For having the with tom to publish a really wonderful and meaningful book. I think a lot of you know ron personally, looks like, good, friendly audience. For those who arent as familiar with him, rons bioreads like one of the more interesting novels of all time and were lucky to have it here in this memoir. He was both a senior military Intelligence Officer in the army and observer for the u. S. Department of state, and he is a combat veteran of afghanistan, serving in the army and army reserve for 25 years, entered as a private and retying an lieutenant colonel. As a soldiers and diplomat serving in a want day, kosovo, afghanistan, and iraq, and sudan, and received awards. His policy writing has appeared almost everything there is mention and he is the founder and the director of the veterans writing project, a Nonprofit Program that provides nocost writing seminars for veterans Ad Service Members and their family. A truly amazing fellow and a wonderful writer so we are thrilled to welcome him here to share his memoir, seriously not all right five wars in ten years. Welcome ron capps. [applause] thank you. As thrilled as clay is that youre here, i cant tell you how thrilled i am. Its really this is the hard launch of the book. The first night, big event, had some press today and some of you i know heard that press and thank you for coming, and i really really means a lot to me to see you here. Some of you ive known for too long to mention and means as much to have you here. I should mention we have cspan, booktv is here so i will iraq and tell stories and then well take questions, and michael and james are going to move around with the microphones, so if you have a question, let them know. Theres two stories in this book. And if you have a chance to if you have read it, at the beginning i tell the story about driving off into the desert with a couple of beers in my truck and a pistol when i was getting ready to kill myself, and obviously something happened, and i didnt get to do that. So, that is the Central Point of the story. That is the point where everything changes. So, the first half of the story is how i got there. And the second half of the story is what happened afterwards. And i think the second half of the story is probably for most of us the more interesting story and certainly the more hopeful story, but doesnt make sense without telling the first half of the story. So what i will do is read a little bit from a couple of sections, and well talk afterwards. I served as a soldier for 25 years. Half of that time i was in the regular army, and half of that time i was in the army reserve. During the time i was in the army reserve my civilian job because you have a civilian job was as a Foreign Service officer for the department of state. I was a political officer, and got sent to a lot of interesting places. The first half of my career, i tell people all the time, was very dull. I didnt do anything very interesting. I never got shot at. It was just a Peacetime Army job. Then i joined the Foreign Service and i started going to places where รท they shoot at people regularly and things got much more interesting. So this begins in about 1996, and runs through 2006, so this is ten years i was deploying. Ll start witha story that take place in kosovo, and its 2008. I worked on in kosovo as part of a team of american diplomatic observers. Half of the team were Foreign Service officers and half were military officers, and our job was to drive around the province of kosovo and stop the fighting, to get the serbian military and the albanian rebels to stop killing each other and killing civilians. We arrived in the village of senec, a day too late. The serbian infantry had come through the day before and this is the story of what we found. Its part of an essay i wrote that was published called, yellow. And it has now become a chapter in the book. So yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails and feet were dirty. There were six of them, all women, under the tarp, some of them lived long enough to have their wounds bandaged before they died. Some of them were killed more or less instantly as shrapnel or 7. 62millimeter rounds entered their bodies. Theyd been dead for about 24 hours. We knew this because we had come to witness their funeral. To witness and to stand a type of guard if we were present the serbs snipers would not shoot at the family members as they buried their dead. The first time id ever seen war so i was surprised. This was the first time id ever seen what dead people looked like if no embalming was done what they looked like without makeup and nice suit of clothes. They were just dead. Lying in a tangle of limbs under a blueyqn u. N. Tarp on the trair that only a week before carried peppers and corn to the market, only parts of their body were visible. I cooperate see all of their faces. One had an armresting across her forehead. One had a bandage covering most of her head. One of the dead was missing, an 18monthold child. We had seen some dogs on the way up the trail. Morgan morris, the dauntless u. S. Refugee agency field officer, who had led us to the scene, said what all of us were thinking. The dogs probably got the body. She was right, but none of us wants to be the one to say it. We had just seen the mother resting in a house in the village a couple of kill almostmers away. A bullet in her upper arm. The bullet passed through her baby, then through her breast, before lodging in her arm. The father said the baby was killed instantly, the bullet tore the child in half. He dragged the mother away to safety. A doctor from the red cross was treating her wounds in a small house in the village. There were ten women and a 72yearold man in one stifling airless room of a house, all wounded in the attack. They sat silently on the floor, their backs against the walls of the room, lost in their pain, and their thoughts. Waiting. We did this pretty much every day for two years. Driving around kosovo, trying to stop fighting, almost always the driving a day late, too late to stop the fighting. Just in time to conduct an investigation of a war crime, crime against humanity, ethnic cleansing, murder. And i would write reports about what we saw. I would go back to our office in the afternoon and sit at the computer and write crisp, dry reports about messy horrible acts of cruelty. But i knew this wasnt enough. I knew i needed to document more. I would go home then to my room or to my tent, wherever we were staying at the time, and sit down and write the rest of what had happened. 8m and those sessions of writing grew into this book. So what i wrote about that event, sat down one night and type out the words yellow. Their skin was yellow. So thats where we are. That day we were up in a small valley, a little draw between two ridgelines, and the infantry, the serbian infantry had swept through, firing mortars directly in front of themselves to clear the path, and then coming through with infantry. What they were shooting at were women and children and old men who had been driven out of the town of senec a couple of kilometers away by more tars the day prior. They moved into this little valley, this draw to try and be safe, and then the serbian infantry came through. We drove back down into the town, and this is what happened. The villagers wanted to bury their dead in sight of the ridgeline where we could see the serbian sunshiners. The land they said had been taken from them in the 1940s and they reclaimed it in the 1970s. It belong these people and they were going to be sure the serbs understood that. The women they were burying were born in the valley and spent their lives raising crops and giving births to the houses in the town. We parked our vehicles in plain view as a deter rent to further shooting. Certainly the serbs wouldnt shoot at eu or u. S. Observers or the white and blue unhcr vehicle. Nonetheless i was shaky standing around. The ground was hard and took some time to bury the dead. The men worked with shovels and picks for an hour to dig graves for the women. Afterwardses we stopped on the way out of the draw and used our satellite telephone to call washington and tell the state department what we had seen. It seemed very far away from that hillside. But the officer on the other end of the line was a friend, a colleague, a c5 classmate. Had it been someone else i might have been more animated in my description of the scene, but doug understood what was happening without my resorting to historianics. 11 dead. Ten women and one 72yearold man, seven dead, six women and one child. Yes, i counted them myself. Yes, were sure they were dead. I verified it personally. I left out the part about the dogs. We made one more stone on the way off the hill. An old man flagged us down as we were leaving the draw for the village, and told our interpreter he wanted to to the us something the serbs had done. I glanced through the window 0 of his house and saw a group of women sitting on the floor, rocking slowly, comforting each other. They surrounded the body of another woman. She was laid out, on her back, and wrapped in a blanket. Part of her face and head were missing. And what remained was veiled in a colorful scarf. The man said a more tar round exploded within a meter of her head. He held his hands out in front of his body to demonstrate the distance. The sitting women wailed in unison as he said this. He was the dead womans father, and amid the crying and the smells and the flies west listened to his story. Having felt safe enough in her house to remain there with her husband and children, rather than moving up into the draw with the others, she decided to take some food up to her neighbors. She was at the base of the draw when the attack started. The more tar shell probably came in groups of three. Punk, punk, punk. As the rounds left the tubes. And then the breathless, agonizing five or sixsecond wait while they flew and finally the brutal, crump, crump, crump, barking and echoing off the walls of the canyon. The gunners probably set the fuses to go off one or one and a half meters before the ground, about headhigh. It was an awful story. I couldnt wait to get out of there, away from the smell and the crying and the death. Soldiers would fire mortars at women and chilled. I concentrated on the colors in the womans scarf rather than her wounds. I watched the other women rocking slowly. I looked at the womans father. My partner photographed her body. I took notes what her father said. Then we left. Eight dead. Down the hill at the intersection, a crowd of women and a few men had gathered. Some boys were sitting at the edge of the road with a wooden box filled with cigarettes, crackers and chicklets, entrepreneurs. They sat expressless as a small crowd swarmed our vehicle. I pushed open the door and stood pinned against the truck by the crowd as my translator echoed pleas for help. One woman pushed through the shroud held her baby at arms length in front of me. I was facetoface with the child while the mother spoke deliberately but calmly. She wants you take her son out of here so the serbs wont kill him, my translator said. I looked at the woman and said to my my, make sure she knows we cant do this. Say this. Were observers. We cant relocate you or your son. If we do, the government in belgrade will order all of us out of the country. I get feckless and impotent as the words spilled out. For the first time i in other words the folly of being in a war only to observe, tourist among the victims. It was hot and with the sun beating down on me i felt cowardly. Yellow. Hiding behind my sunglasses. I waved my notebook at the red cross truck and said that was the vehicle that would take them to safety. I thought the red cross would probably refuse but was unable to muffer the courage to tell them there was little hope they would get out that day. I founds out later id been wrong. Several unhcr officers arrived and one took it upon herself to evacuate some children before a safer village. Before i left i went back to the house and had to tell the mother of the missing child we didnt find her baby. It would have served no purpose to tell r her what we thought happened. I couldnt have found those words anyway. That evening, after we return to our office, after we washed our truck, i drafted my report. It was about three pages long no speculation, just the things we understood to have happened based on what we saw, and what was reported to us. I said, it appears that a valley from north to south, preceded bay barrage of mortar fire. Temperature the would branch and sweeps seven women and an infinity killed and 11 wounded, including a 72 year man. Vehicle and clothes were burn in the sweep. I said weed seen no evidence of weapons or insurgent activities in the village or among the villagers. Did not mention the funeral or the dogs or the woman begging flow take some action to save her child. I didnt mention the look on the old mans face. I carefully told what was told to us versus what we saw ourself with qualifiers like reportedly and allegedly. I carefully made the people and the events in the village the center of the report rather than my own actions or feelings, never star in your own report. I let my teammates read the report to ensure we all agreed with and it then turned it over to our reports officer, our editor. Id written a crisp, dry account of a messy horrible act of cruelty, and in doing so, i had documented a war crime. So the war in kosovo went on for a number of months. We stayed until the Bombing Campaign began. And then we went out of kosovo into macedonia, and spent the three months in and a few days of the Bombing Campaign, interviewing refugees, people driven out of kosovo, loaded on to trains, and shipped across borders. In europe, at the end of the 20th century. When the Bombing Campaign ended we went back in. I was in one of the first aircraft to fly back into kosovo. We walked in, planted a flag,in flew back out to macedonia where it would be safe for a couple of days. We did go back. Kosovo is now an independent nation. Some of the work we did was sent to the hague and was used to document the case against milosevic. I feel good about that. Theres a special place in hell for people like him. I went back to montreal, packed out my house and went back to kosovo and spent another year there and then returned to Central Africa where i spent a couple of years prior, and worked in rwanda for two years, during the end of the war fought just as an extension of the genocide. We documented war crimes in congo, zaire, went through a lot of fighting with the rwandan military. While i was there the United States was attacked on september 11th and i was ordered back to military duty, called back into the regular army request ordered to afghanistan, and arrived in afghanistan not quite a year after the rangers jumped into kandahar and i was sent there to augment an Airborne Unit and showed up as a reservist, not knowing what to expect. They didnt know me and i didnt know them. I was in charge of a couple of hundred people spread out all over the count, and i was tasked to send them off into very interesting, dangerous things. Over a period of time i came to understand that i was suffering from ptsd. I had images of the dead from a want darks from kosovo, come can bag to visit me in the middle of the night. Id wake up in the middle of the night and see dead people standing around. When this happened during the day i in other words i was really the trouble during the day i in other words i was really in trouble, and this is what that was like. In the cold predawn i can hear generators running and vehicles moving on the other side ofu]qe base. But its quiet inside my tent. None of the soldiers i share the tent with is even snoring. Id been awake for a few hours but stay any sleeping bag, fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to run away. The taliban have launched a couple of rockets at the base during the week, and were on edge but thats not what is keeping me up. Im trying to control my racing heart and trembling because the dead have come to talk to me. Theyve been come everything night for a couple of weeks, the dead from kosovo or rwanda, beckoning to me, pulling me from a warm, comforting sleep, into a series of wretched, tormenting, wide awake dreams. Tonight its the death on a farm, burned bible, black and twisted into hideous contorted shapes, lying in cold rain that falls through the burnsaway roofs and pools on the dirty floor. Do you remember us, they ask . Most assuredly. The night before was the dead from the village, 45 of them shot the back of the head and left to die in the rocky ditch on a frozen january morning in 1999. They dropped by for a chat. Why didnt you do more to save us . They asked. Why indeed. Night after night they appear on the big screen of my mind, and oversaturated technicolor rising and imploring night after night the murdered and mutilated comb back, each time im scared and ashamed. I know they arent real. I know theyre only images in my head. But irfear them no less for knowing this. They terrify me for what they remind me of. The fighting i didnt stop and the lives i didnt save. They terrify me for what they represent. I can no longer stop them from taking control of my mind. I lie on my bed, eyes wide open and still see the dead in front of me. Trouble begins slowly developing over time, and by the time im fully aware of it im having graphic, violent dreams nightly. I wake from the dreams in a panic, shaking, heart racing, crying sometimes, always afraid 3akz go back to sleep. Im losing control of my brain, of my mind. In time i start seeing these images when im awake. During the day im unable to concentrate. I set at my desk or go to planning meetings, shaking until i have to leave the tent and go outside and get control of myself. I fear ive lost my mine, but im afraid to ask for help. I fear ill be ridiculed. Considered weak and counterly. You see, an army culture, especially this elite unit filled with rangers and paratroopers, asking for help is a sign of weakness. My two bronze star medals, my tours in airborne and special operations units, nothing will matter. To ask for help will be seen as breaking. But when i can no longer control the images in my head, when in the middle of the day im forced to hide, shaking and crying in a concrete bunker, railing against the noise and the images, when i realize that to continue to deny this would be to endanger the soldiers i was sent to afghanistan to lead. I finally asked for help. So that day, i stopped the Division Surgeon for the 82nd 82nd airborne, a friend of mine, and i said, you know what . Im having some problems. I explained my symptoms, and he listened very intently and reached out and put his hand on my arm and said, are you a danger to yourself or others . Which is a question you get asked a lot when people think youre crazy. They look at yo