today, governor martin o'malley talks live at the national press club. and the president of the blue cross blue shield association talks about the future of health care at the u.s. chamber of commerce also here on c-span. >> this week on "q & a," karl marlantes discusses what it is like to go to war. karl marlantes, and your book what it is like to go to war. on page 114, chapter six, line i want to read you a first couple of sentences. one of the greatest tests of character is telling the truth when it hurts to tell her.

the vietnam war will be infamous for the way those that perpetrated it lied to those who fought in it. how strongly do you feel about that? >> well, i feel pretty strongly about it because i think we got ourselves into a bit of a morass there. one of the things that was leading off of was the way statistic got inflated. and body count because you find yourself in a situation where you're being judged by one whole set of standards that is not -- how do i describe this? it's like when you write fitness reports for people. if you don't give everybody a positive, perfect score then it hurts them. if i don't get a positive perfect score then it's going to hurt me. i think then you got to say am i going to tell the truth when

everybody isn't? you start you get into this morass and vietnam is what got us into it. >> then you say lives in the vietnam war was more prevalant because that war was fought without meeting? >> right. that's another thing i have thought about a lot. why do we get ourselves into these situations when it's like -- i'm sort of scrambling here. when you have no overall meeting to the war. for example, an objective. like we're going to defeat the enemy, we're going to gain ground. where people can actually see you're succeeding or that there is a way that you can justify what your actions are. undergrounds are the larger, overarching, even moral code, or

moral standard. for example, we're fighting fatchism, or these people are threaten my people. if you don't have that overarching moral position, then you're going to have to find yourself justifying it. and you find yourself justifying it sometimes in ways that quite frankly aren't honest. >> you say you lied when you talked about this story. >> what i was saying is when you get into lies, you can use a lie for a good moral reason. and t-dog was a pseudonym. he was a young marine who was an excellent marine and had been wounded a couple of times and he had come back out of the bush. i had just gotten transferred out of the bush and i was made the what they call the watch officer, which means it's just nighttime and you're the senior officer on duty there.

i was the lieutenant. and p-dog is over at another batallion. he had gotten in trouble because he and a couple of his friends for smoking marinara. now this is 1969 and smoking marijuana in the marine corps was a very bad crime. they were coming down very hard on this. virtually mandatory that a kid would get dishonorable discharged, if not a lot of brig time. here i had a good kid who had fought his way through the whole tour. he was two days from going home and then he did this and i thought what am i going to do now? so what i did when i picked him up at the other batallion, the watch officer said i haven't touched these guys, they're your guys. we were in the back of the jeep and i said well, i've got to go take a leak and myself and the driver, we got out and disappeared and we waited for them to get rid of all the

evidence. i thought great when we get back we'll search them and there won't be any evidence. we got back and they started flipping their pockets like this. t-dog flipped his pocket open and out falls a joint on the floor. and my heart just sank because it was in front of about 12 or 15 guys that were working the night shift at the headquarters, including a very well respected marine n.c.o., a lifer. >> noncommissioned? >> non-commissioned officer. and i thought to myself is this where p-dog will end up after serving his country? for something that kids are doing all the time. he's 19. so i picked it up and my hands are like this because second lieutenant, if i was a first lieutenant going over to a marine gunnery -- >> your mike just fell out. >> oh, i'm sorry. >> can you flip it on there?

>> yeah. >> if i can -- we'll just stop and fix that and come right back. what happened to p-dog? >> well, what happened is i took the jointened i held it in front of the n.c.o. and i said gunny this looks like tobacco to me. and i didn't know what he was going to do. and he was wonderful. he took that joint and looked at it and he went around every marine in the headquarters. is this marijuana or tobacco? and every one of them said it's tobacco, gunny. and he came back to me and he said i don't know this marine, if you say he's a good marine i'll say he's a good marine. it looks like everybody here says it's tobacco and p-dog just took off at that point. >> when did he get out of the

service? >> he was probably out of the service a couple weeks after that. >> had you not done that what would have happened? >> it's almost sure he would have gone to court and if he didn't serve brig time he certainly wouldn't have gotten a dishonorable discharge. it was like mandatory sentencing that we have now, three strikes you're out. it had gotten to that point where it was virtually no other recourse. >> the years you served in the marine corps, what were they? >> i started in the p.l.c. program, you join and go summers and they put you in an officer candidate program that you don't have to go to o.c.s. that was in 1964. i started on active duty in 1968. and i got out in 1970. >> what year were you in vietnam? >> i was there from october of 1968 until october of 1969. >> go back 30 years, 30 years to write your initial novel.

this took a year at this point. >> no, i wish i could tell people it took a year because then i would sound like i was really quite the disciplined guy. but i fall asleep in hotel rooms. i actually started writing this in the early 1990's. i had the same problem because no one would publish it. i couldn't get anything to read the manuscript. again, i don't hold any -- this is just the marriage of literature or writing or business. these people have to make decisions about whether these books are selling. maybe 1990 a book like this wouldn't have sold. so it finally, after this got published -- >> it was about the vietnam war? >> yes. >> do you know how many copies sold? >> i am not quite sure but it must be over 250,000.

>> why did it take 30 years? >> same issue. i had started to try to sell it in 1978, and again the reaction was this is -- i don't think we can sell it. through the 1980's and the 1990's i would get people saying you missed the mark that hollywood did with all the movies. "full metal jacket," "apocalypse now." maybe if we rewrote it and put out in the gulf war we would have a chance. literally it was like well it's got a mountain, the matterhorn in afghanistan has mountains. again, things i was talking about, they're trying to see if the market will accept it. and they never know. my publisher is wonderful.

he said he'll find books that are just wonderful and he calls it the gods of the book world. you don't know if people will read them or not. i think the country has gotten into a situation where we're in a very similar world. i think a war novel about vietnam, which hopefully is also the character-driven novel, becomes popular. the other thing quite frankly is that the baby boomers, those of us who were a young age when the war were being fought are now in a much more reflective state. i'll go to readings and i'll get answers and questions and people startling to talk to each other about what were we doing there? doesn't matter which side of the great divide you were on. i think that has been a major factor in the book's success. >> go back to the lying chapter, the body count lying.

how did it work? >> well, when i say if you have no objective, like my father, my awningles. well you hit the beach at more mandy and then you hit the sand and the rind, you measure your progress. in vietnam, it was not clear what winning was. you hear phrases well we win the hearts and minds of the people. to a 19-year-old kid who's actually having to do the fighting, and i think to a military in general that's a very difficult, fuzzy sort of way to measure it. if there's no territory to be gained or no enemy capital to end up with. in other words if it's this fuzzy thing are we in the police role or the military role? it gets confused. and so how do you measure success? and they begin to measure success by body count. and to me that is not moral.

you are not there in the military, and i'm no pacifist, i'm a very proud marine. you're not there to kill people. you're there to stop them from doing something that's hurting your people. and so measuring your success by the number you killed gets you offkilter. then what happens is that's the only way your success is measured. military's run by human beings. they don't want to advance. they want to make it to captain to major and major, just like you do in the corporation. if you can't show penny's per share or cost-cutting in your department, you have body count. i kind of make fun of it in the book, it did work this way. you have a kid out there in a fire fight and he didn't care. he just had a friend killed, his adrenaline is pumping and somebody says how many did you get? in the jungle, in a fire fight, you don't have a clue.

there could have been five or 15. he's going well i don't know. he talks to a couple of friends, i think we killed two, or you know. if you have two dead, must have have some probables. after wall, there should be probables. it's all logical. like i said it's on shaky moral grounds as well. >> did in your opinion that lying that went on in vietnam have any impact on this country today? is there something that's come down from there now? >> boy that's a good question. >> from what you see? >> you know, i really would hate to stick my neck out but i have a feeling that we probably are

more cynical about what government tells us. we're more cynical. there's a fine line. i remember telling somebody when i was in college well, the president wouldn't lie to american people. and i got laughed at. i was from a little town in oregon. well, that was naive. and that's a little dangerous. but then you slip into well who knows what's being said in washington. the sense of can we trust the truth has now slipped more to the cynical side. it's like well they just said this but who knows. and so i think that that's been a change. i think i would like to see the country get back to some kind in the middle. we don't want to go back to being naive. but i think slipping into cynicism is dangerous, because we're a republic. we have to vote. and the people that vote have

that really know what ask the truth. if we don't believe it what does it mean for our vote? >> let's fill in the blanks about you before we go on. what town in oregon were you born in? >> well i was born in astoria, which is right at the mouth of the columbia river and i grew up in seaside. >> how long did you stay there? >> well, i was there until i graduated from high school. 18 years. >> then what? >> then i got a scholarship to yale so i left, and i joined the marines out of high school. and went to yale and i said i had this program called t.l.c., team leader's class so i could go summers for training. i owed the marine three years when i got out but i would be commissioned as a second lieutenant. i got the rhodes scholarship, well it was for 1967 when i

graduated. i thought the marines wouldn't let me go because they were short of junior officers. they were wonderful, they let me go. i had friends that had gone to training who were over in vietnam fighting. i had been told five kids from my high school died over there. i knew certainly i had friends from high school fighting there. here i was drinking beer in england, running around with the girls. and the war was looking dicey. this question of what is the truth, did they really attack us in the gulf or did they not? i'm getting a little bit wobbley here. but that pails in significant to my feeling -- but that pales in the significance of my feeling that you're either in the boat or get off the boat all together. so i gave the scholarship up, i sent a letter to the marines and

i think it took me a week to get to want co. >> you took a side trip right? >> well, i was 22 years old and i was struggling with a very difficult, moral issue, which we were all struggling with with that war. we're in this harky of value does we actually come out? loyalty to your friends, to the oath your swore? to the president and protecting the constitution? i took the money from the scholarship and luckily i was forgiven for that. i just spent, i don't know, a couple of months trying to make my mind up. i don't know how that works with humans. one morning i woke up, i'm

going. i hitchhiked up to a navy base. by this time i had hair down to here, yellow shoes and i walk into this navy base, and there's some young j. g. there. i say well lieutenant marlantes reporting for active duty and this guy just looked at me, i remember him pushing the chair back like why me? >> what did he tell you? >> well he said is there nay way i can get out of this? he said where's your duty? i assigned to london. he said go to london and tell them you want to go back on active service. so i did. i wrote the letter and like i said in a very short time i was on my way to quantico. >> but there was a girlfriend in there, may? >> yes. >> is that her real name? >> no, it's not her real name.

and probably the first time i was really deeply in love. this was very difficult because she was opposed to the war. and i was struggling be this question about whether i should go or whether i shouldn't go. i didn't talk with her about it. because i had the feeling that i didn't want to burden people with my problems. she had the opposite view of things, which as i'm older i can ungs. she wanted desperately for me to talk to her and it hurt her that i kept my mouth shut. we basically split up. she sent me a letter when i was in vietnam saying it was over. it was a very difficult dear john. i see her side of it now and i hope i wrote her fairly in the book. >> but you have a footnote where you got back together meeting

her years later? >> we did. >> when was that? >> about four years ago, five years ago. >> but you're married now? >> i am, very happily. >> how many kids? >> five kids between the first wife and second wife. yeah i had written to meg and i said i was going to be in the northeast and she was up there now. could we get together? just to sort of talk about this painful, poignent part in our lives. it was painful to her as well because i had tried to get back together with her and she was not having anything to do with it. i remember there's this one phone call, the only one i had with her, which was are you all right? i said yeah, i mean i hit a couple of times but i'm fine. she said i don't mean that way. typical guy, i'm off on the physical and she's off on the emotional. she said i'm glad you're ok. and i hasn't made contact with her for 30, 40 years.

and we had this wonderful meeting, and she had pictures from that time and we just talked about it. that whole time being for the war, being against the war, being confused about the war. why did you do this, why did i do that? we just agreed that we were a couple of kids that hurt each other because we just didn't know how to articulate what we were going through. >> how had she changed? >> she had had a very successful law career, and now married and she had gone to the cordon bleu cooking school. she hasn't changed at all. the only difference was that she was talking to me this time. >> and you live where now? >> i live between -- about an

hour east of seattle. >> we're going to go back to the war in a minute but what have you done for all these years? >> i was in business basically. i went to work in the lumber business. then wanting to write books i thought well i'm going to have to try to do something. i had this bright idea that i could do consulting and managed to get myself going in a consulting business, strategy for large corporations and ended up focusing on energy. the problem with that is in between consulting jobs i can write books. because in between consulting jobs you're spending your time trying to find the next consuling job. i ended up running a corporation that singapore that made batteries. i was manager there. so all the time i was writing these books, i was basically either in my own consulting business or running a

corporation. >> how big a deal, you're not the one to ask this but i'll ask it anyway, is getting the navy cross? >> well, getting the navy cross, i can go to any navy base or marine base in the world and never pay for a coup of coffee or a drink. it is highest award that the navy department can give out. so it is quite a big deal. i talk about medals in this book a lot. you never know what to make of it. somebody writes you up, out the other end comes medal. and it's a difficult process. how do people make judgment calls about what somebody did? and as i even say in here in the book, i myself, and i know that people i've talked to really

aren't sure sometimes about the medal. most people thoughtful about it realize there are people out there who have done more brave things than i have who went unrecognized. they either did it when nobody was looking or they did it and combat was going on and people forgot about it or people write them up. i know one guy who has written it up and the paper work goss lost. so things like that happen. when things like that happen, you get pretty humble about the particular medal that's on your chest. like i said, you always have the sense of i don't know if i did as well as that guy who earned it. there are people that may have a medal that they didn't earn. you don't know. i said -- >> what day do you remember you got this? >> oh, i remember it very clearly. it occurred over several days.

we had made an assault on a hill and we were surrounded. we ended up taking a lot of casualties on a second assault where we lost most of the officers. so i had taken over a couple of platoons and combined them under my command. i was the company executive officer. and the particular day was a final assault on a hill called 484. where i say i won the medal is we were all in a wood line waiting to go. the prep from the aircraft missed. it was cloudy, monsoon season and they hit the wrong hill. and the clouds are coming in saying we'll have to go without an air prep. this is a very difficult thing to do going up against fortified positions uphill like this. and we got out in the open and

got taken under fire by machine guns. and everybody went to the ground. me included. then it occurred to me that if you stay here they had been mortarring us for days. i knew they had mortar positions all around us. if we stay here exposed like this the mortars are going to start coming in. and we're going to get really waxed. there's only two ways to go, you either go backwards, marines don't do that. or you go frontwards. where i say i was proud of that day was standing up in the middle of the fire and going up the hill. after the bunkers. there's one pretty good bunker right there at my position that had a machine gun that was holding us down. and i thought i was by myself. got a glimpse of something

moving out of the corner of my eye. i rolled because i tried to get it with the grenade. i realized it was one of my fire team leaders, and then i looked behind them and i can get teary about the whole line of marines had stood up right behind me and came up right up the hill with me. they say i took out four bunkers. that's true. i mean i did go down the line, once i got around the side, throwing grenades. i wasn't all by myself, though. i mean all these marines are coming with me, just a couple of seconds behind. so where i feel proud about the navy cross is just that moment of standing up, and some people would say that's what a leader is supposed to do anyway. give him a navy cross for that. >> i have the citation, i just

read a little bit of it, to put you in context of the marine corps and what group you were with. the president of the united states of america takes pleasure in presenting the navy cross to first lieutenant karl a. marlantes. united states marine corps reserve for extraordinary heroism while serving as executive officer of company c., first batallion, fourth marines, third marine division re-enforced, in connection with operations against the enemy and the republic of vietnam during the period of 1-6, march 1969, company c. was engaged in a combat operation north of the rockpile and sustained numerous casualties from north vietnam meeze mortars, rocket-propeled grenades, and automatic weapons fire. >> there's a road called route 9

and it's just about right in the middle of the country at the edge of the flat lands that are in the high mountains. absolutely just straight up like this. and i can't remember how high it was, but you couldn't, you can barely get to the top and they can only get on and off the top of it with choppers and we had a recon team up there that would often be stationeden up there to do observation. but it was a landmark that everybody could see for miles so they used that when they reference it. >> what's the difference between "matterhorn" and by the way what was the highest it got on the best seller list? >> number seven on "the new york times" list. >> what was the difference between "matterhorn" a novel, and this book, what it is like to go to war? >> well the first difference is that a novelist can get inside

the heads of people who aren't himself, and can set scenes he wasn't physically at. so most of the things, firstly all the things i had seen were of close friends that had seen them. by creating characters, you can allow a reader to actually experience what you're trying to write about because they get involved, they begin to see what's going on through those character's eyes. you don't know as a novelist which particular character they're going to identify with. were it in non-fiction you can only comment about what you know, personally. there are people who have pretended to make things up and have gotten into trouble over it because they actually weren't there. so you have to keep to your own

view point. i think the reader then understands that everything is going on in the non-fiction book is from this one view point, the author's view point. and that's different. of course, there's this difference between the two kinds of truths. this is sort of the non-fiction sort of truth on the outside and fiction to say well it's all made up, it's not true. but it's actually true on the inside. >> are you patients still alive? >> no, they both died about five years ago. >> what did they do when they were alive? >> well, my dad was a high school teacher. then later became the principal, much to my chagrin. my mother waited tables and was a bookkeeper. >> where did you get your interest in writing, do you think? >> you know, i think i probably got my interest in writing from four high school english

teachers. i just was blessed with four english teachers that were extremely important and i acknowledged them in "matterhorn." they would take my writing and i would write something and they would say you ought to think about doing this. had you ever thought about being a writer? and i had, you know, but they would encourage me and help me. they would say well it would have been better if you had done this. my cousin and i wrote a novel about space invaders taking over the world and the world being saved by two 9-year-old boys, that just happened to us. i don't know what happened to that. but i had been interested in this but it was really the english teachers who started to get me serious about maybe i can do this. >> what role did your diary that you kept in vietnam every day play in your ability to write both books?

>> you know, i don't think it played much because first of all i can't find it, it's gone. i have no idea where it is. >> when was the last time you saw it? >> probably eight or 10 years ago. we were busy, so i wasn't writing every day. so the value it had, i'm quite sure is that writing things down soon after they happened is probably help get it in my head. and i do know that when i was writing earlier drafts of "matterhorn" i would look at that diary and i would try and remember what was i feeling like when i wrote that? so that was valuable then. who knows where it is. i wish i could find it. >> 20 rejection letters or more for "matter "horn" from publishers? >> oh, way more.

i started throwing them away. it was 35 years. i wouldn't keep doing it, i would go up to the point where i would get 15 or 16, 20, i don't know. and i would quit. not going to go this time. then i would go about four or five years, maybe sometimes more working on it, making it better. i would make comments saying you can't share large fiction. and quite frankly, i'm glad because the book got weigh better. i got more mature. i couldn't have dealt with some of these characters. when i was 30 years old. it wouldn't have been as good a book. i look back on it and i feel very sad because i was rejected. if i hasn't been rejected it wouldn't be the novel it was.

>> who bought it first? >> a little outfit in california. just two people, tom far ber is the publisher and his senior editor and managing editor, everything is kit dewayne. a friend of mine called and said tom might be interested. she'll take a look at it. i told my friend, you got to be kidding me. this is a novel about marines in the vietnam war and you want me to make a $50 copy of it and send it to a woman in berkeley, california? he said well i'll pay for it. i said no, it's all right. kit read it and kit loved it. and kit of course then gave it to tom and they decided to publish it. a non-profit house. they go out and find money for projects. and their idea is that it's so hard to get good literature into

the commercial market place that if they give to the writer a product, instead of a manuscript, actually has an edited book you have a chance of them going somewhere, new york, and selling it. and they made 1200 copies, and my pay was 120 free copies that i could do whatever i wanted with. that's the first publisher. what happened, what's interesting, a serious of interesting started with kit. my wife, said the same thing. i still got the same reaction. it's too big, so my wife said the problem is no one will read it. and i said, yeah. she said why don't you send it to contests. i called tom up, and he said if we don't have any staff to do that but if you figure out contests we'll send them. and it went to the barn's and noblee.

the woman reader loved the book, sent it to new york. a woman named joe sent it to her boss. another woman sessly, she knew if they picked it, this tiny house in berkeley wouldn't keep up. then of course it doesn't sell, and retailer says send the books back. so she took the book to friends in new york. and when she walks in your office and she says i like this book, everyone salutes. >> you talk about your first wife, is it giselle? >> yes. >> and you brought back the vietnam war to her or married after the war? but you brought back ptsd? >> oh yes. >> where did you meet your first

wife and what impact did ptsd have on the relationship? >> well, i met giselle in washington. after the war, i was assigned to headquarters marine corps. >> here? >> here in washington state. and she was teaching yoga here. so i fell in love with my yoga teacher. and ptsd is an actual physical change in your brain. i haven't even heard of it back then. if you read literature, od odysseus had it. when he's there, and he's asked tell me about the war, he exhibits every form of ptsd. giselle and i had the four kids. i started getting increasingly flakey, rages, moving constantly.

nightmares, thrashing around, startled, crazy things. i remember once i bumped my head against the cupboards in the kitchen and it startled me and i took them out with my fists. that's going to scare somebody. giselle didn't know what was going on, the kids didn't know what was going on. it was very difficult. and giselle had timely after some years of this craziness said there was a local group of psychologists that were doing stress. she said come into a free workshop on job stress. giselle said you better go, i think you have a lot of stress. started telling this guy about my symptoms, jumping up in the middle of the night, running outside without knowing what was going on. car would honk behind me and i would attack the car behind me.

and he said to me, have you ever been in a war? and that hit me so hard, i'm in the middle of a room with like 80 people. i started balling, snot coming out of my nose. it was have you ever been in a war, it was that simple. when he finally got me back, he said you've got ptsd, you ever heard of it? no. this was in the mid 1990's. he took out a card and wrote larry decker, department of veterans affairs, santa barbara. take this card to this man now. not tomorrow, not this afternoon, i'm calling him on the phone. you walk down there and you see him. and that was the beginning of getting healed. but the marriage didn't last. i had gone too long with the symptoms which families get destroyed with this. and we need to prepare our families when veterans come back, combat veterans, they're changed physically.

the actual way you process input, changes. goes from the cor tex, what's that sound to oh, is it a leaf? is it the wind? by that time you're dead so what happens is the brain under extreme adrenaline shifts the input out of the cortech straight to the -- what is it? not the madula, a primitive part of your brain. sound, boom, so you're not thinking any more. so from then on you get startled. out comes the sudden rage. you can learn how to cope with it. i've been taught, no one's trying to kill you here, it's

ok, you're safe. all those things have made life a lot smoother. not just for me but for all the people i live with. >> where did you meet your current wife? >> i met her when i was living in seattle. i was living there with my youngest daughter, sophie. she was going to seattle community college. and i met her on an internet dating service. >> when did you marry? >> about four years ago. >> if she were right here right now i would ask her what resid yill on the vietnam her with her husband, what would she say? >> i think she would say he gets pretty flakey around the fourth of july and she knows i take medicine. i take welbutrin and rid lynn. somehow that combination keeps

me. if i don't take my meds, she'll say i can see it in your eyes because you're starting to do this again, that combat veteran scanning. it just happens. she won't let me see war movies. she says if it's an important one, we'll watch it in the daylight together. but she's been fortunate because she knows. she's also a pyschotherapist. so when i do one of my numbers, which i still do occasionally, she knows that it's not her. that's what's so hard on these families. these poor women, the guy explodes and it's like what am i doing wrong? they're not doing anything wrong. the guy's just exploding because it's the way it is. she's able to sort of step aside and say it's the war, it's not me. >> were you drawn to her on the internet because she's a pyschotherapist? >> no. actually she got her degree while we knew each other.

i turned into a soccer dad with her daughter while she was going to college. i was drawn to her simply because we were very compatible in so many areas. just the usual. i sit with her and think this is comfortable, this is easy. i don't even have to make a decision about this. it worked out just fine. >> what's the answer to the question on your book what it is like to go to war? what would be your first thought when you try to answer that? >> that it is a life changing experience. in its intensities and maybe actuality approaches the spiritual, the spiritual experience that is beyond order life, normal life.

and it's very difficult to come back down from it and function in society. it's remarkable how many veterans do, i mean the majority of veterans return from these experiences and function, some better than others, but most of them do raise families and get the job done. but a large number commit suicide. a large number end up on drugs and alcohol. and it's those that we need to look after. >> how many of your fellow marines did you see killed or wounded, and how many of the enemy did you see killed or wounded? is there any way to quantify that? >> well, certainly -- i've never added it up. of my own marines, 30 or 40 anyway. and that one battle where i got the navy cross i think we lost 17. and double that at least

wounded. so over the course of the time, quite a few. of the enemy, it's interesting, it's harder to tell because there's just jungle. they're trying to save their frebbeds and pull them out of danger so the bodies get moved. so definitely i know i probably killed 20's. hitting them with napalm or with bombs or bringing in artillery. once that's over you can walk around and count the bodies. >> what's the difference between your first kill and your last kill in your own head? >> i don't think there's any difference. you get numbed by the come bat in the beginning. well, i might have to second guess myself. you get increasingly numb.

so as you're there longer and longer, i think on the spot you are not as shaken by it as the first one or two. but when you get back from that situation, mid life 40's or 50's, then it becomes not different at all. the one that kept haunting me was one right in the middle of the numbers of people i killed. and for some reason he had broken through, he was trying to kill me with a grenade and his eyes locked with mine. and that's rare. and he was human. snime in combat, we're raised, if we're decent, we're raised

not to kill them. so you kind of make them not human and that's that numbness that sets in, well they're a towel head, they're a good, they're a jap. and then, then when you get older you realize what you've done and you have to learn to deal with it. >> so what's been the impact on you about war in general? you mentioned it earlier about how you felt the vietnam war was a bad idea. what about the iraqi situation? you say you supported that and afghanistan, but have you changed your mind on that? >> well, in afghanistan i was all for going after osama bin laden, i think we should have. and we did eventually get him. problem happened he wasn't there when we tried to get him the first time. i think we got ourselves into this situation and there are we

are stuck in the middle of it and suddenly again what's the objective? the objective was get osama bin laden. that's clear. now it's like get stability in afghanistan. when is it stable? how do we know when we've won? even if it finally ends up the way we want it, could we not have achieved it another way? i often argue about apartheid in south africa. no one interfered there. you can't play rugby with us, we managed to make a big impact. they had to do it themselves obviously with the help of the world community made it ease yeser if an -- easier for apartheid people. i think we could have achieved it. iraq, i was very careful because i wanted to say i don't want to

be a second guesser and i remember writing it down, a dam hussain has weapons of mass destruction. he is a dangerous man. if i'm in the chair in the white house i need to protect the american people. i will go to war to try and stop this man from doing what i think he's doing. turned out that there weren't any. so, i would have voted to go. and then i would have been disappointed when it turned out that they weren't there. >> i'm going to try this, it may not work. because we don't have a lot of time but i'm going to read the headings on each of your chapterers. we only have about eight minutes left and see if you can give us 30 second synopsis so people can get an idea of where you went. temple of mars. >> we discount this spiritual

side and it hit me once that mystics all have this experience of death, they understand that death is imminent. they are in the moment, totally in the moment. they get to the front where their ego is subsumed into the good of other people. they live in a larger group, the church, the monastery, every one of those things is an extent of combat and it got me thinking what did happen. killing we're talking about some of the questions you were raising, which is that what warriors do is take life. we often get people involved. learn a skill, we'll help you from college. that's all good. but that's not what it's all about. >> chapter three is guilt.

>> you have to deal with it. you're raised in a culture, good people don't kill people. thow shall not kill. unless you're a sociopath you always will feel that way. yet your government says now it's time to kill people, ok. then you come back, gosh, how do i deal with that? it's tough. >> skip over four because it's numbness and violence. chapter five is the enemy within. >> what i talk about there is basically it's the union concept that's shadowed. what gets us into trouble i think in atrocities when the rage comes out, it's our own inner beasts. until we recognize our own inner beasts and start projecting it onto ourselves we get ourselves into deeper trouble. >> skip chapter six which is lying. chapter seven is loyalty. >> loyalty is an interesting issue because it's loyalty to whom. you find yourself at cross purposes. suppose you get an order from a higher authority that you

disagree with and your loyalty would be to support a higher authority. on the other hand if it's going to hurt the people that are below you is my loyalty to them. at some ultimate point loyalty to yourself. when does it deinvolve down to that? should i just run. >> chapter eight is heroism. >> we talked about that with the medal. you have to go at it with the right message. i got a bronze star. i was brave. i pulled the guy out from the machine gun but i went after in part because i wanted a medal. he ended up dying. it may have been, i'll never know, because an attempt to rescue him it was me he put the killing because he was on the ground and i was trying to get the machine gun's head down to get to him. had i gone there with the right intentions i would feel less

bad. >> why would you want a medal? >> i think you want one because of self esteem. i think that's what i talk about. why do people want to be recognized for what they do. there's mixed reasons. >> chapter nine is home. >> coming home is a big part of the war experience. we've certainly handled it badly in vietnam. we're learning to handle it better. but i think we have a long way to go as a culture about how to actually bring veterans back so they become members of the larger group. >> chapter 10 is the club. >> when i was a kid, all the dads and uncles were world war ii. those who had been in combat had known something i didn't know and i wanted to know what it was.

i call that the club. >> chapter 11 is relating to mars. >> this is a summary chapter which is what is the proper way to be a warrior in the modern world? and what is an ethical warrior. and what is an unethical warrior. and where do you -- how do you stop short of moving into unnecessary killing? >> you start the first sentence of your book and the preface is i wrote this book primarily to come to terms with my own experience in combat. have you done it? >> i think that it has -- yes, i'm quite satisfied. there will be no more books for me about war.

so i feel fairly satisfied i've come to terms. i recognized where i fell short and i recognize where i didn't. >> how old are your kids? >> 33, 30, 25, 24rks20. >> have they read your books? >> yes. except i don't think a couple of the girls have read this recent one. the others have read them. >> can you summarize the impact on them? >> i think it helps them understand being raised by a combat veteran like oh, i know why dad did that. i can understand why he behaved like that. i think that's been a big impact. >> what's your next book? >> my next book if i get time to write on it is about a woman who's a labor organizizer in the logging camps. i deal with this conflict in our culture between being an

individual and being part of the group. and we flip-flop with that one. >> what's your schedule on that one? >> right now there's no schedule. i'll be off this tour and then start writing it and when i get it done, that's all i can say. >> the name of the book is "what it is like to go to war." also "matterhorn," a novel. karl marlantes, thank you very much for joining us. >> thank you, it was a pleasure. >> for a d.v.d. copy of this program call 1-866-662-7726. for free san francisco scripts or to gives -- for free transcripts or to give us your comment about this program, visit q&a.org.

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