 All right, well, thank you all for coming out tonight. On behalf of Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president here at New America and Peter Bergen, our director of studies in the International Security Program, we're thrilled to have you here tonight. We're going to do a book event. To my left, we have Maddie Friedman, the author of Pumpkin Flowers, which you can buy here, which I have a copy of here, which you can buy outside. Or of course, you can purchase on your favorite online or Book Brick and Mortar Bookstore. And again, Maddie, like all authors, really, really would like you to read the book, but cares even more that you buy it. So, of course, everyone here has read it, but they should be buying copies for their friends, kids, grandchildren, sisters, siblings, Mother's Day present, et cetera. So we're going to start. We're going to do this in three parts. We'll have Maddie talk about the book, about the themes, about what he saw. We'll then have a brief conversation about what I've written about, the connections between the Israeli experience in there, what do you call it, undeclared war in the Israeli undeclared war in South Lebanon and the American experience in Iraq and to the lesser extent, Afghanistan. And then we'll turn to the audience and have a conversation here. So without further ado, Maddie, stage is yours. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for coming. This connection started with a review that Douglas wrote for War on the Rocks of the Book in which you kind of read this book, which is about a small, little-known guerrilla conflict in South Lebanon in the 90s. You kind of read it as a parable, almost, about the American war in Iraq. And I found that so interesting, because I watched the war in Iraq unfold through the window of my experience in Lebanon in the 90s. And so much of the Iraq experience seemed similar to me, the IEDs, the use of video, an enemy that wasn't a state, but an organization working in a failed state and the fact that a strong military goes into one war and finds itself in a completely different war. And this all seemed very familiar to me. And so I wrote this book with that in mind. And you read my book about Lebanon through the window of Iraq, which was such a kind of an interesting development, which I was thrilled to see, of course. I was born and raised in Toronto, so far from Iraq and far from Lebanon. And I moved to Israel when I was 17 in 1995. And as is the case in Israel, if you become a citizen, you get drafted. There's a compulsory draft, of course. Men serve three years, women serve two years. And after I finished working for a year on a Key Boots, I became a citizen and was drafted. And I found myself in this very odd guerrilla conflict in South Lebanon about which I knew very, very little. I found myself at this outpost, which was a few miles north of the Israeli border. The outpost was called Outpost Pumpkin. All of the Israeli military bases inside Lebanon for these isolated and very grim emplacements of barbed wire and earthen bankments and machine guns and grim places. They all had these beautiful floral names, kind of bed and breakfast names. So there was the pumpkin and nearby was Outpost Basil, Outpost Cyprus, Outpost Citrus, Outpost Red Pepper was one nearby, and ours was Outpost Pumpkin. And I had serious experiences at the end of the 1990s as part of this very confusing war that really introduced me to something that I had not been expecting to find when I moved to Israel with some very simple ideas about where I was going. And I've been processing those experiences since then. I could take the discussion of that strange war in Lebanon in a few different directions, but I'm gonna focus just because I have the pleasure of being with you here in Washington on the commonalities of experience for Israeli soldiers and for American soldiers who experienced very similar kind of war after the Lebanon war ended. Israel pulls out, I guess I should say that throughout the 1990s, Israel wages an increasingly serious guerrilla war against Hezbollah, which starts out as a ragtag organization that people didn't take seriously. By the end of the 1990s, Hezbollah's definitely a serious player, and now, of course, it is one of the most important regional actors. That development happens mainly in the 1990s, and it happens during this war about what, about almost, about which almost nothing is known. There's no history book about this war. The war has no name. It hasn't been given a military ribbon in Israel. There was an invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that's considered a war that war ended in the fall of 1982. But the Israeli military remained in Lebanon for another 18 years. And those 18 years are kind of a black hole. You can't understand Israel without them. You can't understand the Middle East without them. I think you can't understand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without them, but almost nothing has been written about them. Strangely, this is one of the first attempts to grapple with that period. I'm gonna show a two-minute video, which we were discussing earlier, shot by Hezbollah cameraman at Outpost Pumpkin in 1994. I'll just give you a sentence or two about what you're gonna see and then we can talk about it afterward because I think it'll lead us into an interesting discussion about what war is in 2017. The Outpost in the fall of 1994 was not particularly fortified. The war was only starting to get serious. It was manned by a few dozen troops from an engineering company of one of the Israeli infantry brigades. And on a Saturday at the end of October 1994, Hezbollah team attacked the Outpost. And one of the fighters wasn't carrying an AK-47 or a rocket launcher, although you'll see both of those weapons in the video. One of the fighters was carrying a video camera. This is 1994, so it's pretty smartphone, pretty Facebook, no one's ever used the word viral to describe information. This is very, very early from 2017. 1994 is basically medieval times in information terms. Let's just watch this very brief video. The key shot comes right at the end and then we'll talk a bit about what we saw. So what we just saw was the planting of a flag at an Israeli Outpost in the fall of 1994, kind of an Iwo Jima-like moment. The Hezbollah fighters approached the Outpost and they shoot all kinds of stuff at the Outpost and then a team kind of detaches from the main body of the attacking force and runs up to the Outpost and plants a flag and then the video ends. The frame, that frame of the fighter planting the flag printed in all of the newspapers in Israel, the video is almost immediately shown on television across the Middle East. This is 1994 so satellite TV is starting to happen, information is starting to move across borders which it hadn't before because governments control the information that the population consumed and that's changing so Hezbollah has this video that understands how things work and they show it everywhere and they are applauded across the Arab world. In Israel this causes intense concern. This incident is called the disgrace. That's what it's called in newspaper headlines. The very young officer who was in charge of the Outpost is reprimanded, soldiers are kicked out of the army and there are courts, martial and in general public discontent with the outcome of this event because this is a humiliation for the Israeli army. It looks like the capturing of an Israeli Outpost and that's indeed how it was remembered and to this day when you talk to people in Israel about it, not everyone remembers it of course but they remember it as the capturing or the conquering of Outpost pumpkin in 1994 and that's the way Hezbollah also remembers it in their histories. What actually happened was in military terms nothing. What happened was that the Hezbollah guys ran up to the top of the embankment at Outpost pumpkin, planted a flag, filmed it and then ran away so they were never in the Outpost. The Outpost was not captured. One soldier from the garrison was killed but there was no change in the Israeli alignment in South Lebanon, nothing changed in military terms. There was no strategic change. The Outpost was there after the attack and everything remained more or less the same and that was the Israeli military's response to this incident. The military said, listen, there was an attempt to capture an Outpost and we repulsed the attack and nothing changed and yet there was this public furor about this incident driven by the video which is so powerful and I think we have to remember that in 1994 it was much more powerful because no one had ever seen this kind of thing. Now we've all seen these videos which are essentially the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of this video. Now we see them all the time and we even recognize the tropes so you have the martial music playing in the background. You often have a symbol of a militant group in the corner of the screen and you have fighters shouting in Arabic and this is all common to anyone who's followed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or anywhere over the past 15 years but no one had ever seen anything like this. There was no reality TV in 1994. So this is very powerful stuff and the army's explanations that nothing happened fall on deaf ears because everyone can see that something happened and what I think is important about this event is that it, if you're looking for the beginning of this new kind of warfare, you can point to different events. All of them at about the same time in the early 90s but I think that we can point to this event at the end of October 1994 as one of the points where this new idea of what war is starts to really kick in. What does the idea say? What does his bullet get that the Israeli military and the soldiers at Outpost Pumpkin don't get? They understand that you don't need to capture the outpost, right? The Iwo Jima which is the inspiration I think for that video, the picture in the picture of the Marines planting their flag is taken after a terrible battle on Iwo Jima and the Marines actually take Iwo Jima. These guys are maybe smarter. They understand that you don't need to take Iwo Jima. All you need is the picture of the guys with the flag. All you need is a convincing image that can mobilize support for your organization and demoralize the enemy and that does not require actually conquering an outpost which is after all very difficult. So all you need to do is take a picture, take a powerful picture and deploy it as a propaganda weapon. And if you do that enough and if you do it in a way that's smart enough, eventually your supporters will believe that you are winning and your enemies will believe that they're losing. And as Bala does this again and again throughout the 1990s in South Lebanon, there's no military contest in South Lebanon just as there was never a military contest in Iraq. But the Israeli public begins to believe that it is losing. And his Bala is constantly telling a story because this is a story, right, this video. That's what it is, it's not an attack. Outpost pumpkin isn't a military objective, they're not trying to capture it. Outpost pumpkin is a stage on which they are enacting a story that they're telling their own people and that they're telling Israelis. And the story is we're winning and you're losing. We're winning and you're losing. We're winning and you're losing. And if you repeat it enough and if you show it enough and if your images are strong enough then eventually it's gonna start to work and the public support in Israel for the war ebbs throughout the 1990s. In 1997, the number of casualties in South Lebanon spikes in part because of the helicopter crash, carrying soldiers up to Outpost Pumpkin and one other Outpost. And a protest movement is founded called the Four Mothers Movement. It's Four Mothers of Military Age Children. They get together and they decide that they're gonna get the army out of Lebanon. Public opinion begins to shift and in the spring of 2000, the Israeli military blows up all of its Outpost in South Lebanon. My company blew up Outpost Pumpkin and they withdraw. And I think that if we're looking for the roots of what we now consider to be war in the 21st century, South Lebanon and this war that no one's cared about, I think is a pretty good place to start. Not only do we see the rise of very effective cognitive warfare being practiced by people who we didn't take seriously, who we consider to be primitive, but the stuff's primitive. I mean, it's jumpy and fuzzy, but it is incredibly sophisticated. In many ways, it's more sophisticated than all of our sophisticated military equipment in South Lebanon. We see the rise of IEDs. We didn't call them IEDs, but IEDs are perfected in South Lebanon used against the Israeli army, including the precise prototypes that we were talking about earlier that are used against American troops in Iraq afterward, particularly one called EFP, which is a hollow charge armor piercing IED that was used in South Lebanon. And I remember when they started to be used, cell phone triggers, laser triggers, all this kind of stuff that is intimately familiar and fortified to American troops from those two big wars over the past 15 years. We saw them first in South Lebanon, the fact that we weren't fighting an army, we were fighting an organization, an organization that was driven by Islamic ideology and had a very different script that they were pursuing, not a script that we understood. This is all very familiar. So I think that a student of Middle East or a student of history has a lot to learn from this period and from this strange outpost that has been forgotten even in Israel. I think so long, but I won't. You could. I mean, there are so many threads we could pick up here to talk about. Let's start with here, though. This traditionally, terrorists have always been about, the term of art is the propaganda of the deed. We make a really interesting point here. Here it's the propaganda of the non-deed or the undead that it's really not even important that there be a deed or something that it has a important effect at any rate. That's the junk, right? Because the Russian terrorists, for example, terrorism is very old, we have Russian terrorists trying to kill the Tsar at the end of the 1800s, but they were actually trying to kill the Tsar. That's what they were trying to do. If his baller was in their place, they wouldn't have tried to kill the Tsar, because that's really hard. They would have taken a picture that made it look as if they had. Or had the capability of, right. The thought I had was of the four Blackwater contractors hanging on the Pelusia Bridge, except for the, obviously, the four poor unfortunate souls involved and their friends and families. They had almost no strategic significance. Pelusia had been a bad place to go the day before that. It was still a bad place to go the day after that. But the fact that they capture four guys in the wrong place at the wrong time, kill them and hang them from a bridge, burn to as I recall, somehow changes everything and makes Pelusia appear to be this iconic center of the resistance to use a term. Because you have these strong and shocking images and, of course, the continuation of that is the very polished ISIS videos. So you have a pilot being burned in a cage now, again, apart from that poor guy and his family. That's not a military, that doesn't have military significance. One less pilot, except it has enormous strategic significance because it makes everyone crazy. And the actors in the conflict behave in ways that aren't necessarily rational. If you want to take that even further and this might be a more subversive point, 9-11. It's 9-11, a militarily significant attack. I would say no, right? They weren't trying to capture Manhattan. They didn't capture Manhattan. It was a terror attack on a vast scale, but it wasn't. They didn't wipe out an American division and take one of the states. It was a story. It's a violent and incredibly powerful story that these actors are telling themselves and telling us, and it really takes us out of the old ways that wars are discussed with the movement of troops and the balance of power, and it takes us into a realm that's pretty close to philosophy. Yeah, I'll have to think on that. So you have, to my mind, Hezbollah is the first group in our era to move into this space where it has a way in which it can challenge a state power. We've had guerrillas and insurgents before, but the Viet Cong were always significantly backed by a state and really kind of the forward echelon of the North Vietnamese state. Not that they didn't have their own logic, but still. But Hezbollah, it strikes me, is something new and different since cloned. I mean, essentially ISIS is a version of Hezbollah. You could say the Eastern Ukrainian rebels are their own version of Hezbollah. But let's talk a little bit about Hezbollah as the first iteration of this supercharged non-state power. And you were kind of in a position to watch the development. I was kind of listening to you talk about how them is this ragtag band at first. The same way we thought about both the Shia and Sunni-Iraqi insurgents in Iraq early. I think Bradley, who's this guy in his sports and pajamas? Exactly, exactly. They die really, really easy, but it turns out they're learning, whether just through normal education or what we call combat Darwinism. The stupid ones die really, really quickly. The ones who survive are very smart and adaptive and learn very quickly. Talk about what you saw. Sure, I mean, of course at the time I didn't understand what I was seeing because I was 19 and I had no perspective on it at all. And what we understood was happening in the Middle East at the time was that there was gonna be peace. And I read about this a bit in the book, but Lebanon was seen as a secondary event, what was really important in the 90s in Israel. And I think for every observer of the Middle East was the peace process. There was gonna be a new Middle East that was being formed around negotiating tables and ironically the very same day that this happens at Al-Post Pumpkin, Rabin, the Prime Minister at the time, is in Casablanca for a peace conference with the King of Morocco. And they're discussing economic peace and the Israeli papers are full of headlines about the peace that's coming. And on the very same day, the real New Middle East is born or you could make that argument and the only people who saw it were a bunch of 19-year-olds on this hill and they didn't understand what they were seeing. In retrospect, what we were seeing was the rise of what we now understand is the New Middle East. Hezbollah is perhaps, as you said, the best example because hezbollah, unlike the other organizations that preceded it, learned very fast, learned from its mistakes. You can see that the guys in the video are not a rag-tag bunch of fighters. This is 1994. They're already, they look pretty good. They look like they know what they're doing. They're wearing uniforms, they're wearing helmets. They're not wearing jeans and sneakers, which they used to in the 80s. So they're learning. And of course, at the same time, this idea is popping up in different places. So it's not just hezbollah. They're doing what they're doing in South Lebanon, but the World Trade Center gets bombed in 1993. People think it's a one-off and it's not taken particularly seriously. Al-Qaeda is moving in the Middle East in the 90s. Hamas, which is another ideological cousin, Hamas begins to make itself felt precisely in the same years when we think there's a peace process happening, but actually Hamas is increasingly employing different tactics toward a different, and so big important ideas often pop up in different places at the same time. What hezbollah provides is an example of victory because they practice this strategy of just hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting, videos, IDs, claiming victory, telling this very powerful story again and again and again, and it culminates with an Israeli withdrawal. And in 2000, and it's pretty hard to argue that that was a victory for Hezbollah and there are movies of our armored personnel carriers leaving Lebanon and our outposts exploding, and they went to the Middle East with proof of the effectiveness of their tactic and everyone saw it. I mean, certainly the Palestinians saw it and it had a lot to do with the fact that the second the de-fada starts a few months later, using tactics that were similar in some cases, the kids in Iraq saw it, kids everywhere in the Middle East side. They saw the Westerners, the powerful foreigners in their eyes turn tail and run, and rather than interpreting that as a step in the right direction, which is what we thought we were doing and were throwing from Lebanon, they took it as proof that victory was possible and the same tactics were tried on us afterward and were tried as soon as the Americans set foot in the region a couple years later. Again, what struck me about your book was how many ways the story rhymes with the US experience as a kind of a through the looking glass version. So four mothers, the Israeli version of Code Pink discuss. Well, not exactly because Israeli society is unique in that the connection between civilians and the military is very tight and that makes it very different than the United States. We have a draft, which means that most people are in the military. So the mothers who started this protest movement aren't anti-war activists. As Americans would understand it, they don't come out of a college campus, they're not, they're from the left, but they're from the Zionist mainstream left and their kids are combat soldiers and they come very much from inside the Israeli establishment and their opposition to the war has a lot to do with the fact that they know the army very well and their kids are in the army and their husbands were in the army and their brothers were in the army. One of them lost a brother in the Air Force in the 60s and lost a son in Lebanon in 1997 and it's all based on this very intimate relationship that the Israeli public has with the army. So I think it was generated in large part by fear, not just an ideological objection to war, but fear that their sons were going to die. You know that it makes, it's a different order of activism. They thought this war was not necessary, that it was a mistake and that if they didn't do something about it, their sons and other people's sons were gonna die for no reason. And that I think explains how effective they were. When that protest movement started in 1997, pretty much all Israelis agreed that we had to be inside Lebanon to protect the northern border. They can't defend the border from the border. They have to be inside to provide a buffer zone that will keep these guys away from our border communities within a year or two because of the four mothers who were all of the very small group of people and they just catalyzed a 180 degree shift in public opinion and by 1999, most people no longer believed that the security zone was necessary and in the spring of 2000, the whole thing ended. But it's very Israeli and it's very Israeli to have mothers of soldiers, mothers who can call members of parliament, mothers who have the phone number of the aid to the prime minister. That's very Israeli. It's a very small country and it's a very tight country. Not really different I think than the United States. What's a mother's a soldier's and a son could think too though. So I'll leave that there though. You said that you talked about the connection between Israeli society and the army and yet in your book you make it clear that the little piece of the army that was actually in combat really felt foreign coming back to coming home. Talk about coming home as this little, because here's where I think the commonality gets really close. In order to put the parallel in Israel, the army is large and kind of permeates everything but the piece of the army that was fighting at least in this period is very, very small. In America, the army is fairly small relative to the size of the population and is more disconnected, but almost the entire of the army was involved. So it was hard to find someone involved with the army who wasn't in some way involved in the Iraq-Afghanistan experience. So I think you've got different dynamics but the net effect might be almost the same. I guess there is something too that I mean, I've been avidly following the writing coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan and reading a lot of the books that I've been written by vets coming back and this sense that I get from the books of this incredible disconnect of being in the midst of something incredibly confusing and foreign at one moment and then getting on that, the plane home and getting off. Freedom bird, yes. The freedom bird and getting off in the United States of America where no one knows what's going on. There's that great scene in the Hurt Locker where, which many of you, I guess, saw where he's standing in the supermarket. I think that scene is about, you know, he's a bomb disposal guy in Iraq and it's all very grim and something he's back in America in this vast aisle in a supermarket with endless choices of breakfast cereals and laundry detergents and it's this moment and I'm sure you remember yourself coming back home and having a similar moment of surprise and disconnect. Did you? A little, a little. My experience was different. I went to war when I was 37. So... That could make it hard here, right? Yes and no. I had been married, I'd raised children, I'd been to graduate school, I'd spent 15 years of my life in the institutions and knew it intimately. It's a very different experience. I've talked about this a little bit. I think it's just, you have so many more emotional resources to deal with these discontinuities. I mean, I don't think you've read a lot more. You just have more life experience upon which to absorb this new experience where for the 19-year-old who, let's say, has maybe charitably two or three years of adult experience, charitably. Yes. It's an entirely different thing. That becomes much more formative and I think it's then harder for that younger man, let's say almost always males, that younger man to then process this and figure out who am I outside of this combat experience that is now dominates a huge portion of my adult experience. Yes, I think that's true. In the case of Lebanon, of course, the security zone was very close to Israel. You just cross the Israeli border and you'd be in the security zone and from Outpost Pumpkin, which was one of the most distant outposts, inside Lebanon we could see Israel. So I could stand at a guard post at the pumpkin and turn around and I would see the houses of Matula, which is the northernmost community in Israel, and which is not the experience of an American soldier in Iraq. But we definitely had the experience of getting on these convoys and within 20, 30 minutes of travel and these armored convoys, we'd do that across the border and we'd be in Israel and we felt that no one, despite everything I just said about the close ties between the army and the society, we felt that people didn't understand that we'd just been in a war. Like 20 minutes before we'd been in a war and now we were standing in whatever city inside Israel and we were still tingling, we still had that feeling that we could be attacked from behind every garbage can, but everyone was talking about their business and no one seemed to know where we'd been and if you interview soldiers who served in Lebanon as I did, everyone remembers that experience of crossing the border, that kind of weird re-entry, which is so fast because it's so close, it's not a flight, there's no freedom bird, it's just a very short drive and you're back in reality where your experience is completely hallucinatory, people can't even imagine what you'd been going through a half an hour earlier in that, that's one of the main elements of the Lebanon experience, which is I think strengthened by the fact that the society never admitted that there was a war going on and as soon as it was over, forgot it and never gave it a name and has never written anything about it so there's a lot of guys walking around Israel like me, thousands who had this experience in this war and have never seen any recognition of it so we kind of have this thing in our head that we don't know where to put and no one else has ever told us that it's important. This book just came out in Hebrew actually and it's been interesting and it's in Hebrew as well, it's one of the first attempts ever to grapple with that period and I've been getting pretty crazy emails from guys who've been walking around with all kinds of stuff in their head and just have never seen it written down, I've never seen any evidence that it happened, you start to suspect that maybe it didn't really happen and that I think is, that disconnect I think is shared or versions of the same disconnect are shared by the soldiers coming back from Lebanon, soldiers coming back from Iraq to society that has no idea what they were up to. That's interesting, you talk about the distance and how quickly it could happen. In the army, we figured this out after about the first year or so of being in Iraq, the first cohort of units that were there that came back, it was remarkably quick. Guys would be doing combat operations one day and then the second day they'd be packing their stuff and the third day they'd be in Kuwait and the fourth day they're back home on their base and seeing their families and going out. We very quickly figured out that was a really monumentally bad idea. It's a decompression. So we would pick guys up and then literally drop them in Kuwait for like 10 days. Let's talk about this, put your guns away. No one's carrying guns anymore. This is like this transit limbo in between the war zone and home and you can kind of absorb the fact that you're out of combat, you no longer have to duck at loud noises. And it gave people a chance, particularly the combat soldiers, to readjust a little bit, get used to three regular meals a day, sleeping on normal schedules, not getting up in the middle of the night to do things. Did you find that soldiers, that your soldiers were angry upon coming back to the United States and finding that no one knew where they were? Or did they just expect that? Well, that's probably a difference for us. Military towns are military towns. So everyone there kind of knows what's going on. It's not like, you know, you're being dropped ones, our Vietnam experience was much like that because draftees were picked up from wherever and then dropped back into wherever, be that rural Mississippi or Manhattan or Brooklyn or where have you. Probably not very many draftees from Manhattan, but the Bronx was part of that. Queens. So, you know, dropped back into their homes and that was, I think, a much more disorienting experience. Whereas, you know, during the Iraq war, I think this is probably one of the positives and probably why there's less, I think the reservists have a different experience with the regular army that goes over there as a group and comes back as a group and you're in a company town, excuse me, where everyone understands what's going on, what's happened, has some connection to the institution. I think that's a very different experience. So to get that kind of experience, you probably have to turn to the reservists and the guardsmen who deployed and then went back in a much more isolated way to smaller towns and so on. Because I can imagine the, you know, you think you're putting your life on the line for something and you believe in something and you come back and no one knows. I think at least in Israel, because the country's small, because the country's in that war for as long as it has and because so many people have been in the army, so if your chances are your brothers were in the army and your uncle was in the army and your father was in the army and it kind of exists, your experience makes sense to people outside of the military bubble in America, it probably doesn't. And so if you're coming back from Iraq to some place where you're the only guy who's been in the military, it must be a very disorienting experience. One of the quotes out of your book, the signs popping up everywhere in Israel, get out of Lebanon in peace. Talking about the interaction of that, the interaction of the policy, this is a pretty neutral statement. This is not, these are baby killers in Lebanon, right. This is, get out of Lebanon in peace. It's a purely policy position. It's not disparaging of the army per se, which would probably be very hard in Israel. But how does this interact with the experience of, again, the 19 year olds who are fighting? It becomes very confusing by the end of the period. So the mothers and their supporters are going around the country and they have signs that often say things like get out of Lebanon in peace or bring the children home, bring the boys home. It's never baby killers. So it's never expressed as criticism of the soldiers. It's expressed by presenting the soldiers as victims of bad policy. And every death, and there are deaths, every couple of weeks a soldier is killed there, every death becomes seen as a waste. And we have to stop the waste. So for the soldiers inside Lebanon, at the end of this period, it's very confusing. We're told that we need to be inside Lebanon to defend the Northern border. In every outpost in Lebanon, there was a sign that said the mission, colon, defending the Northern communities. And we all believed that. We had to believe that. That was what we were being told to do. And we were told implicitly that the pumpkin, this hilltop in the middle of Lebanon, was worth our lives. If there wasn't talk on the pumpkin, we're supposed to die to protect the pumpkin. At the same time, civilians were saying that we don't need to be there. That we could get out of Lebanon in peace. That in fact, we weren't preventing casualties by being in Lebanon. We were causing casualties by being in Lebanon. That was costing more than it was saving. That we didn't need to protect the border inside Lebanon. So it takes a while for this up to trickle into the army. I was a radio man in my first tour at the pumpkin and none of the soldiers were talking about this stuff. It was all about the mission and everyone was pretty much on board. The second tour I did at the pumpkin was in 1999 and I was a platoon sergeant. And by then, some of the soldiers had kind of absorbed what was going on. And there were some soldiers who asked questions about why we were doing what we were doing. And I got some pushback from soldiers about going out of the outpost to do what we had to do outside the outpost because why? And everyone knew we were going to withdraw at some point who Barack government is elected in 1999 and declares that within a year, they're pulling out of Lebanon. But me and my guys were still in Lebanon. So what are we supposed to do? I mean, and it was very, very complicated. And at the time I was a good soldier, so for better or worse. And then I believed in the mission and I tried to do what needed to be done and some of my soldiers were smart and they asked good questions and it definitely caused tension by the end. One of the tropes of media coverage by the end of the period was that no one wants to be the last fatality in Lebanon. Every, all the soldiers were worried that they would be the last soldier killed in Lebanon. And of course, there's always a soldier in a war who's the last fatality. A guy from Baltimore, his name escapes me, like William Gunther was killed, he's the last soldier killed in the First World War after the armistice had been signed but before it officially took effect. This stuff happens and you don't wanna be that guy but it makes it very, very complicated for the young men involved. So you pick up in your book on one of the consistent themes of war literature which is the utter boredom of fighting a war. Long, long periods of border punctuated by moments of terror. Talk about that experience. Talk about boredom, right? If I really, and I said this right off the bat in the book because I know that any soldier reading the book would think the book was bullshit if I didn't say it. If I presented this war as being kind of a, just a combat narrative and shooting this and that. I mean, that's BS, right? It doesn't work like that. So right at the beginning I say if I were writing an honest history of this war, it would be just pages and pages where nothing happens and daydreams and hallucinations and exhaustion and that's what it was most of the time. You just can't write a book about daydreams and hallucinations and boredom because no one's gonna read your book. But that was the experience and the enemy as I write, the enemy's expertise was surprised. ID's that were disguised as boulders or anti-tank missiles that were kind of threaded through the window of a guard post. Very short mortar barrages that would just come and go. That was their specialty and our specialty was waiting, just waited. We waited in the guard post and we waited in the tanks and we waited in the bushes and we just waited for them and most of the time we just waited and we didn't do anything and that was a big part of the experience and the terrifying parts of it and the exciting parts of it punctuated these extended periods of boredom and one thing that we're gonna have to grab with, we, you know, people writing about these wars, whether it's this war or Iraq and Afghanistan, there needs to be a language to describe these wars as they are because I think often what people do is they try to make them into something that they're not, which is, you know, Vietnam or, you know, even though I'm sure there was a lot of boredom in Vietnam or some, you know, the Second World War or a combat, a very exciting combat narrative but that's not how it works but most of the time it is sitting around and you don't know what's going on and then all of a sudden something very tragic happens and then it's over and then you're wondering what happened and when it's gonna happen again and it's a different way, these wars work in a different way and they need to be written about in a different way. I think the last theme that we, you know, that I wanna talk about in the book which we talked about briefly backstage is going back to the battlefield. You have an interesting moment where you realize that a, you know, fellow Canadian is gonna travel to Lebanon. You have a great phrase, you know, for her, Lebanon's just a place. Right. For me, Lebanon was, you know, for all the Israelis who served there, Lebanon wasn't the place. It was an experience. It was, you know, the war and the question was what you did in Lebanon and how were you in Lebanon and anyone who was a real man was in Lebanon but it wasn't a real place. It was, you know, it was this experience. It was the test of manhood and then a friend of mine named Sonia who's from Toronto arrived in Israel in, must have been 2001 having backpacked from Turkey through Syria and Lebanon and she came to Israel and she said she'd been in Lebanon and I said, what? And she said, yeah, here's my lonely planet, you know, Lebanon guide and I went here and here and I said, what? It's just a place. You can just go there. There are tourists. You can go there. Which, you know, it blew my mind and as soon as the seed of that idea was in my head I couldn't shake it because I'm Canadian. I grew up in Toronto until age 17 at the Canadian passport and I knew I could go. I could just go. Now when we were soldiers in south Lebanon one of our greatest jokes was that we were going to go back because it's just a fantastically beautiful country. So we were, you know, manning this hilltop and you can't escape the fact that it's absolutely gorgeous and there's a river that runs underneath the outpost to the Mediterranean and green slopes and cedars and picturesque villages on the sides of mountains and the Hermon, which is this mountain at the meeting of the borders between Israel, Syria and Lebanon which is snowy, snow-capped mountains and it's absolutely beautiful and we used to joke that we were going to go back. One day we were coming back there was going to be peace and we were going to hike here and we were going to sail in inner tubes down the Lee Tine River and we knew the names of houses in the Shia town that we used to look at with our binoculars but we could never go to and we were going to visit that house when we needed to visit that house and this was a joke. We never expected it to happen. Except I started thinking but it could happen because I could go back. So the army pulls out of Lebanon in the spring of 2000 and in the fall of 2002 I took my Canadian passport. I flew back to Canada. It should be a short cab ride from Israel to Lebanon, right? It's very, very close. It should be, you know, 10 bucks in a cab. I flew back to Canada and then back to Lebanon from Canada so that if anyone traced my ticket it would make sense and I spent two weeks in Lebanon as a Canadian tourist and I had an amazing, crazy, very powerful trip to Lebanon and the culmination of which was a visit to Outpost Pumpkin which by that time was a ruin and I got there in a taxi and yeah, for me this is, you know, a moment that I think other soldiers might be able to understand the idea that you go back to this place which for you isn't part of the real world because you're torn from the real world and you're thrown into this trench in France or you're thrown into Normandy or you're thrown into Najaf which I know, you know, that's where you were and you're there in altered reality or soldier with dangers, you could die but you want to stand there as a civilian and you want to see the place and you want to talk to the people instead of seeing them through a gun sight and this is a common dream for soldiers and I think it's a rare experience to have actually realized that dream as I did and as I know you did too because you also went back to Najaf as a civilian. Yeah, I've been back to Najaf several times you fly into Najaf airport, you know, with a visa and what's that like? It's surreal, at least the first time it's very surreal to stand on ground that for you was a battleground but for everyone else it's just home or a place of business or a place they do things or just, you know, the way things are for you, the place that you experienced and is the only there that you know for them is this really strange aberration this really strange time that has nothing to do with really this place and how we think about it and that, you know, like... It's just our town. Right, right, it's like if your only experience of New Orleans is when it's underwater from flood, you know and you don't understand that New Orleans is really something very, very different where there's, you know, carnival and bars and, you know, nightlife and corruption and everything else that is New Orleans likewise going to Najaf, you know my experience there really defining combat experience was for the people in Najaf just this really weird aberrant moment that didn't last very long and then for them life went back to normal and I left, I never got to see the normal you know, if you're there in uniform carrying a gun you prevent normality you prevent normality from being there but to go back years later in suit and tie with a blue passport just, you know, obeying the local laws doing what normal people visiting a foreign country do could you tell people there that you've been there in uniform? I avoided the topic although I have had the conversation I've had a conversation with a guy who was inside the shrine shooting at me we didn't have this conversation in Najaf we did elsewhere but he and I were talking late at night and I knew that he was affiliated with the Sartras movement he'd since moved on to a different movement and, yeah oh well, I was inside really I was outside, yeah and that was a kind of I mean, it had to be done through a translator so it wasn't terribly intimate it was a fascinating experience with a little bit of closure amazing, amazing for us in Lebanon the aspect of that that stood out most for us was this one restaurant that I mentioned in the book we'd ride these armored convoys into Lebanon and we were in war as far as we understood and our weapons were loaded and we were ready for anything and we used to pass on the banks of the Litany River this bridge and next to the bridge on the Litany River was just a very simple restaurant right on the banks of the river and it was absolutely gorgeous and it made no sense because we were in a war what the hell is this restaurant doing here but they're not, they're just at a restaurant and our dream was that one day we would eat at the restaurant and this psychologically was a way to explain to ourselves that this wasn't normal what we were doing wasn't normal and that eventually normalcy would reassert itself which was clearly a place where we were supposed to sit and I went back to Lebanon and one of the things that I did that I had to do was go back to the restaurant I needed to eat at the restaurant and this was the greatest dream of many soldiers who served at Outpost Pumpkin and everyone in that sector eating at this restaurant and this was a dream meal and it was pretty bad the food was bad sorry to hear that do your emails having written the book are you getting lots of people who kind of vicariously live this through you you've eaten at that restaurant I remember that play I realized a dream that was common to most of the soldiers who served there and as I said I've been getting some very interesting emails over the past couple months a lot of repressed memory resurfacing because of this book great with that I think we'll turn to our audience David has a microphone so if you want to ask a question raise your hand I'll call on you because it's a smaller group I'll wave my usual rule about please make it a question if you want to engage in a conversation that doesn't necessarily have a question with Maddie that's more than fine but let's go ahead and start right here thanks a lot for this I'm sorry could you tell me my name is Gil I'm a postdoc in philosophy but I grew up in Israel served in Gulani served after 2000 so I didn't go into Lebanon nevertheless the book definitely resonated well with me it was definitely the experience of reading in English was actually a really interesting experience of kind of going through the names and then back into Hebrew figuring out what you're talking about it was a really powerful experience I'm curious about you were talking so I'm also through this guy who might speak I'm involved in something called the coming home dialogues working with American vets and being the sole Israeli representative just by happenstance one of the things that seemed very clear to me in the difference of experiences that we had was that for me like you said there was a bit of this discussion everyone knows what you go through and I thought that about my experience as being true I served in the Second Lebanese War I served in the West Bank a lot kind of everyone knew, understood my experience and to read in the book and also hearing now talk about how people that were in Lebanon didn't have that sense in the way that seemed a lot more from what I understood from Americans the American experience I'm just kind of curious to hear about that more about how that kind of different experience can come back home and talk to people because only people that were in Lebanon understand this in a way that it's a great question and that makes this experience different than the experience of Israeli soldiers who served after the withdrawal in 2000 because we were in a different country and the security zone was closed so you couldn't just go there reporters couldn't go there the reserve army was not used there it was specific units who were deployed to these so it was actually not that many guys who had the experience of living in Lebanon for prolonged periods of time so we could only talk about it with each other we had this kind of strange monastic experience living on a mountain 60 guys on a mountain with convoys that would come once a week if there were no bombs and it made us feel special I felt special I would be wrong to say that I loved every minute of serving in Lebanon but I definitely felt that I was at the tip of the spear not only was I in a good infantry unit but I was at the end of the end of the world I was the last Israeli and I stood in the western guard post set up as pumpkin, I was the last Israeli there was nothing between me and the enemy and this was a unique experience shared by not that many guys and for the guys who did share the experience it was an incredibly powerful experience why basically no one has articulated it until now there haven't been there haven't been books about it there's a novel about it that came out a few years after withdrawal called Before published in English under the name Before but there's been no non-fiction writing about it in part I think because it is so confusing and so hard to put your finger on exactly what happened right here Hi amazing book, full disclosure I haven't had a chance to read it all I'm Charles Perkins I do defense military issues at APAC down the road so I'm pretty familiar from a sort of theoretical policy side about what you're talking about in some of the history but I'm wondering in writing this have you looked at in terms of how has gone back and taken lessons learned to the extent that it applied to 06 very different kind of war obviously but in terms of little things like how did that kind of a long deployment affect the psychology of the troops coming in and out was it the right experience to only have 19 year olds I didn't realize actually that there was a lot of civilian troops that went in would that have made more sense to have more seasoned guys who had other kinds of combat experience spend time up there and maybe some of the officers were I don't know but I think you're absolutely right I was following these issues at the time but the focus was much more on the latest bus bombing during the mid 90s it was indeed the sort of forgotten front and it wasn't particularly popular again I want to make a speech I'm sorry I'm just I'm wondering what you think moving forward with God forbid the possibility there might be a third Lebanon conflict which many paint has a full scale war completely opposite of what you're talking about are there nevertheless experiences not just from 06 but from your period in Lebanon was it really applied moving forward for the idea I see these issues from the point of view of absolute bottom of hierarchy so I don't know I'm not a strategy guy the most exalted rank I achieved in the army was sergeant so the army that interests me is really the level of the platoon and the squad and I don't really know about more broad strategic issues however I do think that the army learned from Lebanon that it's a bad idea to hunker down for prolonged periods of time in a situation where you're going to have to leave eventually and you saw in Lebanon in 06 for example that the army goes in and it comes out they didn't start to build outposts and they didn't start to repeat the security zone mistake I think it's basically a knowledge to be to have been a mistake at least at the end of the period so the army I think does understand that I believe don't be there in the first place go in and go out and don't start building outposts and import concrete over everything and don't put yourself in a situation where you're going to lose eventually where your enemy is going to win and you're going to lose and that's what happened in Lebanon as for the use of more seasoned soldiers in Lebanon it's an interesting question and the reason I think that reserve troops most of the Israeli army as many as you probably know is a reserve army there's a small reserve army which are 19-20 year old and they're supposed to hold the line in case of an attack until the reserves can be called up but most of the army is a reserve the problem with the reserve army and it's a problem with the Israeli army in general is that it's very chaotic and democratic and no one does what they're told and everyone writes letters and everyone knows journalists and people call members of parliament and they cause problems and one of the reasons that Lebanon in the early years in the 80's got very hairy was because reservists were really unhappy with people who were lawyers and accountants and journalists or whatever and they'd find themselves inside Lebanon and they'd say what the hell is going on here and they wouldn't shut up about it they would come out of Lebanon and they would make a ruckus and the army didn't want it so they decided in the security zone it was going to have not just the regular army but you're going to have good units of the regular army, good kids who aren't going to cause problems and who will do what they're told at these outposts and I think that which is that there was no dissent in the ranks in south Lebanon, the army functioned until the end there were very few letters to the editor being written from outposts in Lebanon whether that was good or bad for society is a good question Again, we won't talk policy, we'll talk first person but from a first person perspective what was it like for you seeing the 2006 Lebanon war and I asked this because I think we this may have analogies particularly for those of you working with US military people with those who fought in Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul places that then fell to ISIS later and then you have to take them back so that's the reason I'm asking the question but the question to you is what was it like seeing the 2006 Lebanon war through the perspective of what you fought before but just you know what I have in the back of my mind The 2006 war punctuated something that I think I already understood at that point which is that nothing ended with the withdrawal when we pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 I interpreted and many of us did as being the end of something and in the 90s the conflict was supposed to be ending that's what we thought we thought that the Lebanon war was the last war of the old Middle East Mission accomplished the war of the new Middle East and when we pulled out the war didn't end and we interpreted Hezbollah at that time as a kind of Viet Cong as an ideological actor that wants a specific piece of land and you give them the piece of land South Vietnam and the war is over and that's what we thought but that's not what they're up they're playing a much broader game they're playing a different game they're working off a religious script proof that their script works and the war gets carried on both in Lebanon and to other fronts as well so when the army goes back in in 2006 it sounds like Gil was there I hear these same names the same Lebanese names the same towns and as I'm sure any Marine hearing the name Fallujah again and again you have to take it again and again feels that it's not over it's supposed to be over because in the old days of war you took the enemy city and that was it you took Berlin and the war ended it doesn't work like that anymore it's a much more fluid situation it's like a tide and if you understand that to be the war then you have to make different decisions about it because if you understand that you're going to take Fallujah and the second you're out of there it's going to fall again or if you take Afghanistan and the second you're out of there it's going to fall again then you have to decide whether you want to take that at all because these wars work differently other questions Gil mentioned about the names about the names translated into English something that's always fascinated me about the American military is the language that's spoken by the military and what you can learn from the jargon spoken by the military so I wrote a piece about this for the Atlantic from my own interest a year or two ago about the language that's spoken by different armies and the American language as I understand it just from reading reading books is Hellfire, Apache the call signs tend to be things like Cougar and kind of an aggressive military language and the Israeli military language is bizarrely floral and peaceful and in a way that suggests the kind of denial about what's actually being done so the Alphos and Lebanon as I mentioned had these names of fruits and vegetables and we had a system that warned us of incoming mortar shells that was called Buttercup and I'm pretty sure there's nothing in the Marine Corps called Buttercup I'm pretty confident that's true we named all our bases for concepts, freedom, liberty victory so on, independence right, union etc and in Israel it's all nature so the infantry weapon in Israel now was the M-16 until recently and now it's a gun called the Tavola Tavola's Mount Tabor it's just this pretty green hill and the night vision system for tank gunners is called Artichoke and the language is so different from the language with the American military and I've always wondered what that says about the two military cultures and how they speak about what they're doing that's great I'll have to read the piece ma'am I guess I'm wondering you had said in the beginning that if you understood Israel going into Lebanon you'd understand the whole Middle East but to me part of the lesson of the Middle East particularly with the U.S. interventions is that we didn't know what we were doing and we shouldn't have gone in so you don't seem to apply that to Israel which is puzzling to me explain that a bit that's interesting I mean did Israel I mean aside from maybe defeating Hezbollah they didn't seem to really understand what Hezbollah was doing and I just isn't Lebanon also where Israel went with tanks into a refugee camp in 82 you mean right so the Israeli attempt or the Israeli attempt to deal with the threat from Lebanon doesn't start with this war with Hezbollah this war is one incarnation of a war that began essentially in the late 60s with Palestinian mostly PLO incursions into Israel and then Israeli retaliations into Lebanon which went badly awry in 1982 Israel goes in with a massive military invasion hoping to rewrite the entire situation in the Middle East starting with Lebanon installing a friendly government in Lebanon that will sign a peace agreement with Israel and this all goes wrong and Israel gets sucked into internal Lebanese conflicts and Israel is controlling much of Beirut when a Christian militia goes into two Palestinian refugee camps Sabran Shatila and massacres Palestinians in retaliation for the murder of the Christian leader Bashir Jameil by Syrian it's all very complicated and what Israel learns in Lebanon is the limitations of power so if you have the idea that you're going to go into the Middle East with your army and you're going to reorder things with military force you are not going to do that and Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, chasen and with much smaller horizons and you won't find many Israelis today you think that you can redo the Middle East with the military and interestingly Israelis understand that in 2000 more or less just as the Americans embark on a similar attempt to kind of redo the Middle East with the military and it ends in a similar way right and it's interesting parallels that both groups think they can impose a certain order and it turns out local forces are more powerful than any army that you can project in there and to oversimplify you create Hezbollah and we create ISIS congratulations a job well done ma'am in the corner hi my name is Alyssa thanks much it's been really interesting I have two questions when you talked about the reception and specific responses you've gotten from Israeli soldiers the more broadly Israeli public whether it's the literary scene or just generally how are they responding to a book that's talking about a conflict that hasn't been talked about and then second to that if at all has there been any reception in Lebanon I mean if the book has not been translated to Arabic I'm not sure how that would work but if people are reading it in English they're hearing about it if I don't know where the Hebrew version is at if it's already out or not let's talk about what if at all they're talking about really quick the Lebanese it's fascinating Arabic is their birth language but I found almost none of them are literate in it they read English and French speak Arabic is their mother language but it's surprising how many Lebanese can't read and write Arabic but they're not illiterate they just read English and French I'll start with the second one I would love for people to read this book in Lebanon and my dream would be to get a guy who's a dentist in Beirut or in Dearborn or something that says I was a Hezbollah fighter at that same time in that same area that's my dream it hasn't happened I haven't received any responses from Lebanon so I don't know if anyone's read it or if they've read it and don't have anything to say about it or if they've read it and wouldn't contact an Israeli or to talk about it the response in Israel has been very, very interesting and the most emotional responses have been from soldiers who served in this war and I think we're all kind of approaching 40 or around 40 and that's an age when you start thinking about where we are on the continuum of things and what happened and what experiences shaped us and for many Israelis it was this whether or not you were actually there this was the generational experience of the 1990s as a broader literary phenomenon there aren't that many book reviews in Israel so the Haaretz is the liberal paper and they review the book quite positively but the response or the responses that have reached me have been overwhelmingly from people of that generation including mothers of soldiers who were there and people who were their girlfriends of soldiers people who had personal experience of that time and were kind of happy to see someone write about it and prove that it had actually happened Yes, right here Hi, my name is Philip thanks for your talk and your writing you mentioned a sense of yourself as kind of the last Israeli before the enemy what was your sense of the enemy if you could see from your post the bad restaurant by the river presumably you weren't shooting everything that moved so what was your sense of what the enemy is Right, that's a great question it was very complicated because it wasn't like the trenches in the First World War where it was you in the trench and then no man's land and then the German army on the other side of the trench our outpost looked over a Shia town called Nabatia which was as well a stronghold and still is but it's also just a regular town like Najaf, right, it can be a battlefield for you but for many people in the town it's just the place where they live so what we saw most of the time was people going to work and you know school and the gas station and lots of mosques and you never knew what if what you were seeing was suspicious or not when things happened at night in certain places you knew that it was suspicious and we had interactions with his Bala in the sector they would come out of the town and they would attack the outpost or shell the outpost from the town but most of the time I was looking at civilians and I remember the World Cup in 1998 was an amazing example of kind of common humanity because all of everyone's crazy for soccer of course being Middle Eastern Israelis and Lebanese and outpost was completely shut down because with the World Cup because there were certain soldiers that missed certain matches so we had to plan the guard duty rotation so that you know Yossi could see the Brazil game and Avi could see the whatever I'm Canadian I don't even know what the teams are but I was left out because everyone was into soccer both at the outpost and all the Shia people in the town which was decked with Brazil banners and everyone was watching the games and there was a match at that time in the US our patron and their patron and there were jokes about this in the outpost that the Iranians had better win because if the Iranians lose they're going to take out their anger on the nearest representatives of American imperialism which was us on the hill overlooking the town and luckily for us the Iranians did win and everything was pretty chill that night but most of the time when I say looking out at the enemy I was looking at people who were just regular people among them were and that's also a feature of these wars the enemy doesn't tend to move in uniforms or in ranks and they don't drive tanks and they don't wave a flag saying I'm the enemy sometimes a shepherd approaching the outpost with his flock is a scout who's trying to find the best way to the outpost for an attack and sometimes a shepherd is just a shepherd it's that kind of war go ahead quick follow up this is in the book but did you have any interactions with the south Lebanon army the SLA and I guess when you said our patron and their patron made me think what were the nature to the extent you know purely ground eye level it's okay to the extent you've thought about this why was your Lebanese proxy is I was trying not to say proxy but different in their motivation their performance their skill from Iran and Hezbollah and I guess you know one can understand sort of like when we pulled out of south Vietnam there was there was no equivalent process of the way there was vietnamization that the SLA had any prospect of warring after you guys left but I'm just wondering what was the strategic concept in terms of using the SLA could it have been done better are there any again lessons for other friendly regional entities that Israel might have sort of tacit alliances with the SLA was an Israeli allied militia the south Lebanon the south Lebanon army which was commanded mostly by Christians Maronites from the south it started out as an attempt to protect Christian communities from the Palestinians with the original enemy and then became kind of an Israeli ally in the fight against Hezbollah and it's always been interesting for me to track the process of the Afghan national army and the Iraqi army and these more or less I don't want to say fictional but aspirational local allies that the United States like the army south Vietnam you know likes to believe in until the Americans go away and everything collapses and something similar happened with the SLA treated well with kind of claim that the SLA was an actual thing that we were helping and they were almost about to become operationally independent you know what I mean but it just never quite happened they never quite get there and it turned out that they only existed for as long as we were there and for the soldiers in Lebanon that was clear with these guys a lot our range of hills which is called the Al-Itahir range there were two big Israeli outposts both for Castle and Pumpkin and there were three or four other outposts Citrus, Red Pepper and Cyprus that were south Lebanon army outposts and we interacted with them and we used to take over their outposts sometime and you could just tell you could just tell that this was not a fighting force to be reckoned with it was kind of a rotten Eastern militia and there might have been forces in there that were more committed largely I think on ethnic lines so Christians for example had their own beef and they had their own fight in Lebanon but many of the soldiers in the SLA were Shia who had cousins in his bull up and some of them were Druze and they were in it for the money and as soon as the money went away the south Lebanon army collapsed and it could only have collapsed I don't think anyone really expected it to do to do anything else on the other side we had Hezbollah which is not which is an Iranian I mean it's an invention of the Iranian Revolutionary Garden it's an Iranian proxy and it would not exist without Iran but they sat on a real thing they were you know their Shia and they had a clear story and it was a tribal story and they were riding the wave of the Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Shia the return of the Shia to you know to self respect and that's very powerful and his story wasn't a powerful story it was just let's protect our villages and you know get money from you know from the Israelis well that's not you know really die for that you can get a lot of Shia kids to sign up for Hezbollah and die for their story because it was a very strong story it wasn't really a it was no contest at hand Yes a great question I've been thinking about this for a long time when I was in Afghanistan in 2010 my friend Jim Gant who has his own unique story he said he's like what we're doing here in Afghanistan is we are taking the best irregular fighters in the world and turning them into the worst regular army outside of Africa which did kind of sum up the the case I think there's my observation is that there is something to Arabs and South Asian citizens that does not conform well to the western idea of what an army should be and when you put them into a western style army they tend not to do very well now conversely you put them into Hezbollah or Asab al-Haq or ISIS or the Taliban and they fight just fine thank you very much so I think and I'm still struggling with this idea I've been thinking about it for a long time I think there's something to the structure you know a western army assumes that there's no family ties you know that the team leader is going to obey his squad leader because he's a squad leader and he's not going to obey the platoon sergeant over in the other company because that's his uncle I think that may have something to do with it but there is something about the structure of a westernized European style army that seems not to appeal and the record is not very good in the region those ties which are of course very important but it's what you're dying for so you're telling people to die for something called Iraq well for a lot of people in Iraq I think that's not something you'll die for you might die for your clan you might die for your religion but you might not die for your radical entity called Iraq which includes all kinds of people who you understand as your enemies you might not die for Lebanon if you're a Shi'a kid from the impoverished suburbs of south Beirut but you might die for Imam Ali I think often we delude ourselves about these states in the Middle East which for many of the people in the Middle East are fictional or hostile entities so it's not enough to put someone in uniform and say you are now a soldier of Iraq or Lebanon or Afghanistan because when we say Afghanistan and when they hear Afghanistan I don't think they're hearing the same thing possibly My name is Todd Miller I had a question for both of you and you sort of mentioned at the beginning with the shilling of the Hezbollah video in terms of how social media has changed the calculation on both sides both with regard to Hezbollah or Hamas and the use of social media to declare victory when the facts on the ground may vary greatly and also in terms of the sort of a social contract either between Israelis in their army Americans in their army whenever I go to a Nationals game I always feel a bit guilty for clapping when they have the sort of soldiers stand up at the game because I feel like that's a very cheap way of us acknowledging what soldiers go through and I wonder is the social media sort of given us insight for good and for bad for true and for not true on what is maybe going on but in general just in terms of how that dynamic is really changing the calculus in terms of the violence that you see the violence that we see the perception of citizens about the war it's changed so many other aspects of our society is it also sort of changing war making Douglas might have something smarter to say about this than I do but definitely you can't control the images so if once what the American public saw was that picture of the Marines on Iwo Jima that's a glorious image and you didn't see the pictures of headless bodies strewn in the jungle which would have been less of a morale booster now everyone's going to see both how that plays out in the public how that impacts the public's readiness to do what needs to be done is something that preoccupies me about Israel because we face a very long war ahead of us and it might not be a big war like the Yom Kippur War where we lost 2,500 fatalities in three weeks but it's going to be long and there are going to be flare ups and we're going to have to deal with it in this new environment where the Hamas guys are going to attack our troops with GoPro cameras on their helmets and we're going to see it on Facebook that evening and some mother is going to see her kid in the Hamas GoPro video and that is something that happened in the last conflict with Gaza and yet the public is going to have to withstand it and keep sending kids to the army and keep dealing with it this landscape gives a lot of power to these guys with their video camera and they understand it and I'm not sure that we quite do we quite give them credit for being as sophisticated as they are when there was a wave of stabbing attacks a few months ago a lot of the attacks were captured on cell phone videos and security cam videos and they were just raced around people's smartphones and social media and we're watching these videos of horrific stabbing attacks now the numbers of fatalities were not even a skirmish in a war it was militarily insignificant but everyone was freaking out because the images are so strong and the head of military intelligence needs to broadcast on a propaganda station anymore they just need to provide these images and we'll do it ourselves we'll watch the pilot being burned and we'll freak out and we'll watch people being stabbed and we'll freak out and the intermediaries who used to explain this stuff you would have, you know, Ed Murrow or someone in the studio saying well what you're now going to see is then they might show it and so I'm worried about that yes you bring up a lot of issues about which I could talk for a long long time but let's just say that, yes I think the character of war is changing and the character of society's connection to the military I think is quite thankfully distant society in America has a strong connection to the military only when almost everyone has been in it America in 1870 after the civil war had an incredibly strong connection to its military because millions of people had died for that America in 1950-55 has an incredibly strong connection to its military because tens of thousands of people had died in Europe and the Pacific I'm kind of okay with America having a very tenuous relationship with its military because the price of having a closer relationship is god-awful high and I'm really not fond of that, that's why Israel and its military have a very close relationship it's much more up close we have two oceans and friendly neighbors north and south we're very blessed by that no comment no comment I guess we're technically out of time I'm going to ask you one last question Memorial Day is coming up here for those of us who fought in Iraq and we have a unique spot over at Arlington there's section 60 where almost everyone who died in Iraq and Afghanistan and is not buried at home is pretty much there is there anything comparable for you? A place? Yeah, Mount Herzl which is the national military cemetery in Jerusalem which is quite an amazing place it's worth visiting beautiful and peaceful in a way that's the national cemetery so again if you're not buried in your hometown you can be buried at Mount Herzl and it's when you walk around Mount Herzl it's a visual illustration of the cost what this has cost because you just can't ignore it but then within it is there over for Lebanon specifically for the Lebanon War there isn't a cemetery or a monument to the Lebanon War there's no official monument to that war because it officially did not happen the closest thing is the monument to the helicopter crash which I mentioned which was really the pivotal event of the whole era 73 soldiers died in a helicopter crash on route to Lebanon and the families of the soldiers created a stunning I think a lot of war monuments in Israel are very tacky and here too I'm sure but this monument maybe not but this monument to the helicopter crash which is at the site of the crash in northern Israel is stunning it's 73 roughly cut limestone rocks arrayed in a circle around a pool of water where the names of the 73 guys are inscribed and if you go in the evening you'll be alive and if you stand among the stones and I've done this a few times because I feel a very strong connection to that crash and one of the main characters in the book is connected to that crash if you stand among the stones you feel like you're surrounded by these guys and it's incredibly powerful so if you get to Israel and have a spare hour or two in northern Israel I would recommend seeing that place great with that I'm going to close thank you thank you very much thanks Maddie for being here if you don't own a copy they're available outside I'm sure Maddie can be talked into signing them whether you bought them here or there and once again on behalf of Ann Marie Slaughter and Peter Bergen of New America thanks very much for coming tonight thanks