Literal, you know, thing. And, but i, you know, i do feel stronger and i guess i feel stronger in the belief that there are forces that are unknown to us or barely knowable and definitely unable to be spoken about. That are around us. This isnt nearly as tedeep question, but it is a serious question. You guys are all obviously very intelligent people. So, i mean, you had to have known where you were hiking was near iran and iran is especially unfriendly to american s. Did you not have a map or any sense of how far youd going . No, maam, we were walking beforehand. Yeah, no, i remember we were in i remember seeing it on the map. The town. And its like on the eastern part of iran, but its not like of iraq. But its not like, on the border. People said go to this waterfall. So we went to the waterfall. I remember thinking, we are near the eastern side. Like, and at one point during hiking, and this is one of those thoughts that plagued me in solitary confinement, i remember mentioning, oh, it looks like were heading to iran. Totally without any notion that we were, like, near it. But just, like, were heading but just, like, were heading we kind of talked we talked about it for a moment, no, its probably, like, afar, way more miles than we could hike in a day or week. And so we we were very surprised when we saw the its one of those things, like, when something really terrible happens to you, of 10,000 times. If we took less time eating breakfast, spent more time at the internet cafe and printed out the map. If the internet hadnt gone down. You know, a million things contributed to what happened, but mostly our guards were down because we were in a safe part of the middle east. Shane and i both traveled many more dangerous parts and were going by word of mouth. Im sure you guys are told this often, but youre very brave for reliving this over and over again. Those are the comments we will allow you to say. I have a question, sort of a twopart question, but related. On your perspective of the media that you were watching while you were there, because you mentioned you had a television. I dont know if you had newspapers or not. I was wondering if you had this International Campaign going at home, did you see the news being said about you from the United States or were you seeing mostly iranian and persian media . Then with that question were you seeing skewed information . What was your complete perspective on what was being said about you . The news was absolutely absurd. I mean, it was like some examples of, you know, theres an english language ticker that was always on and there were times that it said, israel commits the most crimes in the entire world. Or the earthquake in haiti was caused by the United States exploding a Nuclear Weapon underground. You know, like this kind of stuff. Totally off the wall. And we didnt get a lot of information about our case on the news. Wed mostly get it from letters from family, but every once in a while something would come up and it was, you know, like state tv. It wasnt satellite. Wasnt even press tv. If youve seen that. It was a lot worse than that. But sometimes there would be a story from outside, like cnn, that would be spliced in. Actually the first time we got a television, the day we got a tv, we turned it on and there was Christiane Amanpour on tv and pictures of us in the background and it was this really crazy feeling because it felt like those kind of shows when its some kid who went missing and died. It was like i was watching myself as a memory, you know . But, you know, we did get things like, you know, that, you know, one of the three american three american spies to be tried separately. So that made us think, talk ad nauseam about who is it going to be who goes first . Might sarah get out . Wed get these little snippets like that that wed just obsess about. Let me be clear about the Christiane Amanpour thing. We didnt have that channel, but within the Iranian State television, within their news program, theyd, like, show a 20second clip of cnn or abc or something. So they werent they werent in the iranians and guards beyond the prisoners, they werent watching the american media, they were only seeing some of them watched a lot of them would watch bbc farcey on satellite. Satellite is illegal. But they told us they have it in the prison. Yeah. Pretty much every prisoner that gave me information from the outside, it was from bbc. Most a lot of iranians have illegal satellites in urban centers so they watch bbc religious religiously. There was one a lot of the news, the way we figured out what was going on in the word, the news we would see would be reaction to western media usually. And they wouldnt give what they were reacting to, so we were trying it figure out what the tea party was through the iranian reaction, or the arab spring, you know, they didnt say anything about syria. They would talk a lot about bahrain. And i remember when Osama Bin Laden was killed, there was a lot of conflicting narratives that would happen. In that example, there was a they said that, you know, they had a lot of people in pakistan that were angry that the u. S. Had intervened and killed Osama Bin Laden. The next day there was a story that what was it . I just remember the guy, the newscaster was just like, Osama Bin Laden has been killed and hes been dumped in the ocean and that is nothing to do with islamic burial rights. So we realized there was some that there must have been some media, western media saying that they threw him in the ocean because it was within 24 hours. Oh, then there would be the pictures theyd show, there was one picture theyd show of him after he was killed, probably in media here, too, and kind of were casting doubt on it being him. Kind of like the anger at the u. S. Killing him, but then, you know, that it was a conspiracy and he was actually alive at the same time. Yeah. Media was wild. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell was going on in the world and really had no idea. Thank you. Thanks. Well take these last two questions. I, too, want to thank you for your courage in recounting your stories. Especially as an iranian American Jewish woman, i want to thank you for shedding light on some of the horrific experiences that are lived day to day in the prisons. Two questions. One serious, and one lighter question. Thank you for sharing your experiences with zara and with the gentleman who declared himself as al qaeda. Im wondering if you experienced other, you know, women and minorities who perhaps were treated differently in prisons and, you know, whatever you can tell us about them. And on a lighter note, are you still hiking . The other t some of the other women i met are bahai, and the four bahai Women Leaders are still there and imprisoned. Thats a religious faith in iran that is persecuted heavily. And we were going to the clinic and we were lined up and blindfolded and not supposed to talk to each other or, you know, look at each other and the woman behind me started to rub my back when the guards werent looking and she told me her name. She told me she was bahai and i learned more about her. I do want to point out, take this opportunity to point out that even though we were psychologically tortured through solitary confinement, interrogation, we knew it started to dawn on us as things progressed that we had a certain power, that they couldnt physically hurt us because we were valuable to them. And that they were going to eventually cash us in and tdidnt want to look too horribly cruel. They wanted to have a happy ending. Thats something that was a difficult thing and also it gave us power to stand up. In the twbeginning i would cry d plea for anything from the guards, another minute of their time or attention. Toward the end, i realized the guards really couldnt mess with me that much. One guard told me i couldnt go out to see shane and josh in the open air cell. I was yelling at her and arguing and she slapped me. And i just reached up and slapped her back. And it kind of established a certain level of respect, not hard, you know, but established a certain level of respect between us and we became the closest i think you can become to friends. I dont think you can be a friend when theres that kind of power dynamic where one person is locking you in a cage every night, but i used to give her shoulder rubs. She had four kids. She was a working class woman and i honestly told her i would miss her and meant it when i left. And about people who, you know our lawyer who was detained after our release, so hes not bahai or anything, but there are other people and just to let you know our lawyer was detained after we were released. When he tried to leave the country, he was stripped of his pass swrn port and now cant practice anymore. That was for defending us. The tactics continue. I figured shane would take whenever theres time. Yeah, no, it was weird to find out that we were called hikers, you know . In prison, that was, like, our name. Its not, like, something i ever really identified with before this. But i remember after we got out, and sarah and i were traveling around the country seeing family and i remember being out with her brother in colorado on a hike and i was, like, realized that, you know, i kind of wanted to turn away from that identity. I didnt want i realized i either have to kind of i hike a lot, you know . I still do. I like to hike. I have to either kind of do it in secret or own it. And maybe it can be something in between. I dont know. I cannot be a hiker but still be allowed to hike. Keep on going. Thank you. I for one am very happy that all three of you are here in front of us tonight. So glad youre here. So i know that your family and your friends really missed you and supported you a lot while you were in iran and sent you letters and cards and pictures multiple times. Sometimes your mothers would write you, like, several times a day. So i just wanted to know how often you actually got these letters and were they censors . And books and the like. T did you get them in piles . Did you never get them . What was that experience like . Yesterday ill just start yesterday we spoke at a different venue, and i saw somebody who wrote a letter to me, and she wrote it, and i got it i remember the day i got it. And i can tell you exactly what was on it. It was, like and i could do that for the other 50 letters i got that time. Those for the first batch of letters. It took two month to get them. When i got them, it was like i was shaking the letters at the sky, i was reading, i was laughing, i was crying. It was like the world busted open. And, but that was from friends and family and extended family. After that, they cut down. It was only from immediate family. And it wasnt regular. Once a month, once every two months. It was hard to ever know. And wed ask, wed constantly ask and then at a certain point, i think it was around a year in, they we got less letters. I stopped getting letters from my brother. Only from my mother and father. And they were my mom was writing in her letters that i write you every day, but i wasnt getting every days letters. So it was this huge mystery of where they were going. We asked the interrogator, they always say, well, this is all the letters we get, we dont know. So about a year and a half in, we started this sort of, this campaign of hunger striking and the first time we did it, we it took five days for a dumb guy, the sbeinterrogator, to co and when we came, he gave us, like, letters from sarah for the first time. She had been out for four months by that point, maybe three months. Sarah for the first time, and from my brother and from shanes sisters, and then we didnt know if they were going to, like, keep giving letters, so we said, look, well thank you for these letters, but just so you know, every po d30 days if you t bring a new batch of letters with all of them, no missing letters, well continue to hunger strike. It took us the things just take so long. So then it took us because we couldnt write out. So then we realized that we never knew if we were getting all of them. So when we had five minutes of phone calls, like five months later, i remember one of us said, write on the letter the next letter like, the last the dates of the last two letters you sent. So once that started happening, we had a little bit more to say, but that was the months before we were released and we started getting more letters. Okay. In short, it was a big drama. It was a big drama. Also to say that it was our lifeline. And what would happen, we would go through these cycles of get the letters and feel this, like, bliss, oh my gosh, everyone, like, cares about us and remembers us. Then two weeks later, like, well, havent heard from anybody in two weeks, like, i feel totally forgotten. And, like, the Group Psychology between us would start going down until we could get another batch. Thats really interesting, too, about the dates that, because all of the prisoners that i correspond with now ask the same thing for me to put the date i think its a universal fear of prisoners that the letter is going to be, you know, taken away and theyll never get it. But i will say we have a huge industrial duffel bag full of all those letters and every once in a while when im feeling down and mopey and forget to appreciate life and freedom, ill just, you know, pluck one out and read it. [ applause ] its actually about the books which i dont think anyone asked yet. When you decided to write a book and how you actually did it. I was just leafing through. It looks like maybe you each took different chunks but, um, how did that actually work . I mean, youre living in different cities now and how did you actually want to come together to write this . We i mean, when we decided to write a book together, i think we all assumed that we would write it this way. There wasnt a process of kind of figuring out, you know, we assumed we would all write in the first person. And the way we started it, is we just said, okay, lets just take this time period the first four month that is we were in prison and write about that. And we just all went off on our own and write about it and then came back and had a ton of writing. And we had to, like, put it in order, figure out whose parts were going to go in and it just took forever. It was really difficult. Theres three versions of everything. So that we then decided to kind of divide up the main event events and create an outline. And in the writing process, other things would come up and wed write other scenes on our own. And wed write and then come back and then put it in chronology and then just edit intensively, you know, each others work to transition and then do all of that stuff. It was there was probably six months of just, editing. I look forward to reading it. I know it just came out. And im sure its going to be very successful. Do you have plans to do more with it or, like, use the profits for special program or whatever . Um, no plans as of yet. But i will say that in writing the book and emp in the process to decide to write the memoir, our story is a story about, of course, the horror of losing our freedom, our own captivity and the absolute miracle of getting it back. And its also about all of the people that didnt get back u the people that we had to looech behind. I had a friend in prison that was executed after i left. And so this story is not just our story. Its many stories. And its some of those people whose stories are in the book are in this room right now. Thank you. [ applause ] tonight at 8 00 eastern, Army Veterans tell their stories of the front lines including this soldier who remembers his encounter while fighting with a german some jer fighting in north africa. We were fighting on a hill, 609. And i went out one night to check on my company aide man. And while i was there, a lot of big, big boldebold boulders, i call it a mountain. It was a small hill. And i heard this kind of scraping noise over my head. And i looked up and a german came down with a bayonet. That went right through the fleshy part here of my light field jacket and fell on the ground in front of me. We had been told that the germans were picking medics off with their snipers and we had lost about six of our medics. They were shooting guys right in the head. And so we were gaven permission, given permission to arm ourselves. I wore a. 45. And we took our red cross, geneva crosses off over our helmets so that they couldnt see us. The few killed medics, the moral re moral real morale goes down and its a situation you really dont want to get into. So as this guy fell on the ground in front of me, he came at me with a bayonet and i reached to get the gun. He pulled it back and his finger was almost cut off. The scar is still here. So he pulled back again and with that, i was able to get my pistol out and shoot him. I wasnt scared. We had training for that kind of situation. But he was dead. And i was standing there looking at him. I started shaking and sweating. And just a weird, weird feeling. You know, i never killed a person before. And never did after that. I looked in his pockets to get identification so we could report through to both sides would do that, so theyd have records. I found a photograph, about two inch square or so, and it was a picture of him and two young ladies on there. And german writing on the back. I found out later that was his sister and his girlfriend. I kept that little picture and i still have it someplace. And i used to look at it often to remind me how terrible war is. Two young guys out there trying to kill each other. In a battlefield. More frontline stories from Army Veterans including remember re ranss of d day coming up in occupied france at 10 00 p. M. Eastern. In the weeks following the normandy invasion, allied forces move today drive the germans out of the peninsula and begin the deliberation of nazi occupied france. Including the liberation of the important cross roads town of sanlo. The focus today is postjune 6th. Getting ashore, obviously, is a monumental effort that requires years of planning, years of compromises and politics and whatever else. What follows from june 7th onward is just an absolute bloodied slog that ultimately leads deep into jermtny and the end of hitlers nazi germany. So heres where it sort of begins. Now disturb oops. The aftermath of dday, in about the next five to six days seized this basic situation. Youve got the five distinctive landing beaches, obviously, gold and sword for the british, khan is really the objective and the base point for them. To the west, obviously, omaha beach, the americans have carved out a lodgement there. To the west of that, utah beach. For the americans, that will be my primary focus today, sort of the American Experience in nor man day and a little bit about what that was like. Ill draw on some of the hig