Okay. Good morning everybody, im particularly excited to introduce this event. When we first began discussing the programming, this is the first panel that we thought of and weve been looking forward to it ever since. People have been writing about warfare ever since we had the book. And all our panelists write brilliantly on the topic but each brings a very different perspective. We have a slight change to our published program in their moderator will be sky montgomery from the Camden Institute of the university of missouri. Im grateful to her for stepping in on short notice so join me in welcoming sky, ishmael beah, Gregory Fontenot, Candice Millard and Whitney Terrell. [applause] thank you very much for that warm introduction. As long as human beings have been waging war, they been selling bad stories. Whether its to celebrate the heroic or merely make sense out of the chaos of combat, we can conclude something of the universality of war to the Human Experience from the fact that plastic text by son zoo that written longbefore our own time continue to find places on modern military reading list. Yet all armies and by extension i think all wars are reflections of the societies that produced them. To paraphrase tolstoy, they are all unhappy in their own way. Speaking to this diversity of experience, we have a distinguished panel with us here today which i would like to take the opportunity to now introduce. Gregory fontenot served for over 30 years in our assignment in iraq, europe, africa and the United States. He commanded a tank battalion based at fort riley and southwest asia and in harvard brigade in germany and bosnia. Colonel Gregory Fontenot took history at west point and served as director of the school of advanced military studies. Later commanding the armys battle command training program. Following his retirement in 1999, he turned his attention toward training and experimentation for the u. S. Army and later served as director of the university of word military and Cultural Studies with the deputy chief of staff, an assignment that supported assessments in both iraq and afghanistan. Fontenot let service in 2013 to focus on writing and served as a consultant on threat emulation for army experimentation. In addition to numerous papers and presentations hes given around the world, he is the lead officer of on point, the us army iraq Operation Iraqi freedom and most recently he First Infantry Division and u. S. Army transformed, the road to victory in desert storm, 1970 to 1991. Candace millard is a former writer editor at national geographic. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times book review, Washington Post book world and times magazine. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller the river of doubt Theodore Roosevelt darkest journey which was a finalist for the quill awards and won the william Raquel Nelson award. Her second book, destiny of the republic, a tale of madness, medicine and the murder of a president also a bestseller, won the 2011 edgar award for best actor crime. The penn center usa award for research nonfiction, the one book one lincoln award, the ohio and award and the kansas book award. Her most recent work is hero of the empire, the world war, a daring escape in the making of winston churchill. Ishmael beah was born in sierra leone and came to the United States at age 17. His first book along way gone, memoirs of us boys soldier has been published in over 40 languages and was named by Time Magazine as one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2007. His first novel, radiance of tomorrow was published in 2014 and in addition to his writing, he has an impressive record as a human rights activist, serving as unicef ambassador and advocate for children affected by war as well as a member of Human Rights Watch womens rights advisory committee. He cofounded the network of young people affected by war and served as president of the Ishmael Beah Foundation whichhelps children affected by war reintegrated into society by financing educational and vocational opportunities. And last but not least, Whitney Terrell is the officer author of the huntsman. The king of kings county and most recently the good lieutenant which won acclaim for its humane and honest treatment of the experiences of american soldiers in iraq. He is the recipient of the james bay missionary over his Society Award and a harder fellowship from Princeton Universitys Lewis Center for the arts. During the 2006 and 2010, he was an embedded reporter in iraq and cover the war for Washington Post magazine, slate and National Public radio. His nonfiction as additionally appeared in the New York Times, harpers, the new york observer, the Kansas City Star and other publications. He currently teaches creative writing at the university of missouri kansas city. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to all our panelists. [applause] so to be in our conversation today id like to invite all of you to share in the journeys that brought you to your work and at specific topics that you explore theyre in. I think from the biographies that i just read, some of you may seem selfevident but i think Mackenzie Claris has contain terms and i think we would all love to hear more about how your books came to be. Ill start, thank you. Let me correct one thing, i have visited as an afghan soldier and happen to go down to Zambezi River with a marine friend of mine and we looked over the side of the boat and muslims or however multiple hippopotami are called. And were the stream from Victoria Falls so we were helping the boat curve around before we got the falls and a snake rolls over in that water and that snake was bigger around than i was then, probably not now. I need to get off this river in those deep days but we spent three weeks in zimbabwe which was an enlightening. Because theyre struggling and have been for some time. Im a romantic. I think to be a soldier, you have to be a romantic. In my case, the romanticism of soldiering came from watching my father as a soldier. I remember one morning when i was young he was changing and getting ready to go to work and he was sliding his legs through the crisply starched captains fatigues that made this really perfect sound, every time i got to make that sound is a soldier i remember that moment but what got me was i asked my father why there were these black metal buttons on the uniform, each of which had star on them. And what it was was 13 stars configured in five point star and my father who had finished eighth grade was the son of a sharecropper told me that that meant that he was part of the units organizations that defended the United States and it took a minute to tell me about the constitution of the United States, my daddy never read it. I have but i dont think he had. And i was struck then by, this is something bigger than me and i want to be a part of it. I recognize we dont always live up to the ideals of our constitution but i also will tell you that i am ill disposed in the zen view of history that nothing good in america as ever happened. I recognize we may yet not reach our dreams and our potential but im a romantic. I really believe theres a chance that we may someday reach the potential. I take to the darren desert storm primarily as a victim of desert storm, having gone there. And i remember one of my officers wrote in a diary that we kept, he had an official war diary. This book, the germans would say and we had an unofficial war diary and i kept my young lieutenant and he wrote a note i didnt see until afterwards that said he would like to know who those people were in america who would favor the war in iraq because as far as he could tell, no one at task force three new who it was. I too was in the peace party and i tell you nothing concentrates the mind like the potential for a flight, especially one which the prominent pundits promised we would we would die in great numbers. I told my unit i didnt want to belong to an outfit that didnt have enough of this left for our reunion so we were not going to go by the pundits predictions, we were going to find a way to cheat, lie, steal and win. The other reason is ive been back to iraq multiple times, i went in 03 as a leader of a study group to gather information, to write an official quick turn history of what happened in iraq, the invasion. I can tell you with a time there was a lot of celebratory nonsense being by the army, make this a celebration of our excellence. And i said not so fast, its not over. He wrote the last chapter was the conclusion that had implications because of the fact 03, it was perfectly clear that the war was not over. And its still not over as it turns out. The second thing, the reason i came to it is after going back multiple times there and to afghanistan, it really got me that desert storm was a singular war, little understood and largely forgotten and in a burst of insane and dangerous to rest that happened with the end of the cold war and you have the apparenteasy win in iraq. Very little has been written about it other than quick turn histories, the general war, one divisional history written by manning carstairs but i what i wanted to do was correct the record and im going to say a couple other things about it. There are lots of myths about that war. First, it was a fourday war. My brother flew over baghdad the first night, he doesnt think it was a fourday war. Ive been in saudi arabia a couple months, didnt seem like a fourday war then indicated he got there in august in 125 to 130 degrees, they certainly didnt feel like it was a fourday war. Another dame met his low casualties. Low casualties is a matter of opinion in my view and thats of course an opinion to but we had 300 american casualties in four days of the war, 300. 148 killed outright in combat, another hundred 47 killed because when you put the 350,000 people in the desert, people get hurt by accident and there were about 150 nonfatal casualties. There were 467 kids wounded in four days, thats 100 today. Anybody here that yet . Nobody knows those things, 1500 Coalition Casualties and like to mention that there were maybe as many as 50,000 iraqi casualties. The other thing that is compelling to me about that war is on the third day of the war, im leaving my battalion through the detritus and remnants of four units of the iraqi seven core and i remember looking at that thinking oh my god. We are beating the hell out of these people. And my life sucks, what must their lives be like . So that was another compelling thing im going to stop now so others can speak but when i tried to bring to the story is a sense of what was your army like in 1970 when it came home from vietnam understanding in avoiding the patient to blame others for having lost that war. There was a moment where the army thought about blaming lyndon johnson, couldve made a really good case for but the army chose to look inward and conducted a renaissance in the next 20 years. So i wanted to tell people, what did the army look like, what was it like to be there when we integrated women against the will of the Womens Army Corps by the way and have the feminists, every once in a while the army gets it right and that was one of the times we did. The other thing i wanted to talk about was the training revolution where we quit pretending to be training and did train and theres some ironic things about that. I wanted to get a chance to tell a story as much as could be done from the iraqi side. We captured a lot of iraqi documents and made a couple iraqi friends whose names are not in the book because they dont want to be exposed were in the iraqi army at senior levels were beginning to be the possibility to tell the story from the other side. The other thing i want to say is on 27 january, colonel vincent j anchor wrote in his diary, i hope that someone at the National CommandAuthority Level in the state Department Work state department has thought through what the instate of this war is supposed to be. And i can tell you unreservedly the answer is no. And i can tell you thats been the case ever since. The notion that theres some kind of grand Strategic Vision and respect to how we got in these wars, why were still there is that there was no brand strategy. One of the things we ought to be thinking about rather than claiming if you study war there will be no war is a need to study that business and the folks that lead our country need to study and think about what are the implications, the actions we are taking and what do we want to look this when were finished. A reasonable question, which when anchor had a good sense to write down. [applause]. So as she said, i worked at National Graphics for about six years and it was as you might imagine just an amazing job. Ive worked really hard to get there and every day somebody was coming into the field with some crazy story, some fascinating adventure that they had just been on and my cousin used to tease me because he would say what did you do today and i would say you know, i spent the day with a curator at the smithsonian or i worked on a giant squid and hed say thats not a job. Id say i know. But here i am. So after we got married, my husband had been a war correspondent. He had been the bureau chief in nicaragua and he had covered the sandinista set situation in the late 80s, early 90s, covered all of latin america and then, he had grown up in wichita and had come back into the city and went to law school at harvard and was starting a company in kansas city going back and forth every week and thats when i met him. So when we got married, i was living in washington dc. He was here in kansas. I said we had the least romantic ending to a wedding or a honeymoon since we went to italy and came back and right away was in detroit. So for eight months after we got married, then im pregnant, the facility in washington and i think we should probably live together at some point. I thought i love kansas city, i knew kansas city. I was happy to move back to kansas city but i thought what can i do, ive got this much is this job and its just so unique and extraordinary, and he said you should write, you should write a book and i said thats easier seven done, i have no idea how i would do that but the one thing that i learned is the many things, maybe the most important thing i learned is that absolutely everything is fascinating. If you look closely at anything, its fascinating. And if you know, i have all these stories about things that maybe personally wouldnt interest you and you start to learn about it and youre just over on so i just started looking for ideas and i had been huge in National History for those six years and i was having lunch with a friend who had just written a book called 1912 is about the election in 1912 and got the results, they famously lost as the candidate and he said you know, have you ever heard about this trip that roosevelt did in the amazon after this election and i said no, not really and i had read biographies but i was interested in him. But because of the political career, it was so overlooked and ill never forget, he said the riddle is called the relevant out. And we got back to work and had this Incredible Library and library of congress and we started doing research and im calling my husband every 15 minutes like theres so much ground on this trip. Someone was murdered on this trip. I said i got to get back to work, hes right here writing the proposal and it sold very quickly. Not because of me but because he was in the amazon with these gifts and it was incredible and i went to this river and that was the beginning for me. Good morning everybody. Mind was by accident really and this writing came out of frustration. But also out of the need to bite using words to bring to life the things that survive people physically. I am from west africa, sierra leon. A small country that became a tourism nightmare because of the civil war. I grew up in that war. I was drafted into war when i was 13 and i fought in that war for three years. Guerrilla warfare is very different from professional soldier warfare. You basically train as you fight. And if youre lucky, you will make it like some of us did. But coming out of that war, ive lost a lot including some family members. I was adopted in family in the United States and brought into rehabilitation in new york. And when i started in new york, i realized that this war had been going on for about 8 to 10 years and nobody knew about it. Very little was known about it. And when it began appearing in the news in the United States, it was as if one day we just woke up in sierra leone and started shooting each other, there was no context whatsoever so my desire was to try to change how wars perceive by those who never been in it. Thats other than that in the media sometimes, the trade war, particularly african war that its tense and a couple mornings and also people were thinking about child soldiers in that same thing. That we were this sort of time bomb even though we come out of that war, we would not be able to recover or function because we been exposed to violence at a very young age, that is all we would ever know. And thats how it was walking past those same people drawing those conclusions and if i didnt say anything, they wouldnt know i had been in a war. So my frustration began through that and i wanted to give context from when words are spoken spoke about but also the necessar