Each brings a different perspective. We have a slight change and the moderator from the institute at the university of missouri. We are grateful please join me in welcoming to the stage [applause] thank you for that introduction. To make sense out of the chaos of combat we can conclude something of the university of the of the Human Experience and the fact before our own time continued to find places on modern military reading lists and by extension they are reflections of the societies that produce them. Speaking to the sticker c. Of experience we have a distinguished panel with us today which i would like to take the opportunity to introduce. Gregory served for over 40 years in iraq comin, europe, africa ae United States. He commanded a battalion. They taught history at west point and served as the director of the school of advanced military studies with the Training Program following his retirement in 1999 turned attention towards training and experimentation for the u. S. Army and later served as director for the university of the Fourth MilitaryCultural Studies with the deputy chief of staff and assignment that supported the assessments in iraq and afghanistan. To focus on serving the regulation for Army Experimentation and in addition to the papers and presentations hes of the world as the lead author of on point, the army in Operation Iraqi freedom and most recently the Infantry Division and u. S. Army transformed to victory in desert storm 1970 to 91. Candace is a advisor at the National Geographic her writing has appeared in the New York Times book review and time magazine. Theodore roosevelts darkest journey which was a finalist and won the award. The second book destiny of the republic a tale of medicine and of the murder of a president so a bestseller won the award for the best crime Defense Center award for Research Nonfiction and the notable book award. The most recent work is hero of the entire in the making of winston churchill. Born in sierra leone came to the United States at age 17 his first book a long way gone memoirs of a boy soldier have been published in over 40 languages and was named as one of the top nonfiction books. The first novel was published in 2014 and in addition to the writing he has an impressive record as a human rights activist serving as the unicef ambassador and children affected by war as well as a member of the human rights launch childrens Rights Advisory Committee he cofounded the network of young people affected by the war and serves as president of the foundation that helps children affected by war we integrate into society with educational and vocational opportunities and last but not least the author of the huntsman a notable book the kings of kings county and most recently the good lieutenant that one of the claim for the treatment of the experiences of soldiers in iraq and the recipient of the fellowship from princeton universitys center for the arts. In 2006 and 2010 a reporter and covered for the Washington Post magazine and public radio. Nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, 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 getting a warm welcome. [applause] to begin our conversation today i would like to invite all of you to share the journey that brought you to your work. From the biographies i just read there are twists and turns on how your book came to be. I visited africa as a soldier and go down the river was a marine friend of mine and we looked at the side of the boat and there were multiple hippopotamus, whatever that is called. We were upstream from the fall so we were going to turn around a and the snake was bigger around than i was, probably not now but i thought i need to get off this river. It was an enlightening period. I am a romantic i think to be a soldier you have to be a romantic. The romanticism came from watching my father as a soldier. I remember one morning when i was young he was getting ready to go to work and she was sliding his legs and it made this perfect sound every time i got to make that sound as a soldier i remembered that moment. Thats what got me if i asked my father why there were these black metal buttons on the uniform each of which had a star on them and what it was was 13 stars configured into a fivepoint star and my father about finished eighth grade and was the son of a sharecropper told me that that meant that he was part of the units organization that defended the United States and he took a minute to tell me about the constitution of the United States. I doubt he ever read it. I have that i dont think he had. I was struck then by this is something bigger than me and i want to be part of it. We dont always live up to the ideals of our constitution but i will also tell you that nothing good in america has ever happened i recognize that we may not reach our dreams and potential but im a romantic. I believe there is a chance that we may someday reach the potential. I came to the desert storm problem primarily as the victim of desert storm having gone there and i remember one of my officers wrote of the hottest books of germans would say. And he wrote a note i didnt see until afterwards that said he would like to know who those people were in america that were in favor of the war in iraq because as far as he could tell no one could tell who it was. I was in a peace party and i will tell you nothing comes from dislike the flight attendants promised us we would die in great numbers. I remember telling my unit that i had on an outfit that didnt have enough of what was left to go to a reunion so we were not going to go by their predictions. We would find a way to cheat, lie, steal and when. The second reason, ive been back to iraq multiple times. I went over and over three as the leader of the study group to gather information to write an official quickturn history of what happened in iraq. I can tell you at the time there was a lot of celebrity nonsense being said by the army to make this a celebration of our excellence. We wrote the last chapter that was the conclusion of the implications because the fact was perfectly clear. Its still not over as it turns out. The second reason i came to it is after going back multiple times to afghanistan, it really got me that desert storm was a singular war little understood and largely forgotten in the first of this hubris that happened with the end of the cold war and the easy win in iraq. Very little has been written about it other than the quickturn history is in the general war. My brother flew over baghdad the first night. It didnt seem like a war of the enemy and the kids that have gotten there in august in the heat and humidity certainly didnt feel like it was a four day war and then another is low casualty. Its a matter of opinion in my view that we had 300 american casualties. 300. 148 and another 147 because when you put them in the desert you have a lot of heavy equipment and both, people get hurt by accident and there were about 150 casualties. There were 457 kids wounded in four days. Nobody knows those things and there were 1500 Coalition Casualties and i like tension there were as many as 50,000 iraqi casualties. The other thing that is compelling is on the third day of the war by the italian through the remnants of the units in the iraq east core i remember looking at that thinking my god, we are beating the hell out of these people and if my life sucks what might their life be like thi so that s another compelling thing to me. Im going to stop now so others can speak. Thats what i try to bring to the story is a sense of what was your army like in 1970 when it came home from vietnam understanding and avoiding the temptation to blame others for having lost that war there was a moment when the army thought of blaming lyndon johnson, could have made a good case that they chose to look inward and conducted a renaissance in the next 20 years so i wanted to tell people what did that army look like and what was it like to be there against the will of the army by the way at the head of the movement they get it right and that was one of the times. The other thing i want to talk about is the training revolution where we click pretended through some ironic things there if we get a chance to talk about it. I also wanted to get a chance to tell the story as much as it could be done from the iraq east side. We captured a lot of documents and made a couple of friends whose names are not in the book because they dont want to be exposed. So it is the possibility from the other side. On the 27th of january, he wrote in his diary i hope someone at the National CommandAuthority Level in the state department has thought through what is the end state of the war is supposed to be and i can tell you the answer is no and i can tell you thats been the case ever since. Its something of a grand Strategic Vision with respect to how we got in the war and why we are still there is there was no vision and one of the things we ought to be thinking about is we need to study the business and the folks that lead our country need to study it and think about what are the implications of the actions taken and how will we know when it looks like this one of those are reasonable questions. [applause] i worked at the National Geographic for about six years and it was as you might imagine an amazing job. There was a crazy story, some fascinating adventure they had just been on. What did you do today and i would say i spent the day at the beach or the smithsonian or i worked on they would say thats not a job and i did say i know but here i am. After we got married, my husband actually had been the bureau chief in nicaragua and covered the sandinista situation in the late 80s, early 90s, covered latin america and had grown up in wichita and back to kansas city he went to law school at harvard and started a company in kansas city going back and forth and thats when i met him so when we got married i was living in washington, he was here in kansas and i said we have the least romantic so we went to italy for the honeymoon and came back [inaudible] [laughter] so for eight months after we got married, then i was pregnant and thought we should probably live together. [laughter] i loved kansas city, i was happy to move back to kansas city that i thought what can i do that i love this much as this job that was so unique and extraordinary and she said you should write a book. That is easier said than done. I have no idea how i would do that. But the one thing i learned, maybe the most important thing i learned is everything is fascinating if you look closely at anything, its fascinating and if you knew enough of these stories of things that wouldnt interest you and then you start to learn about it, so i just started looking for ideas and i had been steeped in Natural History and was having lunch with a friend who just written a book called 1912 which is about the election of 1912. He said you know, have you ever heard about this trip that roosevelt took in the amazon afteamazon afterthis election at really. And ive read biographies of roosevelt. I was interested in him. But this was overlooked in life will never forget