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 xin zhao 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 and attorney 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 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 court that’s how i always felt about the career and just because they say they don’t suffer from any psychological problems doesn’t mean that 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 locust 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 been referenced 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 missoula 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 you know 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 i’d 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 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 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 veterans 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 and 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 el 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 standing there going you’re just crazy and then suppose we’re 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 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 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 gotta not play by the rules under the radar that’s the theme
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