involved with the study there was a lot of stuff that we have a big special forces community that are active particularly in africa and a lot of places i think the public knows very little about it i don't think this are my president is been briefed on any of it i don't think he would he's not interested in oh yes i know about it i know there's concern about some people in the military and high up in the military in my government in washington what are these guys doing who's in control there's a lack of control in among the special forces they've just gotten and many of them are driven. with the idea that they are on a crusade that they're there the night some malta fighting the infidels in the fourteenth century a thirteenth century ice really crazy stuff and so i don't think when i hear the military the special operations command say about mali here's what happened four guys died how i'm sorry i i just think this probably much more to this story i think there's much more to our presence there but it's very hard to get to that stuff lots of opportunities for reporters is maybe we do thinking in any way that

this memo already been reviewed quite widely favorably and helps in defending you from some quite extraordinary ad homonym attacks on your recent reporting oh it's you know the only thing that happened in my recent reporting is. it was fine when bush and cheney when dick cheney and george bush were in charge but want to bomb i came in he was the not the white knight if you will or the black knight i can as an african-american and it just changed it and it is just you know that's the way it is the stories that would have been fine in the days of bush and cheney suddenly were you know not getting published and people were complaining that i am always on the complaining about anonymous sources as if every day the new york times you can't pick up the newspaper and find the lead story based on anonymous sources it's just part of our business you can't name people in particular the stuff i do know i you know when i first did the middle eyesore. really master story one nine hundred

sixty nine the first thing i remember there was a poll from the i think for university of minnesota fifty four percent of the people didn't believe it and forty six and among my peers you know eighty percent didn't believe it you have to expand on the me a nice way because it's not all in the british curriculum is as stated a mature in the united states you know how it is it's when i was growing up i born in one thousand thirty seven by the time i got into my twenty's and thirty's the world war one oh my god i don't think i knew about world war one his fields of poppies and hemingway novels so it's not surprising to me that the generation today doesn't know what happened vietnam has disappeared in america pretty we know it wasn't a good war for us i'm sure there are still five pages of textbooks but there was a period when universities all had special courses on the war but that was twenty thirty years ago you and i were too old buddy we're all people i'm a much younger yeah but you know look i know great here but you must have to. leave me but if we go. mentioned it the medium as still resonates the name of

the judge with maybe historians of vietnam you tell in this book the story of trying to find sources and witnesses just describe what you go into that is why i just got a tip about it and you know i covered it's not as if i came from nothing i've been a police reporter in chicago and let me tell you about being a police reporter in one thousand nine hundred sixty wanted to go to go it was you learned a couple things you learned all about the weakness as my first job i copied was working for a news agency that covered crimes and police chases and so what i learned was you could do anything you want as a reporter was great fun you're on the street you're reporting about fires and murders but if a cop kills a black person that's off the books you know no matter what your words are going to be taken and if if you ever get into the police relationship with the mafia in chicago you know this is sam giancana though some of those names some of your people know the famous mafioso as you could you could you can see. we fight some

guy in the street with fourteen bullets in him in a downtown area where those clubs are controlled by the mob and it would be reported as an automobile accident and so i learned right away that there was tyranny in the world that there were things you could do there was self censorship to stop shooting i had a great time i learned a lot about i covered fires i learned more about racism that i thought i would but i also knew there were there was as i say tyranny there were certain things you could not get the chicago police department was operating in a world on its own things have changed a lot since then but what a lesson that was in sixty sixty one whitney army i worked for united press international i covered the legislature in peter south dakota town of ten thousand i was a chicago kid never lived in a small city i then worked in chicago and i was sent to washington covered the war from the pentagon learned to hate the war but the point i'm making is by the time i got to the meat life story had been in the business eight or nine years and so when i got a tip about somebody shooting up a village you got to read before you write so i used to i was not about watching

reading the new york times coverage of the war and then i read the french the french journalist and bernard fall there was a couple wonderful french journalists who wrote about the fall of france india being fool in one thousand nine hundred four and so i read a lot and so i and there was a muscle tribunals was very important although everybody in america said russel's he hates america he's ninety four it was an incredible document there was testimony from american soldiers about shooting up villages like crazy fifty sixty five very early so when i got a tip about me i just whatever else i was doing and i thought i could do it but i thought i would heard that some g.i. went crazy and shot up seventy five people and that sounded like something that could happen what they did in the war early on is we would go into villages american units of the company would go in on a raid find nobody there and we the way it worked as we always thought the viet cong their enemy the north really nice they were. farmers by day guerillas at night

so we go early in the morning and catch them in bed after a night of being aggro i don't know what the craziness was woman and children so after enough of those raids you would get frustrated sometimes the officers would say ok guys i know you're all angry everybody could have a mad moment in this village the tank gunner with his missiles and the machine gun and you can shoot the villagers up so that was quick to let the guys get off if you will be happy so they should have villages and that's what i thought they were talking about and then i got into the story and at the same time as i'm writing about the fact these people killed five hundred sixty seven people something like that and innocent people there was no company to bring in the war for about three months the kids did nothing about the vietnam or the culture and they were proportionately more hispanics and blacks then in the population and poor farm kids really white kids. or the secretary defense of lowered the standard by sixty seven and sixty eight he wanted no more there was

a draft that presumably would take very edgy well educated middle class white people he didn't want them in the war because they would come home and talk and be articulate about it and the senator who ran against lyndon johnson eugene mccarthy used to talk recently about maybe mcnamara wanted to change the color of the corpses but in this village they were brief this this company that hadn't seen the enemy they had been sniped at and they'd fallen into pits with sticks pull of poison they'd lost about twenty or thirty people have their hundred and they want to pay back and they were told by the cia official contract employ bad intelligence some are you going to go into a village and you going to see the enemy there so they got ready to go to their credit to be kill or be killed for america right they had seen no combat really and they fly in and there's nothing there woman making five hundred fifty sixty men women no one no men old men women children and they began to round them up and executed what i could write about. the they did things like throwing up babies and

catching them alive on bayonets i mean and raping like crazy i didn't. so much trouble with that story because i didn't know what i was getting into when i first started it and the horror and shame i felt for my country and for my soldiers i've been in the army i did the army i was it was a piece of everything idea that the guys i served with do this kind of stuff so in a way that the kids who did it was mostly the white kids hispanics and the african-americans no way man this is that the old face the whites that they do it this isn't for us and the next day they all wore on band some of the miners minorities and they were ordered to take them off their black armbands ons trying to separate themselves from the white kids had done the shooting anyway just a mess was a great story and you didn't. blame those soldiers also and you for they were getting did want told anything about this they didn't they were told they were communists they're out to kill us they did they went and they couldn't figure out

these kids we're not talking about the crime deal or crime of america these are their working lower working class kids make them or lowered the standards that normally would be bright enough or have not about brains about education they want to get into the army so what did they know one of the problems they had is my god these people didn't have refrigerators. i mean i talked to forty or fifty that before i wrote myself you know after i wrote a book about this afterwards and i went i spent six eight months just flying around america talking to kids some slam the doors some didn't talk to me but many did and pouring out their heart they had a problem in vietnamese society when they evacuate one of the planes one of the things we did in the war was we would remove families from their lands that had been ancestral fields for their protection it was called the movement of what we called fortified hamlets which enabled us to declare the areas that they cleared free fire zones you could shoot in anything and when they had villages there were people you could do it so we had evacuated and say it's where they're good and put them in the little. protected areas with fences around away from their fields i

mean they would do but choppers and in vietnam society a mother would never let a child go into a strange threshold first they would go first and the soldiers would say ok when they lined up these kids the same group they would if i could a village and they would say to the woman no go first and the woman would not only english would would resist and they would beat him with their rifle butts and say look at these crazy woman want to go first leaving the kids behind not knowing the culture so how can you they were as much victims in a way as those they killed. in this going on the ground special after the break. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have. let it be an arms race. dramatic.

how. very. young this is what happens to pensions in britain. welcome back we're still here with hershey's latest book reporter a memoir is out now in the past forty eight hours israeli jets of targeted damascus i mean the war seems to be continuing all of a kind you said that there were actually two suspects for the chemical attacks that news of which was beamed around the world as a reason why i say britain should bomb syria why do you think money journalists

would just say no there is only one suspect the as that government and what that would happen is with the you're talking about an incident in which. bashar assad's use of nerve agents against his own people. which is a turkey that was in two thousand and thirteen was a very rich from his point of reactionary force there was very hostile to his his presidency. and of course there was constant conflict conflict it was. one of the gangs and isis later it was a stronghold as we all know now it's bombed and bombed to smithereens the war is awful we americans should maybe be a little more tolerant made to hatred for bashar he had a war it was an awful war and he fought it awfully but so do we everybody does that's the horrible thing about wars and they're not good when it was government funding the white helmets right now that say it's one sided here it's the only can we trust you there's no question there's a look there i'm sure there are some people in the white helmets that were very

actually doing what you know trying to save lives but the it's pretty clear now that they're basically the major funding also i think america was indirectly supplying some money certainly the brits were and so certainly it was a hedge it was a propaganda organisation to along with possibly doing some real good relief work but too many times you've seen this same child in photographs you know year after year always covered in dust i mean there's been a lot of actually good reporting on it that they do and gauge anti assad but it's very easy here assad is hated and i get a lot of criticism criticism for saying having a different story for example about the use of sarah and i could publish what i wanted about him in america had a publisher here and a london review now all that happens is in june of two thousand and thirteen there was a very important all source intelligence report put up by the american defense intelligence agency to include it but made it complicated for me i got a copy leaked i guess you call it and it had

a lot of signals intelligence and the one reason i sort of stay alive i only ten i don't want to write i don't want to cross up any intelligence operation that's reasonable legitimate so i there's a lot of stuff. in this particular document i didn't publish it because i didn't know how much of this stuff is is very competent we're doing us good learning some stuff about the other side i just didn't know so what i had a report that said there was tremendous concern in the community because both turkey the. paramilitary police units were driving truck folds of the chemicals that when mixed together make a nerve agent it's called kitchen sir and it's very crude the syrian army has a very sophisticated sarah and that has additives that make it more lethal more toxicity more penetration much better weapon in fact it's so toxic nerve agent you can once you meld it once you make it taken or. phosphate and. alcohol i mean certain specific and you mix them and the additives you have to put

in a weapon because it will burn through a weapon in a day even a congress seal weapon so it's use it or lose it if you meld it and so we and the israelis used to monitor the syrian chemical arsenals and we could for once we detected a melding it that we were going to attack and israel was in this with us to israel knows the story i'm telling you and we also knew then the syrian army had a very sophisticated weapon and we also knew from this intelligence report that saudi arabia turkey were supplying the basic chemicals to al nusra which isis was in there then i was the cutting edge and so there was a tremendous yes well absolutely. always the.