tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation about the challenges facing our soldiers on the front line and a new book on the subject by brian castner. he has written a book about posttraumatic stress disorder that is being called one of the best book of our times about the plights of war. the book is called "the long walk, the story of war and life that follows." former air force officer brian castner coming up right now. >> there is a saying that dr. king had said that there is always the right time to do the right thing. i try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. we know that we are only halfway to completely eliminating hunger and we have work to do.

walmart committed $2 billion to fighting hunger in the u.s. as we work together, we can stamp hunger out. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: brian castner served three tours of duty as an air force officer in the middle east trip, twice meeting an explosive unit and attorney bronze star.

his new book is called "in the long walk, the story of war and the like that followers." i want to jump right in. i want to start with the very first words you're right in this book. i have rarely read anything that is this arresting from the first sentence. i just want to read just a few paragraphs. "the first thing you should know about me is that i am crazy. i haven't always been. but one day, the day i went crazy. i was fine or i thought i was. not anymore. my crazy is a feeling. it is the most intolerable feeling i have ever had and it never goes away. the second thing you should know about me is that i don't know how to fix it or control it or endure from one moment to the

next. the crazy is winning, so i run." >> that's right. i must have rewritten the start of the book of a thousand times. and realized that feeling crazy all the time was the most important thing that was happening to me. by important timing, it is all i thought about all day. it was all i did making better or driving the kids around or doing my other job or whatever the cane -- whatever the case may be. all i thought about was feeling crazy. how else to start the book? you put the most important stuff right at the very top. tavis: that is pretty honest, transparent, authentic. >> i didn't know how else to be. and why else write a book unless you will put everything in there? i wanted it to be a record of how i felt and just honestly how it was.

whatever came out in the wash afterwards, i guess, let the chips fall where they may. tavis: when you say crazy, how are you defining that? in just a few moments we spent together, i know that you did not write this book to be pitied. >> right. tavis: when you say crazy, unpacked that for me. >> i use that word for a lot of reasons. i had something happening to me. like i said, it was a feeling. it was not nausea. it wasn't stress. it wasn't worried. it wasn't a pain in my knee. it wasn't anything i had a name for medically. i had this feeling in my chest and that was swelling and expanding and never went away. that was t worst part of it could i couldn't do anything. it's not like you pop a pill when something happens. i needed a name and crazy worked because, when we did

every medical test -- i thought i had a heart attack. i made them checked my heart and do a stress test and everything else there was nothing wrong with me, but i still felt it. so it all had to be in my head. so crazy worked. the other part of it is that there is this stereotype of the crazy veteran that is always jumping at loud noises are cannot move past his experience, vietnam or iraq or whatever the case may be. i was turning into that stereotype. i felt i was turning into that parity. it is nothing that any individual veteran wants to be. but it is how it felt. i felt like i was doing all of those things. so the word stock. tavis: without appeal or something else -- without a pill or something else that a position could prescribe to you, how do you find something that you don't know what it is? how do you get beyond it?

>> i did everything. i would have done almost anything to make the feeling go away. while there were still medical tests, i did those. but when we ran out of those, i am lucky that my last appointment in the va hospital was not something physical. it was a counselor's office. and i just went to that appointment because it was an appointment on my to do list. instead of having some sort of test, we started talking. but i tried running. i tried yoga. i tried all sorts of things to make it go away. it was months. it is never -- some of it is never really away. some of it comes back. it has taken me a long time to figure it out and put it in its place. tavis: when you suggested earlier that, in your case, so

much of this was happening inside your head. it was not a pain or an acute illness, but inside your head. i do want to put you in terms of having it -- having to diagnose every bed, but talk to me about the notion that so much of what you all deal with when you come home is in your head versus field -- vs fill in the blank. >> vs some physical thing? some guys lose arms and legs some have some specific physical injury. i do to the tick to speak for anybody other than myself. this is a book about what might experience was. but i have gotten a lot of feedback and this is really touching. they have said thank you for writing it down. i feel the same way and you just made it okay to say so. and they were just uncomfortable giving voice to it or just uncomfortable saying it out loud.

there is a lot going on with what i call the crazy. some of it is grief of lost friends. some of it is the horrors of what you see and what you have done. some of it is the realization of what you were willing to do or what you were willing to do to get home or to shoot your way out of a situation or whatever the case may be. the mission, when you leave the base of their common is i am going to get home one way or the other. and we will all get back and we will all do what we need to do for the next three hours to get back. and when you start processing that for all those skills you just learned that you use in daily life, when you start to think that way about your kids and you think that way about your friends and you think that way driving down the highway and you think that way taking them to school or whatever the case may be, it is realizing that your brain still thinks about all those things in that order. but you are not in that

situation anymore. and dealing with that, i guess, realizing the kind of person that you have become or what your training has put you in preparation to do. for example, in the book, i talk about some times when i am in airports and i start to feel trapped a little bit. i find the exit and i think about how i will get to the exit and who i need to kill between me and the exit to get there. it is the planning. it is really the planning that bothered me. the fact that this is how i think now. normal people don't think that way. this is how i think now and i am dealing with that. tavis: i never want to be between you and an airport exit door. [laughter] #1. but secondly, all jokes aside, i can understand how, when you are in the heat of battle, your thought first and foremost is that i will do whatever it takes

to get back home. >> right. tavis: i have to get home to see my wife, my kids, my mom, my dad, my friends -- it is a survival tactic. i have to get home. the flip side of that is that it could lead to you making some strange, unethical, crazy choices. >> right. tavis: if that is what drives your decision-making skills. tell me more. >> it is not the doing. it is the planning. it is not like i ever got to the point of truly carrying out any of the plans. it is not like i had said it up that way so i could actually shoot my way out of the airport or something. like i said, is the planning factor. it is the idea that i am making

plans other people don't. i am thinking in ways that other people don't. and you bring of the ethics of it. i don't wish any particular person harm. it is not about any individual. it is not about any of the people in the airport at that time. it is falling back on survival skills when something feels a little different or in just stuff you encounter in daily life. when i am thinking of is being a father. fathers are very protective naturally. i really cannot parse out what part of some of my feelings are being the protective father, but a ticket to the next step. when i had a newborn baby who was just a couple of days nhome -- i saw so many dead children in iraq that i could imagine these things happening to my

job. i could not just imagine the unmanageable. i had specific pictures in my head of what it looks like. i could picture every last bit of it. and you will do anything you can to keep that happening to your child. tavis: to those pictures were living in your head -- i want to leave the airport and transport back to the battlefield. what i am curious about is what it does to your decision making , how it challenges your character, whether or not you find yourself and emotional or spiritual conflict when you're guiding principle is i will do anything to get home. do you see what i mean? >> there is definitely a spiritual conflicts and a character conflict. you know what the rules are. you know what you should do. but this is one of those things i learned in wartime that i

don't think that anybody can teach you. i learned, growing up catholic in catholic, buffalo, that i had a conscience. and my conscience was given to me by god. that way i would know what to do in any particular situation. if i chose to break that, that was my choice. but it was also pretty clear that your conscience supplies things like stealing candy from a store, all of these little things. it did not apply to shooting somebody because only truly depraved murderous sinners would contemplate doing something like that. and what i learned in iraq is that i thought i had a gag reflex that would keep me from taking that next step. i realized i simply did not have one. maybe it is the wartime situation that somebody is shooting at you and the rules are different -- tavis: context makes a difference. >> it is suddenly right.

all those things that you thought were on a manageable, you are now in a position -- were unimaginable, you are now in a position to carry them out. you have a rifle to keep you safe when you are shot at. and the things you thought you never could do, you are planning on every single day. tavis: you talk in the book in such moving terms about your responsibility to send out the out what werek believed to be ied's and other explosive devices. i will let you talk about that. is what i am getting to heare -- what is the pressure like when you're the guy making decisions about sending men and women into harm's way and you don't literally if, in five minutes, they will get back or not?

>> it is tough getting shot at. it is tough being the one taking apart the ied. but the kind of people that my job attracted, the bomb squad, it attracts a lot of doers. it attacks -- it attracts a lot of type a personalities. we are the ones to watch football to the end of the game. to not have that and know that it is somebody else's job -- it is not being in command of the unit and having 10 teams work for me. it is not my job to go on every call. it is their job to do the work and you are overall eating and getting them what they need so they can complete their mission. but everyone is so mission- focused -- you don't have room to contemplate the idea of -- i don't know. i didn't spend a lot of time thinking, well, i hope they make

it back. we all had a job to do. we all knew what the risks were. i was certainly happy to see them come back every time. i would hold my breath when i was actually on scene and could once somebody putting on a bomb suit and going down range. i wouldn't breathe until they got back. but sending them out, we were doing 25 missions a day. you cannot sit there and bite your nails. tavis: you talk about in stark reality -- that is how it comes across -- you talk about the day -- i am trying to think about, five were six explosions in 15 minutes? >> a v bed is a vehicle born ied pinkett is a car bomb. five of them went off and one of them didn't. the kurdish militia shot the driver. they figured out what was going

on with all of these car bombs going off. we made it to that one. we had a dead suicide bomber in the front seat. that was the only car bomb that we were able to take apart on my tour. after that, we had two car bombs a day every afternoon for months and they all went off. a lot of what i was not prepared for or maybe a lot of what the average person does not know is that taking apart the ied cost is what you hope to be doing. that is what you spend a lot of your time doing, going to the scene of wear a device has already gone off, picking up the pieces, figuring out how it works, doing all of those forensic types of tasks, finding an appearance and pieces of evidence. tavis: when you sit pick up the pieces, some of those pieces are feet, fingers -- >> it gets all mixed together. when the bomb goes off, it will be went everywhere.

some of it is gasoline. some of it is a brake fluid. and some of it is people. and you are picking through all of that to find out whatever it was, the little bit of cellphone that tells you, ok, it was a cell phone that made this go off. tavis: it is pretty clear in his book how you came to terms, how you are still coming to terms with the enemy you faced when you were deployed. i am curious though as to how you would -- described how you came to terms with the humanity of the folks that you came in contact with. >> that is interesting i bear none of them any ill will at all. including the people shooting at us.

there is a shorthand in the military wre we refer to the good guys and the bad guys. that never felt exactly right. if there were foreign troops in new york, we would be shooting at them. on one hand, you realize that there are a lot of people trying to get to work every day. they are trying to raise their families. maybe they are a farmer and the crop was bad this year. and if somebody's going to pay me $10 to put this back on the side of the road and not ask any questions, well, then that is what i need to do to raise my family. i am a father and i understand these things. so on the one hand, what everybody in that country and that city were doing every day made perfect sense. on the other hand, if they are shooting at me, i will shoot back. and if they're trying to kill me, then why am i doing? the first time somebody truly tries to kill you is a -- i

don't know. it was an eye opening experience. i was expecting to be scared, to be afraid. i was not expecting to get mad. and that is really what happened. itas, like, who are you to be kidding me? don't you realize that this is meat we're talking about. [laughter] of course, that is the same with everybody, right? in a war, you don't kill individual pop-up targets. you kill brothers and fathers and mothers and daughters. that is how the game works. tavis: that is where i wanted to go with this question about humanity. i have my own views on this, but i get, if somebody is shooting at you, you have to respond. i get that. but you're killing some is mother and somebody's brother and some of his sister. oftentimes, they end up being the collateral damage did your job is to try to limit what we

call collateral damage. >> right. tavis: did you get any time to get to know the iraqi people, not the ones who were shooting at you. >> it is one of my big regrets that i hardly did at all. we were in this little bottle and -- little bubble. we worked with the iraqi police on the scene and we would ask questions of the witnesses. but it was not like we had tea and sat down and got to know the people. parley, that is a reflection of what i was there. i was there in 2005-2006, before the surge. before a lot of the change in strategy. the surge was as much about how we did business as putting more people there. it wasn't getting out on foot patrol and getting to know people. that is not what we did. we drove around in armored

vehicles and we'll look at them and they looked at us and we hardly got to know them at all. it does -- it makes it -- it is easy to kill somebody that you don't know. it is a lot harder to kill somebody that you have gotten to know or that you have developed a relationship with, either the people in general or specifically. the other side of this is that, what i really felt -- i really felt the social justice part of what i was doing. we took apart every single ied. it did not matter what the target was. it did not matter -- if it was an iraqi school or an american convoy, we didn't ask questions. we just take them all part. which means that you have some satisfaction, at least a little bit. in some ways, you are not choosing sides. you are trying to reduce the overall threat, the overall

danger in the entire place. tavis: this is a question i could not have asked you when you're in uniform. since you are no longer in uniform, i can ask you. you don't have to answer, but i will still laski. that is whether or not you -- i will still ask you. that is whether or not you -- is your world do different? the political prison that you see the world is different? i am not asking you to demonize or cast aspersions on any particular president. but now that you have survived that, now that you look differently at the world, do you look through a different prism? >> i do. i don't have a political prism. putting it in that context makes it less and less sense to me, especially the way american politics work now. the policy and the line and all of those things, a lot of times, they are just lost.

i guess i look at people and i don't -- war is a terrible thing that will continue for a very long time. as long as we have tribes -- by that, i mean, we've put people in groups and say that they are different from this group, as long as we do that, wars will exist. the meaning of my tribe is better or not for the why of all that, it just does not make sense to me anymore. i talk about that a little bit at the end of the book. a lot of these distinctions of the countries and people and everything else, they are our distinctions. they are not real. they are what we created that we put on top of it. tavis: i want to close with whether or not, with all of this said, do you ever think about or have you attempted to want to go back? >> absolutely. every day. >tavis: you are crazy.

>> i have friends there and i want to keep them safe. just because your war and, the closest people to your life, people closer than family, they are still getting shot at and that is really tough. tavis: 5 understand that. the book is called "bill long walk, the story of war and the like that follows." i have enjoyed this conversation immensely. thank you for your service. nice to meet you. that is our show for tonight. you can download are new app. thank you for watching. as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with newt gingrich on the race for the white house. that is next time. we will see you then. >> there is a saying that dr.

king had said that there is always the right time to do the right thing. i try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. we know that we are only halfway to completely eliminating hunger and we have work to do. walmart committed $2 billion to fighting hunger in the u.s. as we work together, we can stamp hunger out. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more. pbs. >> be more. pbs.