but they were sort of agnostic on the war. and but coming case with a ted of 68. a lot of that changed. and so people were suddenly shocked, been told that the war was coming down, we were winning, and suddenly this huge offensive happened. and while in some ways it was a it was a great loss them for the viet cong and that it didn't look that way. it was a propaganda victory. and of course, eddie's picture of the killing, the shooting, the street of the viet cong suspect happened right at the right moment. and so it captured people's attention. and i think that was true later in 72 with the dakota picture, the napalm girl.

it just happened that that offensive to me too. so there wasn't control exerted on on how to make the pictures and where you could go but was there controlling asserted or censorship over how where it but that next picture for example was very controversial and there was much discussion about not airing it at all. well think that there was in various there newspapers that would not publish certain and there was a certain about publishing pictures of wounded american and so forth that might identify them. and some of that's understandable. yeah. and so there was that. but the fact of the matter is that you can write a story and, things will get changed around a bit. but if you took a picture and it was published, it was published. you know, this was a period today you look at pictures and you can't be sure if they're real or not. but back then if you saw a picture, it was real. it was didn't it wasn't necessarily evocative of the reality of the situation. it was a real picture, a real moment. and so i think that's that's

true. there wasn't. so i think, you know, the wire services out pictures and certain newspapers would run them certain history or say, oh, no, that's we run that. so there's that sort. but there was no censorship on the ground about. what did you think as photographers, the disconnect between the kinds of images that you were making and what the government leaders were saying about the war and how did that work for you? i don't really think about that too much because i discovered pretty quickly it was war and, you know, they they talk about the fog war. and i think that's really true that i think photographs have a tendency to show oftentimes horror of war while on the other hand maybe there's some aspect of the situation which pictures don't really reveal. i mean pictures are they aren't necessarily truth is a good distinction. you're a still photographer, but can you say something about the role of television? well, of course, television as

television became more and more in the homes, you know, people like cronkite. and so forth. but i point out one thing, one interesting thing, talking about edie adams picture of the killing of the viet cong suspect there, an nbc film crew there who filmed whole thing as well. and everybody it it was shown on tv, but nobody remembers it but they remember it. hmm. right. an interesting period. thank. well, let's turn briefly to let's turn to music. loren. we can all, as i said earlier, that this was a period of creativity. can you say something about the movement vietnam era music and how that genre came be that? what motivated it and what a little bit of a history about that. sure. and it's it's vast, actually. and i was obviously not in vietnam, was born in 1963, and

my earliest memory about vietnam is that everybody at the dinner table was yelling. my older with my parents and i remember, sir, why is everybody yelling about whatever this this thing is? and the music seemed to reflect some of that and i think for myself help me figure it. but when we were really looking at the war is represented in popular music, and by that i mean rock and roll country soul music. it it starts pretty early in the sixties. we go well into the seventies. we think of it. i think often with rock and roll and anti-war war music, something like country joe in this fish feel like i'm fixing to die. or or crosby stills nash and young, ohio. after kent state. but in the sixties really beginning. 6566. you start to see a lot of songs about the war in soul and country music that are pro-war, the sense of country or neutral,

what country and soul really is. they're describing the war as a kind of experience of everyday life. my boyfriend's gone, my husband's gone. i'm off to war. there's this sense that the war is in people's lives. the soul group, the dells. does anyone know? i'm here, you know, there's this. so popular music being used to of make sense of this experience that's getting bigger and bigger. of course, the ballad of the green beret is a huge one hit in 1966. so it's not you know, there's scores of these songs at this point and some really great archival pride pulling them all together. but some of the ones i'm most interested in are big hits. you know, you're hearing them on and radio, you're hearing them at the in your car, you're hearing them at the auto body shop. they're they're around are very much a presence. so what we see is is pop music as a place as.

it always is. i think for us to figure ourselves, figure ourselves out. you're also seeing obviously the protest music. phil ochs i ain't marching. pete seeger bring them home, you know, so it's it's really across board. and then by the later sixties you start to see the antiwar songs emerging. i think one of the most compelling and i've been thinking about it all day today is, the bob seeger system's two plus two equals question mark, which was not really a hit. i think it did okay in detroit, but it it it it's it's the speaker of the song is going to go to war doesn't know why isn't even necessarily protesting but is saying this doesn't make sense. people are making decisions that are affecting my life what going on two plus two is not equaling logic here so i think you know

these are these are little two minute songs but you know pop, rock and roll had emerged in the fifties here. it was in the sixties record companies were bigger and the baby boom had sort of taken taken forms. and you just see see vietnam kind of all over popular music in that period. as you say, there is an alignment between the kind of war music or antiwar that was being produced with the that were happening in vietnam. and i guess the question is to what extent of the musical movement shaped the political or public movement, or was it the other way around? that's always a question, right, dan is is, you know, whether or not our art is i mean, i think it's a dialog. it's what we're experiencing. i think we like to think that the music that's speaking for us is having an effect. i don't know. but certain certainly i think for a lot of people at that time, the music really carried a

lot of meaning. we were just talking a wonderful book called we got to get out of this place by, doug bradley and craig werner about. music that people listen to who were in vietnam soldiers nurses. and those songs weren't necessary about the war. but like, we got to out of this place, like nancy sinatra's these boots are made for walkin like bobby bears, detroit, roxy, which is not about vietnam, but has that chorus of, you know, i want to go home, become vietnam song. so i think for me, what's interesting is the way an audience will take a song and use it for, what it needs and whether a marching song or a political song really see that? that's a great point. can you say something about the what we might call the exceptionalism, the vietnam moment around music? there isn't, for instance, a body of music around the korean war? and there isn't a body of music around afghanistan war or iraq.

even though those were controversial. but what was it about this moment that produced this extraordinary body of material? yeah, i mean, there was a fair amount of music around iraq. i think the music landscape has changed in the sense that, you know, you've got the explosion of the internet, you've got fragmentation of audience and in a way that i think in the sixties and early seventies, you had some more calm. now, at least some things would be more widely. and i think it has something to do with the boomer generation, that kind of popular music, right? i mean, rock and roll is not the dominant form of popular anymore. hasn't been for a long time. hip hop is now 50 years old. so it was at a moment when that form i think, had had tremendous, tremendous power. and and again, i think to me a little bit of a story that can be told more in keith's reference this earlier soul music's role in articulating the

relationship between black vets. black soldiers experience in vietnam and what is happening at home is profound. i think the most important musical creation during the viet, during and about the vietnam is marvin gaye's album what's going on, which is written in part is his response to his brother frankie, returning from vietnam to detroit and facing discrimination and lack of ability to get jobs, and kent state and jackson state, which had happened right around the time kent state. and if you listen to that album and if you've never heard it, you're in for treat. if you haven't heard it for a very long, sit and listen to that. a whole piece of music where marvin gaye was really able to deal with that kind of intersectionality of being anti-war. but equally critical of what is happening in cities here.

but i think it's that mash cause and the value of that art form at that moment. that's a great answer. thank you. as you think about that body of what other what other artists come to mind is the most perhaps the most enduring interest or importance in the field of music from the period? well that's a really good look like a rock and roll hall of fame question. that's a rock and roll hall of fame question. you know i think i think of it as more sort of individual songs. i mean, i'll go back to crosby, stills, nash and young's ohio. you know, that's written 11 days after the shootings on campus and gets recorded really quickly and released quickly, kind of almost at the speed of the internet in that way. and i think that song having that visceral, emotional presentation is is a lasting piece. and and on the countryside. merle has an incredible song.

71 or 72 written in the voice of a p.o.w. saying you know, does anyone remember that here? and as i to those songs again the stories that they tell the craft and songwriter is is really powerful and devastating. so i keep going back to soul and particularly marvin gaye. but those are some other records that i think tell stories that maybe we wanted. we didn't want to hear, you know, that music an immediate effect. and from what can recall, it was very popular, very quickly, even though it might have been controversial. is that right, that it was the audiences expanding very quickly for that kind of music because content? yeah, absolutely. absolutely. and, you know, some songs become iconic, right? if you know the woodstock country. joe mcdonald, who was a veteran himself, is singing feel like i'm fixing to die, which becomes the kind of iconic song of that film. it's worth mentioning to the music that emerges in the late

seventies and especially the early eighties. songs like bruce springsteen's born in the usa, billy joel's goodnight saigon, charlie daniels in saigon. so there's a there's a moment, and i think it overlaps with film that's happening of really of looking at the war and you're seeing you're seeing the second version of that story emerge. we don't hear too many women's voices on the rock side, certainly on the source, frieda payne, who many people might know from a really hit called band of gold, but she a hit with a song called bring the boys home. in 7172, which it's a big hit. again, are selling records they're they're on the radio. and as the war came to an end in this country, at least active hot part of the war. by 1973 to 75, that music, of course, died. i know that by like 1974, the top hit from that year was

billie don't be a hero by o'donnell. so my agents, which is the definition of insipid but it was a that's about the only anti-war movie song there was. and by that time so i guess people just lost interest the subject was over and the field moved on. well you know protest, music as such is not as popular as we get into the mid seventies. okay. you're i'm distracted because you made me think of that terrible song. right. but do think that rock and roll like it becomes it can become a cliche that rock and roll and, you know, protest against the war become synonymous. so while the while that's people aren't doing that style of music by 7576. i do think the the the linking of the two is really important. i'm going to throw out one more thing that i should have mentioned quickly, and that's jimi hendrix.

a lot of jimi hendrix songs, which mean a lot to people in vietnam. but his song machine gun, which he records an early in 1970, which an incredible musical i think of what war sounds like. and he too like marvin gaye combines a critique of what's going on in vietnam with what's going on in u.s. in fact, he dedicates the song the beginning to the soldiers fighting in chicago, the soldiers fighting in milwaukee, and the soldiers fighting in vietnam. and then he creates sound. sounds like you're in the middle of a battlefield. yeah. thank you, marcus. you are a musician, and you also served in vietnam. ken, let's start with i want to ask you about what the experience of listening music was like for you in vietnam. and then we'll back up and talk a little bit about your former as a musician. first of all, i don't think you can overemphasize the of music, period. and it became even more

important if you imagine if you will, a person like me drafted taken off the streets of wisconsin and transported literally in a very short amount time to this alien place. the soldiers in vietnam called this place the world, and they had to get back the world as if they had been transported to another planet. and what do you do when you're in an atmosphere and a dangerous one at that? you start grabbing on to things that you a sense of hope, a sense of group think. everybody else likes this song. and so on so music was incredibly important and i think the other aspect of music in

vietnam for me certainly also just like to listen to music. i just happened to be one of the soldiers who liked to play music and listened to it. so it put me in another category. i wasn't certainly in that because we saw it out in vietnam. we sought out fellow players and was lucky enough to find at least two one in particular. i won't tell you about both, but one in particular had been good friend of chet atkins in nashville. he played with dave dudley. he played with little jimmy dickens. his name was houda. and of course, the army, in its infinite wisdom, made a cook and so he couldn't really play. but we gathered together cheap guitars and we managed to get some sound and reel to reel tape recorders and we played in max.

he could play the girl from ipanema, jazz deluxe. i mean, he was a better one of the best players i've ever met. he just died recently. he played music right up to the end, but we would play and max would. he was just so fascinated with music and when he didn't have to cook, we would play music and the music was as. i said it was something to grasp on to and give you hope that you were going to get back a normal place where this music came from. and we were sent reel to reel recordings. my wife sent me a seven and a half inch reel of. sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club. yeah. and we listened to that. and there were soldiers that said, oh, the beatles are just gone that don't like that at all. walk out and but among us was

wonderful. so anyway, i think that music in another very deep way. music has always been cathartic and whether it's a song that you latch on to as a sad song or, an uplifting song or a song makes you feel like you're in a football stadium cheering everybody on. i think that those moments are like greek tragedy. they're supposed to arouse in you some pity, fear and a cleansing happens. so marcus who were you playing for when you would do these when you would get together and play? were you playing for people on the bass or just for each other? whoever wandered into the and yeah, and we had to play over the generator that were going on all the time and lights were dimmed down and but there, there's something to be said about late night when you're in base camp and in the field, especially for infantry. and i was an infantry i was a combat engineer, but for

infantry, it's silence. you don't go to the field noise, you don't go to the field and wear aftershave lotion because they can smell it for miles. so there are certain precautions you have to take. but when you're in a base camp, you're in rear area. people would just wander in and that music just happened and we played, you know, there's something be said about late at night playing a whiter shade of pale and going to having people go to sleep by that. or one night i remember we've been playing we played indoors so tired and everybody was going to bed and this guitarist that i mentioned he sat and was playing along with just i fell asleep. he was playing along with bob dylan's. stuck in mobile again. oh mama, can this really be the end?

and so powerful stuff. when you you met michael as fellow students at whitewater, university of wisconsin at whitewater, and you were both folk musicians finding way forward as musicians. yes. and i guess my question is they came and there was real synergy. they made an album and you were on your way to a very promising career music when you went to vietnam. you played music when michael went to vietnam after, you he had trained as a helicopter pilot. so it took him longer eventually to get to vietnam, were already back. but it seems from what we know, he spent most of his time writing poetry and not writing music. yes, he even spoke of that. it was quicker and easier than to round a guitar, although michael and his cohorts came back there. there at camp after a day of flying. and it was every day flying, they would drink a lot.

they would listen to the mortar rounds coming in and, you know, and that kind of thing. but i'm sure that michael if he had a guitar access to the guitar, he would play. he would play music. yeah. jim lake, who is here, was, as i mentioned, was a crew was stationed with michael. they were both helicopter pilots. and he describes how when you're a helicopter pilot, you're mostly behind the line. so you're out in the most dangerous of environments all day long. then you fly back to more or less the safety of your base and for a shower in hot meal and then the next day to go back, go out again. and how surreal that was and how jim describes the base they were in. i think it was in khartoum single night, every single night the base was attacked, was very inaccurate missiles. but in that they're being attacked as they're playing music, it seems like a very strange way to. but i guess that's how it was i do have a reel to reel of i was teaching max a ian tyson song

called red and he loved that song for some it just rang a bell, rang him and he was playing that song. and the recording i have of that, there are bursts of gunfire going off the background. so yeah music can be played even under no circumstance where there are lots people playing music. there was a lot, not a lot. you had to had to look around. although at on base, that was where the big red one was, was stationed they had a pretty we thought existence over there and they actually organized the hootenanny it was they filled it out and somebody wrote big h and a hooch and they had strong it across and we went over and they lined this up and we passed the guitar played and so we those kind of moments too. and they actually bought instruments. the military bought instruments. first time i ever saw a rickenbacker guitar. it was brilliant. but they but i got to play it.

yeah, they kept over the officer's club, so. well, let's talk about the connection, music and poetry. john when you went to vietnam as a conscientious objector, you're already a formed. can you talk a little bit about your experience as a the shaping of your work as a poet and how vietnam informed that experience. actually, i was harvard. i was in graduate school and studying english and middle english and i remember one day i was had spent the day in washington library, was walking out and i saw a huge demonstration on the street. i didn't know what it was about, but i saw a camera team. ap there think, well, we'll get behind them. that'll be a safe place to see what's about to happen. and there was a big blue buick

sedan parked out there behind lowell house and a lot of a lot of young people. at any rate, all clustered around the wasn't moving because they were blocking the road. and inside car was robert mcnamara, secretary defense and he finally got out of the car when it was clear the kids weren't going to go away. and i remember the secret service around and armed pushed back with their hands and he just pushed himself out of the car and not only got out of the car, he got up on the hood and addressed the crowd. i remember the big crunch on the roof of the when his weight got onto it and i was looking at the cameraman and the sound man and their eyes were almost as big as mine because this was something was going to happen. and he got opening, insulted the crowd and he had been there as a guest of the newly opened

kennedy institute. oh, what year was mao had to be 1970. no. 69. so he had just left 68. he was no longer secretary of defense and. he said, wave to the crowd and be quiet. he said, i have one thing to say that when i was a young student at berkeley, oh, i was just radical issue. and the crowd like an animal, all everybody groaning, oh, and in when say stop groaning i remember there was a window and somebody nearby had an apartment there and they had play we're playing mack the knife. and when the crowd quieted, you could hear that song, mack the knife comes out of the ground. and then the crowd erupted. laughter because everybody woke up for the moment. and mcnamara that insulted them and said, but i want to tell you

one thing. i was far more polite. and then, of course, all that obscenities can imagine easily enough were shouted out. he got back in his car, the crowd parted and he drove away and sent me to vietnam. i say strewn over this. or maybe a week and i wrote to my draft board and said, i wanted to turn in my student deferment, which is in the very sweet secretary wrote me back that, oh, you needn't do that. there's no fear of your going to vietnam on a two as deferment. i said no, that's not the idea. i want to go to vietnam. and then i had a set of appointment and i had to come up with a work plan of what i would do and i had to have an interview back in pennsylvania. so i did all that and went to work for a group that was a predecessor, peace corps, called the international services, and

i was, teaching english linguistics and language at a vietnamese universal day. that never happened because the place there is elections that year. and to you and ki, we're going at each other and. the elections never emerged. oh, and then came the tet, the university bombed. i got wounded by a snip of shrapnel, which is my case lucky because it got me to go back to philadelphia, where i got patched up and then i still had. continue at alternative service. i had a two year obligation and so i came up well working for the of responsibility to save war injured children group run out run out of philadelphia but connecting really all the famous research doctors and united

states helen housing here in washington albert strand biology and at harvard benjamin spock albert sabin i mean these are really distinguished doctors all of whom would arrange at institutions all across the u.s. with their fellow doctors to or injured children for free and but the trouble was, there were doctors working at hospitals and in various practice in the us, so they needed a field. so while there apparently up in philadelphia, the director of the organization took me into his home and then i went back to vietnam as field representative. so that was my first real leg back. but when were you writing poetry? when was i writing poetry? i had started at harvard i even started publishing some. i was still an undergraduate at

penn state. oh, going. but good question, because i figured going to vietnam and the end of writing poetry, you i couldn't picture the charge of the light brigade. you know into the valley of death road, the second going over and were in vietnam and. the question of what kind of poetry could survive there. well, let's talk and learn. earlier about music in vietnam, i was out on my own, on the highways in. and one day there was a huge convoy rushing past, could hear the noise behind you and see drivers, people, little motor busses and my bicycle and motorcycles. i just got the side of the road left. this thing by. but what shocked me was, the music coming at the head of this huge caravan, unbelievably loud blasted music, clearing the road in front of all these gunships,

apc and behind them, vietnamese soldiers with truckloads of their own family were following them into war zone as well. but the music that was playing was the rolling stones and it was sympathy for the devil. please allow me to introduce myself as what that music was screaming that vietnamese road that i just i just could not the strangeness of i o and the verisimilitude of it struck me so i did that. and then for oh, i had to do that for two years. i ended up bringing children out of the country to hospitals in the us and then taking them home again when they well enough fit enough to come. but that time i learned enough vietnamese and heard enough music and poetry in the countryside. i'd be at a river crossing waiting for a ferry to take me to the other side. i had a tape recorder.

i had a grant from the national endowment for the humanities and there would be a singer a whole blind guy with 12 strings. your guitar playing for farmers and, you know, panhandling at the same time. or i'd be standing on a riverbank, one of those little motor to cycle boat engines would be drifting by and i could hear a song drifting up. a woman was singing in the boat by herself, you know. and i was right. my feet. i could hear the water splashing at my and i could hear this woman song right idea what it was. and then finally, someone which a dispassionate which really should have been mentioned all day today somewhere and somebody stock. so i well, these were people myself who were hangers on peace

people who broke up my life story fact. and one of them was a friend the secretary there of the place who said there's a vietnamese guy in the office who keeps telling me that if you want to know anything about vietnam, have to learn to hear chi gal or cousin in the north. this is folk poetry. that's sung. it's never or rarely written down. it can be written down. and if you want to know anything about the vietnamese, that's what you should pay attention to. so i took i got a tape recorder in japan on the way. my wife, who had just graduate from penn state with an undergrad degree in english, 20 years old, we both flew to vietnam and i went out in the countryside and recorded that for a year. so i have about 500 of those songs there, pretty well recorded. the fact that i didn't know how to do i did it right and. they're now at the harry ransom

center for anybody to do any research with. and later on in the program, maybe i can play something for you. yeah, go. and next thing i did was i got interested the literary poetry, which is a far different thing. that's song. it's written in a calligraphic or character system that looks like chinese but in fact represent vietnamese beach and mostly and the scholarly class couldn't read it and write to each other in it. almost ordinary vietnamese at that time couldn't read or write until the french brought with them a system of writing. like in 1640. yeah. and that became the writing system of vietnamese used today. oh. so i could read the ancient script in that transcribe form, if that makes sense and i decided to try to translate that

poetry well and i got taken under the wings of two great scholars, leighton koy, a great historian in paris, also in paris, and and forget the name of his prize. i think it was an international prize for his musicology trombone. okay. and they both pushed me on, led me on and introduced me around so that people would talk to me when i was out with my tape recorder recording the folk poetry, i always had somebody take me around, usually a monk, that people in the community would trust. even then i would learn later that they thought i was a cia agent because i was taking pictures of people and i was recording voices. you had a parallel or a parallel path at that time. you were you were becoming a scholar of vietnamese culture and language. i know. yeah. i was trying to i don't know i ever got for. well, you were. you recording and learning on

the one hand and you were also writing your poetry? i tried to do both avenues, right? so both of those resulted in books and some recordings and also my aim, i guess, is the point of this telling. you this is it. listening to the discussions today, the huge in separation of americans here with vietnamese, vietnam and the huge separation between, you know, yourself as a soldier trained and americans there in vietnam. it was immense. the place was indecipherable. so the question about poetry is that it can cross those borders, cultural separation and. that was part of my aim in those translations. would you be can you read a poem? one of your poems for us? yeah, sure. just happen to have. also on sale out in the lobby.

it's called after our war, which is actually the title poem. my first book. i'd it after coming home after our war. this the dismembered all those pierced ears livers, jaws gouged lips until skin flaps and those came squinting wobbling, jabbering back the genitals, of course, were the most bizarre in china on roads like glow worms, slugs. the living one of them back but good as the dead, of course, know. you saw him in the the tens of thousands of abandoned souls who had appeared like swamp fog in city streets, also had no use the scraps and bits because in opinion they look good without since all naturally return to

their source these snags and tatters arrived with immigrant uncertainty in the united states. it was almost home. so no one can sometimes see a friend or a famous man talking with an extra pair of glued and yammering on his cheek. and this why handshakes are often unpleasant, why it is better not to look another in the eye. why your daughter's breast thickens a hard colloidal scar after the war. such cheshire cats grinning in our trees. will the ancient tales still tell us new truths? well, the myriad world surrender new metaphor after our war how will love speak.

hmm? thank, john. you're welcome. very powerful. so for a moment, with your parallel careers, as can you, you have a recording also of a vietnamese poem, right? and want to ask what we can do is what i'd like to propose is. let's hear that then. i have a question. each of you, as we conclude piano. okay, let's do that. okay, so you want to introduce this? what this is? yeah. oh, i was recording on one island near on the mekong, near mutare. and it was the island that had been separated out from the war. the so-called coconut and i figured it would be safe for me to record at that island. but not only that, that most of the monks and their whole families had come from all the mekong delta.

so i could record various dialect differences which are many throughout the mekong delta. and i could up little bits of different singing traditions if i just went to this one place. so it was a wise move on my own. my play my part. and then as i said, i would. and sometimes photograph the singers, they appear in the book, which i think is out on the table. it is. and it in in that book and on the island. i was about to take a picture and my camera almost got slapped out of my hand by the monk who is my good friend. and no, no, not his picture. and i said, why not? and he said, he's a defector. and i thought, oh, he meant the south vietnamese army. he said, no. he defected from the viet cong and if the south vietnamese army here, they will take him away and kill.

if the viet cong come here, they will shoot him just as just as well. since he's a deserter. oh, so i recorded him and it one of the most beautiful voices i recorded that whole year of traveling from the south and the mekong, way up to the city away where recorded members the last royal dynasty. let's hear. okay, thank you. so we're going to hear this piece and then we'll talk just a bit more. some shall i yeah, i guess i'll go. no mai mai, no photos, i'm look how long look back now. who my look. okay. yeah.

i. whlook. wing. yeah. yea way mad i'm the new. oh, thank you what an extraordinary experience that have been for you to have been open to this whole body of, poetry and song in a world far from your own. so thank for sharing that with us. so as we conclude the panel, i'd like to ask each of you to the really the purpose of being together today to think about what we've learned from vietnam, the experience of vietnam, the vietnam war, 50 years after withdrawal of troops. so what have we learned from the world of cultural creativity? what if you were to each of one or two things that stay with you as? important contributions of the creative side, the vietnam war? what is that?

what stays with you now? maybe we'll start with who wants to start? laura. i think the the the songs of the vietnam war reflected so much diversity of opinion and voice and position in culture. if you follow those, you hear people who are very patriotic about the war, you hear pride, you hear pain, you hear anger more and. you hear it from all voices in this country. and i think. one of the things i worry about is the censoring and the suppression of of multiple voices right now at this time. and so to me a lesson is the more the better the more diversity of sound and voice and opinion is.

the only thing that is going to help us to really understand what is really going on. and so when i look back at that body of music, i hear complexity, contradiction and confusion and we better make sure that we can still hear that. that's extraordinary. thank you, marcus. well, the music in vietnam was so diverse and whatever people picked, whatever a soldier pick, that would be the the one that set them up and and took them away. yes. like emily dickinson books then take your lands away and to get back to as they call it the world it could be leaving on a jet plane. yeah it could be something's happening here what it is the exactly clear that kind of thing.

it could be. i was privileged. michael and i were privileged. we sang in town in chicago before the war, before it involved us. and we met a people that were noteworthy. one of them was phil ochs and sat down in them in the the upstairs performance area of a place called richard's, and he sang i ain't a martini anymore forth. and he sang there but for fortune. and he also sang a song we used as a country anthem in vietnam, and that was a song that tom paxton made a big hit in it. but phil ochs wrote it is called the draft dodger rag. sorry, i'm only 18. i got a ruptured spleen. i always carry a burst. and so it goes on like that. it's it's a wonderful song to sing if you're angry. it's a wonderful song to sing. if you just wanted to go home

and, rid yourself of all of this and yeah, the music, as i said it was, it was cathartic. whether it was a sad song, an uplifting song, or a a rag or some of the protest songs that, michael and i were involved with and michael and i sang at poor richard's. we sang sounds of silence, the cover of the of the garfunkel the simon garfunkel song, which is on an album called three wednesday morning, 3 a.m. and it was all acoustic somebody set that electric guitar and that became big hit. this was way before that, and we sang a song and a guy walked up to us afterwards and asked us, is that your song? and were very flattered because, you know, it was an act song. but michael wrote some very good songs along the way, turned his attention poetry. but in the milieu of vietnam, i think we grasped at whatever we could find for hope.

well, thank you. just a quick aside one of michael's sent many, many letters to marcus, which i had the privilege of as i was working on the book and. he was an avid student of new music was he listened to everything and his letters are wonderful. and one of them he listened to paul simon play and he says to marcus, this guy is going to be big. and little did he know, right? mark yes. well, i've seen it's a good question. i'm still trying to figure out what i learned from vietnam. you learn a lot about war, about yourself mainly. i was i guess i came away impressed with the power of still photography to document something. and i think the books by david douglas duncan i protestor philip jones griffith's vietnam ink and about all the other sort things that were done and what effect they had.

i also sort of learned, as i said before, photography, it doesn't really stop wars, but documents them and it and certain images, certain moments make a big difference. and, you know, you think about human as this picture. the people climbing up to the ladder, trying to get the helicopter on the building near the embassy during the final days. it just sort tell you about the moment and they leave an impression. you they make a deep impression within you and that sort of what i learned and also learned that. pictures of dead people particularly do the job. it's pictures of living who are experiencing the horror of war. thank you. well, it's also true that for most us, what we know and remember and see from the war is what you gave us, because we see it through your eyes. that was the only way we could see it if we weren't there. so there's a lasting legacy that connects us forever.

so thank you, john there's a vietnamese proverb go out one day, come back with a basket of knowledge, derive the more chang cong. and so i went one day and i spent two or three. and then the next 20 years involved in another culture that taught a great deal about of culture, about family kindness, about bravery, and by comparison returning home, i measure this and how it behaves with itself, which right now is very troubling to me against the continued ity and the kindness that i found in vietnam. yeah, thank you. thank you all very much. well, thank you so much for joining us today. we are going to just give offer up a few concluding remarks. we end the session today. so thank gentlemen and ladies and. i'll ask the moderators to come

up as well. so. you discussed discussed. sure. sure. so i'd like to just very briefly thanks to all the panelists thanks to all of you in attendance. thanks to my newest battle buddies, dan weiss and peter osnos, dean wall, back in the entire colombian college of arts and sciences, family and friends, the technical people who made this happen, sincerest heartfelt thanks. the carnegie corporation of new york, whose generosity allows the project for media and national security to exist and

who supported this amazing program today. i sat here all day trying to think, what does it mean to win a war? and again, having spent of my adult life traveling along with military, something that bob kerrey this morning that rings so true, militaries cannot wars militaries at best defeat other military eyes. only governments can win wars by sealing the and we forget that all too often in our history because you define every problem as being, you know, a nail, then the hammer is your only tool. and it just is so painful to see the military as heartfelt and as well organized. it is sent off to do things as it was in iraq and afghanistan that it was never designed to do the phrase hearts and minds came up several times today. that was the mantra from vietnam. you heard it in iraq and in afghanistan. i remember a late night at a foreign base in iraq when

officer was telling me how much he hated the phrase hearts and, minds. you can't win hearts and it's a fool's errand. it's insulting how should americans feel if the afghans or vietnamese or the iraqis tried to win our hearts and minds or, the russians trying to win our and minds. you have to respect people's cultures far better, this officer said, should be a national that try to earn trust and respect not only these foreign population laws, but of our own population. here i only pray in the years that we can reflect on that as we reflect on all the painful lessons of wars long ago and wars. more recent. and and peter, it was my great honor to. work with both of you. thank you. thank you. me. well, thank you. and thanks those of you who are here. and to audience on c-span, i

just want to bring this back a little bit to the beginning, which is how this entire event was inspired. it was inspired by book in that time, the tragic error of vietnam, which has an editor. i read the proposal i said, who the hell is this wife's? oh, he runs the metropolitan museum of art. but the truth of the is that book i was a young reporter in vietnam. i've been dealing vietnam in various ways ever since. but that book brought into focus again something that i thought was immensely important. we owe it to the young men, and they were. mostly who went there and lost their lives in a war. that made no sense not to forget they went there not to forget, that they lost their lives but the culture, they were part of that we live in today the impact

of. the war is profound. and what dan has done for future and many generations come because books can't be unlike buildings, can't be torn down. he's created an imagery in that one young man's life that really is indelible. and i urge you all, if you haven't read it and all of us on c-span to and i'm not selling this as a publisher it's book that frames a lot of what you heard today and one person's life. and the second thing i want to say is that because is on c-span and, it will be on their website. rather than just the thing which you all sat today. it'll be there and other people come to it. and i want to encourage as many people as possible to come to

because reflections on the war 50 years after the fact are immensely important in helping us understand what we where we were and where we may be headed. so thank you again for coming. working on the book in that time gave me the opportunity to learn a vast body of material and issues that i was not otherwise familiar with. and in the course of that work, i had the opportunity to read the work of many of the people who are here today. and i cannot tell you what a privilege it is to be with today and to have a chance to do this work together. when i began this project years ago and i found marcus sullivan, he helped me to find my way into this project, i never imagined what would open up for me as a as a scholar and as someone interested in our history. so i'm enormously grateful, all of you, for being here today. we have had the opportunity today thinking about these issues and reflecting on 50 years to hear from journalists oates and historians creative,

political and military leaders, soldiers and citizens and there have been many themes that have emerged throughout the day. and you can reflect on them in your own ways. but for me, there are three broad ideas that i would like to take home with me. the first is there are many, many, and we haven't figured this out, and we have continued to make mistakes since. vietnam that would have been inconceivable to us in 1975 that we would so work must continue these kinds of events are not just ways to spend a saturday afternoon reflecting on an experience we lived through, but vital work we must do to continue to learn what it means to live in an educated citizenry and make good. so i think that's essential for us to continue to do that kind of work us and our successors. the second is that memory matters, remembrance matters. michael o'donnell it right. don't forget, because we gave everything for whatever it was that we were sent here to do. and the most important thing we can do now is remember them and

honor that service and learn from that. and the third, at least for me, is that the center of every one of these issues is the quality and character of the leadership that we select to make these decisions that lyndon johnson single handedly could escalate this war. richard nixon single handedly end this war if they had the courage do so and they didn't. and lives were lost as a result of that. so as we think about the future and when one thing we can do as an educated citizenry is ask more of our elected officials and place a higher burden on responsibility and ethical leadership. we do. because when all else is pass by, that's what they have left is to make decisions on the basis of what they might think is right and what make what may matter most, even if it costs them something. this is why we're here because quality decisions were not made. it was expedient political maneuvering that ultimately led to the debacle of vietnam. so at least for me, those three themes are worth keeping in mind

as we move forward. and again, we want to thank you so much for spending your saturday with us. i would also like to thank especially the gw team that made this event possible. peter and i had the idea. we enlisted tom and then we said to the gw guys, i don't know, let's do it. make it happen. and they did. dean paul wall back generously donated the space and, all of the resources it took to bring it to life. maxine koger denise st ours. elizabeth burns, peggy cusack and michelle dobbin met with us every week and did all of the things that are involved in producing this event, which now i've is more complicated than a big wedding to do it. what did i know? andrew and the tech team here made it happen today, so i want to thank all of them profoundly for, their good work, and to thank you again for being with us. and we'll see you in the next 50 years. this is.