kabul that like they came in bought all our percocet and like yeah that tracks. so you know that's, that's the one side of it and that's the thing and that's why, as i say, there were only a few moments when i was in the moment that had real conversations with colleagues about what we had gone through and was really my former colleague, david gilkey, the npr photographer who was killed in afghanistan in 2016. he over with me in 2014 during a stretch where there were a lot of attacks. the international community and we became targets when before we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time usually i mean that was the one upside of not carrying a gun is that, you know, they wouldn't come after us. but in january 2017, there's 2014 that started to change.

and so there was an episode where another an ap photographer on your niedringhaus was shot by an afghan police officer. we turned weapon on him and kathy gannon, who survived the incident. and david was there with me and we just sat at the house that afternoon and i can't quite repeat the language we were using, but we were just asking ourselves, what, what are we doing? is this story worth our lives? and questioning, you know, lots of sort of life choices in that moment and trying to understand, you know, what do we do with this? and, you know, the feeling was our story might not necessarily be worth our life. we don't really want to think about it in that context. but these are important stories and he more so much more so i did because david was in first in 2001 he was with the first

forces that went in. he that conflict first hand for 15 years and felt an obligation to the people the us troops that he embedded with and photographed and anyone else to keep that story and keep it alive. and i certainly felt that in the time i was there, interest was waning and it was a struggle to keep people interested in afghan system. and so, yeah, you do that obligation to the story and to some of the people and look, i'm still processing things today. i mean, still every day when i see news and i see after everything that happened that i reported that people are still doing same things to each other. what you know, what do i make of that? not just as a journalist, as a person and know what did i go through? what's the message? and so, yes, some of this is trying make people aware and trying to get people to stop, say what?

you know, what are we doing and what do we owe to each other as people? and, you know, it's horrible that service members are sent into places to put their lives on the line and that, you know, people like myself and others, you know, feel called to to go in and tell these stories and. yeah, it's it it's hard, you know, is the thing i don't know how many of you have, you know, relatives from generations who served in a war. my grandfather was in the navy in world war two and served on a munitions ship in the pacific. so basically a floating target and and powder keg. so about as high stress kind of day to day existence. and as a kid, i always wanted him to tell war stories like what was it like? and, you know questions that people ask me when when i got back and he wouldn't go it, you know, he told a couple joke

stories to kind of defuze and distract people to move on and you realize like, yeah, that's i started to see myself doing that over time i'd come and people like so like i'm like, oh, was dusty ha ha ha or know it was it was something you diffuse. it's like you don't really to know the answer to the question you're asking is is part of it. and i'm not you want me to dig in on that and that was again, a lot of my process in the book was deciding, okay, i'm going to dig in on this stuff and i'm going to now, you know, some cases it was years after the experiences that i'm writing about it and have time to kind of process and realize how it impacted me. that's the one thing i do think now obviously to toot my horn is that is a value to my approach of writing it as far after the fact i did is it allowed me to have that reflect and that if i

had written it the moment i got it would have been i saw this, i heard that i did that, but not here's what i felt. here's how that affected me. here's what i think people really need to understand about and so part of it for me now is talking about it a little of paying it forward, trying to raise awareness, but, you know, healing through helping others, trying to raise awareness around mental health, things like that. all part of the processing. and i know i have a of friends who are vets and you know, we talk about a lot of this and that's that gets back that nature of tribe like because my experience i can have conversations with that other people can and they can let down guard with me and i can let down my guard with them and that's and helpful and healing all of us to, you know, kind build those bridges and understand. yeah, i, you know, i know where you're coming from and so, you

know, i think that there's just trying to build those conversations is is a big part of it. all right. not a solution. one one more. since you get a let people go on with their their evenings. you mentioned the importance of doing homework before to country what type homework do you think should be done? how long do you think someone should spend on it? yeah, so i mean, the notion of homework before going into place, i mean, part of it depends on the story. know sometimes you might be going in to a story that's that's very contained, right? a lot of times parachute journalists might go in with the congressional type of thing where they're moving a bubble and capturing. but a lot of the reporting i did, looking at what's driving this conflict, why have peacekeeper has been unable to to with the situation things like that, where in some cases

was going into countries that had been in civil war for four decades and you when you start on peeling history, serbia, kosovo, going back to the 1400s and there are still disputes over territory in that region that people are arguing about today. and so, yeah, i mean, you can never do enough homework. you can never understand enough context. and so, you know, you never know when you're fully prepared going into a place. but having an understood ending of some of those dynamics around the story, what are some of the things that i won't. as an american who grew up a place where land is a item, whereas in this place, it's identity, it's our people. this land hundreds, thousands of years driving their view of everything.

today. and so, yeah, it's to learn and understand as much of that as you can when you go and it's also important to understand the local dynamics again, the safety the security, the realization, oh, sudan is under international sanctions and your credit cards don't work here. maybe i should have brought more than $250 in cash for a ten day trip to sudan and that's why the german woman running the hotel where i stayed looked at me funny when i handed over an american express card and she's like, what are you doing, idiot and i'm like, oh, right, right now. sorry, that was reflex i got this and also then gone, holy --, i don't have any i don't have money to pay my bills and my credit cards. don't work here. i probably should have figured that out before i got on the plane. fortunately, western union came to the rescue. so again, a huge blunder in

sudan that i got out of and didn't have to spend working off my hotel bills. but yeah, an important detail kind of missed ahead time. so each trip honestly for me there was a lesson learned. so when i went to the congo, i brought but then i found out at that time if your bills were pre 2000, they wouldn't take them because they could be counterfeit. so i had a whole bunch of hundred dollar bills that were 1998 and guys like, no, no good like oh --, it's out of money. change your some extra fees, work my way around it learned next time every time go to the bank before a trip check the bills get the newest ones next trip you go on something else you didn't anticipate or learn so in my case, fortunately most of these lessons are sort of happy anecdotes, jokes that i can tell. but any number of situations

that easily could have gone a very different direction. and so it's just a reminder or whether it's journalism or so many other things in life that luck is the factor that makes difference, that you can't control. so on, on note, i will say thank you to everyone for coming out tonight, braving the heat again, braving naito summit. i don't know. i didn't hear the flyover, so i don't know if it happened or not. but again, thank you to charles kennedy school alumni for putting this together and appreciate it. yeah. and so i do copies. they will happily book festivals and more.

anytime only the book tv to work. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ the bus connections are always there.