Street journal publisher karen elliot house talking about saudi arabia from our College Series at pepperdine university. Former u. S. Representative james rogan discusses his newest book, and actor danny be glover is part of a panel on the black power movement. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors on cspan2. Booktv, television for serious readers. Ron capps, a combat veteran and founder of the veterans writing project, talks about his experiences in several different war zones and the damaging effect war has had on him. This is about an hour and ten minutes. [inaudible conversations] hi, folks. Welcome to the half king tonight. It is a to see so many of you all here a pleasure to see so many of you all here. We are absolutely thrilled to be welcoming mr. Ron capps here tonight. He has written just an incredible memoir, and id like to start by thanking Scott Manning of manning and associates, and the shatner press for having the wisdom to publish a wonderful and meaningful book. I think a lott of you a lot of you personally know ron, but for those of you who arent as familiar with him, rons bio reads like one of the more interesting novels of all time, and we are really lucky to have it captured here in this memoir. He has served as both a senior military Intelligence Officer in the army and an observer for the u. S. Department of state, and he is a combat veteran of afghanistan serve anything the army and army serving in the army and army reserve for 25 years where he retired as a i lieutenant colonel. As a soldier diplomat, capps served in rwanda, kosovo, afghanistan, iraq and the darfur region of sudan. He received the william r. Rivkin award from the American Foreign service association. His policy writing has appeared almost everywhere there is to mention, and he is the founder and director of the veterans writing project, a Nonprofit Program that provides nocost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, Service Members and their family members. He is a truly amazing fellow and a wonderful writer to boot, so we are thrilled to welcome him here to share his memoir, seriously not all right. 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. Its the first night, big event. Had some press today, and some of you, i know, heard that rest, and thank you for coming. It really, really means a lot to me to see you here. Some of you ive known for too long to mention, and it means as much to have you here. I should mention we have cspan, booktv of is here, so im going to talk and tell stories and read for a while, and then were going to take questions, and michael and james are going to move around with the microphone. So if you have a question, just let them know. Theres two stories in this book, and if you have a chance to if youve read it, at the very beginning i tell the story of 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 thats the Central Point of the story. Thats 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 i think for most of us the more interesting story and certainly the more hopeful story, but it 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 they shoot at people regularly, and things got much more interesting. So this begins in about 1996 and runs through 2006. Those are the ten years that i was deploying. Im going to start with a story that takes lace in kosovo place in kosovo, and its 2008. I worked in kosovo as part of a team of american diplomatic observers. Half of our team were Foreign Service officers and half were military officers, and our job was to drive around the province 06 kosovo and and of kosovo and stop the fighting. We arrived in the village 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 now that essays become a chapter in the book, so let me get started with that. Yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails, ask their feet were dirty. There were six of them, all women, under the tarpaulin. Some of them had lived long enough to have their wounds bandaged before they died, some of them were killed more or less instantly as shrapnel or 7. 62 millimeter rounds had 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 serb snipers would not shoot at the family members as they buried their dead. It was the first time id ever seen war dead. I remember being surprised that their skin was yellow. My experiences with death before that had been limited to a few funerals, a friends older brother, my grandmother. None of them were yellow. So i was surprised. This was the first time id ever seen what dead people looked like if no em walling was done embalming was done, what they looked like without makeup and a nice suit of clothes. They were just dead, lying in a tangle of limbs under a blue u. N. Tarp on a trailer that only a week before had carried peppers and corn to the market, only parts of their body were visible. Be i couldnt see all of their faces. One had an armresting across her forehead, one had a bandage covering host of her head. Most of her head. One of the dead was missing, an 18monthold child. Wed seen some dogs on the way up the trail. The dauntless u. S. Refugee field officer, whod led us to the scene, said what all of us were hiking. The dogs probably got thinking. The dogs probably got the body. She was right, of course, but none of us wanted to be the one to sea to say it. Wed just seen the mother resting a couple miles away. She had a bullet in her upper arm. The father said the baby was killed instantly. The bullet tore the child in half, he said. He had 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 the house. All of them had been 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 arriving a day late, too late to stop the fighting, just in time to conduct an investigation of a war crime, a 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 they were wherever we were staying at the time and sit down and write the rest of what happened. And those sessions of writing grew into this book. So what i wrote about that event, i sat down one night and typed out the words yellow, their skin was yellow. And so thats where we are. That day we were up in a little draw between two ridge lines, 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 a couple of kilometers away by mortars just the day prior. Theyd moved up 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 plain sight of the ridge line where we could still see the serbian snipers. The land, they said, had been taken from them this the 1940s, and theyd reclaimed it in the 1970s. It belonged to these people, and they were going to be sure that the serbs understood that. The women they were burying were born in this valley and had spent their lives raising crops in its fields and giving birth to their children this the small houses that made up the Hard Scrabble town. We parked our vehicles in plain view as a deterrent to further shooting. Certainly, the serbs wont shoot at e. U. Or u. S. Observers or the white and blue u. N. Hcr vehicle. Nonetheless, i admit i was shaky. The ground was hard, and it took some time to bury the dead. The men worked with shovels and picks for about an hour to dig graves for the women. Afterwards, we stopped on the way out of the draw and used our satellite telephone to call washington and tell the state department what wed 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 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 reporting to histrionics. Eleven 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 head one more stop on the way off the hill. An old man flagged us down as we were leafing the draw for the village leaving the draw and told our interpreter he wanted to show us something the serbs had done. I 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 mortar round had exploded within a meter of her head. He held his hands out to demonstrate the distance. The sitting women wailed as he said this. He was the dead womans father. And amid the crying and the shells and the flies, we 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 mortar shells probably came in groups of three; plunk, plunk, plunk as the rounds left the tube cans and then the breathless, agonizing five or six second wait and finally the writ l karumph barking and echoing off the walls of the canyon as they exploded. The gunners probably set the fuses to go off one or one and a half meters above the ground, about head high. It was an awful story. I couldnt wait to get out of there, away from the smell and the crying and the death. I felt outraged and horrified that soldiers would fire mortars at women and children. I had to look away. 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, rob, photographed her body. I took notes about what her father said. Then we left. Eight dead. Finish down the hill at the intersection marking the city proper, a crowd of women and a few men had gathered. Some boys were sitting at the some boys were sitting at the edge of the road with acwlfxj my translator echoed staccato pleas for help. One woman pushed through the crowd and held her baby at arms length in front of me. I was face to face with the child while the mother spoke deliberately by calmly. She wants you to take her son out of her so the serbs wont kill him, my translator said. I looked at the woman and said make sure she knows we cant do this. Say this were on 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 felt feckless and impotent as the words spilled out. For the first time, i understood the folly of being in a war only to observe, a tourist among the victims. It was hot and with the sun beating down on me, i felt coe wardly. 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 i was unable to muster the courage to tell the woman there was little hope she would get out that day. I found out later id been wrong. Several u. N. Hcr officers arrived late in the day, and one of them took it upon herself to evacuate some of the children to a safer village. Before we left, i went back to the house where the wounded were being treated. I had to tell the mother of the missing child we didnt find her baby. It would have served no purpose to tell her what we thought happened. I couldnt have found those words anyway. That evening, after we returned to our office, 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. Be i said it appeared that a serbian infantry unit had swept through the valley from north to south, reseeded by a barrage of mortar fire. During the subsequent infantry sweep, seven women and one infant had been killed and 11 others wounded. Vehicles, clothes and other food and sprsupplies were burned in the sweep. I didnt mention the funeral, i didnt mention the dogs, i didnt mention the woman begging me to take some action to save her child. I didnt mention the look on the old mans face. I carefully caveated what was told to us versus what we saw ourselves 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 insure we all agreed with it, and then i turned it over to our reports officer, our editor. Id written a crisp, dry account, 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 and a few days of the Bombing Campaign interviewing refugees, people that had been driven out of kosovo loaded onto 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, put our hands on our hip and said were back, and then flew back out to macedonia where it was going to be safe for a couple of days. We did go back. Kosovo is now an independent nation. Some of the work that we did was sent to the hague and was used to document the case against mills slip. I milosevic. I feel good about that. Theres a special place in hell for people like him. I went back to montreal, packed up my house and went back to kosovo and spent another year there and then returned to Central Africa where id spent a couple of years prior and worked in rwanda for two years during the end of the war which was fought just as an extension of the genocide. We documented war crimes in con duo, zaire con duo, 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. I was called back into the regular army in order to go to afghanistan and and arrived in afghanistan in not quite a year after the rangers jumped into kandahar. I was sent there to augment a regular army unit, an airborne unit, and to show up as a reservist not really knowing what to expect. They didnt know me, and i didnt know them. I was in charge of a couple of hundred people, we were spread out all over the country, and i was tasked to send them off into very interesting, dangerous places. Over a period of time, i came to understand that i was suffering from ptsd. I had images of the dead from rwanda, from kosovo coming back to visit me at night. I would wake up in the middle of the night and see dead people standing around my cot. I would when this began to happen during the day, i understood that i was really in trouble. And this is sort of what that was like. In the cold redawn, i can hear generators running and vehicles moving on the other side of the base, but its quiet inside my tent. None of the other soldiers i share the tent with is even snoring. Ive been awake for a few hours, but i stay in my sleeping bag. The taliban have launched a couple of rockets towards the base during the week, so were all a little on edge, but thats not whats keeping me up. Im wind led into my be bundled into my sleeping bag trying to control my racing heart and trembling because the dead have come to talk to me. Theyve been coming every night for a couple of weeks, the ted from kosovo or rwanda, beckoning to me, pulling me from a warm, comforting sleep into a series of wretched, tormenting, wide awake dreams. Tonight the dead from a farm burned bible black and twisted into hideous, contorted shapes. Do you remember us, they ask . Most assuredly. The night before it was the dead from a village, 45 of them shot in the back of the head and left to die in that rocky ditch on a frozen january morning in 1999. Theyve dropped by for a chat. Why didnt you do more to save us, they ask . Why, indeed . Night after night they appear on the big screen of my mind, in oversaturated technicolor, height after night the murdered and mutilated come back. Each time i am scared and ashamed. I know they arent real, i know theyre only images in my head, but i fear them no less for knowing this. 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 there 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 these dreams in a panic, shaking, heart racing, crying sometimes, alw