>> rose: welcome to the broadcast. in what may be a historic day on the way to health care reform, the senate finance committee by a vote of 14-9 passed a bill. we'll talk about it with ezra klein of the "washington post." >> there are two things. one is snowe's involvement is a really big deal. the other is that democrats have a realization they didn't have in 1994. so in 1994 health care reform began to get unpopular, clinton was suffering under a number of scandals at that point and they began to abandon it basically. what happened then is they suffered losses like they have never suffered before and as far as i know haven't since in the 1994 elections. they lost the congress for the first time in 40 years. they lost more than 50 seats. so i think's a real understanding among both moderate and liberal democrats among the leadership, among the white house that either this passes and we can all run on a success together or it fails and we can all lose our elections together. >> rose: and then afghanistan as the president ponders his choices with ike skeleton, chairman of the house arms services committee. >> what i recommended to the president is that according to the custom in afghanistan that he urge president karzai to call together a conference of leaders of tribal leaders, and ask them how they clean up the government the services that they should be rendering as well as how you clean up the corruption. and let that group determine just what the standards would be and then we hold them to their standards as to how to clean that government up. i think that's the best way to handle it. >> rose: finally, david finkel, a pulitzer prize winning reporter, has remarkable book called "the good soldiers," about what it was like on the ground in baghdad. >> it's stories about these soldiers. and, look, i want to assure you, it's not a political book. it's... i promised the soldiers one thing when i went, that this would be a piece of journalism without agenda. i wasn't out to say the surge was working, not working, the war in iraq was worth it, not worth it. but that part of the conversation had to include what was happening at their level. and i was there to document it. so that's what i did. >> rose: health care reform, afghanistan, and soldiers in war when we continue. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: congress today moved up with step closer to overhauling the american health care system. the senate finance committee approved legislation that would extend coverage to millions of uninsured americans. the measure was supported by all 13 democrats on the committee, along with one republican, senator olympia snowe of maine. senator snowe said she would give her support to the bill despite some reservations. >> was this bill all that i would want? far from it. is it all that it can be? no. but when history calls, history calls. and i happen to think that the consequences of inaction dictate the urgency of congress to take every opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to solve the monumental issues of our time. >> rose: speaking earlier this afternoon, president obama said that the health care debate had entered its final phase. >> as a result of these efforts, we are now closer than ever before to passing health reform. but we're not there yet. now's not the time to pat ourselves on the bk. now's not the time to offer ourselves congratulations, now's the time to dig in even harder and work to get things done. >> rose: over the next couple weeks the debate will move to the open floor of the senate and house. joining me from washington, raze klein of the "washington post." i'm pleased to have him here on this day to help us understand what happened at the senate finance committee today and its significance. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: tell me about this and what do we know about what went on in olympia snowe's mind as she made this crucial decision to support this. >> if we all knew what went on in olympia snowe's mind, all of our jobs would have been easier in the past couple months. i mean, what hapned today is genuinely literally historic. health care reform has never passed five committees. trueman wasn't able to do it, clinton wasn't able to do it, nixon, carter, have m have tried it. it's never been this close before. olympia snowe was a crucial vote today but it is important, i think to know, she wasn't the crucial vote. health care reform passed 14-9. it had a fair margin. olympia snowe came on board at the end and i think white house is very relieved to have her there because it meant they have at least a one-vote margin to beat a filibuster and that means they're not going to need to go down the reconciliation route which got a loss of press a couple months ago but internalfully the house and the senate and t white house, there's a lot of concern that that would be a tricky path to go through. so they can point to a remember on the bill, it's a huge win for the white house and for, frankly max baucus at this point who had been under bad press in recent weeks for having taken so long. >> rose: and some people were suggesting he was sort of too heavily influenced by the insurance industry and over the last several days insurance industry has made it clear to that was not true. >> well, i don't know if they've made it clear that was not true. they've made it clear they have problems with the bill. i think that really backfired. last night, pricewaterhouse cooper, which is a consultant tansy the insurance industry used for their smear attack, they backed off. th released a statement saying "they paid us to do the report in a certain way, we only looked at a small number of things, we didn't look at the subsidies or cost-saving measures, don't blame us." and the insurers were sort of on their own. i was watching today blanch lincoln, the democratic senator from arkansas, was attacking that report. when you've not got blanch lincoln on your side and you're trying to influence moderate democrats, you've made a misstep somewhere along the way. >> rose: what's your reference to senator baucus, then, in terms of his role? >> i mean, senator baucus has had... you know, he's really been the chairman with the most power over this, right? the senate is the crucial chamber because the filibuster makes it so much harder for anything to get done. and the senate finance committee... remember, the help committee, which used to be chaired by the late senator ted kennedy and is now going to be chaired by senator tom harkin, they produced a bill and they passed it. the problem for the health committee is they don't have jury diction over medicare, medicaid or anything having to do with revenues so their bill is very incomplete. it was only baucus who could do that. he took a long time and he doesn't have a lot of trust from liberal democrats but he did produce a bill. and whatever its failings, it's not that far from the other bills on the table except arguably on the public option question and i think that it is going to be a bill that can be merged with the others. i think that he's really proven an ability to do something that's, again, historic. it's literally historic. it hasn't been done before. and it's interesting to note that this is a committee that has had very renown chairmen, moynihan and dol and lloyd bentsen and baucus often wasn't considered in their class but he's going to go down within w an achievement they weren't able to grasp. >> rose: and how did he do it? >> you know, he did it through a couple things. one is that he had the votes and at other times they haven't. democrats have 60, it's very rare, hasn't happened since the time of carter, so that gave him a really big push forward. the other thing is he really wanted to do it. it was a year or two years ago now that he began holding hearings which is traditionally very early for something like this and hfs very painstaking about going to the industry groups, trying to mute their opposition, going to other senateors, trying to hear their concerns. the big misstep-- and i think it was that-- was the gang of six where i think he overestimated the ability of senator chuck grassley and senator mike enstoi buck their party. that was a long delay, it made a lot of people angry and was a very high-risk maneuver. but health care was able to survive after that and he did one thing that shouldn't be underestimated: he produced a bill that was able to get an incredibly good congressional budget office score. i mean, as a simple measure of policy achievement, he managed to cover 94% of americans and cut the deficit. and that took a lot of work. i mean, just a lot of substantive legislative work which i think doesn't always get the accolades, maybe, that it deserves. >> rose: so what happens to the public option? >> you know, it's a bit hard to say. what we move to now is there will be a merger beten the health committee bill which has a public option and the senate finance committee bill which, of course, doesn't. in the house all the bills have a public option. so a couple things could happen. one is it could get just sort of a normal public option along the lines of what senator chuck schumer offered. so not a public option that can partner with medicare and be a competitor that insurance is unable to compete against but a public option that works like any other insurer. but there are a couple of compromises getting a lot of attention and the main one i think... olympia snowe had a trigger proposal which i don't hear much about. the main one is senator tom carper's. the idea is basically individual states can choose whether or not to have a public option. and in a move that liberals liked a lot, senator chuck schumer has offered up an improvement to that, maybe in which there would be a national public option and states could opt out if they chose. so you would have a somhat stronger public option, but the alabama, if mississippi, if california didn't want to be part of it, they could just say sorry, no thanks, it's not for me. >> rose: what is this bill that passed the senate finance committee do about the disparity between states in terms of monopolies and in terms of how insurance is available. >> well, the main thing here is the exchanges. we'll see as it moves through the process what form they take. in the house bill it's somewhat national. the big thing is it creates new marketplaces which would initially be open to small business and individual markets. so uninsured people, people who work for businesses under 20 or 50 or a hundred people depending on the bill we're talking about now. and, you know, the idea there is you help dozens of different insurers competing for them. that works fine in a big state like california, but what about a state like montana, for instance,? well they can form interstate compacts so montana could partner with a couple other states in the west or delaware could partner with pennsylvania and a couple others so there would be a very large market that that insurers would want to serve and that they would have structure for competing with. >> rose: the likelihood now that we will have health care reform in 2009 from this congress has gone up to 80%? >> it's much higher than i think one would have felt comfortable predicting at any other point. the basic... there are two things, one is snowe's involvement is real a really big deal. the other is that democrats have a realization they didn't have in 1994. so in 1994, health care reform began to get a bit unpopular, clinton was suffering under a number of scandals at that point and they began to abandon it basically. and what happened then is they offered losses like they have never suffered before and as far as i know haven't since in the 1994 elections. they lost the congress for the first time in more than 40 years. there's a real understanding both among the leadership and the white house that either this passes and we can run on a success together or it fails and we can all lose our elections together. >> rose: and to those people who said the president should have fashioned his own bill, should have gone to the congress and said "this is what i insist on having, i'm a very popular president and this is the legislation i want" rather than doing that, he did it this way. in the end, the judgment will be that the president made the right call? >> i think so. i think they were dead wrong about that. i mean, it's an interesting thing because that is exactly what bill clinton was criticized for in 1994, right? you remember the sprawling task force of 500 something people trying to build a bill up from the beginning. here's what they found, and this is exactly what they didn't do this year, and it had policy consequences but it's good on the political side. in 1994 because they did it all on their own, congresen, interest groups, outside lobbies, the american cancer society, all these groups, because they hadn't built the bill, when it came to congress, they were still ready to try to get more. so they weren't invested in things they had already gotten into the bill. they didn't feel like they had won any battles yet, so they didn't support it. they were trying to change it. but at that point, the bill was a very delicate compromise and couldn't be changed. this year they let all those groups come in at the beginning and, you know, you could say they got too much or gave away too much. but what it meant was as it rolled on everybody had something they liked. even if they didn't like everything. everybody had something they were fighting for. liberals had subsidies and conservatives had deficit reduction and interest groups had new customers. and everybody had parts of it that up set them, too, but they felt invested in the process, think had been part of it from the beginning. and that allowed the white house to come in pretty much near the end and use that sort of power of the presidential bully pulpit to push those final ten yards. to come in with that speech, change the media narrative a bit and give max baucus and the senate finance committee room to finish their work. >> rose: you have been normously informative about what happened today and putting it into context and i thank you very much. >> thank you. >> rose: ezra klein of the "washington post." back in a moment and we'll talk with ike skeleton. he's the chairman of the house arms services committee and we talk about afghanistan. while health care votes in the senate were the topic of the day in washington, the president continues to deliberate about the way forward in afghanistan. he will meet again tomorrow with his national security team. as he continues to weigh his options, the debate in washington has intensified. top democrat congress have different opinions about what the president should do and about what general mcchrystal wants. here's senator carl levin, the chairman of the senate arms services committee. >> general mcchrystal said a number of things, not just that he needs more resources, whatever that number is, he also says we need a new strategy and that that is even more important than the resources. those c r mcchrystal's own words. he also says deliberate, take the right amount of time to think this thing through. and he also says that what is even more important than numbers is the resolve. and i had a personal information with mcchrystal and what he says is that you want to find ways of showing resolve to the people of afghanistan. there are many ways to show resolve in addition to more and more combat forces. including many more trainers to get the afghan forces to be aa lot larger and a lot stronger. >> rose: other democrats and a majority of republicans support general mcchrystal's request. joining me now is representative ike skeleton. he's a democrat from missouri, he is chairman of the house arms services committee and a leading voice on military affairs for many years, i am pleased to have him on this broadcast. welcome. >> charlie, good to be with you again. >> tell me what you think the president... how he's framing the decision he has to make as he talks with national security leaders and congressional leaders and everyone else. >> well, you have to go back quite some time. when the president entered office, i had been saying for quite some time as well as others that the war in afghanistan was the forgotten war. and the president made an excellent speech in march setting forth a comprehensive strategy as to where we ought to go in solving the very difficult challenge in afghanistan. and i compliment him now and i complimented him then for that speech. subsequently, he hired general stan mcchrystal, the previous general has left and has retired a fine gentleman by the name of mckiernan and he asked general mcchrystal to give him an assessment of where we are in afghanistan and he did. and as you know, this assessment came across after a period of time and it was... it made it into the news media in essence saying that afghanistan is in dire straits and it's... it could fail if we don't do something about it. and subsequently-- although it has not been made official-- i'm sure that general mcchrystal has asked for additional troops and additional help, aid, and support in that country. so that's where we are and the president now is weighing where we go from here. >> rose: but you have said that you were impressed by the fact that the president listening and asking the right questions. i'm asking you what are the right questions. >> well, i sent a letter to the president some time ago, a six-page letter spelling out my analysis and the fact that i think that he should listen to general mcchrystal and his recommendations. after all, he's the one who appointed him. the questions he should ask are, of course, very basic. he should ask what type of governance is there, what type of security is there. those are the two major problems. and what do you need. that is really what he should be asking. and if he gets good answers to those, which i think he will, general mcchrystal is a top notch leader, top-notch commander, i would hope he would listen to general mcchrystal's recommendations. now, as you know, the president has several of us down to the white house a few days ago talking about this issue. >> rose: should general mcchrystal if he needs 80,000 troops get 80,000 troops? >> if general mcchrystal asks for it and can justify it, i think he should get what he needs. now, there's... the media reports and no official reports but the media reports said he is requesting some 40,000. but that's not official and i have no reason to know what official figure or what they are for. they should be... there should be an increase in trainers, we need to continue to go after the al qaeda wherever they are. and i have a concern-- i'll talk about it if you want me to-- regarding the governance and the flawed election that came to pass. >> rose: well, clearly the... president karzai said in an interview today that the election was good and fair. clearly that's not the indication we get from all reports from there as well as from members of congress and the national security contingent in the white house and at the pentagon and at the state department. >> well, one of the basics is that there being a strong governance and it appears that there was a rather fraudulent election. now, what i recommended to the president is that according to the custom in afghanistan that he urge president karzai to call together a conference of leaders of tribal leaders, and ask them how they clean up the government the services that they should be rendering as well as how you clean up the corruption. and let that group determine just what the standards would be and then we hold them to their standards as to how to clean that government up. i think that's the best way to handle it. >> rose: what is the option to not giving general mcchrystal what he says he needs? >> well, i'm sure you can slice and dice it many ways, but historically i cannot think of a time when a nation head resources and withheld resources and still came out well on the battlefid. now, there are times, of course, when you didn't have the resources, you had to fight with what you had. but i think we're in a position to do a substantial amount more and i would hope the president will listen carefully to general mcchrystal who's right there on the ground understanding the situation i'm sure better than anyone else. >> rose: you think you know where the president's leaning? >> no. >> rose: you don't? >> i do not. >> rose: you think it's really an open mind based on the questions row heard him ask and the dialogue you heard in the oval office? >> i think that's correct. number one, the president is a good listener and number two he was asking good question bus he also made it very clear that the decision was his, that he was the commander-in-chief, and that... i admire him for saying that very bluntly and very plainly. like in harry truman's words, the buck stops there. >> well, you're a great admirer of harry truman, i think your father may have even known him. >> that's correct. i was ike's boy. >> rose: (laughs) py hear you. but what do you worry about the moist? "a," al qaeda will find another safe haven if theal bran in control of afghanistan or "b," if the taliban are in control of afghanistan it will be a destabilizing factor with respect to pakistan, which is our biggest worry. >> no question about it. pakistan holds the keys to a lot of stability in that area. they're doing a lot better in helping much better fighting the taliban in and around the border with afghanistan. i want to compliment them for their help. but the taliban hang a free reign in afghanistan would cause a lot of trouble for the neighbor pakistan. >> rose: we can't afford that, then, can we? >> no, i don't think so. this is a very complex area. it's a tribal mentality. it's... the culture's so far different. but we do know that the taliban has harbored and will continue to harbor if the chance comes to pass the al qaeda terrorists. and as you know, this is the epicenter of terrorism in the world. and we just can't let that happen again. >> rose: you had reservations about iraq, correct? >> yes, i did. >> rose: you voted for it but you had reservations. >> absolutely. that was a war of choice. it does look like there's light at the end of the tunnel there. we are now redeploying troops from there and the genre cently testified a few days ago before our committee telling us that he's able to speed up some of the redeployment of the american troops from iraq. so i think we can say that's beginning to turn out well, although it's still a major challenge. but afghanistan is a different war. afghanistan is a war of necessity. we didn't ask to go in there. we didn't ask them not once but five times they attacked us. and we just have to make sure they can't do it again. they will do it if given have a chance to regroup and if they had a safe haven we know full well that they'll try it again. >> rose: what do you think, then of the strategy attributed to vice president biden that we should not engage in a war against... a counterinsurgency war but a counterterrorism war which would focus on al qaeda wherever they are and not so much worry about afghanistan? >> well, that's a part of what we have to do. we can put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. but like i say, the taliban are not going to be sitting by idly while we go after their allies, the al qaeda terrorists. you have to be aggressive on all fronts. training, the counterterrorism as well as fighting the taliban and taking control of the country and the countryside. >> rose: so what happens if you can't get the job done? general mcchrystal said it's going to be... it's an urgent situation, it's difficult, we don't quite know what victory means. and what happens if two years from now we've lost more brave americans, we've spent a lot more money, and the situation is just like it is today because we didn't have a reliable partner to fight with us, whether it's nato allies or afghan troops? >> well, you have to try. you have to do your best. no war, no battle has a certainty as to the outcome. but you certainly know if you don't try as best you can-- and i think general mcchrystal has the key to the... a victorious ending or at least a stable ending-- to do it right. >> rose: you have confidence that his strategy will work? >> i have confidence that it's the very, very best strategy that military minds can conceive yes. >> rose: and that strategy is supported by general petraeus and secretary gates and all up the military command. >> as far as i know, yes. >> rose: (laughs) well, if anybody would know about the military, would be the guy. >> well, i haven't talked with all of them, but i have with most of them. >> rose: i am sure. so when should this decision be made by the president? >> well, i hope within the very near future. i'm sure that the taliban, the al qaeda, the pakistanis as well as all americans are waiting for him to decide the path to take. and i commend the president for asking the tough questions of listening to all the points of view. and, you know, harry truman did that. listened to his advisors. he listened to people. then he made a decision and then he followed through on it. and i hope that the harry truman pattern can be followed in the white house now. >> rose: just go the missouri way, is that it? >> that's correct. >> rose: congressman skeleton, thank you very much for joining us. >> thank you. >> rose: pleasure to have you on this program. >> rose: david finkel is here. he is a pulitzer prize winning writer for the "washington post." he has just published a new book. it is called "the good soldiers." it tells the stories of some of the soldiers sent to iraq as part of president bush's serve. finkel spent a month with them at iraq and at the military base in kansas. he also talked with their families about how they coped back home. this book has received wide praise. the "new york times" called it "a heart breaking book that has a novelistic sense of narrative and character." arthur doug stanton says "he gives unforgettable voice to the men who fought and lived and to those who did not and whose voices we would not have heard otherwise." i am pleased to have him here at this table. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: take know the point of deciding this is what you had to do. >> well, i had... originally i had... i work at the "washington post." >> rose: right. >> and i had gone to do a story for the the "post" on the next group of soldiers leting into the war. >> rose: and thiwas the year of what? >> well, it's a good question. because we've reached this point now where iraq seems to not be so much an ongoing war but perhaps the war that's ending or in some minds has ended. it's worth noting we still have 120,000 troops there. in january, 2007, when george w. bush announced the search; if you think back to that time, it really did feel in so many ways like the war was all but lost. and this was attractive to me as a writer. it seemed like it was heading toward a certain tragic moment and i wanted to try to document that. when bush announced the search... well, it was almost defensive when he seemed to say people might wonder what's going to be different this time. and he went on to say, well, here are the differences. and in kansas was a lieutenant colonel who had just found out he was headed to the surge and he honest to god thought to himself "i'm going to be the difference. soldiers will be the difference. we're going to be it." and optimistically and rather naively, off he went with 800 soldiers in a battalion, an army infantry battalion trained to fight and average age 19, first deployment for most of these young men, first time out of the country in many occasions out of their home state, they got on a bus, they got on a plane, they got on a helicopter and they were dropped into a place that simply made no sense at all. >> rose: now, when did you meet them? >> i met them about two weeks before they left fort riley, kansas, to begin their deployment. >> rose: and you decided on them just... >> yeah, i mean. when i went to do the piece for the "post" i did several interviews. i met this guy and immediately something clicked and i was curious about him he said "it's fine you're doing this newspaper piece, maybe you want to come over and visit us about halfway through. and maybe do another piece when we're done because this will probably have some affect on us." and that got me thinking. yeah, this is the war of my lifetime. policy books have been done, memoirs have been done. but a reporter hadn't yet done the book where he or she would simply go and document and observe. >> rose: did you go back to vietnam or go back to the civil war or go back and say... like michael harris dispatches, and you've got to read all those books? and which of those informed you the most? >> well, i have maybe two dozen books i have on michelle >> from world war i forward, all kinds of bos. mostly first person, even the journalism that was done was largely memoir. dispatches mattered, tim o'brien mattered greatly. even though it was fiction it was clearly based on his experiences. all these things were singing in my head a little bit. >> rose: what did they say? they just said thiss the kind of thing you have to capture? >> yeah, this needs to be seen by someone without an agenda a journalist, just to see what happens. i don't want to make too much of my effort. to me the books that matter, the journal. they matters is kind of agenda-less observed intimate portraits of something going on and i thought i'd take ahot at it. >> rose: i couldn't agree more. and how is this war different for these men? >> well, it's the only war they know personally. >> rose: but you know other wars from other books. >> yes. >> rose: or is there a... is 90% of it the same? >> you know, i would imagine so. i think the dference... like this was a place where... with these guys went in eastern baghdad was an awful, awful violent area. it has been largely cleansed at that poi it was a shiite area where the weapon of choice was not a suicide vest or suicide bombing but it was a really insidious type of roadside bomb called an e.f.p. and the soldiers experiences with the e.f.p. day after day after day inevitably changed them. the fact that they knew these things were out there waiting for them and you couldn't tell where they were, what they were disguised as, whether they were in an animal carcass, whether they were under a pile of trash, not a tension that never went away. i think that's the difference. there was no normal there. there were no patterns to predict when war might break out. it was simply everywhere all the time. >> rose: tell me more about him. >> kauzlarich is an intensify, ten years younger than me, much tougher than me, west point guy, trained to be a soldier. >> rose: 41 years old was he? >> well, at that point. a couple years now. incredibly optimistic and to the int where everyday he would find some reason to say "it's all good." it was a mantra, that was nervous tick. whatever it was, no matter what the situation situation was except for a few times he would find some reason to say as a pronouncement "it's all good." >> rose: what was its impact on you? seeing so much? >> well, it's worth noting that what... these guys were on the ground almost 14 months. originally it was a 12-month deployment but right after this coincidence... so many things were coincidence. but by coincidence, right after the first k.i.a. came a notice from washington that their deployment was going to 15 months. so they ended up staying on the ground in eastern baghdad. it turned out to be on the ground about 13 months, almost 14. i was with them for eight of the months. the difference is i had the luxury of going away when i needed to. every couple of months i could either go out to the "washington post" baghdad bureau and sit down and clear my head and have a glass of wine and get ready to go back into this thing, or i could come back to the states and do some reporting here. the soldiers simply didn't have that luxury. everyday involved putting on the helmet, eye goggles to withstand bullets, ceramic plates, the heaviest coating they had, knee pads, elbow pads, basically to alien themselves up and then get in humvees and go out and try to pull off a counterinsurgency strategy. >> rose: and you talked about the marvelous... i mean, incredibly creative but powerful way they would try to avoid the dangers of the e.f.p.s in terms of the way they structured their legs. >> yes, if i can just take a minute and explain what this... so many people aren't familiar with this bomb. but we all ought to be familiar with it. it's basically... it's usually a copper disc maybe about this big. and it's milled in a certain way to be slightly concave. it's placed at the end of a tube filled with explosives and when the thing goes off... because somebody in some shadow is holding a little trigger and waiting for a convoy to reach the right point so he can hit the trigger and send the thing exploding. what happens is this copper disc moves so quickly it becomes semimolten and burns through whatever is in front of it, whether it's a person, whether it's the very best humvee in the u.s. army or whether it's a soldier in the very best humvee in the u.s. army. right through it. and so the soldiers, knowing they were out there and seeing the effects on buddies, seeing injuriess and seeing deaths, began just doing whatever calculations they could to survive another trip out of the wire. and they were little heart breaking things. they would sit... some soldiers would sit with one foot in front of the other so if the blast came in, the calculation was "i'm only going to lose one foot today." or they would tuck their hands behind their vest. or they would lean away from the door so there s slightly more room for the thing to miss them. they would tie horseshoes to the front of humvees and out they would go into this area.... >> rose: for good luck. >> yeah. whatever they could do. >> rose: and what was the relationship they had with the iraqi population? >> i think at the beginning it was an attempt to have a pretty good relationship. but, you know, imagine if you're an iraqi and here comes a convoy of american soiers, the orders are on the road the convoys never stop. all the other cars have to pull over. and if they don't pull over, then rules of engagement could come into play. so you're an iraqi, you're always stuck in traffic jams because of american convoys coming past and then they stop, they're in your neighborhood, out come a guys who are just armed to teeth and shielded to try to talk to you. so the conversations were brief. everybody was nervous to talk to an american was to invite a certain kind of danger into your house. one more tension that everybody was dealing with in this period of the surge. >> rose: the other thing that struck me, which makes this pow so powerful, is the conversation there is not the conversation in washington. >> no, not at all. not at all. and i'm glad you said that because it... it... you know, it was as if there were two war going on. to be in baghdad with these soldiers, what was the war? the war was basically another e.f.p. went off, predators, there were three guys inside on this particular day who died instantly and a fourth lost his legs and the fifth is in terrible shape and burned everywhere. that's the war. and then i would fly back to the states and i would land in washington and of course people took notice of the death, whether in counts or some kind of sympathy, but the war was just about strategy and policy and so much air. and i don't want to make fun of the effort that went into the strategy. i'm a reporter. i don't know what happened in those meetings. i just know what the war was like at the intimate ground level in baghdad and as we go forward now into afghanistan, wherever we go, it's worth paying attention to what happened to these soldiers day after day. what happened to them, the effects of the war on the people we asked to fight. >> rose: and how should what happens to them affect us? >> well, i don't know how it should... it should... i do know. it may not alter strategy. it may not alter the thinking of people who ult matzly have to decide what to do. but it should be part of it. more than just window dressing. they should understand that in their decisions are consequences such as the day that a kid named duncan crookston, 19 years old, very good soldier riding around in a humvee, in comes an e.f.p., he loses two legs at the hips, he loses his right arm here, he loses his left arm here. everything else about him is burned and bandage and somehow he stays alive through 30 operations, through at one point having to have what remained of his eyes sutured shut, so many infections, his ears fall off, the tip of his nose falls off. months later when ralph kauzla rich goes to see him at the medical center, he walks into the room and here's this 19-year-old kid who is basically what's left of him is bolted to a bed, totally bandaged, the only thing visible is a little bit of his face, still still burned a little on the cheek and then his eyes are covered with a kind of dog that will's constantly creating a mist because there's no moisture. he doesn't v.o.a. v the ability to produce moisture. so whatever he can see is framed by droplets, basically. and then things... whatever comes into his hospital room, it's almost like it swims in. and one day in swims ralph kauzlarich. and he's an optimistic guy. and i told you he always found a reason to say "it's all good." but walking into that room, the only thing he could say is "damn." very quietly, but that's what he had to say. and it seems to me that that reaction, that affect should be somewhere in the minds of people making decisions about what to do with soldiers. >> rose: it certainly should. what happened to kauz? they called him "the lost kauz?" >> at some points, yes. as the deaths mounted and the injuries mounted and the reality of baghdad sunk into these soldiers, their optimism... it never went away entirely but it shifted into something more mature and there was a part of it... there was a certain anger that came as well among some of the soldiers and looking for targets they began referring to him as "the los kauz." perfectly normal in the abnormality of what happens happening there. what happened to him? he came out of it okay. to a point. and most of the soldiers at the end of the deployment came home and reason okay. but there are men are think two are really fighting off not just physical injuries but the mental strain. >> rose: and what's going to happen to duncan? >> duncan... you know, it was just one of those things that three days after kauzlarich saw him, kauzlarich went back to iraq, got back to his office, turned off the computer and there was an e-mail waiting from duncan's great, great family. this is from his mother who said that duncan had died. and it was.... >> rose: after going through all that pain and all that... >> yeah, and the family, too. the familyad just.... >> rose: that's part of your story. >> it is. >> rose: the family at home. >> the families at home. but mostly it's stories about these soldiers. look i want to assure you, it's not a political book. it's... i promised the soldiers one thing and kauzlarich one thing, that this would be journalism without an agenda. i wasn't out to say the surge was working, not working, the war in iraq was worth it, not worth it. but that part of the conversation had to include what was happening at their level. and i was there to document it. so that's what i did. >> rose: there's also the story of adam shuman. >> yeah, great soldier. great, great soldier. this was his third deployment. he had been in iraq about a thousand days. well, there was one day when... in april, 2007. all of the companies were out on a particular mission in a really really rough part of their operating area. and a good soldier named michael memory was shot in the back of the head by a sniper. and he was on top of the building. he was on a roof and the soldiers had to get him down stairs and adam shuman was one of the soldiers who did that. basically when the stairways were too difficult to navigate shuman just basically put emery, a huge guy, on his back and carried him wn stairs as emery was bleeding from his head and the blood was going into adam shuman's mouth and he simply couldn't get the taste out. and months and months later when it was finally time for them to go home, he was still tasting that blood. so he was an example of not only a good soldier but one of the very best soldiers in that battalion finally reaching the point where enough was enough. he couldn't do in the anymore. and so he was sent away back home. i won't forget this. because we were standing out there waiting for the helicopter that was going to take him away. the helicopter lands, arm goes down, this is not the helicopter for you. and he doesn't quite understand that. other people get on the helicopter, it lefts off, goes away, another helicopter comes in, big red cross on the side. it's the helicopter for the wounded and the dead and that was his helicopter and that's how he went home. >> rose: for those that survived beyond adam, beyond duncan, even beyond ralph, what's it for them today? >> well, my.... >> rose: because it wasn't as many as... i mean, of all of them, how many survived that were under the command of ralph? >> well, 800 soldiers, 14 dead, 75 purple hearts. so if you compare it to other wars, these are not the numbers of other wars. however they are the numbers of this war. and the tension, the strain. these guys... if they had three other wars in their back pocket and they could say, well, you know, this is pretty rough but it wasn't vietnam. maybe that would bring some kind of odd, weird perspective, i don't know. >> rose: they have none of that. >> no. this was their war. and they were ploped into the middle of it and they did the best they could and perhaps the strategy worked, perhaps they came home thinking they made a difference. a lot of them didn't, though, because.... >> rose: because? >> at the end, as they were packing up to go home when they thought they had survived, that they were safe, it was over, something happened in southern iraq that sent shivers all the way up into their area outside of sadr city. and the last week, week and a half of their war was total flatout ruinous heroic damning war for those guys. and so seeing what happens and seeing how the people they had been trying to protect for 13 months in an instant were suddenly on the streets shooting at them with everything they had was quite jolting. and it made them come home wondering about what this effort really was about. >> rose: and that's the question that policymakers have to ask. >> it's their question. it's not the soldiers' questions. the question for the soldiers now.... >> rose: but the soldiers see it differently. >> sure. sure. and that may be why they shouldn't make policy. i mean, maybe you do need that disconnect. i don't know. but the soldiers came home... the question so much for them seems to be now not did it work but what happened? what happened to me? why is this so difficult to talk about? why do i not feel quite right? and it's interesting. since the book has come out, i've gotten quite a number of e-mails. the e-mails from the soldiers who have survived and have moved on tend to be of a type that... if there's a common thread, the thread would be "we came home, everyone wants to know what it was like, we haven't known how to talk about it but now we can hand over the book and we can say read the book." so that's a good thing. >> rose: but could they talk to you? >> over time. >> rose: because you were there? because you knew them? because you developed a relationship? because.... >> yeah, too a point. but look, look, i'm a 50-year-old guy hanging around 19 and 20-year-old kids so there's separation right there but over time when they saw me not leaving and behaving well when bad things happened i think they began to realize this was a serious piece of journalism under way. that was... the first e.f.p. explosion that dinged up a convoy i was in. it was a pretty lucky day because the guy hit the button either a hair too late or a hair too early depending on your point of view. my point of view was exactly the right moment because the humvee i was in was dinged up and the one in front of us had flat tires but the main charged passed right in between. just happened to miss us. and it was frightening and it was frightening to the soldiers. but instead of me screaming or anything like that, i just... i took notes on the whole thing and i think that helped with trust an awful lot. and, look, there were shared experiences on the base we were on in eastern baghdad, it was rocked and mortared quite a lot and these things would come down and they would be a little siren and then some bizarre recorded announcement saying incoming, incoming. and then the explosions would begin. and sometimes they would be far off in the distance and sometimes it would be close enough to crack windows and send sand flying from sandbags and the fact that i was there for those as well and was trying to record them and record the soldiers' reactions again it helped them trust me. not as a friend, not as a therapist, but as someone who was there to pay attentio to what they were going through. >> rose: is this it in terms of war for you? >> (laughs) i guess so. yeah. yeah. i finished the reporting. came home, spent a year writing the book which was quite cathartic. to summon the war pefrd over the course of the year so i could try to write something honest and evocative about it i think it did have a good somewhat healing effect on me. and the soldiers, it's... we'll see what happens. the day i got the first copy of the book, i think the publisher. it's a beautiful book, i think and my first book. package comes, i take it out of the envelope and i was admiring it and really feeling quite pleased. then you can only do that so long so i went back to work, turned on my computer, there was an e-mail from the soldier saying this happened to be the day the unit i wrote about was shipping out to redeploy back to iraq. so, you know, they're there right now. and i get to go around and talk about it but these guys are there. >> rose: they're back? >> they're there. they're part of the 120,000 who are left. >> rose: you've thought about this, you've written about this. if someone says to you what don't we know about war? what didn't you know about war? >> it's a question i think about. at one level there's nothing new in this book, you know? war is bad. the soldiers would say that. anybody who's been in a war or witnessed a war would say that. that's not news. but the details of what soldiers go through: feeling, having a sense of what it means... this is a war that has not affected the entire u.s. population. there's a certain segment of the society that becomes soldier. factories haven't been shut down to make'm wraps to replace humvees that had no chance against e.f.p.s. so it's that war, the war that's read about from time to time. the war that costs a lot of money. the war that if you look at the count in the newspaper, you know tisk, we're up to 3,000, tsk, tsk, we're up to 4,000. soldier by soldier, war turns out to be quite a profound, moving, wonderful, god awful thing. >> rose: wonderful because it's about the sacrifice and the love and the commitment to each other that soldiers make everyday. >> yes, and it's... as i've said to people, watching soldiers everyday knowing these e.f.p.s were out there, knowing the effects, just get in a humvee to go out once ain and watching these guys get in a humvee and go out was just... it was chilling. it was... it was bravery. it was maddening, it was admirable, it was tear inducing. there they went again. >> rose: and some don't come back. >> some didn't come back. and most did and now they're dealing with it. >> rose: this is what some people are saying about "the good soldiers." "washington post" wrote "they marched into sunlight." david finke has written the most unforgettable book of the iraq war, a masterpiece that will far outlast the fighting. geraldine brooks "from a pulitzer prize winning writer at the height of his powers comes a profoundly moving book, powerful intense, enraging, this may be the best book on war since the iliad." i am honored to have david nkel at the table. thank you. >> rose: thank you. >> rose: thank you for joining us. we'll see you next time. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org