Jocko Podcast 271: Stories of the Horrors of War. “Only Cry for the Living”, w/ Hollie McKay.

this is jocko podcast number 271 with echo charles and me jocko willing good evening echo good evening first they put us in a school in tallafar and held us for 20 days they didn’t let us eat or drink only the children were given a little bread but we had to go to the bathroom to share it if they caught us sharing we were tortured the children were dying starving they wouldn’t drink the little amount of dirty water so we found some toothpaste and put it in the water to pretend it was milk so they would drink it and not die from dehydration dulled of emotion basima recalled everything down to the most minor detail how they were transferred to mosul in cattle trucks and stashed in a traditional ceremony hall how the elderly had to give their children urine to drink to keep them alive after isis cut their only water pipe how everyone became so sick and malnourished that clumps of their hair would fall to the floor but the worst was yet to come in the middle of the night the isis men were coming in and yelling to know who was still a virgin bessema whispered and from the age of eight they were taking girls to the market to sell for a cigarette however bessema and several of her siblings fought up a plan to avoid being violated they tried to look like ugly boys by using a piece of broken plate to shave their heads and dressed in the men’s clothes they found hidden away we thought if they mistook us for boys we would be taken out and killed rather than raped she explained but instead when they knew our trick the men came in and stripped us in front of everybody in front of everybody hundreds they touched us everywhere sexually abused us my father and brother had to watch and that was the last i saw of them basima did not shudder when she talked about the abuse she was telling her story but she was also telling somebody else’s story she was telling the story of so many other women perhaps that is how she was able to get through it with strength by separating herself from the narrative when initially snatched gazal was with her six-month-old son bhaktiarar and five-year-old daughter darren when gazal while gazal clutched her screaming son basima claimed to be the mother of darren in hopes that the isis operatives wouldn’t sell her if it was clear she was no longer a virgin gazal spoke of her ordeal in a tempered rhythm relentlessly tugging at her dress and glaring at her raw cracked hands at first she said she refused to go with the wali but he dragged her by her hair and took her to her and baktiyar to the syrian city of minbij near the turkish border they were yanked into a house like the headquarters where there were already two other yazidi slaves and a constant ebb of foreign fighters the wali said i must marry him but i refused so he took my son and i didn’t see him for two days after that i begged and cried he started torturing me and said i had no option but to marry him only it wasn’t a real marriage there was no ceremony it was just rape i was forced to be a muslim to pray five times a day the coalition bombs soon started falling on isis installations bases and homes but they also fell on people who were already scared and suffering who had no arms and no choice but to be there after gazal was gone besima said that she and scores of others including young darren were wounded in an airstrike on the prison shrapnel pierced her head besima’s only treatment was her long ebony locks getting shaved off she received no medicine the slaves were propelled down 22 skewed steps into an underground weapon storage filled with guns and bombs which would become their living quarters for more than a year we were tortured there were no toilets we had to eat sleep and do the necessary all in the same place all kinds of insects and flies were in there they forced us to convert to islam we were made to look at beheaded bodies through the little window we didn’t know when our time was up all we could think about was whether it was better to live or to die what is a war it is trying to remember those we treasure who are taken while at the same time trying to let them go what is war it is waiting to kill or is waiting to be killed what is war war is a war inside the war which the world cannot see but sometimes if you get close enough you can hear it it is inmates being endlessly beaten lashed maimed with sadistic tools and kept in small cages what is war a human shell might have made it through the storm in one piece but what is inside will forever be filled with a dull pain of waiting waiting for evil to enter to violate the person they once were one more time what is war it is ugly it is lies it is ugly lies what is war war is distrust dishonesty skepticism what is war war is a vision of agony that becomes normal that’s what war does to people what is war everything you could imagine hell to be only worse and those are some excerpts from a book called only cry for the living which as you can see is a harrowing book about the absolutely savage reign of terror perpetrated by isis in iraq and syria and throughout the book and asked that question over and over again what is war and that is a complex question and it requires answers from many different angles and this book does an incredible job of giving us some of those answers the book was written by an australian-american journalist by the name of holly mckay who spent time on the ground in iraq in afghanistan and syria has been embedded with australian and american troops sat through military tribunals and interviewed hundreds of soldiers civilians and government officials before during and after the horrors of war and it is an honor tonight to have holly here with us to share some of her experiences and some of the things that she learned along the way holly thank you so much for coming down to join us thank you for having me this um is definitely a very rough subject that you dove into and that you pursued and you know i i didn’t know you or anything about you really until i started reading through the book i just basically knew that you were a journalist but there’s some interesting the pathway that you took to get here as i kind of explored that is interesting and before we jump into the book i just want to kind of get some of your background you know it’s going to say in most books and it’s true in most books people at least people write books and they say they’re not about themselves but they write about themselves right and you actually don’t spend a lot of time writing about yourself from this book so just a little background before we jump in about you know so so you were born in australia yes so i was born in north queensland in australia and my dad was in the mines so we moved around a fair bit um and then when i was very young i became very very heavily involved in in ballet and so when i was 15 i went to a boarding school it was kind of a fame school in sydney where we could train full-time uh in different sort of arts and then we did our sort of schooling on the side as as well with that and we could all work professionally and so it was it was just a very interesting way to to study and grow up and i really thought that that was the career that i was going to go into what was it was going to be ballet dance it was going to be ballet that is a psycho totally totally psycho totally psycho and i you know but what i i always say and people think it’s just it was the best training ground for what i ended up doing because you you learn to just to push yourself beyond any kind of boundary that you ever think and that’s just normal and when you’re that young you just it’s normal to be 15 hours a day in these crazy shoes with bloody feet and being yelled at and being told you know you can only eat this this and this and you have to weigh this and it’s just there’s so much discipline involved in it and it really was the most amazing training ground but on top of that what it did was it really taught me so much about the world that i wouldn’t have known in my australian bubble when you say what you just realized that through ballet there was all these different yeah we were other countries you know yeah like for me growing up a little new england it’s like okay cool this is the world yeah and it’s you know i learned about the civil rights movement through alvin ailey who was this incredible um he’s got an art center in in new york city and and that’s how he had this amazing piece called revelations and i just remember being about 16 and just watching it and just the music and it was gospel music and i learned about this sort of whole culture and we did that with so many parts of it i think the rolling stones there was this amazing ballet with that that a canadian company had set to the rolling stones and so i learned about hedonism and all these you know different things and errors that i really didn’t know and it really sparked this insatiable appetite for the world and that was through the music and this sort of deeper layer beyond that and i really that was what i wanted to pursue and that’s sort of why i i guess i left i left home very young to go and study i broke my ankle so that sort of set back some of the immediate professional ideals that i had and so as soon as i kind of healed a bit gone to university an opportunity came up to go to new york to i had i got a scholarship i could finish my degree there and so i thought you know i’ll finish a degree maybe i’ll go back into the arts it didn’t work out that way i ended up in a journalism career and it was not planned at all um but yeah when you went to new york did you go to study dance still no so i was studying at a small university just off wall street called pace that was affiliated with my university in sydney and i was studying it was media arts but i had a specialty kind of in writing was what i loved and i i wasn’t sure what direction i was going to take that or whether i was going to go back into the ballet field so being in new york city i got a chance to do both you know sort of the hub of of creativity really and uh and kind of study and have a really great time i turned 21 in new york then then so did you grow what did you end up getting your degree in media arts and production which is a specialization uh you know it’s it’s a it’s a fancy ba but it’s i specialized in in sort of writing and human rights issues so i always had that sort of passion of trying to understand the world in a little bit of a deeper lens i guess at that point so what year did you graduate from college 2003 and then did you go back to australia so no so when i was in new york and i i arrived and then everybody is talking about these internships and i had no idea what it was in australia we just work you know you work you go to school you whatever um so they’re talking about internships i want to do one of those things what are they this sounds fascinating and i i went to a bunch of of websites and i stumbled across a fox website and i didn’t i didn’t even know what fox news was at that time and it was early digital error and i taught myself to web code just for fun one at school and so they said well we’re building up a digital thing you know you obviously seem to like that kind of thing would you like to do that so i thought yeah i’ll give this a go this sounds great and so i joined the newsroom there and i really i fell in love with storytelling in a different way i was so used to doing it through dance through through physically through my body through other and and being able to kind of be there and it was much more literal than what i’d used to but i really i fell in love with it and being able to write and this whole new medium was just beginning and i just i really threw myself into it and i loved it and then at the end of it you know as i said i was 21 and they said we’ll sponsor you if you’d like to come and and work here full-time and so that sort of made up my mind pretty quickly that was a pretty amazing opportunity and uh the dance career might might have to be for another life um so yeah so i i was sponsored and they said would you like to go to la and i was i was really in love with new york but i said sure let’s go to la and let’s do this and so i went to la and i guess by default being in los angeles uh there was you know the entertainment hub of the world and so that sort of seemed to be and i had my own column which again was sort of a bit of a baptism by fire and was just immediately thrown into this cage of of yeah i describe it when i got there doco it was the summer of 2007 and paris hilton had just gotten out of jail and somehow i’d made friends with an assistant of hers and she was living in this beach house down in malibu and so every day we’d go to these parties at paris’s and it was the paparazzis were lining up on the beach and i just remember thinking this is the biggest circus i’ve ever seen like this is this is ridiculous and and and it stayed that way for me and i think even though i had some really incredible opportunities and and to to meet really amazing people too and i don’t think i really at the time you know when you get to sit down for 20 minutes with steven spielberg or something i don’t think i really you know valued i think i just i i was too young to kind of understand this is pretty cool but i just got to meet so many people from different walks of life i would be i’d be covering a suge night trial in compton and then the next minute i’d be you know driving to to a choreography session with the spice girls reunion tour it was just this real crazy you know be at at you know diddy’s party and then i would be at you know some other cool place and it but to me the funny thing about it was i always felt i was the outside looking in at something i never felt part of it i just felt like this was this it was a launch pad but it was this incredible stepping stone and i guess similar to the ballet it told me something really crucial which was to snuff out the bs and that’s something that’s i don’t think there’s a better training ground for that than than being in that entertainment world because you learn to see through people so quickly and you learn to really navigate there’s so many layers around these people they have publicist managers there’s just so many layers and a lot of intimidation people trying to stop you from running a story people trying to spin this this way that way and it really taught me from a very young age to be very resilient against that to be no that’s not that’s not what i saw that’s not what happened that’s not what the situation is why are you doing that and i think yeah i can’t imagine and that’s something that’s really served me served me really well so the the name of this what was the name of your column pop-tarts it was my old boss i don’t know where that came from he just came up with it one day and said this is what it’s going to be and let’s do it did you isn’t it as a reporter aren’t you supposed to feel like an outsider are you supposed to be on the outside looking in and technically yes but in the entertainment industry and this is one thing that always bothered me about it was that people were so busy trying to be friends with these people and i could never get my head around it i was like they’re not my friend i don’t want to be their friend i have my own friends and so i think people always automatically assume that you must yeah that you must you know want to be this friend and everyone’s kissing each other’s ass on a red carpet don’t you look great tonight no so people get totally sucked into the whole totally sucked in yeah and that was what yeah that was one thing that annoyed mary i i remember being about 22 in one of those big entertainment shows a producer had approached me and said you know we’d love to talk to you about a job and this and that and probably stupidly because the money was probably quite good but i said oh no not interested thank you and that was my immediate reaction was i would just have to sit there and basically be nice to you all the time and that wasn’t that wasn’t the person i was i wanted to understand the real story behind it and it’s hard to do that in in hollywood without sort of being being shunned i guess and anyone who does kind of do that they are shunned they don’t get the access they want to the places and things and i think people are really drawn to that world because they want to feel that that being part of something so at what point did you sort of envision where what you really wanted to do so i it was a slow process i started to do a lot more sort of investigative work and then i would sort of pick up different politics stories um i was always very vested in world affairs and and there was a great a foreign correspondent in our bureau and he’d spent a lot of time living in pakistan and and just you know had incredible stories and he really and i sat with him and he really gave me that encouragement that i needed and that was just you just have to go and do it you know you love to travel you’ve traveled to all these places and i and i traveled a lot and i’d sort of learned to speak a little bit of arabic it’s gone now but growing up i’d learned to speak and i just had a real appetite for understanding different parts of the world and and kind of growing up growing up in the time when afghanistan and iraq and a lot of friends of mine that were my age were kind of being deployed and so i always really wanted to understand it and then with his name was dominique and his support was was just you’ve just got to go and do it and so i just i really just had to put myself out there i had to be that annoying person to my bosses i want to do this i want to do this i want to do this and luckily i had people in in new york that supported me that looked at my work and thought well we’ve thrown her on so many different stories and she’s always managed to come back with something and she knows how to investigate she knows how to work independently so why not so that was sort of my my segue into it and i really reached a point where i knew i had to leave that entertainment thing and did you create enemies in the entertainment thing i wouldn’t say i created enemies i mean there were certain you know i definitely had a few run-ins and i definitely spoke my mind probably more than it seems like if you had the attitude like hey i’m gonna tell the truth and people are trying to adjust your stories and you’re like not not complying with what they want you to do it seems like it’d be a pretty easy environment to make people mad yes yeah it did it did and then to sort of i guess toward the last year or six months i was doing it i i i probably looking back and it had checked out a little bit but yeah you do you create enemies as you go and again i just i think i just slowly was removing myself at that point anyway so what was the first did you get like an assignment just like your first assignment that started to move you down this path of this going to war so i i was uh i was in and i sort of been traveling through the area and then i ended up doing some work there uh was i guess the the biggest one was i was in um the middle east during when 2014 the war broke out in gaza so i was sort of going back and forth between israel and and gaza and sort of being able to cover it because i was there that was kind of my baptism by far what were you doing there i i was there i was i was vacationing visiting friends in jordan i was hanging out with bedrooms in a bedroom tent and you just saw a notebook and a piece a pen and a notebook and then you have contacts back in your news station and you say here’s what’s going on just wrote this and i i wrote some stuff there and then i sort of went back and i thought this was just and at that time that was also when isis had sort of really sparked i guess in uh in in the middle east and i’d been covering or closely sort of following the arab spring which was all in those years prior to that so i just i was so vested in it i guess and i i harassed and harassed and then made contacts with with different people and fixes on the ground in iraq and yeah i went for to cover isis i guess after that would have been the fall of 2014 so that was in the very beginning stages it’s i mean i’m just sitting here thinking we everybody kind of knew what isis was it’s a very courageous move to say that’s what i’m gonna go do go find out what these folks are up to yeah and i use the term folks very loosely with them you know i’m gonna and and um as i read through the book which i’m going to i’m not gonna do it justice because you know we’re only gonna obviously not gonna read the whole thing right now the the book is you know i got the manuscript i don’t know when a year ago six months ago a year ago something like that uh because we ended up publishing it at jocko publishing which was awesome it’s when i i read like the first seven pages and just said to myself are you kidding me this thing this story needs to get out so with that um i always have to make that caveat that when i read this thing it’s if it seems like it’s oh wait where’d that come from or who’s that character it’s because i’m not reading the whole thing and you you have to get the book to really to follow your story and it is chronological you know it starts off in november of 2014 and it ends up close to 2019 i think but it is chronological but it’s also it’s it moves around from location to location story to story because sometimes you’re in baghdad sometimes you’re in raqqa sometimes you’re in outs on the outskirts of missoula you’re traveling to all these different places but it’s it’s way more evident when you read the book the whole book rather than me just sitting here reading um chunks of it so that’s my caveat um when you are traveling over there just are you just traveling are you traveling on an american passport so uh i became an american citizen in 2017 so initially i was just australian i was a green card holder and then i got my citizenship in 2017 so and then when you’re traveling into a country so i i was in the military and so we would have um an official passport so not a diplomatic passport which is a black passport but not a regular american passport which is a maroon passport we would have blue passports which said that we’re official i guess government americans is there anything that you have that that gives you some kind of indication as press nope journalists are just regular citizens nothing special you’re rolling in there yeah who’s supplying you with gear who’s giving you body armor who’s giving you helmets stuff like that so very very i did i did have my we we all generally as journalists we all have our own or i arranged to wherever i’m going to get any training yeah yeah what kind of truth is this sort of basic you know uh hostage training just kind of the basic first aid um you just kind of have to do a few basic things you go but most of my training was really on the ground and the approach that i decided to take really early on which i think served me and it’s probably the approach that i will always take is very under the radar so i would see people that went in with especially and it’s very difficult with television because television crews have to go in with cameras and they go in with a lot of security and you become very visible for me i went in i would organize to meet with locals wherever it is i was going my local fixer a local house i’d be staying in and i would just very much go under the radar and to me that was always the way that i felt that i could get the story and even though people thought oh you have to have security you have to have this you have to have that i never felt i needed that i felt that that would have made me more of a known presence which would have been you know more dangerous for me as a writer i felt that i didn’t need a lot of those things and that was always you know and i discussed those things with my with my superiors and ahead of time and and that was always something that they took um you know enabled me to make those decisions and and be that independent and how good was your arabic it was okay for a while where did you learn you know i grew up so where i was going to school was a sort of there was a big lebanese community there so i would just i was so interested i just i would have people teach me and so but i always worked with the translator because i couldn’t pick up the dialects i mean the dialects were just so confusing and i didn’t want to risk ever i guess getting something that would have been crucial in getting it wrong yeah i know the the locals ability to to understand and give you these nuanced things you know the interpreters that we had would you know because we’d have we’d have americans like seals that had been trained to speak arabic and god bless them they’d do their best but like you just they they’d be standing side by side with a native speaker and you know my seal interpreter would say hey the local guy said this and then the the native speaker would say hey here’s what he’s actually means and there’s just a little bit that you’re just not gonna catch you know it’s just not gonna happen so you you definitely um it’s like trying to trying to tell the difference between you know someone that’s from new york and someone that’s from new jersey right there there’s people that can go oh yeah guys from jersey that guy’s from new york you know and the same thing overseas and you are correct here’s here’s the weird thing about what you said about security is a low profile 99 of the time is gonna be better no one’s gonna notice you no one’s gonna care what people freak out about is there’s that one percent of the time and then what do you do and then you weigh those out because it’s only if there’s only a tiny chance of something happening and then you’re in a really bad situation because you don’t have any security that’s horrible but when you have security you increase the chances so much that it’s a gamble this is always a gamble and i always felt very comfortable in the fixes and the people that i used locally that that they had sort of the know-how to at least you know with exit plans and other things like that and i always had contacts in the us in the region and other places that if i was desperate that i could i could turn to if i if i needed to how did you go about finding your fixers it generally i mean it depended a sort of assignment by assignment but i usually went through either other journalists who gave referrals for people that they’d worked with or people that i knew that were living there with other businesses that had used different interpreters it really really depended on on that but usually it’s always word of mouth i would never just pluck somebody off facebook and and expect them to to be a fixer it’d always be several layers of people who could sort of vet and and work for them and then do a little bit of my own background digging on them and just try to make sure and you can never get it right there i mean there’s plenty of situations and unfortunately where journalists have been sold out and other things and we saw that a lot in syria with isis but in uh in my case i always worked with some really just incredible people i’ve got all kinds of scenarios running through my head right now i i when i look back at my life my whole life in my entire life from the time i was born until like two days ago i always think about all the things that i’ve done where i look back and say man that wasn’t too smart oh god do you do that much i was i was thinking about it that i thought the things that i did not just in iraq but you know other places in yemen and afghanistan and in my 20s and i just would never do them now i would never do them now i look back and i think what what were you thinking or or i guess when almost in the beginning and this is where experience comes into it you almost maybe it’s not it’s naivete you don’t always know what you’re getting yourself into and you get out of it and you’re fine and then i i look back on it now and i think that was so stupid what were you thinking like that was not worth the story you mean did you even get a story out of that like yeah yeah as i read your book i mean that’s what i was thinking you know there’s a lot of you got lucky a lot which is awesome you know you had a massive amount of courage goes into these which is awesome and that was i wanted to ask you that like did you feel do you feel looking back like now like you you were a little naive at the time and obviously sometimes a little bit of naivety and arrogance is really nice when you look back at it if it went well yeah which it certainly did for you awesome all right i’m going to jump into this book the first boy to introduce himself was a nine-year-old named abdullah he struck me with his light eyes gap-tooth smile and spattering of freckles across his nose there was a gentleness to it to his demeanor i wondered how such gentleness could come from a child that had been ripped from his home by war abdullah told us that he was a muslim from sinjar or sinjal as they say in kurdish he had been forced to flee two months earlier when isis invaded his village he insisted on showing us around the camp annotated annotating like a proud tour guide he explained the different people who lived there and where they were all from he explained how they had been confronted with the same vicious enemy and how they coped in different ways some isis we knew abdullah said some of our neighbors became isis too i did not know then that such a phrase would be repeated time and time again as the years went on i did not realize then the importance of that phrase the clefs and all the conspiracies that would come from it that one phrase would come to represent the fissures of a country that i wasn’t sure could ever be put back together our neighbors became isis too and you know something that i failed to do as i put these notes together is is you throughout the book you you pick these characters and you revisit them and i get some of them but i don’t get all of them i’m not sure if i get back to abdullah but that’s what you do so as people hear me sort of talk about these different characters just look the book is 450 pages long and so if people are wondering like oh i wonder what happened to that kid or what happened to that character many of the characters that you become close with you revisit over the years and and as i said the length of the book is five years or four four and a half years something like that there’s a lot i mean think of a a kid that’s you know 10 years old becomes 14 that’s a big difference and and obviously there also are characters that you never see again and god knows what happens to them um fast forward a little bit here the soldiers at the mosul dam greeted us warmly the peshmerga began and you this i’m giving everyone a background in peshmerga what you do and look you give all kinds of nice little history lessons in here too the peshmerga began as something of a mountain militia in the 1920s when the push for kurdish independence began in recent decades they had faced unrelenting persecution from the bath loyalist and of former iraqi dictator saddam hussein one peshmerga fighter told me they don’t suffer from psychological issues pertaining to combat because they have grown up around fighting and have developed an early understanding that it is just what we have to do to them ptsd was something of a first world phenomenon we worked with um kurdish soldiers sometimes in the iraqi army and they were just really good and they just were really good they have that that’s why that that that’s what they do they grow up fighting that’s sort of their thing it’s like when you’re in the u s military and you meet someone that’s from you know wyoming and they grew up hunting and living out in the land and they’re going to be good soldiers that’s just how it is somebody from alabama that grew up in the woods they’re going to be a good soldier that’s just how it is that’s that’s how you feel about the courage that’s how i always felt about the crime and just because they say they don’t suffer from any psychological problems doesn’t mean they don’t and that’s just a very different relationship that they have with it and not just the peshmerga but in a lot of the you know in the middle east in those in the armies and things it’s just not something that they they acknowledge or really talk about yeah and in many ways it’s something that we haven’t talked about up until these most recent wars yep even though it’s always been there you continue on here the peshmerga soldiers range from around 18 to more than 70 years old with many coming out of retirement in the quest to defeat isis threat during days of intense conflict the peshmerga are lucky to return to their base for two or three hours of sleep and a quick bite to eat before venturing back to their fighting locus as it stood a prominent portion of the fighters are not soldiers but what they call security advisors who don’t take a salary and volunteered simply out of devotion there are special forces that have been arranged for these people they don’t register their names and don’t sign contracts they just want to serve in kurdistan one peshmerga soldier explained how isis commanders often drug young fighters with special tablets that leave them disoriented and shooting wildly into the night sometimes they were able to keep going despite being shot several times taking upwards of 20 bullets before they went down for those who survive and that’s in reference to the isis fighters when they realize what they’ve done they sometimes regret it and you say here almost every kurd wants to share their history history of their people and their oppression but the string that could be weaved through and through was that they did not expect to be granted freedom for nothing they knew they would have to fight for every fight for it every step of the way the secession of let downs of losses and gains was all part of their rough climb up the road of revolution at the top they would find their independence when they referred to their soldiers killed on the battlefield they sometimes said that they were martyred and sometimes said that they were murdered i wondered how differently americans would see wars if the press and the people spoke of our troops in the firing line as having died in a homicide rather than killed in action and and now you kind of reflect on this battle that had taken place the rain fell harder the bullets flew wildly into the growing darkness that hid the dead isis bodies nearby hungry untamed dogs had gouged into the skeletons almost immediately some had been dead for days some had names and others had been left nameless some maculated by the creatures howling at the moon had no faces so you jump right into this stuff with i mean this battle that’s taking place up at the mosul dam you’re seeing the isis fighters this is a a long way from paris hilton’s malibu beach parties i guess definitely and and when i first went and i didn’t go with the intention of of going to the front lines i i really went with the intention of trying to understand i guess the human cost of war and i really just wanted to go and talk to people that lived there i wanted to understand what it was like to to be a displaced person what it was like to to sort of have everything and and then have nothing and i just happened to sort of make a good connection through through somebody and then when i went to meet him it was a crazy story he he came we picked us up the car got stuck in the mud and there was sort of a lot of fighting going on and so we sort of had to go to go in a different direction and then we ended up sort of on the front line so it wasn’t something that even really planned and i’m sure my bosses would have had a heart attack if i’d sort of told them in advance but yeah it was it was a it was a night very eye opening and even when i i guess the times that i’ve spent with the peshmerga with other soldiers iraqi soldiers on the front line it’s always still being that same theme for me of wanting to get that human cost so i’m much more interested in in those stories i guess from my perspective than than what we call the the bang bang is what journalists usually call it the sort of the more military aspect of it i wanted to understand who who they were who their families were what their motivation for being there was as you said it’s you know these people coming out and volunteering and and they’re not getting paid and they’re bringing their ak-47 from home and they don’t really have much more beyond that and i just that to me was fascinating what is it what is motivating you what is driving you what what are you sacrificing to do this and do you plan to just keep doing this over and over again i think for me that was always the question that i was trying to trying to understand or trying to piece together in my head yeah and as i’m sitting here thinking about you on the front lines for the first time sort of and then going back to the the conversation we had about being naive and i just i just remembered a conversation first of all i’ve had this conversation with a bunch of but the one that came to my mind was a guy by the name of dean ladd who is a marine in world war ii who went on the island campaign and he was going into tarawa as a marine as a marine platoon commander or company commander i forget which but i there was this was an insane operation they could tell it was going to be insane you know they’re going to storm the beaches where the japanese had been dug in for three years and he did this over and over again but i i you know i said well did you think anything might happen to you he said that’s always going to happen to the other guy which is what everybody thinks which is what everybody thinks and you know that’s what that’s what i think you know that’s probably gonna happen to somebody else but not me yeah and i think just i guess by nature you know with a lot of journalists whether they’ve had you know tremendous years behind them doing this or not it’s i guess it’s that same notion of you know we’re not working for the government we’re not working for anyone in particular you know beyond our organizations and so you sort of have this kind of strange freedom no one is telling you what to do you know and and and for me i guess i i really wanted to take advantage of that in and just yeah be i remember one time being it um did you ever go to taji air base just outside of baghdad i think i flew through there but i never spent anything i spent a bit of time there and i was with the aussies and then i we were supposed to go to al-assad and on the uh to the marine base there and there was just dust storm after dust storms every flight was getting cancelled i was like i just want to go back to baghdad i was trying to get a uh interview with satur and i was just let’s just go to baghdad and i couldn’t couldn’t get back to baghdad and so i was literally just calling a cab from taji to like come and get me so i could drive back to my hotel and meet my fixer in baghdad i remember the aussies were standing there going you’re just crazy and that’s probably really jealous i was like yeah i can i can do that yeah and what’s interesting going back to the earlier conversation if you were to take a convoy back from there to baghdad you would probably be at a greater risk much greater risk than if you were in a cab an orange and white opal freaking taxi cab that are driving all over the place yeah yeah and i i would do that to work i i remember going through like all these iranian militia checkpoints i was would be in these yazidi cars with a baby on my lap pretending i was a yazidi you know i put the scarf over my head there’s a baby in my lap i think i managed to get through about a hundred of these iranian shia checkpoints and not one of them questioned me and i remember just getting out of that being like oh had i and i know of other journalists i knew a couple of people and they they got busted at checkpoints and turned around or turned in or whatever it was and and for me that was going under the radar i got to where i needed to be had i even got the checkpoint permission slips that you’re supposed to get i would i wouldn’t have gotten through so sometimes you just got to not play by the rules under the radar that’s the theme i got one more maybe it’s not the last one but earlier in the book there are some history lessons like i said even though most of the book is more just interviews with people and and what you’re actually seeing this is a little history lesson on march 17th 1988 the morning after saddam hussein’s bath party unleashed a tirade of chemical weapons and killed five thousand iraqi kurds in the city of halabja halabja a few brave photojournalists ventured into the city to ensure the brutal dictators atrocities would be documented and exposed to the world and you’re you’re now interacting with one of them akram looked at me shyly extending his hand nearly 27 years later he was working at the memorial site known as the halabja monument and peace museum constructed in 2003 on the anniversary of the attack in 2006 residents thousands of residents rioted at the site protesting what they thought was to be capitalizing on the tragedy and misusing aid funds destroying many of the archives the monument was rebuilt into a hub of reflection and solace poised against the serene iranian mountainside with several abandoned bath party tanks sitting idly to one side inside the iconic photographs taken in the pallid aftermath of the attacks had been recreated as life-sized images and statues a mother clutching her dead baby lifeless children strewn across pavements and here’s akram talking we need to remind the new generation about what happened to this town and we need to keep reminding them so that it doesn’t happen again sometimes i can’t stop crying every day i look at the pictures and i am reminded that it is my family in those pictures end quote there’s there was such a depth of sadness in the way he shared a story constantly relieving a cursed reliving accursed history sodom had ordered the chemical attack amid the iran-iraq war following intel reports that iranian soldiers had been implanted inside the kurdish city akram still didn’t seem quite sure how or why his life was spared or why he was the only survivor within the proximate area he recalled having instinctively placed his mother’s scarf around his mouth for protection the moment something felt wrong he recalled throwing up blood into the scarf which still smelled of his mother even though she was dead beside him he recalled the way the vision blur his vision blurred slowly fading into blackness he remembered cars rolling over bodies as other victims in their last few minutes on earth vomited chunks of green some were visibly burning their skin boiling with bubbles others laughed uncontrollably an eerie side effect of the lethal chemical cocktail of vx vx sarin taboon and mustard gas [Applause] that’s a a chilling vision what kind of health was this guy in now was he scarred yeah he definitely i mean he was rel looked normal but there was something about him i can’t put my finger on it but there was definitely something that that was wasn’t quite right fast forward a little bit there’s a section called the faces of evil this is november 2014 some isis soldiers will tell you that the reason they joined were simple straightforward woven into the web of basic survival money protection food other times their reasons to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group were complex deep-seated in sectarian tribal and historical grievances dating back centuries so what is war war is a composite of individual stories and reasons one rarely the same as the other and you know i pointed out in the introduction that you asked this question over and over again more times than i read maybe that’s the first time you asked ask the question but that’s what’s interesting about that answer it’s a composite of individual stories and reasons and that’s what this book is is like you’re compiling all these different perspectives that people have what they’ve been through and how they ended up here did you have that intent when did this work that you were doing start to formulate in your head as a congruent story that you could put together in a book it was something i guess it’s funny most of this book was written handwritten in notebooks so you can imagine how many of those are sitting in storage right now um but yeah i think from sort of the first in in 2014 i was trying to craft together how i wanted to read these stories and and what how to make it a bigger story and i just i knew that i didn’t want to write something that was political or policy driven or i just i didn’t feel that that was my job as a journalist i wasn’t here to change laws i wasn’t here to to become or to be a quote-unquote expert in in anything my job was to tell a story that was what i knew and that’s what i knew that i could do and so for me it was it was early on that i started to shape that idea and i didn’t quite know how to put it together and then i guess around 20 end of 2015 i thought you know this is the approach i want to take with it i really have to be patient because you’re gonna have to stick this out for a few more years this isn’t something that you can work on and finish in the next couple of months so i had to give myself a good lesson lesson in patience and and just continue to to spend the next few years just going back and forth and and spending as much time as i possibly could on the ground and then i guess i felt that i hadn’t and i could have kept going that was the thing i just i could have kept going i could be there now and keep going and still have these incredible stories but at some point i had to realize okay you need to stop and you know there are other other things you need to do the other places you need to focus but there also has to be a beginning and an end to this so yeah i guess it was sort of 2019 that i i decided that i think i had enough to to put something together but but have you ever read hiroshima no oh it’s one of the most incredible incredible books about japan and it was a journalist who’d gone back and he was telling stories there’s individual stories decades after it and it had such a lasting effect on me um growing up and and that was sort of i guess one of the biggest motivations in in the style that i took with it was again that human cost and then just telling telling the very narrative story from as many perspectives as possible and and as much detail as i possibly could as well and i think that was something i i wanted to bring out was it’s those small details that make up the big ones and i i think it’s the individual stories that tell a big picture and sometimes we can look at statistics and we can look at these things that really distance us from a conflict because it’s really easy to do that you can say okay well 202 people died in that suicide attack but you tell the story of one person who died in that suicide attack and it’s probably going to have a much more profound impact on you and that’s what i wanted to drive home was how the individual stories make up the big story it’s the micro in the macro yeah and that’s um very reflective of the way i well with this podcast of course do we cover some big you know general patton’s books yes we do but the majority of the books that we cover on here are written by a lance corporal or a corporal or a private that’s out there in the front lines carrying a machine gun because once again when you when you’re talking about what the general saw or what the general did there’s a there’s an altitude there there’s a lack of connection in many cases as to what actually is happening on the ground and and what that looks like down there so yeah your your effort to do that absolutely came through and that example of the suicide bombing yeah i see a statistic of 202 people are killed in suicide bombing you can read that and you can move on you can you can re-see that headline and read you know what city was in and cool you got the information you can move on when you read about one of those victims their family how it’s going to impact them what mark it’s going to leave how they ended up there in the first place what their goals and dreams were like that’s that’s the impact and by the way it’s not always good as is the case here with omar back to the book omar a 25 year old isis fighter from the iraqi village of dor saladin admitted that during isis’s first month in mosul he had killed scores of his countrymen and foreign contractors on their behalf quote they came to our area and forced me to protect their lands omar said flatly of his isis commanders his thick mono brow remaining frighteningly still a physical manifestation of the emotionless figure before me after a while they told me when are you going to start protecting your own land his eyes burning into mind he went on to describe the words of his superiors they told me to do it or die and then they killed people in front of me by his count he had racked up 70 executions in a matter of months he mandated that he killed his victims with rifle shots and was chillingly candid about why he did it yeah it’s it’s fascinating that you’re sitting face to face with these these individuals and obviously you have a knack for getting people to talk because throughout the book you’re getting people to explain things to them to you that are either a in incredibly painful or b incriminating like that somehow you’re getting these people to talk it’s very impressive you’d be surprised how many people want a platform you know get them to talk and they they they want to and often i think a lot of it came down to they just hadn’t talked to anyone for a while so they were ready to talk to someone and they wanted to tell their story and you get them going for a minute and they’re spilling their life to you because they’ve been you know locked up or whatever the situation is and people like to listen to themselves speak and and that’s what i’ve certainly found in interviewing a number of different jihadists and they want to talk you say here the facilities director of security noted that most isis fighters were uneducated and easily led down the grisly path of violent jihad some regret their actions some do not the guard said to me earlier nonchalantly understand that most are young and have no information they are impressionable they listen to the second life paradise story 72 virgins rivers of wine and staying young forever that is all they know and you look there’s pl there’s so many interviews in here with all these different people you’ve gotta get the book to read through them they’re powerful i guess i got drawn into this section a star spangled love the notion of giving thanks the red white and blue was not lost on the people of kurdistan the bald eagle old glory and the almighty american dollar were king in the kurdish part of iraq most ethnic kurds did not hide their affection for the u s a concept that had become rare in the predominantly anti-american throngs of the middle east shops peddled american flags us military gear was prized and the locals spoke glowingly of the notion of the nation they created with removing saddam hussein the dictator whose heavy hand had so often come down on the minority group clustered into the northern region imagine if america didn’t exist said accountant kurdo amin aga whose home was outfitted with israeli american and kurdistan flags and who wears a u s army shirt and a navy seal watch without america the world would be run by china or iran dewy eyes he turned to me in earnest america represents freedom he stressed our dream is to be eternally allied to america you don’t hear a lot about that yeah that was it was fascinating yeah when you go it was this little pocket of i mean the kurds in the north they just they loved they loved both bushes they you know it was just something that they just they thought america was the the ones to save the day yeah i mean you go in and talk about how you’re walking through uh the like the bazaar has red white and blue has flags and all this stuff in there just pro america pro freedom yeah and this is also interesting kurds who as a group are overwhelmingly muslim also portrayed themselves as more religiously tolerant right now i’m working with muslims yazidi christians we’re all working together said one high-ranking krg official they celebrate occasions together it’s something very beautiful i have friends who pray and friends who don’t that’s not my problem that is their choice that is how the kurdish people think about religion on one early december morning i saw several kurds busily setting up a and decorating christmas trees whether it was done in a secular embrace of a foreign religious right or simply to make guests more comfortable was not clear we’re still new to this a kurdish hotel employee said with a smile bickering with a co-worker on how to decorate the tree but we love it very tolerant yeah setting up christmas trees yeah during the uh after the 2003 uh iraq invasion they marketed they had an entire tourism marketing campaign called the other iraq and that was sort of how they would try to draw people in to come and visit them was this other iraq they call themselves so even though they belong to iraq they tried to be the other so that was their kind of approach beautiful fast forward a little bit that summer i drifted between displacement camps the big ones and the small ones the ones that were new only just established to accommodate this constant swell of newcomers the ones that have been here for years as past wars melted into new wars over time the camps had burst in into little towns of their own complete with banks and bridal stores and markets and places to buy home goods and sweaters what is war war brings resiliency it is turning what feels like a prison into something of a home what is war war is running it is not knowing what is on the other side it is being unwelcome in your own home is being unwelcome away from your home sometimes war is walking too one moment here and the next in some no man’s land that you could that could never be home it was drifting from place to place both in mind and body crazy to think these camps are set up for so long that they become little villages yeah and and what’s really sad is that so many of them still exist and because i guess it’s really out of sort of the main headlines of the news now they just the resources are just there’s nothing the likes of bassemer and gazelle they’re still in camps just with nothing and and no resources so it’s almost even a worse situation for for so many of the displaced now than i it was for them four years ago you say here in a small camp designated especially for displaced christians a group of men looked me in the eyes and said sternly that they do not bother trying to read or watch the news anymore because it was all fraudulent all lies as you’re hearing that does that make you think okay i’ve got to tell the truth i mean i just can’t i can only imagine hearing that from your perspective yeah yeah for them i think they’ve just grown so frustrated i think when you see such astrologies happen in the beginning you really believe that there’s no way the world’s just gonna sit there and do nothing i mean this is crazy somebody’s gonna do something someone’s gonna stop this and then you reach a point a year in maybe it’s 18 months in when you realize it’s it’s not well it’s not that simple but it’s just not the situation’s not changing and so for them i think that was just the acceptance that the news was never going to help them nobody was ever going to help them and so they they’d come to that sort of group rationale of they mustn’t be telling the truth because if they were telling the truth then this wouldn’t be happening if the world knew what was really happening it would have been stopped by now so therefore it must be all lies how much how much do you think these stories get lost because of the short attention span of the world i think very lost i think i think very lost which is why i guess i wanted to try to put it at least together as as one cohesive unit the attention span is is short but i think it’s always been telling foreign stories has always been difficult i talked to journalists covering it was in the 90s with um you know with bosnia and other places and they said the same thing it would you know princess diana did something and it would take the headlines and then for me it was sort of you know something would happen you know kim kardashian breaking the internet and that would take the headlines and so i think it’s always a thing where no matter what error that you’re in that foreign news unfortunately isn’t going to always be at the top but that doesn’t mean we don’t report on it that doesn’t mean we don’t give it resources that doesn’t mean we don’t tell a story and for me that was what i was drawn to was the stories that i felt needed to be told whether they have an impact or not that that is out of my hands but those voices deserve to be heard this is a good segue into this section which is entitled don’t forget us early one morning i ventured further north to visit a yazidi camp stuffed into the wedge where syria iraq and turkey converge as it came into view over hilltop’s awash with the midst of equity air i ascertained a sense of something profoundly exhausting what struck me most was that unlike other camps where people animatedly voiced their anger and wailed about the lack of water sharing conspiracy theories about who was really behind isis and detailing what had happened to them in the flashes after they realized they could no longer stay the yazidis were so grieved that they said very little they did not complain they just looked at me with wide eyes that could brand even the most stoic of souls they all spoke softly repeating that they all they wanted was for their family members to return and for the chance to go home every single person had either lost a family member to death or disappearance or had been maimed when isis assaulted their village less than a year earlier it did not make sense for them to complain to complain would be a waste of their precious energy i was escorted into a tent where a thin woman had burrowed herself into the corner weeping silently into her black scarf shoulders trembling she was a survivor of sex slavery she was alive but she was hardly living more girls and women tiptoed into the tent behind me nobody wanted to speak of this ordeal the notion of being touched the term sex slave is a controversial one many decry that it should not be used that it was not politically correct nor accurate an argument which i hear and understand but i have chosen to use it because it is a term that many of the survivors and families use and because it’s blunt and embedded in the reality that is not the reality that we want speaking of rape was taboo and terrifying within the closed and staunchly conservative yazidi community although the silence was slowly shifting but there inside that suffocating space the women held each other up their embraces reassuring each other that they were now safe if only for that moment in time and at that moment in time i understood that the most valuable thing i owned was my 99 cent notebook with which i could try to capture the plight of these survivors in hopes that somehow they would not tumble from the world’s oblivion it was with my notebook that i could recall and write things these women taught me what it meant to be extraordinary what it meant to be brave what it meant to lose everything and still find the internal spark to go on we’ll get into more of the the yazidi treatment i mean it’s just a genocide slash i mean the isis viewed them as satan worshipers yeah devil worshipers yeah other end of the spectrum this section stood out to me one evening i met emerging pop star hallie love for tea and hookah in the lounge hookah in the lounge of an ups of the upscale rotana hotel in erbil she was dolled up to the nines with long perfect bleached hair extensions fake eyelashes red lips and strappy stilettos that clashed with their camouflage military pants in and loose-fitting white top by recording techno-driven energy-boosting tunes to increase morale and filming music videos in the direct line of fire heli was doing what she considered to be her part in the fight standing vehemently with the soldiers and their will to win much had been said and speculated about helly’s personal life and i wasn’t quite sure what to expect but what i found was a true girls girl underneath the hairspray and larger than life persona helly was a self-assured young woman who sought only to use her stardom and musical talents for something more than milking the hollywood machine some say i used to be i use the peshmerga to further my own fame but people will always complain she said bluntly in her sharply accented english flicking a perfectly manicured hand my country is bleeding and my weapon is my voice and my music and for those who have had their voices shot i felt this was my only way of bringing their story the story of the kurdish people to the world helly love i love telly she was lovely she was she was born in iran became a refugee ended up in finland from there got put into a music school of some kind um and and then the lore of hollywood got a hold of her she says this very quickly i saw the e so she ends up in hollywood yeah she lives in the hospital she’s living in hollywood yeah doing doing the uh i think she got signed to one of the big labels i think uh dream or one of those big you know producers had signed her and then you know what happens is you often kind of get sort of shelved away and then yeah she really really shoved away so the labels will sign you and you offer you a deal and then they actually just don’t you know you never get kind of to actually release and so once the contract is up you can kind of move on so i think i’m not sure of all her details but i think she was sort of brought over here and and it was sort of starry-eyed and then nothing kind of moved and she really saw the underbelly of of water what hollywood was yeah she said she said i met some producers and realized that what they were offering in exchange to promote me was a lie it was all about sex it was shocking to me i gave up on almost everything she ends up cutting a cut in a couple songs over there she says straight away i received death threats from radical islamic groups and the mullahs at the mosque were insisting i was a bad influence and should be stoned to death my life changed i was the lion girl i had all these fans and all the success but i had to contend with this too you can watch your videos on youtube and i definitely recommend checking them out yeah that’s something else right yeah even echo charles would be proud because she has a lot of explosions and she’s filming it’s like yeah literally i remember she was filming and getting you know controversial some people agree some people won’t but yeah isis is five miles or something down the road and she’s filming a music video [Music] yeah um how’d she and you this is one of the things i don’t really trace but you traced the rest of her story you go back and visit her at some point don’t you yeah so i went back and because yeah i always wondered and i really i really loved telly when i met her and so i went back when i was in nebeal and her name came up with a friend of mine there and she’d opened a beauty school or a sort of big beauty salon and everything was very pink and and you know all the young girls will go there for their you know their equivalent of the prom and and get ready and and i think she’d really settled into that kind of life of of being able to to be in with her people and and to do things in a really different way than than she didn’t envision so yeah that was her way of i guess giving back in a new evolution was to sort of be the the the motivator for a lot of the the young girls in sort of the next generation yeah i thought that was that was awesome it’s like she she like you always hear people um going back to your roots you know go back through she straight up went back to her roots and she lives there now and pretty awesome yeah then she does have some pumped up videos and she’s gorgeous uh i’m gonna fast forward up to 2016 this brazen attack struck deep when no one was ready for it there had been no intelligence warnings an isis suicide bomber detonated at a checkpoint outside a small town called dbs near kirkuk on november 3rd 2015 allowing three fellow fighters to sneak through and temporarily commandeer a local government off office the men were sentenced to hell and all died in the attack but the isis bomb expert whose handiwork sent them to their maker did not jasim mohammed atiyah was being held in a high security prison near the oil rich city in late january of 2016 the guards let jessem blindfolded into the room to meet me what i did were terror acts justine the 22 year old said matter-of-factly sitting handcuffed in the small office in the erbil headquarters of the of assaya it was my duty there are infidel infidels and there is instruction in the quran to stop this and to fight all infidels the kurdish security forces had nabbed jasim weeks after the attack that slaughtered 14 kurds and left scores more wounded three isis fighters had used the checkpoint bombing as a diversion to enter the city then briefly hold themselves up in the mayor’s office the standoff ended when they opted to blow their own bodies to bits as police forces closed in while that attack served as notice that isis was able to strike outside the territory it controlled the one thwarted by jazeem’s capture would have been devastating by comparison the kurdish security officials told me that jasim had been preparing to rig a powerful truck bomb bound for erbil when he was arrested by intelligence agents jasim had cried like a big baby when he was seized one intelligence officer recalled smugly and had cried that allah would be mad at him the authorities relished any opportunity to take away the perceived power of isis members to bellow that these fighters were nothing more than pathetic delusional con artists the exact number of deaths caused by the exact number of deaths jazeem caused whether directly or indirectly remained unclear he repeatedly gloated about conducting operations that killed and harmed scores of people including the fighters he outfitted with suicide vests or put behind the wheels of vehicles rigged to explode he was proud of his monstrous work and craftsmanship but he was by no means ready to be a martyr himself when i asked if he would have strapped a vest on of his own i never thought of killing myself i’m not convinced to kill myself he said unapologetically actually i would leave or escape if they gave me this order i wouldn’t explode myself that is another level of faith he was unconvinced by the mullah’s routine espousing the paradise replete with 72 virgins that don’t menstruate or defecate it’s our leaders that make decisions jazeem said our scientists our scientists say that there are infidel people in kirkuk it is not my decision we are students and we listen to our teachers if somebody pledges allegiance to isis they must take orders and do whatever orders they get they have to do it i asked about the scientists and their theoretical determinations of infidel blood but he didn’t seem to know jazim had been taught not to question the scientists if the scientists were really scientists but at the top of isis of the isis hierarchy was abu bakr al-baghdadi who jazeem described as a good leader who lived as a simple soldier and who was just like everyone else he had never met or seen the elusive self-professed isis khalif it’s dangerous to meet him no one can see him jazeem said his eyes widening in surprise that even suggested such a question it is prohibited for anybody to see him alternating between bravado and circumspection brought on by either remorse or the presence of a watchful jailer jasim chorus that he would have to be convinced not to go back to isis if he were released before i went to prison i had no problems killing people now i have a bit of regret that maybe some people don’t deserve to be killed how long would you sit in a room with these guys for really depended i think with him it was around about an hour to two hours so how would you select who you would you just say hey who do you got yeah i would usually talk to the guards about who was there who was willing to talk i always wanted to make it very clear uh to them you know i was a journalist um and their stories were going to be you know as as they told them and and they needed to be it was difficult because in some cases they hadn’t been brought to trial so you know when they’re saying these things you know and you haven’t been brought to trial yet you are incriminating yourself to a degree and so i always wanted to be very fair and very clear that i’m a journalist and what you say is going to be printed so their willingness was obviously a big factor in in them coming forward and telling their stories yeah he also said it’s better if they join we want to go to america we want to spread our ideology all over the world you talked to another guy sahir sahib jamel by his count he had killed dozens of uninvolved men women and children he says at the beginning isis told us we would all go to heaven but now that i’m in prison it means i am going to the fire i am going to hell the indoctrination was self-fulfilling fantasy script was evident but any sign of real remorse was not real quick when you interview these people you mentioned that that one guy was blindfolded is he blindfolded during the interview as well or they they take it off yeah they blindfold them when they bring them in so they don’t really know i guess exactly where they are you know specific office or whatever they’re i’m not yeah but they they take it off normally i mean he was he uh still had chuckles and on but they they took the blindfold off isn’t that weird just looking at him in his eyes when he’s telling you all this stuff um at first it is there’s a little bit of a warm-up process and and i found in a couple of the situations where my fixes would get very angry and i would have to ask them to leave or you know because often you know it’s it’s their relatives it’s their you know people that have been killed by these people and they their hate is so strong that sometimes i i felt that i’m not going to get a great interview right now because you know you can feel that animosity and the reason i’m i’m trying to get them to open up here so you know there was that barrier i had to deal with a little bit in the beginning and then i think as you sort of move into it you kind of get a you build that rapport to a degree they realize you’re just there to talk to them to have a conversation it’s not it’s not my job to i’m not there to interrogate you i’m not there to you know to to stick it to the man i’m just there to find out the information so once i think they get um used to me a little bit and then you know i get used to them a little bit then it can become a little bit more of a conversation after that isn’t it would you compare you know how like the doctor’s right like a surgeon or something like this and they gotta cut somebody open complimentary yeah like for a normal person they’d be like i don’t know if i can cut this person open but then if you’re a doctor after a while it becomes less of oh i’m cutting this person open more like this is like a you know like a specimen that i have to like work on kind of thing yeah i think i mean there is there are certain degrees of you that you have to compartmentalize i think for me i’m always very cautious of not wanting to do that too much because i think my you know what i’m trying to do is to to really bring a different level of understanding on all sides of it and i don’t want to be too distant so it’s a fine balance and sometimes you know and sometimes i make it better than others but um yeah it’s really it’s just listening often it’s just listening that’s what it comes down to seems like after a while this like all these stories might kind of jam you up yeah yeah yeah i did get to that point a little bit but i’d set boundaries for myself to recognize that i think and yeah i did get to that point when you say set boundaries for yourself give us help because there’s a lot of us yeah we could use some boundaries so i had i had certain markers i knew for myself really especially because i was you know spending so much time and the stories would just get heavier and heavier and heavier and i would just be living in and i’d be living on a floor somewhere and i didn’t have a team i didn’t i didn’t have people around me beyond you know my fixes and who i was very close to but i just knew that i i wouldn’t be able to do my work effectively if something or i was hearing things that were really tragic or something tragic had happened and i didn’t feel anything and that i think that moment didn’t really come for me during this particular book um i had a couple of moments where i just i felt very broken a little bit because i felt so helpless and that happened during that but i still managed to feel um you know everything affected me and i wanted it to affect me to a degree and then when i realized i really needed to take a break was was sort of several years after and it was in i was in africa in east africa and i’d interviewed a woman from the congo who had had you know sexual violence and she’d had these babies out of rape and just what she went through was so horrific and she’d been shunned by her community and she was running and she was just the most extraordinary woman and she was so her name was nancy and she was so strong and amazing and i just remember sitting with her for hours and with these babies and having that feeling of oh my god i don’t i don’t even feel this i don’t i don’t feel anything right now and that really bothered me that i didn’t feel anything and so after that trip i i went home and i i didn’t go anywhere i don’t think for about six or seven months because i just felt that yeah if i’d got to that point of just not reacting that was not the point that i wanted to get to and that’s when you just have to take a break and that’s it but i think during the process of this book and i talk about a little bit in the book but it’s often you know as a as a writer i think it’s an advantage because you’re telling stories and so it’s almost cathartic so people are telling you terrible things and you have a way to release it out of your body whereas i know a lot of my colleagues who are photographers or videographers um sort of in combat i think that they suffer more to be honest and i’ve heard this from other journalists because maybe they’re not getting that same release that i get as a writer you know may or may not be true but that’s sort of my experience with it but i know and i talk about in the book and it’s not always the most obvious things that i use the word break you but it’s not always you know digging up the math graves or or seeing somebody be killed or you know they’re horrific things but for me they weren’t the things that you know shattered me the things were and there’s one that that really sticks out for me and that was in in sinjar in the city and it had been completely destroyed and a few of these very poor people had moved back to live in these houses where there was no water no electricity there was nothing and because they couldn’t afford to live at camps even and so i remember being there one day and there was a young father and he had two young children and he was just living in his old bombed out house even though there was nothing in there and he said that he they were yezidi and he said that his wife had been taken that the children’s mother and that the capture had called him and said if you give me x amount of dollars it was several thousand dollars then you know i will turn her so this poor guy for months walked around and around the village and everybody was trying to give him money and he’s selling his furniture and and you know doing whatever he finally comes up with the money and then he calls the the captor and says hey i’ve got the money and he says oh the price has doubled and at that point the man just gave up he just gave up he said i can’t i don’t have that no one else is going to give me any more money and so he’s sitting here with these kids and i just and that was the story that really really cracked me because i felt so helpless and i thought i can’t even give you money because i would be labeled as a terror you know giving my financing a terrorist regime if i did that because they’re paying isis to get their women back but but to him that was that was his wife that was these children’s mother and just the fact that she’s probably not even alive now because he just could not come up with that money and he didn’t have the resources to do that it was just it was such a helpless feeling and i i couldn’t help him and yeah that was the moment for me that i was like this is this is just insanity this is ridiculous and and there’s no reason that this should be happening i think when you talk about the fact that writing the stories is an outlet and and it’s something that i talk about with um even with from a leadership perspective when i’m talking to leaders about how to make decisions i say look when you write something down you are detaching from it it’s literally on a piece of paper outside of your head now and now you can assess it from a different perspective so i think that i totally agree that writing is therapeutic because you get it out of your system and now you can see it on the page and you can relate it from a different from a different perspective you know and it’s weird you also talked about the you know at a point where you were in africa and you’re interviewing this woman and she’s been through this absolutely unimaginable horror and she’s pressing on by the way and she’s carrying forth and you feel like empty and that’s you describe the yazidis at any point at many points of being in that zone where they just have no more emotions left because they’ve just gotten crushed at every single turn um and there was there was one point there and there telling me these stories and showing me the pictures of these yazidi babies that were being burned and i just i lost it and you never want to lose it yeah you know especially as a journalist you never want to cry you never want to break down and i just i i broke down and i was just bawling in this room and i just remember i looked up and if somebody was handing me a tissue they’re all men in the room yazidi men and was with one of their religious leaders and i just looked at every one of those faces and i thought and even one of them just looked at me and he said we just don’t react anymore and i just thought this is just it’s such a it’s a place beyond a place that i can you know thank goodness can never imagine getting to or hopefully never would but the depths of what they’d endured the the thousands of people from their community that had been taken and and just it was so hard to even now to wrap my head around but for them it was just they were beyond the point of even reacting to any of it anymore then they were just so lost and so so broken by it all that i just nothing was triggering them anymore and so here was i feeling terribly unprofessional and crying but i just i couldn’t i just couldn’t stop and it was just you know that was a probably the only time i’ve really done that but that was yeah it was just a moment for me of realizing that here i was feeling terrible and they weren’t even you know as upset as i was and then i had to really realize that they were suffering in a much different way yeah you also mentioned in the book that so at one point you felt like that and then you kind of had to say i’m a volunteer here like i’m here because i want to be here i can be sad but they can’t leave this is it for them absolutely and there’s always a guilt that comes with that and it’s still something i grapple with so i can go in and i can spend however long i want to spend there months weeks whatever and you get their stories and you you tell their stories and then you get to go home i get to get on a plane i have an american passport australian impossible i go home and they don’t they don’t get to go home they don’t get to they don’t understand you know what that that that in itself being such a luxury you know and there’s a guilt that i i feel with that sometimes in just in being there and they don’t view it that way they view it as why we you know what a gift it is that someone would want to even come in and tell their story and would leave their comfortable home in their you know families and come and and and talk to us and and that’s how they view it which is lovely but but for me it was always yeah a sense of of just feeling a little bit of guilt about it and and i always tried not to be a vulture i didn’t want to go in and and have somebody sort of open up and tell their story and then i and then i take that story and i leave um and i don’t know that it’s ever it’s ever gonna change anything for them i don’t know that it’s ever gonna do any good for them um so yeah that’s something i i i sit with what about the sun ladies tell us about the sun ladies because this is a cool thing they were extraordinary so yeah i heard about them and we went to sort of we went for a long drive to meet them and they were these extraordinary yazidi women most of them had come from sinjar and and uh so when when isis came in in 2014 these the yezidis had to flee up the mountain because there wasn’t anywhere to go it was all surrounded at the bottom and the tragedy of it was so many of them died on that mountain because they starved to death it was the middle of summer and iraq in the summer is something else but they stopped they were they were describing you know having to throw children off the mountain because that was going to be a better way for them to die than to to die of starvation or dehydration and and that was really what spurred america to to get back involved in iraq was the yazidi plan and the fact that of what happened to them was just and there was no it was so hard to get aid and anything to them so the women that survived that formed their own unit that they called the sun ladies the force of the sun ladies because they wanted to i think was multiple reasons but they wanted to to a find their women that were still missing and b they wanted to be involved in that in that liberation of getting their towns and villages back and and they were just really really extraordinary women they also wanted vengeance yeah as you would as you would yeah i know it’s a very cool section in there that you talk about um and and they also had real a real situation i mean i’ll just go to the books we have a lot of our women in mosul being held as slaves their families are waiting for them we are waiting for them the liberation might help bring them home so they’re they’re in this situation they don’t just want revenge they have actual people that they know their their friends their relatives that are actual slaves and they can go help them and that’s what they’re trying to do [Applause] you say this when you’re when you’re talking to them but what i also had come to learn about the yezidis was that when i said isis had already taken away their hopes and happiness they would now allow them to take away their sanity too the sun ladies were strong always sitting upright a few tears were shed but hastily wiped away as the morning melted in the afternoon isis had abducted yazidi girls as young as eight trading them at the market for a few dollars i learned of one young mother who was pregnant at the time of capture she had given birth in the back room of her overlord’s home but was not permitted to feed her newborn son the baby cried and cried the muslim militant beheaded him the depth of depravity was hard to swallow and we all sat and clouded quietude for a small period it’s important to us to be able to protect our dignity and honor a 19 year old son lady named mesa finally said softly shattering the wincing silence my family is very proud they encourage me to join i’m very proud to protect my people after all that has happened to us yazidis we are no longer afraid and as brave and stoic as the sun ladies seem to me there was one thing that did frighten them the notion that yazidi boys who had been kidnapped from mount sinjar and presumably drugged and brainwashed by isis were now fighting their mothers and sisters under the black flag of isis we now have terrorist yazidis something that never used to be so you know we hear about child soldiers throughout history but this idea of what which happened where they would capture these yazidi kids that are seven eight nine ten years old and brainwash them and abuse them and turn them into extremist isis terror kits and that still is still really it’s still a really big problem for them um even even i guess given the lack of resources so a lot of the the boys that are coming back are still are still very radicalized in in many ways and i remember being in a refugee camp or a displacement camp for yezidis once and hearing just horrific story about how one of the he must have been probably six six seven years old and he’d been rescued and brought back and tried to behead his baby sister zed is his name in the book back to the book one blazing summer afternoon i traveled the bumpy road a couple hours north to the office of kidnapped affairs it was perhaps one of the saddest structures i ever entered not because the building itself painted a bright sunny yellow and standing indomitable in the middle of a city sprawling but rather because of what it represented the office had been established with support from the krg prime minister after the isis eruption of 2014 to find to help find thousands that had gone missing i would visit that office many times in the months to come and every time it would get sadder you’re talking to one of the individuals there zaina zane explained that it was her neighbors muslim families that had lived side by side with for generations who ended up turning on them one morning she said our neighbors came for us zaina who was 32 years old had spent more than a year as an isis sex slave when isis came they said they didn’t want to fight us they told us to give them their weapons our weapons she said telling me her story all over again but this time face to face where it felt cruder and more inescapable we gave them everything we had these were our muslim neighbors but so many of them had become isis and we didn’t know zaina whip winced as she recollected the day isis assaulted her village at the foot of mount sinjar the elderly who could not run fast or far enough were similarly executed men and women separated with older men dragged off to mosques to be killed the females including girls as young as eight were loaded onto cars and trucks and bound for mosul isis took me my sister my brother’s wife and my little sister for 13 days we were put in a school we didn’t know what would happen there were about 50 people women and children squashed into a room there was no water for us to wash ourselves the children were sick zaina had lied to her captors telling them that she was married hoping somehow it might spare her from their evil intentions that somehow it would save her from getting robbed of the one thing she could never get back her captors however were undeterred she and dozens of others were taken to a heavily guarded building in the isis-controlled iraq city of talafar yazidi girls under the age of 14 were whisked away and sold at auctions the remaining women were handed off to isis fighters and told they were hence for forth their property when a fighter grabbed zaina and carter off to into a dust storm fear paralyzed her from head to doe in its official propaganda materials isis justified killing raping and enslaving yazidis calling them devil worshipers and linking them to their mandate to reinstitute reinstitute reinstitute slavery raping them those unbelievers have become a core tenant of their theology zayn is angry impounders threw her into a prison cell days later she was transferred to another facility in talifar and forced to convert to islam under the threat of death zane had already witnessed a dozen fellow yazidis being executed in cold blood as punishment for their escape attempts she was not ready to die but she was not ready to give up on finding her freedom zaina and her another yazidi woman were sent to live with a jihadist in the isis stronghold of mosul he took me to this place they were flats small tourist flats it was a tourist community then he raped me for the next five months zaina remained inside mosul and was handed off to another militant who locked her in a small room this is how the game was played rape had always been a weapon of war that thrived on silence but the yazidi community was bravely and gradually changing that notion they were collectively bucking the mortification and the fright and all the repercussions that came with it to speak out and tell the world that they would not be muted it’s a tough situation zaina admitted with a shrug but i am still here and i mean i’m i’m skipping giant chunks of the book as i’m going through with different details and um evil and i think i write a fair bit in the book about about sexual violence because i think it’s something that doesn’t it’s very uncomfortable to talk about and it’s something that even now we’re seeing isis fighters are not no isis fighters are being held accountable for for that and there’s still this mentality of well these are terrorists you know they’re killing people so what do we care about that for and i think we we need to start shifting that perspective they they need to be trialed for those crimes as as just as important as every other horrific crime that they’ve committed because that’s something that needs to change and i think for so long i mean it and they really officially became illegal in 98 you know to sexual violence in wartime so it’s something it’s still relatively new and i think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in that topic in you know within the international community that needs to be looked at and how can that be sort of brought to justice otherwise you do have that impunity that’s going to continue and what so many of these women go through have gone through in so many different conflicts i think it really deserves a lot more attention than what it gets but it’s uncomfortable it’s uncomfortable to talk about fast forward a little bit here to fallujah uh the city is damaged but nothing like the other cities where isis has been dislodged explained in iraqi i tell intelligence officials who work closely on the fallujah campaign this was a well-planed operation led by iraq’s golden division the golden division was iraq’s special for special operations forces it ultimately had been created by u s led coalition forces after the 2003 invasion and had received top-notch training this is a local talking about the the push through the city and he said if the decision was mine i would have made a statue for every fighter in the battle against terrorism those heroes are examples of courage when when faced with daesh it was awesome for me it’s awesome it was awesome for me to watch as all this stuff was taking place um you know obviously i retired in 2010 but when we worked with the iraqis a lot of times the iraqi soldiers they weren’t very determined and it was you know they would they would have a lot of hard times sticking to the fight and we had an entire battalion one time leave the battlefield and so that was not a great that’s not a great look right and so when i started getting reports back from my friends that were in missoula with the iraqis and the iraqis were fighting they were fighting and not just in missoula but in ramadi in fallujah the iraqis were fighting and it was it was so that’s kind of why i mentioned that because i i had worked with some of the troops that trained up the iraqi special forces the iraqi special special operations forces and they did take the lead and it was awesome to see their courage and that they were going in they were fighting they took massive casualties in mosul they took massive casualties my friend told me that in the first few days they thought to themselves we not the iraqis might run out of troops because they are taking so many casualties i can tell you when we were in ramadi in 2006 they wouldn’t have taken that many casualties because they wouldn’t have continued to fight they would have run away and so here this they were fighting for a cause that they believed in and it was awesome to see that taking place yeah and i really noticed also just in between 2014 2019 just that that trajectory and how much over that time i guess that their will to win was really compounded um and yeah by the end of it i mean they would they’ve seen some of the most horrific combat that you can begin to imagine i mean just the level of what they’ve experienced for those that have gotten through it is really remarkable oh you know i can’t there’s some of these examples that you give of who this enemy was i i just i just have to read them every day for three months they tortured me azir from where he sat stranded on the syrian side of the shuttered turkish border but after a while the torture just became routine he was one of the thousands of prisoners arrested by isis for so-called crimes like wearing western jeans or smoking a cigarette but he was also one of a select few who had managed to claw their way out of the terrorist group’s dungeons with all his limbs intact short of jail liberated by opposing forces such escapes were considered rare just another another one nazra another former captive isis told us we will give you safety if you give up your weapons but they lied to us they took our weapons and they arrested us many of nasra’s fellow soldiers had had since been executed but many remained incarcerated there was no rights or to attorneys due process trials or even a phone call he estimated that as many as 2 000 iraqi armored soldiers had been slain since succumbing to isis over the past two years he also estimated that 5000 at that time remained in prison bowels across the country the cages were so small nazra said that their torsos were marked by the folds of skin and their limbs tinged blue from the hours of crouching curled like a fetus in the womb women arrested by isis typically disappeared behind the prison’s exterior held separately from the men and were often never seen again children are not exempt from the torment either a large number of children have been arrested by isis my friend hassam a member of the syrian activist group raqqa is being slaughtered silently he explained the most common charges are insulting allah and cooperating with apostates they are being tortured just like men and some of them have died under torture they torture children too mostly flogging beating on the hands and feet and psychological torture i was administered with electric shocks my bones were broken i was hung by my feet from the ceiling and beaten with my hands tied behind my back said ali a professional in his mid-40s who had been arrested in the early days of the terrorist onslaught on suspicion of being an atheist they swore on a quran that i would be cut to pieces you make a note here you can take a life without killing that’s what torture does between the summers of 2015 and 2016 isis had been on an especially vicious rampage to compensate for the loss of seasoned soldiers and to take into drugging those it radicalized or first forced into its lair isis is using special tablets the fighters take drugs and they don’t know where they are or what they are doing they are just shooting and fighting one kurdish intelligence official explained they lose their minds some can be shot 20 times before they go down that ominous drug was known as captagon is that right a methamphetamine-like variant of the banned pharmaceutical fentanyl fentanyl phalene it was manufactured in copious quantities primarily in lebanon and neighboring syria where it was sold to isis through middlemen it removes any barriers you would have the fighting there is no second guessing they just go out and kill it’s still a very common battlefield drug often comes from lebanon or syria and yeah it’s unfortunately it’s it goes just beyond isis but it’s a very common it’s becoming a very common drug that a lot of militias and even government soldiers are sort of being given to to give them that sense of invincibility to have them go out there and and you know do whatever they’re told and and i think yeah really it really gained prominence under isis um with little kids yeah yep it’s drugging them up among the ranks of captured brainwashed and drugs drugged were scores of yazidi boys whose minds had been twisted to turn against their own people they had been propelled into training regimes that included islamist indoctrination and weapons instruction they had been forced into learning the finer points of beheading forced into becoming suicide bombers and into serving as human shields did your perception of evil change while you were there i think in the beginning i perhaps had a little bit more of a black and white um perspective on it which i think you know especially in the us we tend to sort of think which i think is completely wrong but we tend to always it always comes down to a religion thing and and that always always is often painted as the motivating factor and i think what i really learned from people that were joining isis it was really one of five things or one of you know ten things that was motivating them to join and so i think the complexities for me really grew in that because i suddenly started to see you know when i isis is absolutely evil and that that hasn’t changed for me but what i started to see was the complexities of how they got to that point and why they joined and it wasn’t so black and white really and that majority of them really were joining more out of a necessity for survival than it necessarily was um some kind of you know religious extremism religious extremism however there was a difference between the ones that were coming foreigners were coming and they were often a lot more extreme in that respect what i found for the iraqis in particular that were joining um was that a lot of them it was you know isis had come in and taken over their town or their village and you know they still needed to feed their family um so you know those kind of complexities grew for me in it was a lot harder to look at things in in such sort of black and white terms yeah i think you’re right that america definitely misses the point on that a lot um it was always i still i still have conversations with people that will talk to me about or they’ll come at me about you know we had no reason to be fighting the iraqis and i was like hey we were fighting alongside the iraqis they were literally going into the same buildings with us that’s what they were doing that we were we weren’t fighting against the iraqis we were fighting against the insurgents that were there same thing with the um what you mentioned about you know how are we gonna how am i gonna feed my family there’s plenty of 14 17 19 22 year old young male iraqis that wanted money and how are they going to get money well there’s someone over here that’s going to pay them 50 to go shoot an rpg at the coalition forces and that’s what they’re going to do and they weren’t jihadists they were little hoodlums just like a little hoodlum in america that’s how are you going to make them a living in america in some crappy city where you don’t have any opportunities oh i’m going to be a drug dealer or i’m going to be a gang banger because somebody’s going to pay me you know to go and carry this from here to there it’s it’s an economic decision more than anything else and and you know even when they’re talking about you know if it’s a religious thing well it can’t be a religious thing because we’ve got it’s the actual muslims fighting against the muslims it’s not like there’s there’s it’s not about that and what the other crazy thing is you know when you when you talk to people and you know i would explain well you know we were working with oftentimes a majority shia army and it would be hard for them to interact with the sunnis and people have no they don’t understand what you’re talking about and that was a big you know with isis is you know you disbanded an entire you know the sunnis were very disbanded after saddam and yet they still had their weapons and they’re out on the street and feeling you know persecuted by by the government and so what are they going to do they’re going to band together it was the same people it wasn’t it wasn’t anything new i think isis was sort of looked at as this group that came out of nowhere and dropped from the sky well no they they were always there um they just kind of came together at some point when you mentioned baghdadi um abu bakr baghdadi al-baghdadi um we my task unit in ramadi in 2006 went to go and capture or kill him he had a mission to go capture kill him and didn’t get him it’s actually the it’s actually the opening story leif leif babin was the ground force commander on that operation they got into a big gunfight because there was security there which means he was probably in that vicinity but you’re right well it’s not these aren’t they didn’t drop from the sky this was a guy that had been there and fought as an insurgent and was on the run and constantly trying to maneuver and so yeah these people didn’t drop from the sky and you know the other crazy thing that you can compare to a lot of bad situations in the world where what they want is there to be problems what the what the insurgents want is to create division right division and they would go and bomb shia mosques just to get the shias to lash out at the sunnis and then the sunnis they were trying to create a civil war and it was very very hard to walk that line and make sure that you’re doing this in a proper way and even when we in ramadi when we got there in 2006 i thought we were just going to do a big sweep through like we did like like the marines did in fallujah just go and rubble every building and just run through it and maliki the prime minister who was a shia knew that if he did that it would be bad it would be bad and so he said no we’re not going to do that we’re going to do it in a more sparing way as with minimal force required and that’s what we did there was still force required but it was a lot less kinetic than fallujah was so yeah i’ll tell you but um all that being said i i the the the evil that’s perpetrated is just absolutely horrific and you capture it in this book and what scares me the most about it is how easily people are swayed towards it doesn’t take much to push somebody over the line from being a normal person to beheading children which is which is horrific and you know i i did one podcast on the on the milai massacre there was roughly 500 old men women and children no military age males there at all 500 murdered raped mutilated and the reading the interviews with the guys that perpetrated this and you read their backgrounds and you read where they came from and you read what they did you can’t it’s we have to be on the lookout for this kind of stuff because these guys committed heinous atrocities equivalent of isis atrocities and they were americans that had crossed over the line absolutely and i really think you know and this is something i found in afghanistan in in syria and iraq and a lot of other places that we when i say we we just don’t give enough attention to and that is government corruption and how much of these things are a symptom of that you know if you have to pay someone every time you’re going to go through a checkpoint you know so that some policeman can line his pocket if you have to if you see your leaders rolling around with you know the in these fancy cars and big houses and rolexes and and and you’re not you know you can’t get by you’re sweeping in the street and still not getting any services then at some point it’s going to make you angry and when you’re angry enough i also think it’s a big factor for for joining a lot of these groups to sort of rise up against their own governments and i think it’s something that when i talk to officials about it they’re often so quick to throw up their hands we can’t do anything about that that’s just a systemic problem okay but you’re always going to be dealing with terrorism as a systemic problem from that problem because corruption is just such a huge driver of it in every way shape or form and i just think it’s something that gets barely any attention when it’s such a big reason why these groups exist and continue to exist and will continue to exist yeah you have that um you have that little bit of anger in the back your mind that you’re being oppressed and then someone comes along and says hey you can fight that oppression with us and i’m in let’s do this no fast forward a little bit what does war look like it isn’t just blister buildings and empty brass casings and displacement camps war looks like wounds and soldiers who don’t resemble fierce fighters but are men in unfathomable pain soldiers belong to someone they are mother’s child someone created them and brought them into the world only for the world to rip them apart and for what was it worth it it was always the question in my mind but ever the hardest to ask soldiers in medical staff you go into a into a hospital soldier and medical staff faced a fight of a different kind no money and no medicine to treat almost 9 500 that have been seriously wounded the tiny hospital if one could even call it that had no mri equipment or ct scanners it reminded me of poor clinics of a soviet time and place there were thousands of open unresolved case files several soldiers young faces old faces and with body parts gone gone came forward to outline their predicaments in pain to reconstruct the blows to their bodies i feverishly jotted down all i could in my fraying notebook and and you go through just talking to soldiers and their their horrific wounds that they’re you know um pawan ishmael been defusing a roadside bomb for peshmerga on christmas eve in 2014 when it exploded his two comrades died much of his body was burned and his thigh skin had been reduced to ash karwan saeed 37 years old proudly dressed in his soldier’s uniform he was one of the victims of the isis chemical attack kiter merker 42 years old 25 year old peshmerga serviceman ambushed by an isis vehicle around from a pkm machine gun cleaved below his left ear and lodged a few millimeters from the top disc in his back the round remained there infected and inflamed his hands were numb his head ached persistently bizarre hussein 32 year old been working on the front lines struck by a sniper’s bullet in broad daylight reduced from a strong able-bodied man to an almost infantile physical and mental state hussein could no longer control his legs nor could he control his head and eye movements occasionally he could speak slowly other times his eyes just swelled with confused tears as the words would not come out these men had been robbed of bones and body parts that could not grow back some had lost their minds but none had lost their self-respect they were heroes who did not look like conventional heroes but constituted what the hollywood depiction of heroes should have been and once again to your earlier point holly of when you read 40 were wounded or 12 were wounded or seven were wounded or a thousand were wounded the way you d and i just breezed through those i didn’t go into the detail that you go into some of the back story but every one of those little statistics is a person going back to tal afar this is a here’s a tactic when the people came when the people from town heard that kirkuk had been taken over by isis many came out to the streets to celebrate so this is what we’re talking about you’ve got people that you’ve got the shia power and you’ve got isis taking over kirkuk and now the sunnis come out so yeah let’s celebrate and then what happens with all the families out in the street isis members then executed their scheme and had the trucks ready and filled them with young boys and imported them to the front lines isis has used all sorts of tactics and human shields many times before isis was using the young boys for three main functions functions on their fateful front line as direct fighters as human shields and as suicide bombers one soldier showed me a video of the remnants of a cauterized truck and told me the three inside were just kids taken from the talifar streets just a day earlier what is war war is the reason you wake up there is no life outside of the conflict you eat and breathe when you’re in it it is impossible to have a life outside or even to if you attempt the ritualistic movements of daily life the soldiers i met may have had their families but war always came first it was not a choice they had no option but to live it and breathe it they had all abandoned their studies and or deserted their livestock or quit their jobs to defend their people for a paltry paycheck a paycheck that often did not come on time if at all there is no time for anything but war how often are you going in and out of country during this time um i lost count of the amount of trips would you would you normally stay for a month yeah it varied some points some points you know i’d go in and do a trip for a few weeks other points i would go in and end up doing a trip for a few months i just i often left it very open-ended depending on getting what i needed so yeah it was sort of a lot of going in and out and then i’d go to other countries in between it all so i was going to cover other conflicts kind of at the same time and then i would just go back or i’d spend a chunk of time you know back in the us and and then go back and spend a chunk of time it was sort of just whatever i could get that i felt i needed to to go back for and then it was all just very um it’s a very arbitrary step to how long i thought i needed to be there for is there any dry is there any of your work driving this is there stories that you owe or anything like that nothing you know no nothing sort of pragmatic in that sense it was more um yeah it was more just trying to to develop it as it as it needed to be i guess in that very organic sense we’ve talked about the sun ladies we’ve talked about some i think we’ve talked about some of the other peshmerga females there are females on the other side as well females of the caliphate i got 15 years one plump 54 year old woman said flopping onto the office couch for being an isis terrorist i wanted to be a suicide bomber you you refer to this female as ks chaos wanted to tell her story in a jagged timeline a biography bound by battles she was the daughter of an arab father and a kurdish mother she grew up speaking her grandfather’s language language of turkmen she ended up in isis after her marriage fell apart i wanted a divorce i was very poor i have schizophrenia and was just diagnosed with blood cancer and my only daughter wasn’t treating me well i was borrowing money from people for the treatment ks lamented eyes welling but then i grew desperate in the obscure days after mosul i was snatched after mosul was snatched by isis in june of 2014 when the terrorist group was quickly capturing territory across iraq she had detailed her situation to a cab driver named mahmoud in her home city of kirkuk he offered her a solution he was isis and said if i joined they would treat me well and pay me i said i would join on one condition that they make me a suicide bomber and get me out of my misery the only thing i was seeking was to be bombed and die so again you are pointing out who becomes isis and why and there you go here you have someone that’s schizophrenic has all these problems in their life and and you know you see the same thing in cults in america right you take someone that’s been abused you take someone that’s down on their luck and that’s that’s who cults actually go after they go after people like that for the most part and this is a classic situation psychological issues divorced uh being treated bad by her daughter there you go um yeah and she you know in the when i was sitting with her and she’s sort of vacillating between this laughing and crying and it was all it was all very bizarre but i i talked in length with one of the the guards that was in the room at the time when she was telling me her story and you know did she’s sort of painting herself to be this very innocent person but there’s two sides to the story and the other side being that she was was really evil and she was one of the people that was was taking these yazidi women and and helping facilitate them to be sold and and beating them and things so you know it’s a very complicated situation in that colonel marwan sabri of the yazidi peshmerga battalion recalled that in march 2017 a disillusioned american i’m moving from females this is to westerners amongst the ranks a disillusioned american surrendered himself to the peshmerga he had begged them not to shoot him that fighter turned out to be 26 year old mohammed jamal khawise from virginia who was later deported to virginia’s eastern district for indictment a 20 year old 20-year jail sentence handed down october 2017 awaited him and you go through some of these other westerners males females coming in from first world countries coming in from america coming in from parts of europe to go giving up it’s crazy crazy yeah their their recruitment campaign for for foreigners was was pretty extensive um moving forward into the book all tools in the war against isis had eventually pointed to mosul it was the isis bread and butter the head of the snake i learned that many mo mosul civilians innocent souls who had managed to survive over three years of isis occupation were slaughtered in retaliation as iraqi forces surrounded the city to have made it this far just to be taken out in the twilight of the fight jarred me their body parts were strewn across dusty streets tiny bodies cracked open left to die after their fleeing parents were gunned down some hiding underneath the bloody corpses of their family members orphaned and forever traumatized i remembered the howls of a broken woman her little daughter had been lost for days until she was found with nothing but a gaping black hole where the back of her head used to be suicide belts are strapped onto helpless civilians including women and children by isis kareem of the iraqi counterterrorism forces conjectured this was a big dilemma we didn’t know who a bomber was and who was not many of our men died from these people forced to be bombers this is one of the things that when my friends were over there and they were reporting back they’d have these kids women children men coming to checkpoints with strapped with bombs and the predicament that they were in but then also the great lengths that these that the americans made to try and spare the law because what you normally do with a suit well obviously a suicide bomber what do you do you could kill them and what do you do with a roadside bomb or an ied you blow it you what we do we call it blowing in place so you just go put a explosive charge near it and you blow it up and then it’s safe what you don’t want to have to do you do have to do it sometimes but you don’t have to go up there with a whatever like a like a an action movie with a pair of pliers and the wire cutters and actually disarm that thing because it’s dangerous and by the way the way they build those bombs oftentimes when you cut one wire it’s rigged to blow up and that somehow causes a detonation anyways so what they had in many of these cases were these kids or innocent people that had these bombs strapped and could go walk into the checkpoint it certainly complicates and it’s there’s no easy solution to that yeah you know we we talked about on a few podcasts ago we talked about the idea of total war which is at the far extreme of conflict right total war we will do absolutely and act you asked me echo charles you asked me give me any like is there any examples of total war and i said isis they did there was no boundaries zero boundaries to what they would do i mean america pretty much always operates in some there’s some cap now you could say world war ii once we dropped the atomic bombs it was like hey this is total war and we are going to do whatever it takes to win as quickly as possible that’s that’s how you can make a decision to say hey we’re going to drop these atomic weapons but other than that you know there’s always rules of engagement there’s always geneva convention there’s all these constraints but if you want to talk about just total war we will do absolutely anything to and stoop to any level of barbarity to try and achieve victory this is an example female isis members were said to have stooped to weaponizing their own babies seemingly harmless mothers carrying their babies had been trained to enter areas thick with iraqi soldiers only to blow themselves up their young and their liberties liberators around them to bits an enemy is most dangerous when on the defensive or when they are fighting for survival this was not an easy fight and isis was not the jv team isis did not care for rules of engagement by which the west was taught to fight isis did whatever it would take to achieve its strategic objectives regardless of the consequences there you go you and me on the same page president trump gave a free hand to his then defense secretary mattis who in may stressed military commanders were no longer slowed by washington decision cycles or by the white house micromanaging that existed with president obama as a result of the new approach the fall of isis in iraq at least in terms of territory came even more swiftly than hardened u s military leaders expected it moved more quickly than at least i had anticipated brigadier general croft said we and the iraqi security forces were able to hunt down and target isis leadership target their command and control so i kind of heard that a lot from the leadership when i was uh interviewing them i think that was in the end of 2017 and that was sort of the the reoccurring theme was that they were given a more of a free hand and they were sort of able to push forward i could look at that you know in hindsight in many different ways and and you know how that could be interpreted but you know that was the narrative on the ground at the end of 2017 was that they felt that they were given more support than they had been in the past yeah i think that and it’s also very interesting when you look at the fact that this is this is general mattis right this is general mattis who’s saying this and obviously general mattis and and president trump in the end were not friendly right which it shows you how very caustic trump’s leadership could be or could become if you you know crossed him yeah um and it didn’t start out that way clearly you know at some point they they were seeing right away it’s it’s what i love about this and what i what i is this is decentralized command this is saying okay listen i’m the president there’s bad guys there i don’t care what you do what i want them i want them gone i want this that problem solved commander’s on the ground okay we’re gonna go solve it yeah that’s what i said go solve it that’s that’s a great sign right that’s a great sign uh and obviously i guess the disease of victory as general patton used to call it meaning hey i i we won this thing now everyone should just listen to me more i mean that’s that’s what you have to watch out for you can’t let your ego make you think that just because you made one good decision you’re gonna make all good decisions doesn’t work that way but this is just um again very revealing of how confusing donald trump’s leadership could be that you could have that he could have completely empowered general mattis to go and solve this problem and then a couple years later general mattis leaves yeah and i think it really started that way you know with iraq with afghanistan go do what the job needs to be done and and my understanding from from talking to different people at the white house at the time was that president trump knew he’s he’s not you know he is the commander of chief but was the commander-in-chief but isn’t a military guy so he kind of he he gave that job to the generals to do and then at some point i i feel like that shifted and the love that he sort of had for the the men then somehow sort of changed i’m not entirely privy to what happened there but there was definitely a shift at some point yeah it was all very strange to watch from the outside um general mcmasters another guy that was on his staff who is from everything i understand i’ve never met with him i’ve never we’ve covered some of his stuff on on this podcast because he’s very res from everything i’ve understood he’s one of the most respected guys he worked up in tallafar my brigade commander when i was in ramadi had relieved him in talifar he had done an amazing job in talafar bringing stability to that city we used that plan in ramadi so so mcmaster’s just a very well respected and he he was gone general kelly same thing i mean just a marines marine whose son was killed in afghanistan and he ends up so so you’re sitting there it causes a lot it’s very it makes it it’s obvious that it’s very hard to logically track the thought patterns of president trump you you can’t really just there’s some inconsistency there that you just it’s just confusing but at this time it was very clear this is another great another thing that is very positive it says here we we really had one mandate and that was tenable for iraqi security forces to defeat isis militarily here in alambar i feel we have achieved that mission folsom said i never felt constrained in a lot of ways i felt liberated because we had a clear mandate and there was no questioning that we were able to focus on what our job was without distraction and i think that goes a long way in what we were trying to accomplish so that’s another thing it was a very clear mission and and i’m sure general mattis drove a lot of that to say okay what do you want us what what is it you want us to do because if you don’t have a clear mission well i mean i don’t do i need to say anything else if you don’t have a clear mission what are you trying to do yeah and that that mission was defeat isis and and it became very complicated i think because everybody wanted to argue what does defeat isis mean or people thought well if we don’t if we if we leave syria then that leaves it open to you know all sorts of other things but in trump’s mind i think it was clear it was defeat isis militarily at least not defeat the ideology of isis i think that’s going into a whole different rabbit hole but in terms of territory arguably yes that that that was something that was achieved oh yeah yeah and killed a lot of them tens of thousands of isis fighters were killed i’m going to fast forward a little bit you you you talk from every like i said your your effort to capture many different perspectives and one of the one perspectives that you capture in here is of the iraqi christians and i had to read this part because just because it’s very moving scores of iraqi christians in the region who earlier fled in fear neighboring countries such as jordan lebanon turkey weren’t much better off father afrom said am i saying that name right afrom they had waited years for visas to western nations only to be rejected now the refugees were stranded did not have money or the courage to resettle in other pockets of iraq those fortunate enough to have been granted visas had to watch their families be split apart some members lived in the u s others in europe and still others were strewn across the middle east what was what is war it was options almost all bad does war ever bring about options that could be considered good that sense of helplessness hung in the air during sunday’s service women in aphotic mantillas sang and prayed and the men stuck struck candles to illume the darkened space while tiny children played outside in the cold sunshine destroyed all the crosses crosses that had been made 150 years ago father ephraim said but i said to my people make new crosses you you note in here again you have you have a couple modes and i’d say ten percent of the book is sort of history slash uh facts to give context around one of the one of the history lessons that you give us is that in 2003 as the americans invaded for the first time into iraq there’s 1 5 million christians and in 2019 there’s 200 000 christians in iraq yeah and there’s two sort of very different schools of thought i think in that is that one being a lot more effort should be made to ensuring that they do stay you know that’s the land that’s that’s that’s their homeland iraq essentially so that or the second thought being they’re going to continue to be persecuted regardless of whether it’s isis whether it’s government whether it’s an al-qaeda irrespective of that their lives are in danger so everything needs to be done to sort of bring them out and and have them resettle in europe or the united states so there’s two very it causes quite a schism i think in that community because there’s just two very divergent thoughts on what the the better alternative to that is help them stay or help them leave a whole section here isis wives infighting jealousy and regrets and this is where you know you started i didn’t dive too much into it you said you were talking about the the recruitment system that they had in europe and i kind of moved past it i didn’t mean to like ignore that but it’s just that you address it a little bit more here lena frizzler was a 28 year old blue eyed blonde with milky pale skin from hamburg germany she was once an aspiring business student with european dream of money travel family and success in 2012 she married converted to islam and left the country comforts of her home for turkey she said that she had made the abrupt decision after being courted and encouraged by a known radical salafist in the hamburg area she called him pierre vogel who urged others to rise up and fight against the bashar al-assad syrian regime her husband also came under pierre’s spell one day my husband came home and told me he wants to go to syria and fight lina told me matter of factly as she nursed her one year’s old son her second child with an isis fighter and that goes back to what i said earlier with the government the corruption how much of this is a symptom of of that bigger problem that we tend to ignore and that’s what i found a lot with the these women and these fighters that especially the foreigners yes some were going very specifically to join isis but there was this sort of whole group that went before isis was even a thing and their mandate was to go and fight bashar and so i think that sort of we we tend to sort of overlook uh how much of a symptom you know it is of a government problem another german native a stunning raven-haired 26 year old named heidi ralphie told me she spent most of her days alone in a tent she said she had fallen in love with an older boy in 2009 then then several years in a relationship he informed her that he was going to help the people of syria that were suffering as a result of the war and bashar al-assad love struck heidi ditched her social network her social work studies for a life of a jihadi wife in 2014 her beloved kareem later died on the battlefield she remarried here’s the remarrying it was an easy process there was just there was an isis man we all knew with a laptop and he would just ask us what we wanted and bring us guys to choose i met three but chose a man from kosovo blinded by shrapnel because he wanted to go to turkey for an operation that was my out so she was trying to get out now she never made it across the border months dragged dragged on she wanted to return home to germany i was in love it was a mistake and often these women when they try to get out they’d get money someone from home would send the money and they’d pay you know what they called a smuggler or whatever to get them out and the smuggler would just take the money and drive them round and round and round in a few circles and drop them back so it sort of became this you know um hotel california you go in but you can and you can never leave so that was sort of the recurring theme with the women i found too that even if they wanted to it would they couldn’t ahmed a 43 year old departed karachi pakistan with her husband and children to fight for the syrian people my husband was distraught after seeing a unicef documentary about the war in syria he wanted to go fight bashar my husband sold our house and all our things for us to leave he used to be a normal man worked in telecommunications but he saw that documentary and he made it mind change and like you know like we like you’ve been saying that’s um what kind of underlying issues were in his head right what was going on could he not get ahead at work you know could he was he not getting the support that he needed what was going on you have to add in all these other factors another one um this is a this is a a male born to moroccan parents in the idyllic countryside just outside of brussels hamza was well known in his community revered for his soccer and boxing skills his last job was with dhl delivery service homs admitted that in 2011 he came became more militant in his ideological views after being introduced to a salafist group called sharia for belgium the group called for the overthrow of democracy and urged young people to join isis abroad almost two years after he had heeded the call and set out for the battlefield the organization would be formally designated as a terrorist group by the belgian state hamza was first placed at an immigrant’s location in the opposition bastion of idlib where he was housed alongside several western fighters after two weeks he spent he was sent for 40 days of training weapons fitness religious doctrine after that he was deployed to the northern city syrian city of aleppo to fight i just want to give people some kind of a indication hamza particularly remembered the isis celebrations after the 2014 beheading of american journalist james foley and how leaders used the gruesome event as motivation it was to say look how we are fighting the americans he continued underscoring that isis initially gained momentum after the formation of a coalition of over 60 allied nations designated to defeat them designed to defeat them the coalition’s creation was spun by the isis propaganda machine to show how strong the militant group was against such a massive force homs repeatedly emphasized in the interview that the ideology driving isis was not going to stop and had permeated some circles so profoundly that it would be next to impossible to defeat he also said each new incarnation of the group brought a school of thought even more rigid than its predecessor a central tenet of isis brainwashing of new followers was its singular focus on the united states hamza said in what he described as an obsession with america it was the big enemy gotta have somebody to fight against absolutely gotta have a bad guy we’re the good guys you gotta have a bad guy america makes a very nice bad guy for much of the world yeah and there’s always gonna be a different cause you know that’s what i always found too is that you could i’ll use example of of guantanamo bay so you could close that down but they’re going to find another cause so there’s always going to be a cause there’s always going to be a reason um and so i think we think we you close one thing down you you um you create a palestinian state whatever the reason is there’s always going to be another one and that’s something that i think people don’t really want to recognize also when it comes to policy is that you can’t have these arbitrary lines between war and peace necessarily i mean that those days are long gone with terrorist groups like this it’s just something that i think we have to learn to manage to some degree and i hate saying that because i want to be able to say that it can be totally defeated but i don’t think that’s realistic i think maybe i hope maybe i just hope but i i i always hope that human beings intrinsic motivation for freedom will rise eventually to a very positive place in the world i hope so too i really do uh i’m not even sure i believe my own hope that’s what my hope is though i said i hope yeah um i think and and what’s unfortunate is you know you see various places in the world where freedom rises and that my theory right would be that once it rises it’s going to move forward right and unfortunately we see it received i mean iran’s a great example right i mean right the freedom in iran in the 60s and 70s was completely on the rise and it absolutely receded totally so maybe maybe my hope is misplaced you know i think in sirius who you in the beginning with the revolution the arab spring you there were freedom fight you know they were it was a legitimate sort of movement of wanting a better life that wasn’t under the the bashar al-assad dictatorship but what happened was it got hijacked by a lot of of these terrorist groups and jihadists who then i guess diluted that opposition and then it became this very again it wasn’t black and white it was an incredibly complicated mixture of of opposition with a lot of them being good solid you know wanting to live a better life and then a lot of them being these awful terrorists so you know that that itself was something i think was was really hijacked and deluded yeah that story and you do a very good job in this of kind of showing some of those strange alliances very strange alliances that took place and what do you make of those strange alliances who are you aligned with and and wait a second what happens when we’re done with this job and all of a sudden i look my person that just helped me and realized that they’ve got a whole nother idea where they’re heading i mean iran worked to defeat isis too and look at well you know how the u s policy is with iran i mean the friend of your friend is not your is your enemy or or not yeah exactly that’s the thing is that that old saying is the thing that that saying just goes around in circles yeah yeah you know i’m gonna i’m gonna fast forward past some of this some of these horrors i’m gonna i’m gonna pass the pass the battle you know you you detail some of the stuff of mosul and you definitely talk about raqqa and in syria and i’m gonna fast forward and again i’m just gonna i have to otherwise i just sit here and read this entire book and i don’t want to have you here forever but we get to a point where the cleanup is now happening and this is at the end of the book and the cleanup is happening in missoula and and in this particular case there’s cleanup happening in in talafar and i’ll just go to the book 40 miles west of missoula talafar had a population of about a hundred thousand before being captured by isis in june of 2014 the city was liberated in october of 2017 remnants of war were everywhere bodies found around and under homes i learned were not uncommon neither was the smell of putrefied flesh in many cases families living under isis rule were for forced to bury bodies in their own homes and backyards as well as in local public squares sometimes victims were made to dig their own shallow graves the 43-person emergency division was tasked only with removing civilian remains from mass graves the larger 700 person nivena civil defense corps was in charge of sweeping up bodies from the streets and collecting them from individuals from individual from within individual homes the first wasted life to be wretched up from the sewage was that of an iraqi soldier his bones a blood drenched uniform and a pair of handcuffs were exhumed then came seven more all dragged from beneath a home that had once served as a local headquarters of isis local officials who had been tipped off to the presence of the remains just a couple days earlier said the victims were likely held in the basement across the street at a second location another 12 decomposed civilian bodies were exhumed among the remains found were those of at least two children and dismembered heads without bodies each skeleton bore a thick black blindfold most of the victims appeared to have been slain execution styles bullets showered into the backs of their heads it was a massacre more and more of the same one police official told me a police official always accompanied the recovery workers through their day’s work a standard practice it’s never-ending the official continued staring out the yellow fog which lifted into the bright sunshine as the day passed on officials had become all too familiar with the discovery of isis victims our duty is to the innocent people under the rubble said hamadi al-hussein commander of the civil defense corps emergency convoy unit he explained to me over cold tea the night before isis kills them and throws them into the sewage one by one and covers it over with cement this is their way after several grueling hours with small children watching from low-lying roof tops above 20 body bags were sealed and handed over to iraqi federal police law enforcement took them to a specialized committee for examining the bodies whenever possible surviving family members of the victims were notified a 44 year old rescue worker from mosul considered something of a hero among his peers for excavating the bodies for 27 years it was a job that never got easier sometimes it’s five or six entire families all buried in one house he told me after losing after hosing himself off behind the fire truck at the end of the shift in tallafar as a father especially when i see women and children it hurts i’ve had to pull out many pregnant women too darude said he and his team had recovered 2 400 bodies since mosul was liberated last july with more than two thousand of those coming from the old city on the west side in talafar they’d recovered 640 bodies many of whom were still unidentified another 500 bodies were discovered last year in a mass grave between the two [Music] strongholds it wasn’t just human recovery required of the dedicated team ali was also burdened with demining bodies sometimes those of isis fighters i can tell straight away if they are isis they are usually booby-trapped and often have foreign passports strapped to them we don’t remove them our command after demining them is to leave them and authorities take those i stood alone as the last of the lives were swathed in those big black bags their brains bursting through empty eye sockets i tore off my surgical mask heaving at the smell of rotting corpses in the unbearable heat iraq stood still at the fork between a potential future of death and one that would value life it was a place that resembled a fractured mosaic that could only be put back together by a young generation who knew little of life not maimed by the brutality there was supposed to be a time after the war it was supposed to be a time of peace only all it felt like was strange and sorrowful i thought about that tried and true expression we all tend to offer one another during hardships everything happens for a reason no there was no reason these young men and women had to die alone their bodies left to de decay in the literal bowels of their country there was no great lesson to come from that no sense in that they had completed their mission on earth and no reason that it was their time to be taken by god that is the lie we tell ourselves a child from the neighborhood who had watched without flinching as the bodies were brought up peered over what was left of the bond out fence he looked through the gaping hole into my tearful eyes soon we stopped crying for the dead he whispered but all we can do is cry for the living that too was war and that is um it’s not quite the closing of the book but obviously it’s the it’s the name of the book and like i said we probably covered five i probably read less than five percent of the book today and these stories i mean every page every story just captures so much of this perspective that you are trying to convey for me you know coming coming home from my experiences uh for instance my first deployment to iraq we spent a lot of time in humvees we were driving a lot we were at that time the enemy would attack from bridges so when you drive underneath a bridge you’d sort of get like a little you kind of go into a little bit of a standby mode get that little that little um heightened awareness right so when i got back to america you’re driving and as you know around baghdad and much of iraq they look like highways in california you know this is a big highway with signs and it there was you know when i first got back you’d start to feel or a vehicle would get close because you didn’t want vehicles close to your humvee convoy so you’d see a vehicle coming close and for that split second you’d think why is this guy getting close to me or you be approaching that bridge and get that little sensation of brace for it so you have these memories i guess that stick with you and i’ve got a bunch of those different memories that stick with me what where are you at what memories stick with you do you have trouble getting back to normal do you have trouble with going to sleep at night i think you know this this was a project i worked on a few years ago and i think there has been a little bit of distance from it for me i remember being in the middle of it and sort of um you know when i was still writing and covering it it was just it was it was an you know obsession to try to understand it to get the story right to get the facts right and it was so all-encompassing and coming back it you know it always took me a couple of weeks to kind of readjust but one of the biggest sort of long-lasting i guess impacts i always found what you know in my experience was i think it was a sense of that uh feeling a little bit unsafe but i would be in new york or l a i was living in both cities at the time and you get a phishing scam or something on your phone that everybody gets and for me it was oh my god i’m being targeted who wants something from me and i always i couldn’t separate um you know and think of it as well everybody gets these for me it just became this sort of i was convinced everybody was tapping into my phone or um and for me it was more of the i couldn’t see this sort of enemy you know and that took me a while to kind of let go of that a little bit and to be like you know you’re okay nobody’s nobody’s coming at you now nobody’s trying to hack into your emails nobody’s trying to figure out who you’re talking to on this particular day or maybe they were but you know it definitely was something i’d exaggerated i think in my head so that’s something i’ve had to have separation from and i think that um i’ve done that but i still i think about it a lot i think about you know a lot of the people that i met and think you know i try to find out where they are what they’re doing i think today with all these you know whatsapp signal encrypted messaging you stay in contact with these people a lot and that’s something that previous journalists and different generations didn’t have so today which is lovely you can still sort of stay in contact with them and their families and then but it also is is that you do sort of feel helpless because there’s not much you can do and i dedicate this book to um it was a family that i stayed within in syria and they live in a place called gabani and that was sort of one of the big isis strongholds in the beginning and you know they took me in and you create these immediate bonds with people because you know they were my immediate sort of family and they had two young sons and uh muslim’s wife parishion was pregnant at the time and they said oh when i left and we’d gone through all these you know experiences and and when i left they said oh well if she’s a um if we have a daughter we’re gonna name her holly and i just sort of smiled and i thought that was just really endearing and lovely sure enough a few months later i get a message and a picture that she had a girl and they named her holly’s fault the same as me that was funny and i try to sort of check in i can’t even send them a copy of the book i can’t send them you know anything but i tried to check in you know with them and it was really sweet because they said oh there’s about five hollies in kobani now so it’s kind of this funny little trend and i was just so i was so endeared by it and i think it’s those moments in life where you create bonds with people and they want nothing from you they’re not trying to get anything from you they’re not trying to have their name in a newspaper they’re not trying to to do any of that they just want to protect you and it’s such a rare thing in this day and age to have those relationships that you know aren’t transactional in some way other than it just comes from a place that is so pure and i think that’s also why i was so attracted to the work because you’re really meeting people in their most authentic state and i think that’s just a huge thing i’ve tried to do in my in my life at home too is is to really weed out you know what what doesn’t serve me as a human being and and look for those authentic relationships and that’s one of the biggest takeaways for me in working in those war zones i remember when when i got back from my last deployment and then i retired and i you know would talk to guys and see stories about guys that would that guys that were in vietnam war and they’d go back to vietnam and then when i started doing the podcast we met guys that had gone back to vietnam and i read more stories about guys that are going back to vietnam and then you know you can take it to the the guys that were in world war ii that would go back to the beaches of normandy and and i remember thinking to myself as far as going back to iraq especially when i first got home this is i don’t want to go back there don’t want to go back there no i’m never going back there only recently have i started to feel think to myself you know it would be kind of cool to go back and walk those streets again where are you at oh i was i was planning to go back just before uh covered lockdown i had a visa to go and then i was approached to even go i think like uh in a couple of weeks to go and i had to sort of turn it down because for different reasons but oh yeah in a heartbeat i feel like iraq is sort of just a um yeah it’s kind of a second home really you know it’s been a little bit since i’ve been there but i have i have nothing but but sort of a desire to still go there i don’t um i don’t view it as a place that i i never want to go again yeah i’m slowly getting through that um maybe because i don’t have a lot of things i don’t really like my memories of it a lot of them are great memories that’s what makes me start you know i used to say to the platoon guys like you’re going through things while you’re on deployment and you’re mad about this and you’re mad at that guy and you’re mad at this other guy and i said you know what two weeks after we get home you’re gonna forget all those bad stuff just remember the good stuff and sure enough as time goes by you just remember the good stuff so i think i’m getting there with uh specifically with the city of ramadi and it was really i mean obviously it was heart-wrenching to see that when when ramadi got taken over by isis and the the black flag of isis flying over the government center which i know so many people had fought so hard to liberate that city and it was doing so well and then it got smashed by isis i remember there’s pictures of after after the iraqi soldiers went back in they annihilated ramadi they blew up so many buildings there was a neighborhood called tamim on in western western ramadi and they i saw pictures of it it was just leveled building after building after building because they just every building that they thought might have a mine they blew it up and guess what they thought about they all had ieds so they blew them all up but yeah i think you have a much better relationship with the land and the people and the memories that i do right yeah and for me it really is it comes down to the people it does it’s it’s the people who who i mean what a privilege it is to to for these people to just to trust you enough with some of these stories to be that vulnerable with somebody that they don’t know you know at least initially and i just think that’s that’s something i i take as a as an honor really to be able to to be some kind of vessel in uh in telling that for me you know i hate to use the word voice when people say the voice of the voiceless i no they have a voice but but i think as a journalist you you are some kind of vessel that can can bring that back and and tell that and i can’t do anything really beyond that i think that was also something i had to learn was that you want to be able to think that a story is going to make a difference it’s going to change so and so you know some lawmakers mind somewhere and something’s going to happen and you know 99 9 of the time doesn’t change anything but doesn’t make it any you know less important to do and b once you take that weight off your shoulders it’s so much easier to do your job because again it’s that clear mandate you know what it is that you’re doing and everything else after that is out of your hands and and not in the description well that’s a probably a great place to wrap this up because what you’ve absolutely done in this book is you have told their stories and we will pass these stories on to as many people as as we can and uh i think like hallie love said you know you’ve got what your talent is right you’ve got your skill in life and heli love can make videos and sing and and you’ve got this ability to write and share these stories and that’s what you’ve done so echo you got anything no that’s it i know holly that we can find you well the book will be up on the website um if you want to order the book on twitter and on instagram you are holly i e is that a weird spelling for hong kong i guess it’s it’s slightly unusual because my mom was having a moment holly s mccann mckay mckay on and on facebook there’s no s just holly mckay and you also have hollymckay com yes so i’ll put it up there yep so people can go there and check out what you’re up to what’s your next project what are you going to do next so i’m working on a few different things so i have a couple of writing projects that i am notting out the basis on it’s a it’s going to be quite a journey and i’m waiting for travel to open up but i’m sort of looking a little bit more into the survival aspect of it um so yeah so that’ll be interesting and i am yeah just kind of focused on that for now and sort of doing a lot more um sort of geopolitical stuff as well so it’s kind of branching out do you write do you are you writing news anymore on a regular basis i’m doing a little bit here and there um but i’m really focused on my more long-term projects right now kind of getting down a little bit more to the nitty-gritty and the things that i i really see is important as opposed to uh the daily churn so i’m sort of taking a bit of a leap in that so it’s nice how was the book writing process did you like it i you have always have a love hate with it you know um but most of the time i really love it and i i love being able to to i hate being having to decipher my handwriting out of a notebook but beyond that i really love being able to kind of just sit and you sort of meditate on the details and and i try to remember colors and faces and places and and all those things and and try to to put it into words and so it can be challenging definitely and it can be definitely moments that i just i don’t want to get up and do it did you take pictures i did i took a lot of pictures so we need to get those up on the website i’ll get you pictures of whatever you need so a lot of these these people they have uh they have uh faces and places and yeah the you wrote a novel i did when i was young and what’s up with the novel where i’m i’m sure it’s it’s somewhere in australia probably in my dad’s [Music] it was a it was a sort of a young teen fiction novel yeah we don’t need to go into that i love to write i was writing you know that was one thing aside from from my ballet from a young age i love to tell those stories and always sort of love to write and make up weird and wonderful things and yeah awesome awesome um anything else do you got anything else here so i just yeah thank you for having me here and you know it’s obviously these things don’t happen in isolation so i have a wonderful family back home in australia my parents have always been amazing support my sister and my nieces and and then my i call in my american family which is really my you know close-knit group of friends that i have in in different pockets of america that have really been such a backbone of support for me um i had one good friend miley cardenas who’s a veteran and she came on a few trips with me and was amazing and another good friend of mine dennis santiago who helped me with the editing so yeah they’re really my family in the us and then my my family in australia well it’s all come together for uh i mean i think it’s very clear that this is a powerful book and i i thank you for coming on here i thank you for letting uh jocko publishing put it out along with uh along with d’angelo publishing yeah our friend sequoia so that’s awesome and it’s it’s an honor for me to be able to help get this book out there to the world and get these stories shared thank you i appreciate it and by look i i i hope i didn’t come off as um crazy or arrogant or like a jerk when i was talking about the fact that you we we do some crazy stuff when we’re young and there’s a certain amount of being naive but i don’t care how naive you are or how naive you were for you to go into these places to capture these stories and i didn’t there’s there’s plenty of stories in there where i know from being in combat myself how close you were to the front lines how close you how much danger you were in all the time so thank you for writing the book but also thank you for your courage and your bravery to go out there take these risks to capture these stories to capture the horrors of war so that hopefully we as a race of people in the world can learn to avoid it at all costs absolutely thank you holly thank you thank you both and with that holly has left the building and left us with an incredible book with some incredible accounts in it so definitely check out that book a lot of horror in that book yeah a lot of horror in the world yeah yeah it’s bad hell like like she’ll describe each detail and it goes along with kind of what we’ve been saying a lot where it’s like yeah when you just individualize one thing and see their story it’s like oh man it really opens up this perspective of like man this is bad yep yeah and by the way this is 430 something page book you know and i probably read 20 pages something like that so it’s an awesome book and yeah check it out a lot of horror a lot of horror in the book a lot of horror in the world i kind of feel like we should do our best to bring some good in the world starting with our own lives yes trying to live a good life live a good life yeah start there yeah kind of be appreciative too you know oh yeah i didn’t bring it up holly just you know um living on the floor of some random blown-out building she’s getting after it man she’s getting after it she doesn’t she she talks about it but it’s not that’s what i it’s very humbly written story because it’s not about her yeah yeah that’s good it’s not about her it’s about the people and so with that it’s yeah yeah very cool yeah that says kind of a lot too about an author don’t make it about themselves because you could she could oh this could 100 this could be a book about her yeah 100 i went here and i did this and i did that it’s not that that’s not what the book is i thought my life is about to be over yeah in fact i had to drag it out of her i had to drag out of her where she came from and how it started and how she got there she just jumps right into it and what you just said about i was here and i was there she’ll be talking about it and i can tell what she means but a lot of people it’s going to she said you know their explosion happened here but you know what i’m i’m thinking okay i know what’s happening there there’s gunfire going on that’s not she just kind of puts it under the rate under the radar kind of her mo is to be under the radar so yeah you know so yeah yeah we do have to be appreciative for sure where like even at like even if you’re not involved in the war in these places even though i guess be appreciative of that yeah because like your day-to-day life here versus day-to-day life there even best case scenarios bro it’s different your worst case your worst day here is better than your best day there for 99 of the population if not more oh yeah so yeah men make the best of it’s one of those deals right anyway all right so yes let’s not let our lives and capabilities go to waste in any way let’s try not to how about that intention is a big deal you know it is just knowing these things that’s a that’s a huge start you know like gi joe remember what they’d say knowing is half the battle did gi joe actually say that i thought that was sun tzu and twenty five thousand twenty five hundred years ago no yeah yes sir so probably gi joe yeah so you got to keep these things in mind did you work out today if you’re like oh wait did i work out and you got to know this kind of stuff and you got to know whether or not you’re working out tomorrow you see him saying working out is important definitely and yes i did work out today yes sir you work out every day right seven days like that’s that’s the the that’s that’s the jam yeah i recently incorporated that into my whole thing usually i’d have a five day and then two rest day situation two rest days yes sir back to back yes sir like usually the weekend because my program goes five days at a time like week by week and that’s just how it is convenient and it is convenient but it had that was it even before even before i was like well i need rest days or nothing like that or had less one had less going on that’s what i’m saying so that was the the structured program but i found that if you sort of spread it out a little bit more and i try to go hard too on every single day like hard at least one thing hard you know some people they’ll be like oh yeah seven days but like this one or two days like it’s like a mobility day or whatever well i might have depending on how i feel i can i can tell when i’ve beat myself down to where i need a quote mobility data for sure oh yeah i’ll usually still try and break a sweat yeah like just at a minimum just you know at a minute i’m going to break a sweat yeah see and that and you know there’s uh there’s a bunch of different effective philosophies in working out and working on programs so like i get i’m not saying oh you’re not going to be as good as mine i’m not saying that at all but i found and currently what i’m currently on is the to um do something hard like hard where your body has to be like hey we got to recover from this whether it be like a one small body part situation even like a metcon situation like that just at least one thing i like that on these kind of one-off days a normal workout day is hard is it’s going to be a hard one oh you’re saying on the easier day you’re still going to do one thing hard hard yet i like it i actually do a very similar version of that not consciously but unconsciously yeah so let’s say i’m going a little bit let’s say i’m not going super hard metcon style but i’m going to probably go heavy or if i’m going heavy or if i’m not really like feeling the metcon i’ll go heavy somewhere yeah so i guess we’re kind of in the same boat there yeah it keeps your body there trying to you know trying to adapt adapt and get you know kind of re uh rebuild itself as the new and improved version anyway so hopefully we can kind of take this philosophy and apply it to our whole life hopefully i’m saying but here’s here’s the thing keep in mind we might need some supplementation from time to time you don’t get you don’t get nine hours of sleep every single night you know you don’t you don’t max maximally nine hours because is that it hey everybody’s different so you don’t you don’t recover max you don’t maximize your recovery every single day okay once well you need some supplementation for sure you need supplementation in fact you got a little supplementation routine boom you’re gonna be on the track even quicker faster more effectively no worries jocko has some supplementation choco fuel so here it is you need protein supplementation got milk tastes like a dessert by the way i’ve been on that train for about almost a month now i forgot i forgot the joy the glory um so actually we’re going to rewind just a little bit so all this stuff you can be on a subscription yeah we mentioned it before but the subscription you will not have to pay shipping right you will not have to remember to take these less fun ones to take and i mean less fun like they’re like anti-fun i’m just saying the difference between taking a milkshake drinking a milkshake and taking joint warfare or super cruel oil like one has like a pleasurable experience one is kind of like okay you just sort of do it one’s prolonged pleasure when you don’t have joint pain yeah but that’s the delayed that’s the deal gratification i’m just saying if you forget like it’s a little bit more can be more of a thing anyway track you got a subscription you don’t have to even think about that kind of stuff also do you get a like a discount or something you get a discount right yep little ten percent discount boom so if you subscribe yeah yeah and free shipping so you combine those two things together we’re in a good spot oh yeah so it’s kind of a win-win yeah it’s a no-brainer if you’re like if you’re taking it consistently which you should be trust me the difference between even that taking it not taking it consistently night and day man so if you’re doing it it’s a win-win-win really triple win triple win comment so jacofuel com you can get your supplementation there which you apparently do need you do need and if you subscribe to it you get shipping free and you get 10 off which is cool you can also get the drinks the go drinks at wawa you can get all the supplements at vitamin shop so there you go or jockofield com yep do what you want to do do what you do if you see something if you like something you get something get something also at origenmaine com jeans geez all american made by the way all american made yeah all meaning all of them and all meaning the entire product itself is all american made do you can you and i don’t expect you to answer this question but i wonder if you can find something that’s not american made in the whole chain like if you go to one of the looms that they got could you find like a set of screws that are used in there you’ll be like hey those are made in you know somewhere else you are going to be hard-pressed to find something in your genes that is not 100 percent american crazy in fact the jeans i can tell you there’s nothing that’s not american-made the clothing 100 american-made i mean and not only is it 100 american-made we know where it came from we know where the the hide is that we’re getting the leather from we know where that is yeah it goes deep so yeah american-made bunch of awesome stuff by a bunch of all made by a bunch of awesome people in farmington maine yep sorry originusa com sorry i said origin maine i’m sure you can still go to origin you can’t let’s face it originusa com a little bit stronger we’ll say stronger yes not that maine’s not strong but look who would you rather fight a war against maine or america you know what i’m saying including maine yeah which includes maine right so i think we’ll go we’ll go with origin usa yes sir i agree so yes also jocko has a store as well dracostore com this is where you can get your discipline equals freedom shirts and hats and hoodies good all kinds of cool stuff on there you get the shirt i’m wearing right now yeah you can get the jacket that you’re wearing is that called a jacket lightweight hoodie you can get a lightweight hoodie that echo charles is wearing right now yeah why it’s lightweight hoodie weather you’re over here taking on and off your hoodie which i dig it’s just off currently it is because i’m warm enough you showed you showed up with it on you see what i’m saying cool outside i showed up with mine on fine came in here fine you see i’m saying though so all i’m going to tell you is that in the middle of the bell curve you’re good if we go outside the bell curve in either direction you’re out of here out of luck so if it gets a little colder you’re screwed and if it gets more hot you’re screwed yeah that’s true so i guess it looks like i’m right i i like the aesthetic value that this lightweight okay so you like the look some of us some of us like this kind of stuff some of us are just over here trying to win nonetheless worried about how we look nonetheless these things are available for those of us who appreciate it speaking of appreciation if you can appreciate let’s say one-off designs or concepts we call them layers from time to time on our apparel that we choose to wear because it looks good and feels good we have a little subscription situation as well so it’s the shirt locker we’ve uh landed on that name with the help of jocko’s creativity no no that was not my creativity that was a suggestion from the trooper yep i got your name the shirt locker because the name which i will not mention because i don’t want to hear it yes sir that echo charles lack of creativity yes sir okay got us too we’ll will that’s the name that will not be spoken shall not be spoken okay because now we got something good the shirt locker locker so that is a monthly thing you get a new a new design they’re cool they’re they’re there’s some layers there’s a attention and focus on the layers so if you listen you know and you’re gonna understand this it kind of is yes sir but yes yeah check that out and if that seems cool hey that might that one might be for you as well jugglestore com that’s where you can get those subscribe to the podcast leave a review if you want to we also got other podcasts we got the jocko unraveling podcast which daryl cooper is in the house we should be rolling out with some of those grounded podcasts again work in it and the warrior kid podcast working it i have some time coming up so we should get some of those done you can also join us at the jocko underground dot com jocko underground com we have alternative podcasts with some amplifying information some other subject matter some behind the scenes we’ve got some q a that we’re working on where you can send in your audio voice video thing and we’ll put all that together also the underground what i kind of notice when i listen to them and stuff these are like i mean i think it all even the jock podcast of course like makes your brain like think and work and stuff but it’s like i find myself like doing little brain it’s like exercise for your brain almost you know you start to think about stuff like oh wait do i do that oh wait does that apply to me yeah i would tell you that the subject matter in the jocko underground podcasts are based on me going through daily life and recognizing the patterns and the maneuvers and the thoughts and the and the curiosity and hey wait why do i why did that happen why do we do that and sometimes it doesn’t fit into a jocko podcast because it’s some something about psychology or something about negotiating whatever yeah and so but it’s very important and does it it’s like a venn diagram is there some part of it that’s leadership yes there is some hundred that’s the history yes there’s some psychology some social it’s all mixed in there but what it’s what it is it’s all subject matter that will help you helps me it helps me but it’s me digging into and revealing why these things are happening why am i doing these things sometimes my instincts are good sometimes they’re not good but either way i’m gonna learn from it and it’s just the approach that i take in life to try and figure something out because like jiu jitsu you know when you train jujitsu and someone goes oh put your arm here and you’re like okay but then the next day you don’t really remember that but if someone says put your put your arm here and here’s why you do it and you start to understand the concept so i think that’s a big part of the jocko underground podcast is what’s the concept behind what’s happening here what makes it like jiu-jitsu obviously a great analogy where like there’s certain things in jiu-jitsu and subsequently in life or your day-to-day whatever that certain things are not intuitive in fact they’re counter counter into like you know just to turn your back right and like a full like there’s so many reasons in regular life to like turn your back that’s the best move it feels like it from moment to moment like if someone’s mounted on you like turning your back if you never trained you did too it’s weird basically i want to get away how do you get away turn your back and run away yeah right you can’t run anymore yeah like if you’re mounting you try to stand up the most powerful way you can stand up is to turn over and stand up with him on your back you can’t do a sit-up with someone correct you know so it’s like there’s all these intuitive things that are incorrect that is going to make you lose and then in life it’s the same thing with like a lot of those whether it be the cognitive biases or whatever it’s kind of the same thing and everything yeah it’s real interesting how you kind of explore them and you’re like oh man you shoot and then then you know what to do and what not to do so that’s the jockowunderground com if you want to if you want to come and check that out look it’s it’s also us our way of having a contingency plan in case things get wild in case there’s a bunch of things that could happen look we could get censored for something that some subject matter that we cover we could get people could start to say okay well now you’re gonna we’re gonna put our inject advertisements into your podcast we don’t want that we we just want to have a long advertisement at the end that echo talks for 48 minutes on but we don’t want that so that’s what we’re doing we don’t we don’t want to be held hostage by a platform or held hostage by sponsors and so eight dollars and eighteen cents a month if you want you can you can join the jocko underground dot com and and if you can’t afford that look we’re not uh we’re not trying to be elite so if you can’t afford it no factor email assistance jockonunderground com and we will take care of you it’s true we also have a youtube channel where you can check out echo charles’s legit videos where i on the good ones i’m the assistant director on the bad ones he kind of goes solo so you can check those out lots of explosions we have an album with tracks called psychological warfare you can listen to that if you have a momentary just a just a just a temptation that you need to overcome it’s okay hit play psychological warfare all on your mp3 platforms flip side canvas dakota meyer flipsidecanvas com cool stuff to hang on your wall we have a bunch of books only cry for the living by holly mckay there you go check that one out final spin a novel written by me we don’t even know if it’s a novel i don’t know if it’s a novel i don’t know if it’s a poem i don’t know if it’s just i don’t know what it is but we’ll see i’ve been getting warnings people are going to critique you i’m like that warning what are they going to say to me your book sucks cool thank you carry on good critique thanks leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluations protocols displace freedom fan field manual warrior kid one two three and four get those for any kids that you know mike in the dragons get those with the little kids that you know about face by hackworth extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership echelon front is my leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership if you need help with leadership in your organization go to ashlandfront com we have ef online which is leadership training online which means you can get it for everybody that you know everyone inside your organization and whatever problems you’re having inside your organization the problems get solved through leadership as i just said well there’s nothing better than getting everyone on your team aligned around the same principles of leadership it’s it’s insane to think you would even try and run an organization without having everyone aligned around the same principles of leadership so go to efonline com and start taking some courses go through the program come and do q and a’s we have a live gig that we do we’re doing three of them this year go to extreme ownership com if you want to come to those ef overwatch if you need people inside your company to help you with your leadership that you want to hire go to eforewatch com and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their family families you want to help gold star families check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she’s got a charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to americasmightywarriors org and if you want to continue this conversation we’re on the interwebs once again holly is on twitter and on instagram holly s mckay it’s h-o-l-l-i-e-s mckay m-c-k-a-y and she’s on facebook holly mckay and she also has holly mckay com and of course echo and i are also on the interwebs on twitter on instagram which echo only refers to as the graham and facebook echoes that aquacharles and i am matt jockle willing thanks once again to holly mckay for taking risk for showing courage and for capturing these stories to share with all of us and thanks to all the military personnel out there all over the world who stand and face evil like isis every day thank you for keeping that evil at bay and right here at home all the police and law enforcement firefighters and paramedics and emts and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all first responders thank you for keeping us safe on the home front and everyone else out there you heard it today there is a lot of evil in the world it’s everywhere and it’s up to all of us to fight against it that doesn’t mean you you have to pick up a gun doesn’t mean you have to pick up a weapon doesn’t mean you have to go overseas but you have to fight it and we have to make sure we keep it at bay by making sure we never forget that it’s there and then what we need to do is go out every day and do good and bring light into the world and until next time this is echo and jocko out