Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 148 - Margaret Thomson

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Margaret Thomson is the author of "The World Looks Different Now," a memoir about her oldest son, an active-duty soldier who committed suicide.  Her book chronicles the grueling journey of grief, and hopefully, healing for those left behind.   The book was amazing, the story is heartbreaking.  Margaret is a journalist and television producer who's reported on a variety of subjects, from Middle East politics to the British royal family. As a radio correspondent for ABC News, she was the first American broadcast journalist to report the end of the Falklands War in May 1982; several years later she became the first radio correspondent to report on the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Upon returning to the United States in 1992, she taught journalism and television production at the University of Memphis. Thomson continues to write for print and online publications. In 2016, she and her husband Tim relocated from Memphis to Franklin, Tennessee. Their son Matt, a recent graduate of the United States Merchant Marine Academy, visits frequently from his job in the shipping industry.

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Get a good night's sleep. Wake up feeling like a recharge battery instead of a drained one. And that's it on the business side of the house tonight. My guest today, how do you describe this woman? She is a force to be reckoned with. And originally, somebody associated with her publishing house reached out to me. So obviously she is an author. And she wrote a book called The World Looks Different Now.

And we recorded this episode in September, which is Suicide Awareness Month. Unfortunately, suicide directly touched her family. Her son, her older son, committed suicide less than three months before. he was due to deploy to Afghanistan. So not only a suicide, but an active duty military suicide. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity to sit down and talk with her, but I had no idea how incredible her background was. The book itself, the story of her son, the aftermath of what happened is heartbreaking. That's the only way that I can describe it. But we opened by talking about her, talking about Margaret and who she was and where she came from in her life.

And it was absolutely fascinating. So I'll give you the wave tops. She started off her, I was almost said life, but nobody started off their life as a journalist. She started off her professional career as a journalist in a television producer who reported on a variety of subjects from Middle East politics to the British royal family. She was a radio correspondent for ABC News. She was the first American broadcast journalist to report the end of the Falklands War in 1982. Several years later, she became the first radio correspondent to report on the AIDS epidemic in Africa. She came back to the United States in 1992 and taught journalism and television production at the University of Memphis.

She worked on an HBO documentary all this time she was also writing. Unbelievable, an incredible amount of time spent outside of the United States traveling to war zones throughout the world. and like I said, her personal experience was unbelievable. I can't thank her enough for coming up and not only sharing her story, but the story of her family and the story of her oldest son. So I'm going to shut up and let her speak for herself. Episode number 148 with Margaret Thompson. Enjoy.

I'm looking at danger close now. That way, because I'm not smart enough to sync up audio and video, but I am smart enough to go onto YouTube or Google and find a program that does, but it needs wave spikes. So now everything is good to go. Okay. You look nervous. You don't need to be nervous.

What did you start your travels from? You came in yesterday, right? We came in yesterday, yes, from Nashville. I am going to guess that the skies were not covered in smoke in Nashville. Now they were pretty clear. I'm actually really bummed. Are you guys staying for a little bit after this? Yes, we're staying for a couple of days.

In the worst time that you could, because if you're up in one, whitefish to the north is the beautiful big mountain resort to the east of that you could see into glacier national park notice i said you could but you're not going to because the stuff is going to be here for a while so you actually you did not win the lottery on your days to visit but i appreciate you making the uh the time to come out here oh yes we were happy to do that yeah so your publisher sent me a copy of your book which i'm sure that we will get into but i'm curious as to What led you to journalism? We're going to talk about you for a little bit.

I was afraid you were going to do that. It's important. Here's the one thing you learned about me. I don't care about me at all. So we're not going to talk about me at all. We're going to talk about you. But at the beginning of the book, you talk about living in Europe, specifically London as a journalist. I'm curious what led you down that path.

Yes. I always wanted to cover foreign news. It was just, it seems so challenging to me, especially because. the networks back then it was ABC NBC CBS they didn't cover much foreign news and I felt that there should be a lot more I felt that Americans should know more about what was going on in other parts of the world so that just was my dream and that kind of became my thing and I had I had been in Paris I had gone to school there for a semester just four semester but that made me feel like I owned all of Europe and that kind of thing and I had every right to go back there. So after I graduated from Columbia, Columbia University,

I got a master's in journalism there. I went to London, kind of on a flyer and with kind of some vague promises of work. That happens a lot in journalism. Even back then, we're talking kind of old school journalism. You mean like, hey, come out here and we'll see how it goes? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's tough to go across the pond on. Yes, it is. But if you're very young, I was quite young. I was one of the youngest in my graduating class. You're idealistic, and you kind of want to do those things, and I wasn't afraid to do it, I guess.

You're at a time of your life where you can take some gambles. You can. You're young. You think you've got your health. You're not worried about a lot of things. So I went to London, and I kind of pounded the paper. there was the old fleet street in those days and that's where they had all the newspapers or a lot of the newspapers were headquartered and some American papers and magazines also had

their headquarters over there so I had some work lined up called stringing like writing articles and things like that just again on a piecemeal basis I did not come in as a tourist that can get you not deported it's not the right word but kicked out on a tourist visa Yes, yes. I know of a few of Americans who've tried that and it did not work out well for them. But maybe in those days they would have been more lenient because this was in the 80s. I don't know. But I had a letter. I had a letter from an editor. And then once I hit the ground over there, I could find work with any American or foreign company, but not a British company. That, again, I think would have required maybe special permission or something.

But anyway, I ended up working in ABC, ABC News in the London Bureau, which was kind of like my dream job. Yeah. But I had always been a print person, I say always. So I was still very young, but I had always worked in print, not in broadcasting. So that there was a lot of pressure. That was kind of the assent of broadcasting, late 70s, early 80s. Oh, yes, definitely. especially like at ABC, it was a gentleman by the name of Rune Arledge.

He was one who started ABC's wide world of sports. He came up with this idea of having three anchors, three different locations. They had an anchorman in London, Peter Jennings, who was well known as a foreign correspondent. then they had Frank Reynolds in Washington and Max Robinson in Chicago, who was one of the first African-American anchors. And so it was kind of a tri-fecto. And would they anchor simultaneously? Or they would just have, oh, let's say technology-wise, that was actually probably stretching

it back in the day. That was totally cutting edge. That was way out there. It was like Rune Arledge, again, wide world of sports. He had, he wanted to maximize the technology as much as possible. So he said, we can do this, and they just kind of had throws to each other. And our links in London were pre-recorded because it was too risky. Or probably the time shift as well.

Yes, it was partly that because there was, what, five hours difference. And so we would finish up about 10 o'clock at night, and then they would play in the links. But partly it was because, too, that something could go wrong technically. Never. Not with technology. and in those days we had just like a certain window window of satellite time. We didn't have dedicated transponders. It was satellite. It was satellite.

Yes. In my head, as you're describing this, I'm thinking, we can do this on our cell phones now. Yes. We can walk around in our pocket with the technology to do a try, broadcast, live, record. Yes. Oh, how things have changed. So where were you originally from? For the good and for the bad and the changes.

I think more for the bad, to be clear. I think I've landed now that the connectivity and the amount of information is, I love it, but you have to be careful with it. And I think it pulls people in so much that they lose a little bit of actual greater context and perspective. Their world gets narrower, even though they have more access to information. It's a scary time. Yes, I agree. So we didn't have all that back then. And you were asking where am I from?

Yes, where did this all start? I was born in Memphis and grew up in Memphis. Tennessee, grow your whore life, huh? Yes. Well, except for London. I was there growing up. Yeah, had a pretty sheltered existence, I guess you could say. But I always wanted to be in newspapers, which is so strange.

Like when I was seven years old, I started a newspaper for my street or for the community. So we're talking as long as you can remember. Young, yes, as long as I could remember. I grabbed the first Nancy Drew book that I ever saw made me want to write, and I dictated stories to my mother, because obviously I couldn't type when I was six or seven years old, so I would dictate them to her, and she could type, but not well. So I don't know where that just comes from the very instinct, I think, of who you are. It makes sense to me.

I knew at about 11 years old, I would say, the path that I wanted to go down. I have a hard time articulating to people why. Even now, I turn 43 next month, and I am actually not much better at describing the reasoning why. It was a gravitational pull, and I never looked in any other direction. So when you say that, it's like, okay, you're my kind of person. We're going to get through this just fine. And some people are like that.

I think they know what they want to do from a very, very young age. Some, not all. I look at my three kids, and it doesn't worry me because they don't. don't express those things. They have, they have some, I would say, conceptual directions that they're heading, but far less precise than how I felt. And I'm okay with that. It takes all types, and I think they're all going to find their way. For me, it was easier, but I tell you what, I didn't realize, I look back at my life now. I get very, very lucky along the way. By being so focused and targeted, I didn't have many plan B's, full disclosure, I didn't have any plan B's. And I didn't realize

the injury rate. I didn't know what I don't know what I would have done if things didn't go my way. So I got very fortunate going that path. And it's it's kind of something that I cautioned people on now is it's great to be that focus, but give me 5% of your upstairs horsepower for a slight plan B. Don't make the mistake that I did. It worked out for me. But a coin toss a few times along the way and it probably wouldn't have. Yes, I totally agree with that because I think I should have maybe looked at other paths, other avenues, other careers. possibly instead of kind of like wanting that certainty, just wanting that certainty so badly that this is what I'm going to do.

And, you know, unless you just feel you're so talented and you're so driven in a certain direction. And I really wasn't. But I just think I inherited a love of writing and literature really from my father. He was... Did he read to you? Where does it come from? He just was a very literate person, just read everything, read all kinds of philosophy. He loved William Faulkner.

he had he was a doctor also my father was a doctor my mother was a doctor which was very unusual for say they got married in the 1950s yeah that was really really unusual to have a mother who was a doctor was really even unusual to have a mother who was a nurse but i mean no it was all right to be a nurse but it was not all right to be a doctor so what type of medicine did they practice she my mother was a pediatrician which was like the only okay thing she used to say for women to do. I mean, they could do a few other things. Like she had a friend who was a pathologist, that sort of thing.

But it was really unusual. Like she and this other lady, they were the only two in their medical school class. Doesn't that sound insane talking about that in those terms in 2020? It does. It was. It's the opposite of the world that we're living in right now. And I'm actually glad that it is like that because to me it means we're making catastrophic leaps and pounds in the correct direction.

Right. I agree. So she was like one of those early trailblazers and my dad was a surgeon and they met in medical school or just after medical school when they were doing residencies in Memphis, which is a big area for medical school education. There's a big medical school there and everything. And my mother was from middle Tennessee. My dad was from northern Mississippi. But his real love, he was just very brilliant. I guess medicine wasn't difficult for him, but his real love was this was literature. and thinking and philosophy and that sort of thing. So. Sounds like a Renaissance man of sorts. Yes. And then I think I was more influenced by my mother, though, because it was kind of that early, early day of women can have it all.

You know, you can have the career and you can have the family. Nobody can tell you what to do anymore. Nobody's going to put a governor or boundary on you. And that is and it isn't true. you know, I found that growing up. I know that she experienced some, she experienced a lot of hardships. She did experience some discrimination. She felt in, in her career. And then ultimately, they did divorce when I was about 21. And that's always hard on kids. My brothers were younger. I have two younger brothers. And so I think I saw things that made me think that it's not really that

easy to have it all. It's like you said about your own career, you have to be, you have to be very, very lucky. You have to marry the right person if you're going to get married who's very, very supportive and does not have issues of their own and that sort of thing. I think you said it. You have to marry the right person. And I think it's easy to look from the outside and say, well, I wish my life was as perfect as whoever. But you're not living in that house and you don't see things behind the curtain. I was in February of next year, I'll have been married for 20 years, but we're 18 months into a divorce right now. And it's rough. I'm sorry, too. I feel bad not only for her, but for my kids and for myself and what we've had to go through. And one of the things that I struggle with is I don't

want my children to have a skewed perspective of marriage. And I've had a conversation with them multiple times or any time that they want to talk about it and I'll tell them the relationship with your mother and I and the fact that it did not work out does not mean that relationships can't work out or that marriage doesn't work what it means is that you need to find the right person and also on the other side of that coin if you are with somebody and they are not the right person there's a path to correct for that as well neither of those are easy though right and they all three of them and being at different ages. They're now 12, 15, and 16. All three of them have reacted very differently. They have their own filter that they view the world through

and what has and what is going on in the relationship. But it is it is the exact opposite of easy for sure. Yeah, I think it's it's tough for kids. And when I was really young, my parents didn't get along, frankly. And I used to just wish that they would get a divorce. I've heard that from more children of divorce than I realized. Divorce is not something that I paid a lot of attention to until a couple years ago. And I've talked in the process, I would think back and be like, okay, who do I know who has either been through this as an individual or live through this as somebody earlier in their life? Most of the people that I have talked to earlier in their life expressed exactly the same thing. almost to the point where a couple of my friends have said when they sat us down and said,

hey, we're no longer going to get me married in their mind. They're like, oh, thank God. They, they, finally, now it's, you know, good was the thought in their head. I don't think my kids were right at that point, but I also don't think my kids were surprised. But I don't know what they'll say if, you know, if they were to switch seats with us 10, 20 years from now. I'm not exactly sure what they would say, but I just wanted to, I'm trying to preserve, I want them to understand happy and healthy relationships. And I want them to find that for themselves to Yes, of course. And to stay married or people say, well, we're staying together for the kids. It's the worst advice I've ever heard. Yes, I don't think so.

What example are you setting for your kids if you are in an unhealthy or toxic relationship and you consistently stay? I would be worried that the example that I would set, I have two boys and a little girl, that I would be setting to all three would be you just tough it out, regardless of what happens, which is great to say. I mean, it's a good bumper sticker. but that's not, I don't believe the recipe for a truly healthy and rewarding life on both sides because the relationship, if there's the equation, you know, the equal sign in the middle, there's work on both sides. Yeah, so when I was eight years old, I remember this is hilarious, but my, I remember sitting down and writing a letter to the president who was president.

Of the United States? Yeah, President Johnson. I'm dating. I'm dating myself. Slightly before my time. Dating myself. And saying, would you please ask my parents to get a divorce? No way.

Yes. Did he respond? For a child, that made sense. Well, no, that would be some letter to have. That would be a souvenir. That would be a good way to tell whether or not the White House just sends back blanket like cookie cutter. You get a mail. Thank you for reaching out with the robot signed White House paperwork.

Yeah, so I was appealing to the highest authority. Yeah. I get it. I get it. Yeah. So Memphis. So they stayed together. Yeah.

I got out, went to college. For journalism, I'm assuming. Yes, I went to the University of Tennessee. I wanted to go to the University of Missouri at Columbia. That's the top undergraduate journalism school in the country. Is it still? Probably. Yes.

I would say so. And instead, I didn't want to pay out of the country. of state tuition or have my parents pay out of state tuition and probably I was scared to go that far away. That was like another world. I mean, we had traveled a little bit, but we hadn't travel much to Atlanta to see Braves games and to Washington, D.C. to see the monuments and stuff there. That was about it for vacations. Real exciting. So I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and majored in journalism or majored in communications. I think. I think they called it. They didn't really specifically say it was a journalism major, but that was what, that was all I wanted to do, because I'd been on the high school newspaper, written everything, done everything on the high school newspaper. And while it was at UT Knoxville, I had a journalism professor come to, he came to our school from New York City. And I probably had never met anybody from New York City.

And I'd imagine that's probably the mecca of the journalism world at the time. It was, yes. It definitely was. And his name. was John Hoenberg and he was the administrator of the Pulitzer Prize board of the Pulitzer Prizes and he taught at Columbia University which was considered probably still it is still considered the top graduate school in journalism if you want to do a master's if you think you need that so I had him for a few classes and he had been a foreign correspondent which was something I really wanted to do because my junior year I had done this semester in Paris. And he'd been there, like, as the correspondent for the International Herald Tribune. And he'd covered the UN. He'd done a lot of these things in

journalism that I just couldn't believe. And my peers didn't seem to think anything of this man. He was very distinguished, you know, white hair and very, very distinguished. Did he have tortoise shell glasses? Did you have an ivory handled pipe? That's what I'm thinking. He just had random times in a conversation just and bubbles would come out of it. That's what I would use because I don't like to smoke a pipe, but I would blow bubbles out of one. Yeah, so he had that, yes, he had that academic air. Oh, I can picture it like the patches on the jacket, all sorts of stuff.

Probably all of that. So, of course, I was very impressed and I did my best in his classroom. classes and didn't know him that well, but I tried to kind of stand out. And then when I graduated, I took a job as a reporter at the Birmingham Post Herald, which was the Avis, we try harder. Isn't that the old slogan? We try harder. It was second to the Birmingham News, even though it was a morning paper and the afternoon papers were usually not doing as well. But the Birmingham News was stronger and the post herald was weak. But I had done an intern. at the Memphis paper called the Commercial Appeal.

And so the editor, he had been promoted to the editor of the Birmingham Post Herald, so he hired me because he already knew me from Memphis. That sort of jumped into that kind of backwards. Did you love it as soon as you got into college and everything beyond? You were doing what you wanted to do. I think maybe one of the rare, I talked to most people about their experience in college, of which I have none. I went high school, military.

and most people when they talk about their college experience are like, nah, I had to do it. They weren't very passionate about, they would find one or two classes that they love, but the rest of it they were kind of were just putting their chips down until they had what they needed to graduate. It sounds like you actually were enjoying the process. You're fortunate. You're the minority of people that I've talked to when it comes to that. That's probably true, because I did business school later on for a very short time, this MBA program. Didn't enjoy that as much?

Everybody was going, I hate this, I hate this, you know, to my right and to my left. So I said, oh, that's probably not for me. But I like the journalism because it was a craft more than it wasn't academic. It pursued, it wasn't real, real academic. It was more putting things into practice. Yeah. Like at UT, they still do have a newspaper called the Daily Beacon. And so it came out every day.

So we had to get used to that. 18, yes. And I was editor of that, worked my way up to that. And we wrote editorials, covered the news, all of the city politics. That's awesome. Just like a real pipeline into a traditional newspaper. And from there I also worked at the same time, I worked at the Knoxville Journal, which was a real newspaper. So that was, I'd already had those real newspaper experiences with the commercial appeal. I'd had a summer internship. Then later with the Knoxville Journal, I kind of worked there part-time, worked at the Daily Beacon, worked at the school cafeteria to get money to go to Europe so I could do that Paris thing and spend a semester over there. So I was always kind of immersed in. I really wanted to do it, not just think about it or study. Like it was important to study the First Amendment to study the libel law.

libel law is very important and I studied that. But it's also learning to write and learning to write under pressure, that sort of thing. Time pressure, you mean? Yes, definitely. What was your favorite topic to report on? I mean, you look back at your career. What was your favorite thing to write about? Oh, wow.

There's just, there's been a lot of things, a lot of things. And even starting in college, I love any story I was assigned, I just loved. I love the people-based stories, character-driven stories, you know. I just covered so many. And especially, well, starting down, when I went down to Birmingham, this is after undergraduate school when I graduated, I would cover things like the Ku Klux Klan. And there was a bombing.

You may have heard of this. I think it was 16th Street Baptist Church. They called it. It was six little black children. That had happened, I'm sure, in the 60s, but people were still talking about it. We're talking kind of late 70s, and people still talked about it a lot.

There were still investigations going on about who was behind it, that sort of thing. So I covered stories like that. I followed around a very, very famous writer named Yudora Welty, who wrote short stories and just so many people. It's just wonderful to kind of have that action. you know where people want to talk to you like like you experience you experience that and so I had a

decent portfolio after I went to Birmingham I worked there for like a couple of years to get help me get into Columbia which was like like it is today it's super competitive there were like 10,000 applicants for 130 slots. Damn. And that has not changed. That was the same when I applied. and it's the same now. Well, it says something to you about the quality of what's going on there and the prestige involved. People still want to do it. They still want to do it. Even though you really wonder about journalism jobs because back then when I was in it, starting out, it was like, this is a profession.

You know, it's a, it's a respectable job. It, it, you can make an okay living as a salary. You know, you can, you can survive. You're not going to make a lot of money. But now, I'm sure, as you know, the journalism profession, if it's a profession, it's in flux. Well, as you just said, if it's a profession, I look at a lot of people who believe

because they can record either audio or video or the combination on a phone that they're a citizen journalist. And I'm by no means an expert to say whether they are or they aren't, but it puts them in competition with everybody who's also reporting who went to the school that you went to. And it seems to me almost that it's a race to be first, not accurate. And the citizen journalists who are out and about and stumble into a situation, they almost can get in front of the traditional journalists. It seems like it's a battle. I don't know if

they're helping each other in that battle or they're slowly eroding the career field in general. Yes, I think there's a lot of corrosion going on there as far as. And maybe that's the technology partly because it's the technologies eroded a lot of fields or eliminated. Well, the speed with which information you get to people is there's no way that a, I don't care if it's a morning newspaper or an evening newspaper. There is absolutely no way you can compete with somebody doing a Facebook live or Instagram live or anything else like that. There's no way that a print organization could get inside of that cycle and be faster. Right. It's just in those things were, we couldn't even conceive of those things back then.

I mean, we couldn't, you know, we had no idea, no idea. A global footprint within seconds of something happening. No. Just. Maybe over a short rave radio as it passed along. I mean, that actually might have been the fastest way to pass information. Yeah, yeah. And we just couldn't even dream of it.

And, you know, I remember stopping at the side of the road saying Alabama and I was covering a story and there had been a car accident or something. And I had a huge camera with me in the glove compartment. I had to take that out to snap a couple of pictures and then take the film back to the newspaper and have somebody develop it. And, you know, it was great because I just had. happened to have the camera in the car and got some pretty decent shots. But of course, those days now. It's a new world now. It's so different. Yes. And there, as we've said, a lot of pros and a lot of cons to, uh, to both of those things. So basically when I had this portfolio and I had like, oh, she covered a Ku Klux Klan rally or something like that, that in coal miner strike and

they slashed our tires and that sort of thing. You know, And that was, and I say that's a lot to myself now, nobody told us the dangers of journalism when I was an undergraduate or in graduate school after I got to Columbia. Dangers you mean you have to be so close and proximal to what's going on that you can kind of get touched by it or people might seek retribution against you for reporting on something they didn't want reported. Both. Okay.

Both. And then some and more of the same. So I guess that could have been one of the early experiences, well, real early in one of my, while I was doing the internship at the Commercial Appeal in certain neighborhoods, there was a lot of crime. And, you know, I'd drive in there late at night, maybe to cover a sniper thing. And I'd see how nervous the photographer was. And maybe he'd had 30 years of experience. And I'd had no years of professional experience.

And it was like very nerve-wracking, is there going to be. shooting or that sort of thing. And it was certainly possible. Nothing like that happened. But I know that the coal miners did slash not my my tires, but again, the photographer who was with me, he was in his own car, his tires. So, you know, you think, wow.

And then I covered also in Birmingham, there was a real shady guy who had started something like a photography school, if you know what I mean. I think I do know what you mean. Photographing young ladies. and that sort of thing. He's probably putting newspaper ads out looking for models type stuff. Yeah, that type of stuff.

So I, you know, kept going by where the studio was. And I never saw any activity. I never saw a car. I never saw anything. And, you know, it gets very labor intensive doing any type of investigative work. You go back and the editor says, where's the story?

Where are the goods? Have you got it? Because you've just taken two or three hours out of the day to pursue this story. So eventually I had enough to write a piece. I never talked to him, but I had enough to write a decent piece, you know, 12 paragraphs or something like that. And again, not accusing him of anything, everything is not just even just covering with allegedly, but just having enough of the facts to put it together and stand by it. And then I hear he's looking for you and he's got a, what is it, a 357 magnum? Is that?

There certainly is it. Is that a certain gun? It's kind of known as a dirty hairy gun. Oh, my. On the front seat. A little Clintiestwood pistol. Yes. He's got that on the front seat beside him and he's driving around looking for you.

Yeah, that's not awesome. And no, it's really scary. Yes. You know, you do understand the repercussions of what you're doing, but I think you do. As a journalist, you should. You should. You know what's going to happen if you think you know what's going to happen. But you don't really.

I mean, people can get very upset about, people can get extremely upset about stories, even though the stories are perfectly sound and the stories are perfectly fair and there's nothing wrong with them. So that was another brush with, hey, this is, this could be a little bit dangerous. You know, anytime you're talking about somebody's livelihood, I mean, this case of maybe a very illegal livelihood, they can feel threatened. I mean, it's probably the number one way that a newspaper, or magazine gets sued is if they impugn someone's character or impugn their, something they've done in their livelihood that's, that's illegal or something,

this kind of sends up red flags and that sort of thing. I can't believe they didn't even, for an hour on a day in your progression into becoming a journalist, at least talk about the danger. I feel like in the modern day, that would be a mandatory. class. Oh, yes. And I mean, you can probably put it under the ethics or the gas. It's somewhere in there in the combination of those things. So you can rotate the chair. You can move the mic stand. You can do whatever you want to do to be comfortable, Margaret. Well, I want you to have continuity, but I may have to take this off. Take it off. I don't worry about continuity.

Don't use words that I don't know. Yeah. And you're editing in that stuff. I'm not worried about that. Okay. I don't edit it by my buddy Mike does. He can worry about that. I know. Like I said, The ACs is, of course, broken today. So we'll see how far we go before one of us passes out from heat exhaustion. Yeah, you can swing that thing farther over. Pull, there you go. Yes. So, London, you go to school.

You're working in the U.S. Go to London. Did I read it correctly in the book or am I thinking of something else where you actually, did you go to any war zones during your time as a journalist? Yes. That's what I thought. Where and what was that experience like? And I just, I never imagined that I would ever end up doing anything like that.

That was just, that was so. totally crazy. So anyway, I wouldn't have ever gotten out of Birmingham. You know, I'd still be there at the Post Herald, except it closed. It's not around anymore. But, you know, again, I had this bank of stories that I'd done. I had this recommendation from John Hoenberg, who was big at Columbia. Otherwise, I'd never have gotten in. And I was kind of a token. There was another gal from Georgia. Actually, her name was Savannah. It's Savannah. And she and I were the token southerners. in our class, in our class this 130 kids or people who had these somehow gotten in out of 10,000 people who'd applaud.

Two out of 130. Yes, but see, that was, it was a rough ratio. It was a time of Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein. And it was a glory day for journalism. It was not like it is now with the fake news and we don't like journalists and we don't know who to believe. And, you know, we'd rather. Well, we listen to some journalists, but not the ones who have.

facts or opinions that are ulterior to our own. Right. Like we know now you kind of curate your own news. You know, you get your news and your feed that you like and you agree with. Your echo chamber, you mean? You're a little insulated echo. People don't do that. People don't have confirmation bias.

I believe that's fake. No. I'll do it myself. I'll go. You can pick a left-leaning organization and a right-leaning and I won't define any of them because I think they kind of define themselves. And you just watch the same topic described Right.

And you look at it as if sometimes I look at it as are you guys talking about the same thing? You left this out, you put this in. These are flip-flopped and you can just see that they're taking the information and pointing it in the direction of either their constituents or their consumers. It's not an awesome time. And I don't know if people realize if they don't intentionally go and seek information from broader sources. Their pool might be starting as a 360 degree pie, but then it's 180, then it's one, you know, 90, then it's 45, and it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Like I said, unlimited access to information, super small optic on the world itself. Right.

And again, we just couldn't imagine those things at that time. When I went to Columbia, we had like Mike Wallace. I don't know if you. I do. Chris Wallace's father, and he was an incredible broadcaster. and we had just these people who would come and speak to our class and talk to our class. That would be amazing to have Mike Wallace speak to your class. All the time, stuff like that.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, like my news, my adjunct professor, who I actually mentioned in the book, she was the assistant to the news writing professor was Anna Quinlan before she'd written any of her novels. And she was a columnist for the New York Times for a long time. Before that, she was a reporter when I knew her. was a reporter at the New York Times. So I just, you know, idolized.

Maybe I put them too much on a pedestal, but I idolized these people. And we had access to them, and it was a time in journalism when journalists were still much more exalted. Like the, again, the Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate and just come off the back of that,

and maybe they made a movie about it. And it was the glory days. It was journalism, can change things and journalism can make a difference and they did have power and hopefully they used it responsibly i don't i'm going to go out of limb and say not all of them right only because we're talking about human beings and therefore inherently flawed yeah i bet you most of them lived up to every ounce of what people will want them to be but i bet you there was a little maneuvering in the shadows some deals made over probably dirty martinis or whatever james bond drink was you know yeah yeah

lovable at the time. I'm sure there was. And probably all that was going on, you know, way above any type of level of journalism that I was in. But, I mean, some have fallen on their swords like Brian Williams, for example. An interesting study in how he ended up falling on his sword. Yeah. It was it was a incremental, microscopic untruths, which is what they were, until it became something that was unavoidable. and he built it himself. The wall that fell on him, he built.

Very interesting how it happened, though, over a very long period of time. And of course, that came much later, but I know there have been scandals, too. There was actually a scandal of a J-school graduate who made up a story about a little boy. This was in the D.C. area who was like a drug addict, I think, at the age of eight. It was called Jimmy's World. Oh, no. I think that I don't want to know. I don't know for sure that I'm getting everything right.

But yeah, and then it was, it turned out it was completely, had been completely fictionalized. And that's so bad. It's bad for the whole occupation because it gives fuel to the false news narrative. If they can point at concrete things like that, it's hard to sit there and say, no, that didn't happen. It's like, eh, it's kind of right there. And it did happen. Right. So that was, that was kind of the, I mean, of course they talked about ethics.

and we had, like I said, libel law, First Amendment law is very important. We would take all of that at the Columbia Law School. They had special courses for us there. And again, it was like my undergraduate and the other work that I had done professionally and that they just threw us out in the street. You know, we had to, I had to go to Bedford-Stuyvesant to cover a story. And it was back in those days, it was very dangerous. It was, you know, and I just was terrified anyway.

They had just had the son of Sam murders around that time. And so the taxi drivers all had big partitions between you and them, big thick partitions. Yes. I watched the Netflix documentary series on that terrifying. Yes, absolutely terrifying. I think they had already captured him around the time I went up there to school. But I just remember the taxi driver letting me out on the corner of 116th and Broadway and going, and you need to get streetwise,

and you just need to get that really scared look off your face. And I was like, okay. You know, so, yeah, that was kind of my, you know, kind of became my M.O. was like you're the Betty Boop of the Middle East, they call me when I ended up there. It was like, you know, the kind of innocent. Yeah.

Oh, nothing bad can happen to me kind of thing. But one student did get mugged during our year in graduate school. So I mean, anything, it could have happened. It was just a much, I don't know exactly what it's like now. I haven't been up there too many times lately, but it was just, it was not cleaned up, you know, Times Square and all that. So we covered all the stories, just like we were, we had a service called Columbia News Service that actually put out wire stories that were published in newspapers all around the country.

And they would, at the Commercial Appeal, where I'd worked in Memphis, they would, grab my stories and publish them with the byline and everything. And so that was really cool. And so we had a lot of good experiences there. And then that led to after I graduated going to London and just thinking there are only two ways to be a foreign correspondent in those days. Either you go back to a newspaper, preferably a large one that had some people posted overseas. You're talking about like the times, the post, all that type of stuff? Yes. Yes.

In those days, Boston Globe, maybe a few others, maybe Wall Street Journal. And you wait and you work and you try and you try to get that posting. You do as much domestic reporting as you can that might get you that coveted appointment. Or the other route, you know the other route. Freelancer. Gun for hire. Stringer. Yes.

Flying by the seat of the pants kind of. things. Also known as a young person's role. Yeah, it's definitely something, you know, you don't want to do that with a family to support. Be a lot of risk if you did. Yes. I feel like that's a young person's game. Yeah. So that's kind of how I went and I had some friends who knew some friends who had a place that I could stay in and live in in the east end of London, which was like its own world very much. was like I went out one day for a jog and it just in you know like you would jogging shorts at top but all of these old men were staring at me you know because they'd never seen anything like that that was very unusual for that community in that part of the world I mean I hope I wasn't

offending anyone but it was very much its own culture its own accent it's just its own world I mean, in all of London, in those days, just shut down at 9 o'clock. Really? So, yes, there were no restaurants except Joe Allen's, which served American food and maybe Indian food you could get. So it was, they just kind of rolled up the sidewalks. So, again, I arrived, and I was working on stories. I was doing that thing, pounding the pavement, going up and down Fleet Street, interviewing, trying to get gig work, but trying to get other work.

gig economy even back then. And one evening somebody I knew invited me to come over to ABC and watch the broadcast, which was Peter Jennings recording these links, and then they were fed to New York, not real live stuff. And Peter Jennings had an assistant named Carabelle Daniel, and her husband was the AP Bureau Chief. That's a separate story. But it was all in that world.

You could call it incestuous world. But she was from South Carolina. And so it was like we Southerners have to stick together. So she said, what are you doing? Are you busy? Can you start like right now doing something? And so that's just how it is. Rhetorical question.

Yes. Yeah. So I said, sure, why not? I mean, so that's kind of how I started. It's a substitute teleprompter shoving paper through in those days, feeding paper through a machine that you've typed letters on. that are about two inches tall and then the mechanism to feed it was broken. So you had to kind of manually push it through. Oh, no way. No, you had to manually push it through what you hope was

the right speed. You know, even then technology was thwarting us. Technology was painful. Technology was killing us. So, because we were right on the edge. I mean, to have fax machines and to do an international facts, that was a big deal. And all the scripts had to be faxed to New York approval and then sent back. So that was that was kind of the height of the technology and then having like a 10 minute satellite window at 945 at night London time to to send all the links. If something was breaking, we would literally go live. But of course, you know, like you said, there's a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure with going live. So I just did, I did what they told me to do and I did a little bit more and a little bit extra. And if there was any opening to do anything else,

I would research something for Peter Jennings. Like there was an uprising brewing in Poland where there was a strike there, led by Lech Valenza, who was a Polish, I guess, nationalist. So there was that brewing and that eventually did explode. So I did that summer. And then I was offered a job back in New York. And it was on a magazine called Ad Week. and I was the media reporter.

So that was like the ultimate in naval gazing. I hate that term, but anyway, it was naval gazing. Because it was like the media reporting on the media. That's what I was, the media reporting on the media. There is definitely a place for that, and there's some fantastic media reporters out there. It's an interesting specialty, but I just didn't want to, I didn't want to do that forever. So I went back and my whole life was like going. to the 21 club or going to Sardis or going to the Waldo Frestoria.

And that's how I covered stories. And I don't want to do hotel journalism. And I don't want to go out to lunch every single day and try to get a story out of that. I want to see something and I want to do something. I still had that idea that I could make it or could I make it overseas. Did you have any desire or had you thought it all about writing a book at any point up into this time? No, not really. Again, I was so young.

I mean, that was the thing. I wanted to do all these things at a very young age, and you can't be the youngest forever. You can only play that card for a while, and then you're going to get older. So I thought, well, you know, I'll write books later. So at least it was a thought. I loved it. Yeah, I love the idea of it because it's like the ultimate journalism. If you're sort of a journalist who does short work, short stories, like if I write an editorial or something like that, it's going to be 850 words.

Yeah. If I write a major magazine piece, it's going to be 2,000 to, say, 4,000 max. That's a really, really long piece of journalism, like for a magazine. And then when I got into broadcasting, and again, I was floundering because I had started. started at the top and worked, you know, I say I started at the top and worked my way down, because I did not have broadcasting training and did not follow that track at Columbia. They have very primitive film equipment, and it's not that you can make a documentary. You were assigned to the job of making a documentary as your project, but I stuck with that

print tracks totally, because mainly because we had so many great writers from the New York Times who were our teachers. Well, it sounds like you were called to it early on or drawn to it early on. I was like, I want print, you know, print was me. It was my personality. But then I thought broadcasting has got a better future, maybe a better, because even then I wondered what was the future of newspapers going to be like. What do you think it is in the modern day?

2020 looking forward. I think it's terrible. Dying? Yeah, because I mean, they're so. They seem to be so stuck between how do they put paywalls up and how do they charge for their content. And then at the same time, or they want to give certain stories away free, which is very laudable. But how do you have it both ways? And then you've got all these other competing outlets and competing streams of information.

I think they were just kind of hit. I don't know when, like early 90s or something or mid-90s. Yeah. I know nothing about journalism, but I suspect. that the print paper is a dying art? Right, I think so. We'll see. Unfortunately, unfortunately.

So, I mean, the good thing about online stuff is you don't have limitations because there used to be very strict space limitations and maybe your story wouldn't get in because they had too much copy and yours was not as good as something else. So this story didn't make it and the story didn't get in.

But going back to London and even in the early days, When I went back to New York, it was kind of that, well, I just don't know if I can make it. And they had actually offered me a job to stay on at ABC, and it would have been more in the technical department, which was probably not my forte, but it was like booking landlines. That was the deal back then. To get pictures through Europe, you had to book coordinating, you had to have confirmation telexes from every country. along the path that you wanted to send these pictures on. Oh, wow.

So it was a very bureaucratic, sometimes slow, and you want the pictures now. Oh, it sounds like anything. Anything other than speedy. It was, yeah, it was like, it was almost like the Vietnam War and having to mail back canisters of film and that sort of thing. And we did that sometimes. I mean, we mail back canisters of film. So I didn't, I was like, okay, I'm not going to take that technical job.

I'm going to stick with a writing job, go back to New York. And that was when I actually did meet Walter Cronkite covering a story, or I turned it into a story because he was standing just behind me in the coat check line at the 21 club. And I said, are you going to retire? I hear that you're going to retire, you know, so I got a couple of comments. I could spin that into a story. And I don't mean spin the way you think of spin. No, I get created or crafted into it.

It was enough for a little column like this. So it was a fun job, but I, when they announced in February of 1981 that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were getting married. And Lady Diana back then, you know, I'm like, this is the story of the century, which people still say. That is, you know, one of the most televised, if not the most televised event. Really? There's ever been, I think. I did not know that. I don't know. But I guess it was like billions of people watching and stuff.

So that was February. They announced it. I called my boss in London at ABC and said, you're going to have any work over there within connection with the wedding? And it was like, yeah, but I don't, again, I don't really want to promise anything. And so I turned up and just there was just so much work.

There was just tons of stuff going on, not including the royal wedding and leading up to the royal wedding of five months preparation for that. So I went back and I just stayed and then I ended up living there for 12 years. As you say, your son was born in London, correct? Yes, my son who passed away, he was born in London in 1987. And that was that sort of thing where I had met someone and like you say about divorce. It was very painful and that it did not work out after four or five years and but my son was born over there and after that time I never I never went on any war

any more war assignments or anything but those I had done where did you go on those assignments well after sort of after the royal wedding things sort of heated up in the middle east there was there was going to be a lot of people said there was some of an invasion of Lebanon by the Israelis to route out the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. And this was on the cards and this was coming. So just my boss was like, get on a plane and go to Cairo, you know. It was just, that was the way it was back then. Like, you never knew what was going to happen. And that was, so that was, that was my first trip to the Middle East. And from there, I went to, I went to Beirut. That was my first taste. Beirut and that was where these signs that the that the invasion was coming. It was only a matter of

time that it was that it was going to happen. And I went back to London and got the day I arrived back in the bureau on where Sadat, the president of Egypt had been assassinated in a very, very bloody, bloody, bloody coup thing where a bunch of supposed army soldiers turned on him while he was in the reviewing box watching a parade, watching military parade. And they were insurgents, but in dress uniform. And that was like, all this carnage came flooding in over the, pictures came in over the satellites or whatever. And, you know, I couldn't edit that or any, New York just kept screaming, I mean, what's coming? How much worse is it going to get? How much worse is it's going to get? I said, I don't know because I don't have control with Cairo. They're just feeding. They're just feeding it blind with

no control line or anything. Nobody on the other end telling us whose pictures are these, are these ABC or the NBC or the CBS or they, you know, so everybody's grabbing, grabbing everything. So that was, that could, you know, contributed to the tensions, I think, in, in the region because he, Sadat probably had been killed because he had made peace with, had made a separate piece with Israel. And so eventually I ended up, I ended up going back again, kind of just kept, they kept sending me back there. And I started doing radio. I had started doing radio work in London. I had covered some IRA bombings, which were very, also very scary.

because there was a famous one called the Chelsea Berwick's nail bomb and where the IRA blown up this bomb and had all these nails and stuff in it and you never knew if there was going to be a second one there was always that concern that where there's one there might be another one so I was like I was trying to understand that conflict

I was trying to understand the IRA conflict that was still that was going strong and then I was trying to understand the Middle East and that was very complicated the situation in Lebanon because they'd had a long civil war, like all through the 70s, and they'd had sectarian tensions for many, many years ever since the country was created at the end of World War I, and it was carved up.

And so it just was a, it felt like a challenge, just doing that kind of work, because it's the most extreme kind of journalism, them a good way, bad way, I mean, like you're dealing with, obviously you're dealing with some physical danger and they did not, in that day, they really didn't do anything to prepare journalists that I'm aware of. I think a little bit more maybe it's done now, but it was, you're dealing with language barriers, you're dealing with translators, you're dealing with maybe your local fixer is not honest.

Maybe your translator gets kidnapped. I mean, things could happen just because these individuals, local people were working with you, working for you or working for the network. So I went back to the Middle East when the conflict was raging in the summer of 1982. and that was where Israel was going to route out, Yasser Arafat come what may.

He was just not going to be able to stay there and hunker down, you know. So there's a lot of shelling and stuff like that going on all the time. And a very tense situation again between all the factions in Lebanon, which is almost way too much to explain. But I couldn't do it justice. But the Shias, who are Islamic. Muslims and Sunnis who are Christians and other Christian sex as well. And so then there's Drews, which is an offshoot of Islam.

So there's all this kind of stuff trying to keep all of that straight. So I covered a lot of it from Damascus and Syria, and that was like there was no action over there. So I felt like it was that summer. It was difficult to come up with stories. and then also spent more time in Lebanon near the end of that conflict where they did route out. They got Yasser Arafat and all his PLO guys. Grab them and go right to the top. There you go.

And then you can pinch them to make them tighter if you want. There you go. Squeeze the, bam. Yeah. That's good. Yes. Yeah, so they were put on a ship and sent out of Lebanon to Tunisia, I think it was. And there was a multinational force that the Americans were part of that were brought in to kind of restore the peace.

And then they left and then they had to come back because there was assassination of the Lebanese president that I was there for. So they'd have these tremendous blasts when something like that would, when that happened, that was an extraordinary one. You could feel it miles away when that happened in East Beirut. the Lebanese president is a Christian. So the Christian side of Beirut is the East Beirut. You could feel it all the way over on the west side. Beirut and you just go, wow, something bad has really, really bad has happened. So there was...

Hard to describe that unless you felt it. A lot of, yeah, a lot of shooting, a lot of... That was one of the most frightening things because I had to go to the east side and then they were all in the Christians over there were enraged that their leader had been killed so they were looking for revenge and so they like for example they grabbed my cameraman's camera and grab the they didn't keep the camera but they grabbed it they pulled the cassette out of cassettes in those days and shot you know shot it up and I was so scared yeah I didn't want to get separated from them but I was like backing up against this hospital where I think we thought that the president of Lebanon

had been taken to that hospital. I was just, luckily I could like blend in with a crowd. I didn't really stand out. Sometimes it's kind of helpful. I think it was kind of helpful to be a woman. I think it's often helpful when you don't stand out. Yeah. Yeah. So because I have dark hair and everything. So I just would blend in. I'd blend it in, but I didn't want to get left. and I was like, I don't really want to spend the night in East Beirut. I've got to get back. So I've got to get with them. We've got to jump in the car.

We've got to make it over the green line. We've got to get back no matter what. But I wanted to stay in East Beirut and Hyde because they were shooting the whole time. We were trying to get across different checkpoints and that sort of thing. There are checkpoints everywhere to get back to the west side because that's where the journalists were. Most of them, some few were on the east side. but the communications were better. But again, we're talking extremely primitive compared to what we have now.

We had telex machine. We had wire service. We could see what the AP and the UPI were filing. We had ways to file stories via telex, but we had to obviously had to use lines, or at least phone lines, to do broadcasting, do broadcast tracks. It's very difficult to get pictures out. Did you find the work there in the war zones fulfilling? Yeah, I think it is in a weird way.

You know, the whole time I was thinking, I want to tell the American people about this. I just want them to know what's going on. And I want to be objective. And I'm not trying to color the story this way or that. I don't want to skew it. I just want them to understand this conflict to understand what's going on. And to know also, too, when the Americans were doing, there, it was probably of more interest and more stories because we had the Americans there.

Direct involvement. The Marine amphibious unit, and it was about 800 of them or 1,200 13 total, because there was some Navy, there were some French, there were some Brits, it was all multinational. So they went out, but at the end, when Arafat had been taken away, they came back in after the assassination of the president because everything was was in terms. turmoil and they stayed, but it became what's known as the quagmire. Accurate term. I think that's accurate for that, yeah, because it was like everybody was going, they're going to get bogged down. They're going to get bogged down in this, and they did.

So I guess I just couldn't get enough of it, but I hope I wasn't like a war junkie, but there's always that risk. There was that danger, and I think there were definitely some. individuals who are war junkies and as journalists. There are soldiers who are war junkies. That environment has a gravitational pull to it in very different manifestations, depending on the individual. But I know guys who cannot put the spurs up. They will get out of a military career and they will go into a contracting career and they'll

switch an issued uniform for a rented uniform or a bought uniform. They keep going back overseas. And it's something that I think you have to be aware of and that you have to manage each and every person, I think they respond to it differently, but there's a draw for sure. Did you, did you ever feel that way? Yes. And it manifested in me in really during that time period where I was consistently going overseas of an inability to detach my thought process from thinking about, you would get back

from deployment and you'd start thinking about the next one. Instead of spending the time to, put the car neutral for a little bit coasts take your foot off the gas reintegrate into family maybe work on yourself a little bit take care of some things that you need to take care of and you just get um it's exciting it's fulfilling you feel a sense of purpose it's a tangible feeling overseas directly interacting with people and being able to take them off of the chessboard and make a difference it will get a hold of you and it's tough and it didn't until I got hurt, which was a forced break from that. I don't think I realized how much my body might

have been in other places, but my mind was still in that area of thinking about that. And again, that's just a different manifestation of that magnetizing pole. Well, I think journalists experienced that too. Oh, it makes total sense to me that they would. Yeah, they do. So a lot of them, you know, they get to be known for their war experiences. And of course, you kind of want to send somebody. to a war zone who knows the lay of the land. So, you know, kind of by a flu. But you need to be able to navigate your way out of that too. Yeah, you do.

You can get stuck. You can get really, really stuck there. So I had done that stuff in 82. There were just, there were a lot of frightening and traumatic and traumatic experiences with being in Lebanon during that time. So I came, I came back out though. I was still based in London. I still considered myself I was based in London.

but I just kept going out on limbs, you know, and I decided to go back and I went freelance. I left a job that I had at ABC as a radio correspondent to just go again, like when I originally arrived in London, just totally freelance. Like I had some gig work lined up. I was working for RKO radio. I don't know if that exists. I have a voice of America. I was working for IRN in London independent radio network. They call it one of my friends. I had a really good friend. There were some women out there.

She was the ABC correspondent, but she wasn't going to stay. It's hard to know how long anybody was going to stay. She wasn't going to stay indefinitely. So I thought, well, I'll just have this work. And then when my friend leaves, maybe I'll inherit that job. And it will be more work and more stability and that sort of thing. and kind of like, I know what I'm doing, and I'll go out there.

But it was a really, really hard. It was during what they called the reconstruction phase of Lebanon, like the Civil War reconstruction, I think of. And they were trying to rebuild the country and they were having peace talks and they were like, you know, everything's going to be good and it's all good.

But it just didn't feel good. It did not feel good. It felt like it's going to get bad. I was like, the Marines are here. and they're going to get, they're going to get hit. I always had that feeling. And we were not embeds. We never had embeds back then, not to my knowledge.

Maybe they did for organizations like Stars and Stripes or whatever they had, you know, official, official, obviously they had official publications. But we would go with Marines and occasionally go on driving around through the refugee camps and stuff in Lebanon. And people started throwing things. and it wasn't good. And we kind of understood, I don't know if we understood more than the Marines. Maybe that sounds really arrogant. I'm sorry, but if it does. Well, it depends on how isolated the military units were in their interaction with the local populace

versus it sounds like you were out in amongst the local populace. So you probably had a better idea of the environmental's and the pattern of life and all those things. So it's very, very possible. We did on that, from that standpoint, you know, we were. talking to women and children and all that kind of stuff all the time. And so this was, this was in the spring of 1983. And it was, it was just hard living there too. You know, we had electricity cutoffs. We had water cutoffs. I lived in a very small apartment that had like rats. I'm sorry to say. And, um, I put tape all over the windows because of car bombs. You know,

I was so scared. To hold the windows in. Yeah, I was real. I didn't know what I was doing, though. you know, I really didn't have experience with that. And then in that spring in April, I went to the U.S. embassy to renew my credentials or something to see the consular guy who was in charge of the journalist. And I was sitting in the lobby, had to sit in the lobby waiting on him for a while. And then got that taken care of, left, went to London to have a break for a little bit of R&R. and the embassy was blown up. I'm sure you remember that. And it was really massive explosion.

So I saw that on TV, and I think from seeing that from London, and I saw my friends doing their journalism and the carnage and just the expressions on their faces, they look in, obviously they were in shock. They could have been experiencing PTSD or the beginnings of that. So I thought I was just sitting there

just a few days ago in that lobby. It throws it in your face. It's pretty real. That was really scary. Not like anything like the experiences that you've had, but... You know, one thing I will say is your experience are yours and mine or mine, and they should never be compared. And that includes experiences in war.

I hear... I got an email this morning from a man who was talking about a diagnosis that he has with post-traumatic stress. I don't call it a disorder. I think it's a natural reaction to stressors. And he said he felt, felt, feels guilty that it comes from a non-service related. He never served. So he feels like he can't say he has post-traumatic stress because it's somehow the bastion

of soldiers. And I wrote back to him, I was like, listen, stress is stress your body's reaction to stress is your body's reaction to stress. The fact that you've recognized it is a great thing. You can do something with it. But don't compare yourself to other people. All you're going to do is set yourself up for failure. Your experiences are yours and they're real for you.

mine or mine as are other soldiers. And I think it's very important to take people as an individual. And you don't have to go to war to experience post-traumatic stress, period, in my opinion. Having said that, I did not go to medical school. But that is how I feel about it. I agree. I agree. It's really hard to say what an individual's experiences, how they affect them.

And obviously, the journalists had individual experiences. and some people maybe didn't share their experiences and some people may have struggled and... Well, I think it's important to realize, too, that the same experience can drastically impact one person and another person, it's water off of a duck's back. There's, I mean, as far as I know, there's less known about the human brain

than there is what is known about the human brain. But one thing in talking a lot with psychiatrists and psychologists when I was getting out of the military and I still talked to a guy every Thursday, it's you know the comparative nature is is insidious and it's dangerous and just because two people experience the same thing you shouldn't expect the same outcome nor should that individual and it's okay for somebody to not be bothered by something that bothers somebody else because you'll see that and like well you know bob is having a hard time is there something wrong with me no there may not

be something wrong with you but there might be something that bugs you that bob's going to be totally fine with. I think one of the first steps towards heading in the right direction with that stuff is cutting the cord to comparative issues or the manifestation of any post-traumatic stress. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, anyway, when I saw all the carnage at the embassy and I was in London and I had a chance to take another job, a different job, working for the Canadian Broadcasting. casting corporation and working on documentaries and that sort of thing.

I just, I didn't go back. I didn't go back. I didn't have much there, you know. I had a really tiny apartment, like I said, with rats and tape on the windows and the sliding door. It was awful. And no hot water or no water. That's not good either.

And so I just got somebody there. I said, when you're coming out, just bring me, just bring me my stuff. You can just get the key from somebody and go. and so they did and I didn't have to go back. I mean, I could have, but I just chose not to. And then six months later or so in October of that year was when the Marine base was blown sky high and the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II. I think they might have just had one that trumped that.

Where was that where the explosion was a, I should know this, but I think there was a larger one very recently. it was in the Middle East too it was huge was the one in Beirut the one down at the port yeah they had all that was it like fertilizers I don't know what it was but it was obviously combustible and flammable yeah yeah and I think that probably exceeded the size of the barracks yeah yeah oh yeah but in the you know the people there have suffered so much just to think that that probably was not an act of terrorism even though when I first heard about it, of course, I did think that it was. I was my initial thought as well.

I haven't seen anything yet that pinned it on terrorism. I'm not sure. Trust me, the listeners will correct us if we are wrong in that sentiment. I assure you. I'm sure. So I was glad I wasn't there when the barracks got blown up. I had only been there maybe once or twice for like press briefings. And it was just, I just felt terrible for them.

and I was, you know, it was just devastating and so we got out of there a little bit like we finally got out of Syria. I think last year we know, you know, we finally pulled out of there and it was just, it was inevitable at that time that Reagan was going to pull, pull the troops out and not keep them there. But I think to the local people, it signals, can signal a lack of commitment on the part of the United States. Like, we're here, but now. it's cutting up rough and we're gonna leave now and you know what they're thinking of the domestic base and if you get more casualties like that and it was it was just such a tragic thing and it was it was Islamic jihad and they called themselves but that was Hezbollah that was

the beginning of Hezbollah and I'd say that because eventually I interviewed someone not the top top guy at Hezbollah but in the 2000s like the second in command. And so things happened to me later when I interviewed these world leaders where people domestically didn't like that. It's hard to do that without looking like you're, you're pandering to them or you're glorifying them or you're, you know, you're trying to make them look good. Don't let them have their say. But it's still, if you're a journalist, you're still supposed to, in my opinion, interview if you can, if you can talk to somebody. I think you should pull bad ideas into the light. The way you beat bad ideas is with better

ideas. Sometimes I think ideologies need to be wiped off the face of the planet because some of them are just hell bent on destruction of everything else and the economy of ideas is not going to fix that. But I'm willing to listen to just about anybody from just about any, position on what they think because it challenges my thought process, my belief, where do my ideas come from? And I think the more that bad ideas are drawn into the light, the less foundation and framework they will have. Right. It's tough though. Like you just said, it's difficult to do that and not. It's very tough. Yeah. And not give them a platform or whatever. So, so I say that and I was back in London. I was working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I was doing all different

kinds of, well, I was, I'd been hired to work on a five or six hour documentary on George Orwell for the, whatever it was, 1984, maybe it was 1984. So it was something to commemorate the actual book. He wrote 1984 and this was the year 1984 and how much of that was, how much of that had come true, you know, like Big Brother and all of that. So we sat about interviewing every living person who knew him in the U.K., or even, say, in Canada or whatever, anybody who had any contact with him. So we did a lot of that. That was different for me.

I'd never done that kind of real documentary work. And then I covered a lot of different subjects for them, but not always some war related, some Middle East related and went back to the Middle East in 84, 85, and interviewed Queen Nour, King Hussein's American wife and met them both. And that was a very acceptable story because she was American. And of course, King Hussein was a great ally of the United States, so it was not the sort of enemy. But all this time I had been trying for a year or two

to get an interview with Hafez al-Assad, who was the president of Syria. at the time, but he was not media savvy, let's say. He didn't speak English, and he was very distrustful of Western journalists of any type. That one probably wouldn't have gone that well. No. No. No, so I was trying to pull contacts for that to get that for ABC.

And it never did pan out. And then a couple of years later in 1986, I took a job with, agency, it's agency journalism, which the public doesn't always know too much about, because the agencies are sort of behind the scenes, and they feed material to all, not all of the networks, not directly competing networks, but they will supply material to clients. So like CBS would be a client or CNN or this agency was called worldwide television news, and prior to that, it had been called UPITN. It was owned by that. news agency, UPI, which folded, and only the AP was left and Reuters was left.

And so that was, again, sort of some connections to the Middle East because I was hired based on the fact that I had been there and they said, would you go, would you go back? And I said, well, I had been asked to do a story by the CBC, again, on the reconstructing. of Lebanon. This was story was still playing out in 86 as it had been in 83 when I was there. So I said, well, you know, the mistake I made was saying, yes, I was thinking about going for them. So they were like, well, then why won't you go for us? And all you have to do is fill in for a couple of weeks as the bureau chief just sit in the bureau, babysit everything. You send the crew out maybe. You don't have to really know heavy lifting. And I I said, well, you know, okay, maybe I would. And they ended, the agency, WTN said, ended up sending an Irish guy who was named John McCarthy, who I never met because when I was hired, he was, I guess he, by the time I came on, he was already in Lebanon filling in. And he'd never been there before. And I had.

And he was kidnapped. And he was held for like five or six years. And again, I'm backtracking. Prior to that, I'm sure it was prior to that in 85. I think it was a friend of mine had been kidnapped, Terry Anderson, who's the Bureau Chief for the AP in Beirut. What did they want when they were kidnapped? Were they looking for a ransom? Yeah. Or did they want a change politically or both? Both. Okay. Yeah, both. So it became this rash of kidnappings. Again, that spun out of me being there in 83 and the embassy bombing and the feeling the Marines were in danger.

And I was feeling the kidnappings were starting. They may have started. My memory is not great, but say 83, 84, 85. They took academics, professors from the American University at Beirut. They took them sort of like the Iranian hostage. thing, you know, which was a big thing in 79 and 80, and that's when I was in school and I was just starting out, you know, at ABC. And one correspondent made his name, made a great name for himself just because he had an Iranian visa and he could go in and cover the hostage thing. So that became

everybody's thing was, if you see trouble brewing, go and get a visa, you know, go and get a Polish visa. If you think there's going to be the uprising there, make sure you've got a valid visa. You you'll be the one who gets sent if you've got a valid visa. So this was still going on. The kidnappings, it was like 79, but it was not a mass kidnapping. That's kind of what I wanted to say. They took a group from the embassy on mass, 50 or 60, or however many. And then in Lebanon, they just started picking them off the street

because that was all they could do and following people around and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it just, it did not feel good. So by 85, 86, Terry Anderson, who was a colleague, I didn't know him well. I knew the woman who became his wife, but I didn't know him really, really well, but he'd been taken. He was being held. Then I was asked if I would go, and that's why I was so leery. I was like, I don't know. I just still don't feel good at all about being there, going there.

And then John McCarthy was sent, and he was kidnapped. and I felt a certain degree of survivors' guilt. I felt if they had sent me, not that it was that experience, I wasn't. I mean, I had been there a total of half a dozen times and lived there for, say, three months on one of those occasions. That's a lot comparatively to somebody who lands there

and is taking everything in live their first day on the ground. For sure. And he was like, you know, raising a glass in a home video, kind of having a toast and relaxing and you think it's the Paris of the Middle East and these beautiful limestone buildings behind him. He's with some people maybe from the bureau, people he's just met. And it was just so fatalistic to see that last clip of him like raising the glass and how badly it was going to end. And I also, again, I just didn't think I would be kidnapped. Maybe you have to think that. And some nuns had been kidnapped.

So it was possible that a woman could be kidnapped. I was fooling myself to think otherwise or killed. Was he released? He was after, but it was a long time. It was like five or six years, and my boss felt so bad, and he suffered the survivor's guilt, and it was very hard on all of us who were back in the London Bureau because it was that thing kind of like the coronavirus,

you don't know when it's going to end. And if you're that captive, you can imagine you're captive you don't you don't know when it's going to end and it it tests you it tests you so much i think uh psychologically i just can't even imagine but i did i did feel guilty about it and i had been told once by an islamic leader that uh said we would cap the women would never be kidnapped because it's not it's it's a degradation of the act of kidnapping it's like we would sooner kidnap a dog. It's not worth it. Okay, that's good. I'm glad I don't want to be kidnapped. I don't know how true that is though. That might have been a way for them to get around talking about the

actual risk. Yeah, yeah. But they claim they wouldn't. I don't know for chivalrous reasons or other reasons. I feel like they weren't chivalrous reasons. No. No. Yeah. You have experience. You have experience with that. Yeah, I just wouldn't, I wouldn't apply the term chivalry anywhere near kidnapping. Usually they have their intent as far more malicious. Yeah. So I think Survivor's guilt, I bring that up because I think as a suicide loss survivor, you always feel a certain amount of guilt that you carry with you.

And so you've known people who've taken their lives that the woulda, coulda, shoulda, what if or what if I'd done this? What if I'd done that? Or just that feeling in that situation with John McCarthy that it could have been me. Or if I'd gone, this wouldn't have happened. And it just radically changes the course of your life if you're held hostage for five, six, seven years or a month. Or I know a few days. It's just to be, it's very, very traumatic.

And I just can't imagine how people deal with that. and so I certainly don't have an answer to that. I've seen people who have dealt with situations like that well and others where it has unraveled their life completely. Right. And everything in between, actually, as well. So shortly, you know, it sounds like you have a pretty good amount of experience there. And then you said, though, the birth of your son was pretty much the end of that.

That was the end of your willingness to go into that world. Yes, that just didn't feel like the right thing to do. but yeah prior prior to that I had also been I had been to Iraq I had very briefly met as I met Saddam Hussein which I didn't think that was going to happen you know I used to go to the guardhouses around the presidential palace and just wait to say you know I'm here I'd love to have an interview with his excellency blah blah blah again kind of playing the betty boot I'm kind of naive person and trying to be very patient You know, I'd wait, I'd wait for hours just to get a glimpse of anything, you know, just the slightest thing. So I was there, went there for a, went to cover a women's convention of all the

international women's convention where they were trying to show how progressive the Iraqi women were at that time. They were not, this. This was, I think it was 84 or 85, somewhere in there. And they were. They didn't wear, they didn't wear the hijab or different. types of veils very much and they didn't wear the hijab when you saw them or all the time my experience with some of those events is that when you show up for the event people behave in a certain manner that is different than how they would behave before and after the event yes there's a showmanship aspect to it you could show a small section in a controlled environment of somebody or a group of women being incredibly progressive and then that particular portion of the

world Iraq specifically pretty suppressive to women. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, like I said, it was kind of, it was kind of a show of look, look at how progressive we are and that sort of thing. And then we were, we were taken to the parliament building, and they said, you're going to see Saddam Hussein. I was like, yeah, right.

I didn't believe it. You know I didn't believe it because I tried. No, I tried so hard and so many times, and it was so out of the question, and it was never going to happen. And so, but he did. We heard him make a speech like Castro that went on for hours and hours and hours. And then they were just like these Iraqi cheerleaders in, in uniforms, chanting. And it was all just, it was quite a spectacle. And we got to meet him briefly afterwards. And I was just kind of like put next to him. And you know, you're kind of, you know, you're being used. Like you'd be used if it were, if it were a real interview, you're being used. But,

it wasn't anything really that I could do anything about. And he didn't speak English well, but I asked him some questions about the Iran-Iraq War was what was really going on at the time. And that was raging on the border and down south and in the marshes and the Hwaiza marshes. And then it became, while I was there, I kind of became trapped there.

So the conference was over. I became trapped. And the war of the cities broke out. And that was, yes, where the Iranians were shooting like the missiles, I guess, and they're guided. And one... Scuds?

Yes. And they could travel several hundred miles or something. And one hit a building that was right in line with my hotel. If it had not hit that building, it would have hit my hotel. Okay, and we're talking about like hotel journalism kind of thing. And you never know what's going on. And they're often trying to confine you to the hotel or not literally confine you to the room. A lot of blasts and stuff going off.

and a lot of, you know, and then we travel with the Iraqi army and we traveled in a helicopter down to the border to see the fighting or see what a wonderful job they had done killing all the Iranians and they probably... You got into an Iraqi helicopter.

You're very, very brave woman. And the other journalists were scared too, you know, because we could... You guys had reason to be scared. We could smell like the petrol fumes and stuff like that. You just like, yeah. Just sitting on the...

the floor of a helicopter and just that smell and knowing there's fighting going on like the shooting back and forth of rockets or missiles going off and you're in the air and that's in the air and then they just showed us that all of these bodies that had some people said they've been kept in the freezers so they could drag them out for this showing I mean that's gruesome I know and it's logistically complex as well but I'm just trying to think my way through that I don't know But there were so many rumors that they were booby-trap, too. Not that we were going to go close to them. So it was like a friend of mine put it just a really grisly.

It was a very grisly war. And that was my only real look at it. Journalists did go in and cover it from either side. They go in from the Iraqi side or they come in from the Iranian side. But at any time, either country could prohibit, you know, not recognize visas, not allow you in the country unless you were doing what they wanted you to do and seeing what. they wanted you to see. Information is key in those environments. Those countries will want to, or they will take you to places that paint a narrative that they want to have told, not necessarily the truth. I know, and it's so hard because unless you speak Arabic and I'm not great at languages

anyway, and I could speak French some, but you don't know what's going on. You're dependent on a translator. One day my translator did disappear and he never showed up, but he never came back again. So survivors guilt over that. Then when I got the picture, the next day after having my picture made with Saddam Hussein, it was propaganda, you know, look at how wonderful I am with Americans and all that. But we were kind of as a nation, the U.S. was kind of having a detente period with Iraq at that time, if you can believe that. Like Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense at the time, and they were talking with Saddam and, you know, getting cozy. Getting cozy. with Saddam because he was seen as the bulwark or Iraq was seen as a bulwark against Iranian

fundamentalism pouring over the border, especially in the south, where you would see the women in the black, the hijab or the full black dress. They would tell us you can't take a picture of those women, don't, you know, because I always had my camera, still camera with me too. So knock on the door, the hotel room door, and somebody gave me a big, or they left outside the hotel room door, it was just left there, it was a folder in Arabic gold embossed letters on a leather cover, open the thing up, there's the picture of me and Saddam. There are other people in the picture, too. So several copies of it, several copies in this nice folder, I take one, take the fingernail scissors, cut out, just me and Saddam.

and then I stick it in my passport. Just instinct. Instinct tells me to do that. It might be handy. Keep that. So a few nights later, I was walking with some NBC folks. We went out to one of the fish restaurants, and Mukabarat stopped us. I mean, we were walking.

They pulled up in a car and said, get in. That's going to be a hard pass. So scared. Yeah, I was so scared. So we got in and I showed them the picture and they let us out. They put us out of the call, a car. And, you know, it was in that time when, or earlier even in the early 80s, Saddam, there were always talk about him having a double.

Yes, I've heard that as well. You've heard that. So like parades, you know, we used to study the footage because we study hours of footage come in. And, you know, here he is waving from the back of a car. car or something. And from a certain distance, you think, yeah, they probably could get away with a double. It'd be pretty easy. But when I met him, and I say that, you know, ask him a few, few questions real quick, like, you're really winning the war, aren't you? It's not great. I was so close to him. It couldn't have been a double. There were so many people around.

As soon as he finished giving his long, long, long speech, like three or four hours, the deputies, they call him like the parliamentarians, they just rushed the floor and just surrounded him. There was like no security that I could see, but we'd all gone through metal detectors. So people were, you were able to touch him, come right up to him.

So I was closer than you and I are right now. Well, definitely. So I don't know that they could have gotten away with a double. I don't know how good they are able to do that stuff. Yeah, but it was one of those folklorish things that might or might not. have been true. So that was my time in Iraq. And then I didn't, you know, just to round out the war experiences, I didn't go, I didn't go back to the Middle East when by the time Gulf

War I had broken out. And I had reason to go, especially to go maybe to an offshoot place like Jordan. I had been to several times in Damascus in Syria. I had been there many times. And, but I, I didn't think it was the right thing for me. Just was not something I was comfortable with. I know one American female journalist who has done that sort of thing. She even went to war zones when she was pregnant, like with her third or four child. That's ballsy. Yeah, that's.

And I'm not condemning that because everybody, like you said, everybody has their level, their comfort, their comfort zone. And no, I didn't. By that time, I had moved into celebrity journalism. Is it that crazy? I believe that's described as hell. Yes. Knowing nothing about journalism or having ever been a journalist, I would imagine that would be a pretty tough row to hoe. Yeah.

So they just came to me one day and said basically, nobody wants to do this job. Here you go. Yeah. Another guy had set it up. and he was a very hard news freak. Were you back in the U.S. at this point? No, I was still in London. I was still working for the agency, worldwide television news.

So we're going to do entertainment news. So that's what I said, yeah, I'll do it. I mean, it fits with, I could stay in London almost all the time. I could do assignments, but I also could farm them out. I was the executive producer, like my husband said. So I could hire freelancers to do what I did not want to do. If I really wanted to do something, I could. but even that I kind of found stressful just because my son was really young.

He was born in 87, so he was like two, three, four years old at this time. So I didn't travel to events like, say, the Cannes Film Festival, but I had to cover that for, had to make sure that was covered for CNN, the Hollywood Minute. Of course. I mean, it's so critically important. What's happening there? It's so important. And entertainment tonight was one of my big clients.

an E, the E network. Oh, I've seen. It was big. Far too many shows on both of those networks. So I just started filling my head with bubble gum. It was like, you know, are we going to get this interview with the star? Is that star going to have a tantrum? Or is there publicists going to have a tantrum?

Or are they going to, you know, cooperate with us? What are we? So, yeah, it was really, really extreme. So I just went from one extreme to the other. I really, I wanted to, I did want to change. If I hadn't wanted to do it, I wouldn't have done it. I would have just stayed in whose. Yeah.

What brought you back to the U.S.? And then my marriage ended, and that was about in 92, and my son was, my son, Karen, was four years old at the time. My mother was very ill. She had had a stroke, and there really was no one to care for her. You know, you could say it falls on the daughter. I mean, not always, but it does. It can. It can fall on the daughter. I have two brothers. But so I moved back to take care of her and tell one of my brothers don't come back because it's not going to be good for your career.

So I returned to Memphis and that was culture shock. You know, I tried not to see it as culture shock because it was home. I feel like it would be impossible not to see it as culture shock. I had been away so long. I had been away so long. And, you know, 12 years, it's not great for your career. Like if you're on this career path, like say you're with the network, but you're a local hire pretty much was, that was what I was. It's hard to get back with the network, say, in New York. You kind of die on the vine. You stay there and you maybe hang on and you could die on the vine, that sort of thing. I was offered a job in New York. at CBS, mainly because of my entertainment experience, because I knew how to cover the Cannes Film Festival. And they wanted that. They wanted that for the morning shows. So I had all the contacts.

How crazy of a world is it, that that is valued more over your international wartime correspondence experience? Yeah. This world that we live in is completely on its head. It's crazy. And I mean, I knew people at, say, for example, I knew people at CNN well,

and CNN was my client as well with the Hollywood minute and they had been my clients before they were a client of the agency worldwide television news uh you know that i went down there and interviewed in Atlanta and they said well why should we hire you because we can hire three kids for what we have to pay you and which wasn't a lot anyway it was you know not a huge amount of money but but experience wasn't valued i guess that's what i'm trying to say kind of plays off of what you were saying that and and i would say experience does matter. You have to get on the job experience as a journalist. You have to know what to do, how to react in a certain situation, and you're not going to know your first time out. I mean,

I probably, I know I made a lot of mistakes. How would I know how to cover an IRA bombing when I was like 24 or I didn't in a foreign country, even London, even not having the language barrier. There were a lot of experiences I had in other, in other. journalists had too, and they might not have been valued for their experience. They too might have died on the vine or they might have gone into PR work or they might have gone into something that was either safer or more lucrative. But that was kind of going back to my earlier things that I was telling you that I'd never realize the level of danger. You know, I never realized that people were going to threaten me. Like later when I wrote about Saddam, you know,

my encounter with Saddam, that kind of thing. It's always good for a yarn, you know. And I wrote something about it for the commercial appeal, and they published the picture. And then I get letters, which are threats. But they're letters to the newspaper saying, if Hitler were alive, she would be interviewing him in his bunker. What do you think?

I would want to interview Hitler because then I would interview him and then beat him to death. And that way it would kill two birds with one stone. Wow. Get the interview up front, take care of what needed to be taken care of. I've actually been asked often any historical figure that I would want to sit down and do a podcast with, and I would want to go to Hitler pre-war before his assent to power, pick his brain a little bit, and then choke him to death. Oh, wow.

But that's just how I think. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I could say. I wouldn't be that way. I'm not violent. I would just whimp off, you know, and thank him. Thank him for the interview. Here's the thing, Margaret, I'm not violent either.

until it's time to be violent. Right. And then when it's time to be violent, you need to come to the table with more violence than anybody is ever expecting. But I prefer not to do that until I have to. Right. And Hitler deserves some violence.

Do you think there's ever a time and a place for a journalist to be violent? Yes. Off the top of my head, I can't give you an exact specific example, but I feel like there must be. Maybe. I would say maybe in defense of their life or their safety.

Yeah. I mean, that would be a good time to respond with violence. Yeah. We were kind of like, you know, like I said, we were never in beds, but I did wear, I did wear flackjackjacket when I was in Iraq because we had so many bombings and explosions and stuff flying all the time that CBS gave me one. It lent me one. But it made me feel more like I was involved in the war. I can see that. You know, and I can see that. I think journalists try not to wear them, you know. If you're in an environment that has things flying around ballistically, it's probably not a bad idea. Right. You know, why not add a piece of equipment that could potentially save your life?

Even though they're hot and heavy. Hot and heavy is better than fast piercing and hydraulic fluid leaking out. I know. So you got to balance it. That's, you know, when you hear things flying, bullets flying is so very, very scary. And that's what I was always saying in Lebanon is like, who's shooting, who's. in which way is the shooting coming from and the incoming was the incoming was the little piercing noise and then the outgoing was the big booms right it depends on what you're talking about

incoming and outgoing bullets when they go by you they snap um and if they're shooting people are shooting next to you you hear the report of the rifle going in that direction but when it goes by your head it makes a snapping noise the louder the snap the closer it is you can hear mortars and probably rockets flying through the air. A lot of times they have fins and you can hear the fins of it cutting through the air. It makes a pretty particular and distinct whistle. I didn't have the experience to pick any of those things out. That's good. That is good you didn't have the experience to pick those things out. No, so from that standpoint, I couldn't cover the actual sounds of that, but it was so, it could be so dangerous that somebody I remember

a driver or somebody pull me back from a balcony because I was. I was so over-eager to get the sound in ABC radio. What you heard was what you got. We were never allowed to put sound behind us. That was different from NBC and I believe CBS, who, if they had the technology, they could go and dub in, dub behind the sound of explosions or rockets.

That's a no-go. Yeah. that's that becomes editorialized yeah that's not the news that's a presentation at that point right so we were it was so strict that which i think is good you could be fired you would be fired for that good so you could be in a life-threatening situation as i'm sure you can imagine and it's just uh it's just a sniper's bullet whizzing past or just a minor little sound that you're risking your life for and you've got to be talking over it while the bullets whizzing by or maybe there's a shell or something like that, but you just talk, talk, talk continuously,

hoping that something is going to happen behind you, but not too much. Yeah. Not too much where you end up being. That sounds insane. Yeah. It is insane. That is crazy. But it was honest. It was honest journalism. And the others had their reasons for doing whatever they did. Did they disclose the fact that they were dubbing the noise in the background? And see, that's the issue that I have.

Yeah. You know, like, hey, we're going to create something to, you can hear the sounds of whatever they might need to say. It has to be disclosed. Otherwise, it's anything but transparent. I agree. And I do like now that it seems like journalism and like you and I are talking now, it's much more natural. It's much less heavily edited. It's just like people talking.

Because when you are editing, you are editorializing. Well, you're changing the narrative, too. You can craft left, right, center, whatever direction you want to take with. I mean, there's some pretty amazing editing tools. And then with the introduction of artificial intelligence, it's going to get pretty wild. That's what I read something about that. I just said yesterday or something where, of course, pictures, photographs can be really doctored a lot. And they're working on that with audio as well.

Basically, they could take this podcast, however long it will be, and look at the words that we say and then start rejumbling them into. to statements that neither you or I said. Right. So that's the technology going too far or maybe becoming not a good tool. Yes. Boy, that's the word for it for sure. But we still, you know, I go back to we couldn't even imagine the different things. If you go back to graduate school, I did my thesis on a typewriter.

And that's just, that's almost impossible to imagine. I imagine typing. Yes. Me too. Let's think about it. What skills do I use every day? I'm typing every day. Math, English, and that's about it.

I wish I would have had a class on taxes. That'd be great. Anybody listening in the school system? Let's do that. How to balance a checkbook. Responsible management of debt. Income. Like, come on.

There's some classes that we can have. You do wood shop. I'm sure that everybody's going to make a picture frame. How about we teach kids how to balance a checkbook? Yeah. Definitely. definitely. I needed that for sure. And then when, you know, the technology was, imagine being in these war zones and not having a cell phone, not having, you know, we started to hear about the technology and how you could set up a field thing. That was kind of a dream. A lot of it was military technology. A fly away. And then from there, you could beam your, you could beam your pictures out because it was always difficult getting pictures out of these countries because the television station would be closed or blown up or something like that.

and audio was not good. You couldn't really, they didn't want you to use a phone line. That was bad. So you tried to set something better than get something set up that was better than that. But I mean, I remember the first time really dating myself, but that's okay. I don't care. The first time I saw a cell phone. I remember it too.

Do you? Yes. What was yours experience? Well, the first one I ever had to follow, I think was Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. I was like, that thing is crazy. Oh, wow. The first one I ever saw was like a brick that was a little. flip and I'm pretty sure I paid a hundred bucks for 30 minutes, something like that. The ridiculous

per minute plans that people, like I got to go mom, hang up the phone because I get six minutes that I can use here. I'm going to go into a penalty minutes. Wow. Yeah. It was late 90s. I remember the first cell phone I ever bought was it Horton Plaza in San Diego. Why that sticks with me? I have no idea. I know exactly where I was. They were definitely, they definitely seemed useful. I was with a freelance cameraman and he was a very expensive cameraman. You had to hire him by the day. It was like a thousand pounds for the day, which was a lot of money. This was like early 90s. Still a lot of money. That is a lot, yes. And he, because he was a well-paid cameraman, he had bought a cell phone. It was very large, like very large, one of those big things. And we were standing in Piccadilly Circus in

London and he said, look at this. This is my cell phone. And I said, wow, you know, can I make a call on that to the office? And he said, well, it's 10 pounds a minute. No, thank you. No, I said, no, I don't need to talk to the office that bad. But the potential, you know, I saw that and I could just see the potential was there. And we could see that potential in video as well, because we had to do linear editing all the way through most of almost all of my television career. We did not have, we did not have digital. You know, we were scrolling, scrolling tapes back and forth and, and, and, editing. So what you laid down, you couldn't go back and lay shots over once you'd built. Oh, wow. Once you'd built a piece with so many shots, you could only drop a shot in if it

exactly covered what you'd already laid down. Imagine you just had a nice MacBook Pro back then. Can you imagine? No. Yeah. Well, if you did, if you did have one back then, imagine what we would have today. Because we're making advancements, leaps and bounds. So fast. That is a thing. fascinating career path that you were on. Yeah, it was kind of up and down. And then I did get married to a British gentleman who was in television, probably, you know, that wasn't his nationality or the being in broadcasting. Those were not the issues. But I decided it was better for my son and for me to go to return to the states. That was really a tough decision because my whole life was over there in London and my friends and formative, you know,

formative relationships that you make like through your, I know you have and or mid, mid, mid, 20s, that sort of thing. Yeah, 20s to 30s. To go home and take care of mom and then how do you, how do you relate to the people? I thought I could relate to people everywhere and I always tried to land all my feet when I went to places like one time, the only time I've been to Africa, I was the first, I was told I was the first broadcast journalist to report AIDS in Africa. You know, I was like just land on your feet, deal with it, deal with the locals. I was alone. I didn't have a producer even, you know, that type of situation.

So I go home a few years later and it's a hard adjustment. I could really relate, I think, to service men and women trying to readjust. The pace is different. things that are important in a war zone, they don't even present themselves in the civilian world oftentimes, which is a good thing, by the way. It's just, it's a different rhythm, I guess would be the best way to describe it. There's a pace and cadence to the music overseas and then you get back and the beats permit it is drastically reduced.

It's a difficult transition for not all, but many, and almost impossible. for some, unfortunately. I say it pretty often. If you go touch war, war will touch you back, and not everybody can recover from that. And it will change you, and you should expect it to change you.

It doesn't mean it has to destroy you, but for some people it does. Yes, you will be changed. You want to think that you won't be. I mean, maybe I'd say, especially as a journalist. Yeah. I think you're a sociopath.

Yeah. Yeah. That's probably, I think that's true. Yeah, and to have it, to do it over to voluntarily be, I guess anyone's voluntarily in the Army or in the service now. But to go over there and have that experience, maybe you think it's not going to affect you. You think I'm going to be the one who's not going to be affected or I just don't want that. I don't want that to be my identity, but it is your identity because you can't escape it. I think the services do a much better job in the market.

era of trying to dispel that allure or dispel the misconception that people think that it's not going to have an impact. Mental hygiene, mental health. As I was leaving the military, specifically the special operations community was ramping up their concern and emphasis on both of those things. There were people there to talk to. They had programs in place not only for the service member, but for families and kids and retreats. And it was becoming part of, you know, the holistic cycle. So the military does some things very well, others not as well, and I think they're trying to take the not as well health perspective, mental health perspective, and put that into the very well category. But it will take time. It will take time.

I think I could have gone, you know, sort of gone into denial about it because I had my child to care for. I was not that person anymore. And I think a lot of it was people couldn't relate to my experiences. So it was not, there wasn't anyone I could share anything with. And they would have thought that it was odd. I think that's common. Everything you're describing, I believe, is common. Yeah. So I married, I remarried. I married my husband, Tim. We got married fairly quickly after I moved back. We had known each other as children and our families knew each other. Our brothers and sisters knew each other. The families were close friends. Oh, I read about him in the book, the blonde-haired blue-eyed pilot with the piercing gaze. Excellent description. I want to be

described in a book like that someday. Problem is, I have brown hair and brown eyes, so it would be slightly different. He always says he wrote that part without me. Hey, you know what? He wrote it well. He wrote it well. So then I had two. children. I have, we have a son, Matt. How old is Matt now? Who's a great fan of your podcast. And he's 25. He's turning 26 later this, later this month. And so it kind of, I'll get to what he's doing in a minute. He, it kind of became this real happy ever after story. It was everything, sort of like everything falling into place. I went back to Memphis. We had a very happy.

home life. We had two boys seven years apart, but they were very close growing up. And as I say in my book, the world looks different now, that kind of thing. It certainly fits a lot of these scenarios that we're talking about. That kind of rosy picture lasted for a few years, but then we could see that our older son, Kieran, that maybe he was having issues, but we never had any diagnosis. diagnosis, firm diagnosis of anything. And so things kind of snowballed with him. And I say in the book that I didn't talk to my boys about these more experiences like that you and I've been talking about.

And so much of it's come back to me now. But, you know, I didn't because I didn't want them to have a mother who was weird or to think, wow, my mom's really different. from all the other moms. I don't talk to my kids at all about any of the experiences that I've had unless they ask. My rule with them is I'll answer any question

that they ask me. Obviously age appropriate answers. But they, when it comes up, they'll have a fleeting moment of interest and I'll give them the best answer that I can and then they move on. And I'm totally fine with that because I just wanna be dad.

I don't wanna be dad's experiences or dad's old job title or anything that. I just wanna be their dad. And if they're curious later in life, we can sit down and have deeper conversations. But at this point in their life, specifically two boys, 16 and 15, they're worried about their world and their world only. They're like, oh, yeah, I do have a dad. Maybe I should check with him once every month just to make sure he still has a pulse. Right.

But it's, I don't think it's, again, I think it's natural to not talk to your children about those experiences. Mm-hmm. They wouldn't have had any context to understand them, really. No, they wouldn't have. but I was conscious of being that mother who was different from like all the other the soccer moms and the football moms and that kind of thing. It was different. But I totally think what you're saying is true that kids are focused on themselves and that's a healthy thing and they should be and it should be about them. I didn't want to put myself front and center.

I felt growing up that sort of my mother was the center of attention. She was the attraction. She was the female doctor. was the woman doctor. And if you, as the parent, are taking up so much space and so much oxygen, your children, that's just my opinion. I agree with you. They're not going to have the room and the space and the oxygen to flourish if the parents

just totally. Well, let's be honest. Regardless of, I mean, an occupation is exactly that. It shouldn't define who you are. And my metric for success when I'm laying on my deathbed will be, did my kids make a positive impact in the world that they were in? regardless of what that world is. I don't care what the job title is. It should be about them, and it should be about them doing better than I did.

So basically, Kieran, my older one, he did not do very well in school and struggled. And we got him set up to go to college. He did go to college. He did well on standardized tests, but not well grade-wise. And it, didn't last in college. He didn't even make it through the first semester. You broke down the issues well in the first chapter. It sounds like he struggled. I don't know any other way to put it. It seems like you picked up on that pretty early on as parents. We did. I think you you keep hoping things are going to get better, but then you have the teenage years kicking in and and the challenge is associated with the teenage years and it doesn't exactly get better.

Much people who don't know what those are if you have kids who aren't teenagers, just wait. Just wait and then send me a note when you realize what we're talking about when we say the challenge of teenage years. Yeah, yeah. They're hard enough as it is, perhaps would be a good way to put it in addition to any other issues that your kids will have. And your kids are all going to have issues. All three of my children have quirks. I have quirks. I got my own stuff that I have to work my way through.

I just have the benefit of 42 laps around the sun, whereas they're at 12, 15, and 16. Mm-hmm. So he dropped out of college, and he had met a girl, and they ended up getting married, and they had a child right away. And he was young.

Early 20s, right? Yes, he was barely 20 when his daughter was born. and of course I think that was that was a stress or two and he decided the thing to do was to enlist and he researched all of... Had he ever talked to you about the military prior to that? Because I was reading that in the book and there was one question that I had as I was reading last night is I was curious. For me, my parents knew I was going to go into the military.

My mom's side of the military brat on the army side, dad's side, naval service from him, his dad, his dad's dad. they didn't talk me out of it at all. I don't know if they were necessarily thrilled at my occupation, but I had been talking about it for seven, eight years before I even went. Right. Kieran had not really really really really. The only thing we knew is that, as I say in the book, he loved the Boy Scouts. He loved doing that. And he loved being outdoors. He loved all of that kind of stuff. But no, he, I think it was a, desire to provide for his family to try to have something that was a secure a secure job and

a hands-on he was better with sort of the hands-on type stuff than doing that then doing the academic work of college and sort of like I was more hands-on doing journalism that sort of thing he he kind of needed that so and the military will do a great job of providing exactly what you're talking about the first and the 15th are I mean it doesn't get any better than that a government job which is exactly what the military is food housing health care and later on so for me I would have I look at college if I would have gone when I was 18 I would have crumbled I didn't have it I didn't have the discipline absent oversight of you know in high school your teachers actually want you to succeed my teachers are awesome from my understanding of college the teachers don't care if you show up

It's a, you know, the paradigm shifts. And me, I went into a community of people that were, I mean, I understood work ethic. I wanted to be in that community. There was nothing that was going to stop me, but I didn't have that mentality about school. And I say all this because the beauty is if you are, you can get a lot of trade skills from the military. And like I said, the pay, the health care, the benefits. And also as you mature through your early formative years, probably more for young adult men, I would say, than women. the educational options are still there.

I would do fine in college now, where I would have done fine in college in my mid to late 20s, and that's because of the, I had that safety net of the military. So it does provide those things. Right. But you have to be cautious that the military will get their pound of flesh as well.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't think he saw that. I mean, he might have been a little bit cynical, thinking I'm going to use the army to get what I want out of, you know, to get the benefits or skills or whatever. And you can, however, pound of flesh. and the military will get theirs up front,

you can get yours a little bit later on. The military will get what the military needs first. Because there was this part of him in high school and everything, especially, where he was kind of like a 60s hippie type. You know, he was intrigued by the anti-war era of Vietnam. He liked Bob Dylan. He liked beat poets from the 1950s and 60s.

and he liked long hair, that sort of thing. So he kind of had to do a real big 180, or you call it, to become the, to adopt the military persona, I think was, it could have been kind of overwhelming for him. It seems like as soon as you put that uniform on, you have that persona. You're part of. Some people more than other.

Yeah. One of the first things that they do, I can only speak for Navy boot camp, which is very different than Army. me boot camp, very, very different from Marine Corps boot camp. And I'd have no clue what they do in the Air Force when it comes to boot camp. But one of the first things, you know, that you have to do everybody, the military is a cross section of society. And it's, if you ask me, I would say that our society is a very me, me, me, driven society. Look at me on Instagram. Look at me on Facebook.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. The military needs to be more of a we. You know, the mission needs to take priority over the individual needs. So a lot of. of what happens in those first months, depending on how long boot camp in, is that breaking down of the individual and a rebuilding of that team philosophy and mindset. So to a degree, yes, you become that persona in the military. And some people grab onto it harder than others, though.

And a lot of that depends on where they come from. If people who played organized team sports, they take to the military incredibly well. Intelligent people take to the military incredibly well. people, and this is totally anecdotal, but, you know, that struggle with interpersonal skills probably a little bit more difficult. Communication skills, poor communication skills, probably a little bit more difficult. But it's the role of that entry into the military as you're coming from me and you're going

into we being whatever branch of the military you're in. Right. And that was not easy for Kieran. He was not good at organized sports. He was not physically very well coordinated. he was much more individualistic, like skateboarding, like, it was kind of the romantic poet individualist. And it's like you said, you're working for a greater good, you're working for a common goal. You have to learn to work with others.

And those are really important skills, I think. And so we could see that the Army wasn't necessarily a bad, thing for him. It wasn't a bad path for him because ordinary college just didn't seem to be working well for him. How much time did he give you as a heads up between he first started talking about this or thinking about it from when he went and signed on the dotted line? Six months, maybe, maybe a year. Okay, so relatively rapid. And we were not, he was not living with us. He had married and he had moved to middle Tennessee where we live now. What was he doing for living at that time? Like working at Walmart or Sam's or something. And so he didn't like that. He hated that.

And so he was, became one of those kids. He was hanging around the recruiting, recruiting station, kind of learning. I mean, was he doing like National Guard where you start going something like that? You start going twice a month or? I don't know exactly how the National Guard. works that sounds correct but even to go into the National Guard for my understanding and for National Guardsmen if I'm messing this up I apologize but I think you have to go to boot camp then you go into the National Guard so I don't know necessarily what he would have been peripheral to or involved with there yeah I'm not sure but he did he did go to regular he did go to regular army Army boot camp.

And he'd been talking to us, but not in person, mainly over the phone. And we didn't feel, I say, we, my husband and I, we didn't feel we had the right to say that much because he was married. And say that much in relationship to what? To pros and cons about it, to just questioning, was this really right for him? I mean, my husband, Tim, went to the Naval Academy. He went on to flight school. He went on and became a pilot.

And his grandfather was in the Navy. I mean, my father was in World War II. But we don't, you know, we're not really military background. Yeah, it's like generational lineage. Not too much. I know people are like, I go back to the Civil War. It's like, damn, man. Branch out a bit or don't, you know, whatever you're into.

That's something. So we didn't have that, but I don't think we would have been. anti him going into the military, but we would have had, we had reservations. And we tried to voice those reservations. And I think that's fair. 20 is not that old. I look back at how much I was absolutely certain that I knew when I was 20 years old. And it was pretty much nothing. That would be the best and most apt description. I thought I knew everything and I didn't know that much. And my parents did have hesitation with me going into the military. And they, and they, we would have conversations and they could bring up concerns and we could work our way through

or around, depending on how the conversation went, the concerns. But I'm glad you at least voiced how you felt. From my understanding, that's what I'm hearing. Yeah, it just seemed like we were on a freight train or he was going to go in that direction and he spent hours and hours and hours researching all the branches of the military. So this would be the best way for him to go. This would be the best deal. That would be the best deal for him personally.

and so but he he did enlist and he was very excited when he got in and he went to boot camp at Fort Knox and wrote letters because I think they make them write letters so he wrote letters like almost every day handwritten proof of life letters yeah hey mom I'm okay wink winks and cookies yeah yeah I think they made us write letters too even in the Navy yeah yeah so So he did say things like, I think in a weird way, I'm kind of enjoying this because he was doing a lot of outdoorsy things. I meant to ask you this. What year was this that he enlisted? This would have been, I think, 2009. So post-9-11, I entered pre-9-11 where the thought of what happened on September 11, 2001, if I had been a fiction writer and you'd give me an unlimited amount of time, I don't think I would have come up with that.

that particular manifestation of it. Right. So people who enlist, and I saw this when I was a Bud's instructor, some of the Bud's instructors have a, how dare you try to be who I am mentality or a holier than now mentality? And I don't think my approach or thought process

was necessarily catastrophically different, but I saw young men volunteering to go into an occupation in a community who, by design, the execution of their job is combat operations, which for the military, about only 15% of the U.S. military engages in direct combat. But it's a different mentality to go into that in a post-9-11 world than it is a pre-9-11 world. What were his thoughts on potentially deploying overseas to a, because at that time there was still Afghanistan and Iraq deployments? So is that, what do you mean by it changed before 9-11 and versus after? I'd just like to hear what you think about that. I feel

that the military could be viewed as more of a foundation for a career later on. There would be, and this is still possible to this day, but there was such a gap in kinetic activity, a mature theater of war. I remember, you know, one of the biggest things they would talk about up front would be the educational benefits. It's a ladder out of a social, socioeconomic position wherever you're at. You could get vocational training. You could get a solid paycheck. You could retire if you wanted to. You could take the educational benefits. And there was a concept of war based off of movies that you had seen, but there was nothing that you could point at the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, which lasted about seven seconds.

That was really it. Versus somebody who grew up in a world where on the news, there are vehicles burning, reports of IEDs, embedded reporters watching. gunfight, seeing tracers going back and forth in real time. And by that point, 2008, 2009, in Memphis, I am sure that you probably knew people or families that were directly touched or impacted by that war. There had been enough time and the country had had been war long enough. And the decision to join during that time period, to me, there's no, I don't put a value judgment on the pre or the post, but I feel like the person joining post 9-11, I have a lot of

respect for that. They know exactly what they're getting into. It's no longer just about the college benefits. They're volunteering for the armed services in a time of war. I don't think he understood that, Kieran. Even if he, and he was very intelligent, but even if he told you, yes, I understand that. Yes, I understand exactly what you're saying. I don't think that he could grasp it. And that was the whole thing that I say in the early part of the book.

Here's mom lecturing on the phone. You are going to go to Afghanistan. Dan, I don't want to give you bad news, but I know that it's going to happen. And he's saying, well, I know these ways to get around it and I can do this and I can do that to get out of it. I didn't feel. And that's an interesting approach. That he could.

Well, so two things. There would be no guarantee that he would have to deploy. By 2009, 10, it was the surge had already gone past. So the number of troops going over there, I guess in theory was diminishing. it took longer, obviously, than, I don't want to say promised, but that politicians got on their, you know, stump speeches and talked about. But the military is big, you know, that he may not necessarily have deployed over there. But two, and for anybody listening, considering going into the military, if your plan going in the military is to try to manipulate a system to avoid a deployment or to avoid a, you're going to go into the armed forces, but what you're going to, you're going to try to do is pull on some levers and change to get, make sure that you

may not have to execute the roles and responsibilities of your job. I would highly caution you against the decision that you're making. That's not a good decision or your, it's not, it's not a good mindset in my opinion. If you believe that you want to go into the system, but part of your plan, your overall plan is to try to manipulate the system once you're in it to achieve your particular end state. I mean, the army is a deployable unit that is by design, it fights wars. So you have to look at that objectively and holistically. He wasn't looking at it that way. He wasn't. And that was sort of the beginning of the beginning of the end kind of thing. I don't know how I could say, so with such certainty that I knew he was going to be deployed.

I don't know what I was reading. I would imagine any parent worries about that. I didn't realize in thinking, I've known you're going to come up here now for a couple weeks probably. And I was I was reading the book last night and I was thinking about my own parents and the realization that I didn't, I didn't really have this conversation with my mom. She passed in 2010. But I don't have really any idea or understanding of the stress that I put on my mom and dad. Yeah. It's, uh, I was worried about myself and not the effects of the people that were, that were around me. And it's, uh, and I don't think anybody in his position necessarily. necessarily thinks that. But I'm sure that my mom, when I told my mom and dad that I wanted to go to the military, those were probably her first thoughts too in a pre-9-11 world. I think it's a completely natural thing for you to feel. Well, I tried to express it in my writing, and I don't know if it was clear at all, but, you know, I tried to say that I wasn't, when I talked to him and I said, you're going to go to Afghanistan. Or somewhere else. Or somewhere. Yes, I mean, at that time, it could have been Iraq, but. but then Iraq ended about 2010, is that right?

Or nine or 10 there in? It never ended. It never ended? There's still people there? There's still people there now. Okay. So I just felt that he would be safer if he could really grasp reality.

You know, if he could really come to grips with this, at least take the worst case scenario and then work back from that. But he had been chosen to be a medic, How did he do on the Azab? He did great. That's the Army entrance exam. I believe it's the same for all.

It's the Armed Services Vocational Abtitude B. Yeah. Very, very high. I mean, I know on what they call to me when I received information about this. From the Army, the Army entrance exam, he missed like one question out of more than 350 questions. Jesus. It missed one. Did he want to be a medic?

Did he have any inclinations earlier on in life, trauma medicine, emergency medicine, anything like that? I only said you might be interested in it. You might be interested in being a medic because maybe you kind of got that from my parents. Yeah, grandma and granddad too. You might like it. And I don't know if I encouraged him saying go down that road, maybe go down that road or if they kind of recruited him for that. but when he scored so high on this exam that was, well, at the time, it was, they give you that exam before Basic, I think even starts. I'm sure they do.

Before it even starts. The military will give you that, from my understanding, or at least when I went in, they give you the battery of tests up front so they can at least put you on a pathway for the first probably six months to a year because they're going to invest that time post boot camp, your occupational training. Right. So as I say in the book, he says, you know, I scored so high, they are talking about me as officer material, whatever that means, exactly. And then later we find out he's going to AIT, they call it, advance individualized training. Which I believe everybody does. Yes, everyone has to go to one. And I think that the ones who score higher or the ones who are considered smarter, they're amongst the medics. I do not know. I don't know. But I think you have to. be, you know, it's a thing, honor sort of to be chosen for that. So I tried to encourage him as much as I could. I said, you know, this is good because you are good. You're going to be good

at these things because your grandparents were doctors. And so he went to Fort Sam Houston, had his AIT. But before that in basic, he wrote letters, a lot of letters to me and some just to my husband and not to me, but my husband did show them to me. I'm not sure at that time, maybe he did or later. And he said, you know, it's really starting to hit home. We're doing these exercises with the officers, the people dressed in Iraqi, dressed as Iraqis, and we're trying to defuse these IEDs that are on the side of the road. And if you see a strap over the guardrail or something on the side of the road and you see two straps, it means something. things been strapped.

Could be. So they did that kind of thing. They did a whole lot of, with people really dressed up, like the Iraqis. And it hit home to him. It hit home. And he was,

he was having, I felt in those letters even, he was having trouble dealing with it or painting it as too, too rosy a picture. And then I think feeling, already feeling trapped in different ways,

trapped, personally trapped. Hey, I'm going down a path and I can't, I can't get off this conveyor belt. I can't get out of this path and go a different path. And so at, that was at basic. We went up for basic graduation and took his wife and daughter with us. And, you know, I was, of course, I was so proud. I was really proud and he'd really accomplished something. And he hadn't in so much in high school. He really hadn't had many opportunities to feel that sense of accomplishment. And I could see what the Army was doing for him. But I would also have these thoughts, and I write about that in the book, you know, middle of the night, wake up thinking, I should call the Army and tell him that he's just not suited.

He's not suited for this. What number would you have called? I have no idea. That's the problem. Yeah. Like, you know, where do you start? What do you, you know, they're going to listen to a mother. It's an overwhelming organization. It's overwhelming. It's just, it's a monolith. In the book, I call it a monolith. It is to a degree. And by the time that he had begun that process, the wheels were in motion. I don't even know who you would have begun to call. And the reality is he was given the battery of tests. He performed well on the battery of tests. He signed on the dotted line. So they may, they may have. unless they could have diagnosed something that was disqualifying. They probably would have not, they would have taken your call, whatever 100 Army, whatever number you would have called,

but they might not have, probably would not have done anything with the information. Because the number of mothers out there are concerned about their son beginning of Army pipeline in post-9-11 world is voluminous. But how many call up and say, let my child out? My child should not be in the Army. He's not suited for this.

Very few, if any, but I bet most, if not all, feel that way. Yeah. At least for a fleeting moment. You're getting a sign wave of, this is great for my son. Oh, my God, what has possibly happened? It's building character. It's doing great things for him. He's not prepared for this.

I think every, and, you know, we're talking about mothers. I'm sure fathers experienced it exactly the same way. Maybe, again, different expression. But I'm sure my father, as I began my journey through boot camp and into the seal pipeline and what happened post 9-11. There's no way that I can only imagine the number of sleepless nights that I provided for my parents

without thinking twice about it. Right. And he did. Kieran did for us, too. A lot of sleepless nights, a feeling of kind of helplessness, but also seeing that it was, he was benefiting. He was not benefiting from other paths

or going to conventional college and that sort of thing. So he was an adult. a great option for a lot of people. You'll get structure, you'll get discipline, you'll understand them. That doesn't mean that just because you're in the military, you have those things, but it'll be laid out in front of you, work ethic, integrity, honor, courage, commitment, all the core values, again, easier to say than actually live, but it's great for what the military is. It is a really good foundation starting point as an option for people should they choose to take that option. Right. I think it would have done me a lot of good. And I think a lot of

us as journalists, we were not disciplined. You know, we didn't have that, that militaristic discipline or anything. I think it's, I think it's good, and it would help a lot, a lot of young people. And so after Basic and during AIT, he called us from Fort Sam Houston and said, I want out. Did you say why? And that was more terrifying than me, thinking of me calling the Army a meddling, in this. I don't think he did, really. I don't think he did, but I found out later that there was a sergeant who was one of Kieran's best friends said he was too much in everybody's faces. He was too hard. Kieran was too much in people's faces? No. There was one of their trainers, a sergeant. Very overbearing? Yes, that's the word. Overbearing.

and I think he was putting it mildly for my benefit. And so he says, Kieran's friend says, and I say in the book, that we all wanted to quit. We all wanted to. It was not, I read it as, it's Kieran. He's cracking in the sense that he wants out. Finally, those feelings of being trapped, feeling trapped and feeling conflicted, and I'm not sure I want to be in the Army.

I'm not sure I want to be in a uniform. I don't sure I want to do any of this. That that had just finally overwhelmed him. But his friend told me later, and this was probably after Karen's death, for sure, if not before, he had said that, well, before it would have come from Karen, I guess, that not from his friend, but he said that they all felt that way,

that it was just too much. That was probably the role that that particular person was trying to fill there you it's better to and this is not an excuse for that person playing that role but it's better to sweat in peace than bleed in war most of the training that I have done in the seal community has exceeded the physical and psychological demands of an actual combat environment and the reason that they do that is if you're going to get to a breaking point it would better happen in the united states in a controlled environment and we can build you from that or through it or around it or whatever it may be. So I don't know who that person is or exactly the

situation, but we're talking very close post boot camp, so very early on in the military. And I would say for your first few years in the military, they're more overbearing than receptive or passive because they're still trying to mold you, if you want to use clay as an analogy. So that might have just been that individual's role. Right. And what he was, because if everybody was feeling that way, that leads me to believe that that was the part of the pipeline that they were working their way through. And I think it, you know, to certain extent it happened in basic just because they were trying to prepare them so well. Oh, it definitely happened in basic. To go to Afghanistan, it was just like really, really, this is real and this is what it's about. And if you don't do this, you're going to get

killed. And it was they were, he understood that part of it. He was like, I know they're trying to, they're trying to keep us alive. They're trying to, you know, do everything they can for our benefit to let us know what it's going to be like when we get over there. And I say in the book, I wish, you know, I sound like I'm living vicariously through my child in a weird way, but I was like, oh, I wish I'd gone to Afghanistan when I had the chance, because I did, because they used to send people from Beirut, of all places, you know, I think that may seem kind of weird, but from Beirut, they go into Afghanistan and come out. Interesting.

Not stay there. But, of course, that was during the Russian war. and I said no twice. I didn't. I just like, I think it's too tough for me. Just the terrain and being, you know, it wasn't maybe hotel journalism at that point. But that, I still just wanted to,

I just, I didn't want to experience what. I wanted to know what he was going to experience, but obviously I couldn't accept really by reading about it. But I wanted to tell him what, you know what it was going to be like I wanted to wake him up you know because I just wanted to shake him and wake him up and say war is real does that make sense because I had seen it it does but from my own experience of people trying to not necessarily my parents but other people talking to me about my desire to join the military it may not have mattered what you would have said

kieran might have heard you but he might not have listened and there's nothing that you can do about that. Right. And he was already, he'd already enlisted, so all the time I was worried about, well, what if he quits, he goes, AWOL, he is, would he be court-martialed, you know, all these things, would he be, I didn't know the procedure for dismissal or anything like that, or what, do they just do it on a case-by-case basis? Do they, you know, so I had no idea, but that was really a concerning phone call that came late at night. And my husband and I tried to just say, you know, it's going to be okay, just relax, go talk to the chaplain. We said, go talk to the chaplain. So he's agreed to do that. But then the next night or two, afterwards he called back and said,

I'm not going to do that because the chaplains do not keep things confidential. That's what my buddies told me. And there'll be something on my record or I don't want the chaplain to tell. I don't trust, you know that lack of trust, but I've since found out they are bound to confidentiality. They are. Sometimes your buddies are idiots. Yes. And they give you information that's not necessarily correct. It's called roomint, rumor intelligence.

And somebody heard somewhere, fifth party removed, about a story of a guy saying, well, I got screwed because of what I told the chaplain. And the reality is, is you got screwed because you did something stupid and you got caught for it. And it's a more convenient narrative to say that the chaplain turned you in. I don't have a lot of experience with chaplains, but I do have experience with psychologists and psychiatrists who work for and with the military on active duty at operational elements. And I would go and talk to them, and they don't say anything unless you go.

I'm sure they have the same criteria. If you're expressing an intent or desire to hurt yourself or others, I think they're obligated to say something. But other than that, it is my understanding. They're bound by the same confidentiality, the client patient. It wouldn't be obviously be for the clergy, but I don't know what that would be covered by. Same thing, I can't think of the words right now. But in my experience, they are everything that you would want them to be. Yes. And we found that out when we had started

interacting with a chaplain, but he didn't talk to the chaplain. And that was it. He never called us again expressing any doubts or any misgivings or anything like that. and he was supposed to deploy to Afghanistan as soon as he finished AIT and he was not. I think if he had, everything could have been different. If he had what? If he had deployed immediately. If he had deployed from almost virtually from Fort Sam Houston, he had deployed. So he was supposed to go boot camp AIT deployment.

Yeah. But he went boot camp AIT and then there was a pause. And that's the thing. rotation cycles, sometimes they get extended. Talk about what we're going through right now. COVID, from my understanding on the guys who are still in, detonated the deployment cycle. Oh, yeah.

Because they didn't want to rotate people overseas and have people coming back. And they don't, you know, so that's how that stuff happens. Or something else in the world will kick off. Syria will fire off. And instead of Afghanistan, you know, now we're going to go west and we're going to stage out of Iraq again and go conduct operations in Syria. So things shift. And those hiccups are natural. Hard to explain that.

they should be expected to somebody who's got, when he was in AIT, what are we talking? Five months in the military? Yeah, at the most. Very little amount of time in the military, it's very hard to understand how the bigger cogs in the wheel fit together. Very. And he was kind of impulsive by nature, so he could have jumped to different conclusions, but they told him, you're going to Fort Bragg.

And so he went there and his family, his wife and daughter went there from, Tennessee, they traveled up to Fort Bragg and because he knew it was going to be there long enough for her to leave her parents and them to join them up there. So it was going to be some months that he was going to be at Fort Bragg. What was he going to be doing there? Well, they had a like a place where you take care of equipment or heavy trucks and they were like mechanics, but they, I hope I'm not explaining this wrong, but they had been trained to be met. So they were constantly like upping their training or refreshing their training, but then they were doing work that was not always medic oriented, like doing maintenance on vehicles. That's all I can't explain. Maintenance on vehicles, but they would go out like when people were jumping, doing parachute jumping. Medical support.

They would stand by case somebody hurt their ankle or something like that. They would do that. But I think sometimes it was frustrating to have done that training and not really be able to use it. And there were probably several more delays where he'd been told, you're going, then you're not going. Then there was the Haiti. Was that earthquake? Yep. He was almost deployed for that and didn't. And again, I think if he could have been sent somewhere, it was that process of waiting that I think became very difficult. Okay.

So you think if he was able to actually go execute his duties, it would have maybe rounded the edges on how he was feeling? Yes. It could have just changed the dynamic of the whole, the way things were, were kind of going. But that, but that didn't happen. And again, my husband and I were in Memphis and he was in Fayetteville. It's about a thousand miles between the two. So we just didn't have a lot of feedback as to what was going on. But soon after they got settled up there, about three months after he'd finished AIT, say around February or so, and I write about this in the book, I take my husband's old car to them so they'll have a vehicle because they had my old minivan. I was the minivan, minivan mom.

Oh, I got some miles on a Honda Odyssey. It's an amazing urban assault vehicle. Hit what push button door open, rockets on the top? That sounds great. That's how I think. You're looking at me like I'm a psychopath. That's okay. That's what I see when I see a minivan.

I'm like, let's get six dudes in here and some rockets. Flip down the DVD on the way to Target. Beep, get out. Well, the one I gave him just broke down completely. So we gave him a vehicle and I took it up there. And so I was able to see sort of where they were living. They were living on base and, you know, kind of get a little bit of a feel for it. And it was the only time other than going to Fort Knox that I'd really ever been on U.S. bases.

So I really thought I knew something about war, you know, like you say, but I hadn't really interacted with U.S. personnel except in Lebanon. And, you know, that was an unusual, as we've talked about. That was a very unusual situation. That was supposed to be peacekeeping. And so sometimes I was comfortable with military stuff and other times not so comfortable feeling it was kind of a foreign land. But so that was February. then he How did he seem when you went up there

with the vehicle? Oh boy, that's a tough question. Yeah, just I seemed okay. He seemed proud of what he was doing and

he seemed happy. He seemed he was, I don't know, taking a lot of responsibility, feeling the weight of the responsibility. You know, I have to take care of my wife and my daughter and just feeling that was I think heavy for him but he didn't say that he didn't really say that at the time

he had a lot on his shoulders for a man in his early 20s yeah he was really young I think he I think he turned 21 no he would have been 22 turned 22 at a IT so it was it was a lot I mean I can't can't even imagine that and having that much responsibility. But we still felt he was doing well. He was still kind of, he was kind of the clown. You know, the unit. He was the one who provided some comic relief, sometimes at his own expense, but sometimes not.

I know the guy you're describing. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that he was very, very, very good as a medic, from what I understand. He was the one who everybody called and said, hey, can you help me with this or that? And they had to learn different types of bandages or wraps, ways of wrapping. And he got good IVs and helped others who didn't have the confidence with that skill. So, of course, I was proud. I really, I really was proud. How could we, how could we intervene?

And I say in the book, what if I had Cole 1-800 Army? What if I had tried to get him? I wanted to believe I had power. And of course, I didn't have any power at all. But what if I'd gotten him removed? And what if he'd gone back to Middle Tennessee and was living with his wife and her parents, the daughter, back at Walmart or back at Sam's Club?

would he feel, how would he feel then? And how would he feel, how would he felt about me or how would he felt about himself where here he had a chance to, the army was helping him to succeed. They were actually just going to make him succeed almost in spite of himself. He was like one of these kids or young men, young people,

who he feared success more than he feared failure. Really? I think so because if you experience success, you're likely to be have more required of you and asked of you. More in the spotlight, more pressure. And a young woman who was in the army with him as a medic told me that. She said that he was so competent. The more competent you are, the more they're going to put on you or they're going to... The military rewards competence for sure, and they will layer responsibilities on top of competence.

So it would be that the situation then would involve him going to Afghanistan where somebody else wouldn't have to go because they weren't as good at the job as he was. But basically he came home after I went up there in February of 2010. In February, and the whole of 2010 just was like this nightmare year. It was like the COVID thing now. It was like just when is this nightmare going to end? because I went just personally, I had a bad skiing accident in March,

to my ACL. Then my younger son, Matt, got one of his front teeth knocked out playing baseball. And that was about six weeks later. It just felt like things were just building to some bad thing. Bad, bad thing going on. And then Karen came home in June to visit us. because he said he wanted to visit us one time before he deployed because he was still waiting

to deploy and it was like going to be maybe in the fall September, October, then eventually it got moved to December of 2010. So he came home and visited for about 10 days, but he was always with his friends and he was never with us and never at home. And I was so disappointed. That's not about you guys though. I know. And how do I know this? Because I did leave periods where I went home. Hey, Mom and Dad, I'm going to come hang out. buy that I meet, make sure dinner's ready because I'm going to eat it on the way out the door, and I might park your car in the grass because I'm going to be hammered on my way back home. That's a young man who's 22, who the center of their universe is themselves.

So that's not on you guys. I think that's very common. Right. So, yes, I set myself up for disappointment. You didn't set yourself up for disappointment. You just had a 22-year-old son. Yeah. That's the only issue you had.

Yeah. But you know, you're the mom, you have that fantasy of they're going to sit down with you and you're going to have talks and you're going to do things like you used to do them. I don't think sons realize the damage you can do at that level to mothers. Right. It's a weird age. I remember being in my early 20s as a young team guy. And all I wanted to do was be my friends talking about work or talking about my friends or being at work or you could just rinse, wash and repeat that. Like I said, I put my parents through hell and I didn't mean to.

I think that's totally normal. Yeah. It's like Matt, our younger son, now he's almost 26 and he's kind of surpassed that age that Kieran was then. And I still have those fantasies that when he comes home in October, he's on a ship now in the Gulf of Mexico moving all around, that he's going to, you know, play. We're going to play video games together, board games. and, you know, just have those family nights. And I know that's not even, that's not normal. It's more like the behavior you're talking about.

It doesn't make it, they don't have any malicious intent, but it doesn't make it any easier to be on the receiving end of that. Right. I get that now when my kids are like, no, dad, I can't hang out with you this weekend because I want to go do whatever. I'm just like, use. All I can see is, you know, the infant that I used to hold and care for. Yeah, I get it.

It sucks. That's why I said for people who have kids and they're not teenagers yet. but just wait, just wait. Right. Yeah. So I think I was a little bit upset with him, so I didn't reach out to him so much after he left, and that was like July, August.

I think he called me on my birthday in July, and then after that he communicated some with my husband, Tim. He was always good at keeping the lines of communication open. and sometimes I think he didn't want to talk to me because maybe he knew what maybe he was planning what he was going to do and he didn't want to talk to me under those circumstances or he might have realized that he had hurt you intentionally or unintentionally the last time that you guys were together and avoidance is easier than facing that and bridging that gap yeah And I wasn't doing my part.

Like I said, I wasn't overly reaching out. I sent maybe at least one card and a note. And I know that he changed his Facebook profile picture to something. I wasn't friends with him on Facebook. It was kind of early days for me with Facebook for a lot of us. But he was very active on social media, even prior to Facebook as a teenager, when those other platforms and things first came out.

Oh yeah, he grew up with that stuff. He grew up with that stuff in the very, very early stages. Then Facebook appeared on the scene. And he put up a profile picture that was disturbing, I guess, but I wouldn't have seen it. What was it? It was, I say in the book, the Hindu goddess of death. Hmm, I am not familiar with that.

I think it's like a multi-armed woman who's sets of arms coming out in like a seated position in sort of a red and orange and yellow colors. And at that same time he befriended certain people. But I had no knowledge of this, of course. But his wife told me later that he befriended certain people because he did not want them seeing his latest pictures of his latest tattoos.

What was he getting? And he was, all of his tattoos, I just assumed he got him because he wanted to not spend much money. He wanted to spend the least, I mean, I don't know anything about tattoos. Okay. Are you trying to say, I don't know anything?

Are you trying to say they're not good? To me, not tastefully done. What were they? He had like, I write in the book. What I saw was he had like a checkerboard thing on his chest, just like, I mean, a not checkerboard, like a tick-tac-toe, just lines going horizontal and vertically. More than just the tick-tac-toe board, like repeating tick-tac-toe boards or just one? Just one.

Interesting. And to me, I just described him in the book as being garish in the sense like not a lot of colors. and they were always just black and just heavy. That's kind of a style though. Yeah, maybe it's a style thing. Yeah. Some people prefer. Well, no, I know people who have full sleeves with no color whatsoever.

And then I know people who have freaking pastel painting on their arm. Kind of just individual, whatever suits them. Yeah, yeah. So he seemed to like tattoos, and that had been a thing. As a teenager, you know, we said we're not paying for any tattoos. and so when he got out on his own, it was just important to him to have tattoos. Maybe I read too much into it.

I felt like he was defacing his body or that it was a sign of not self-mutilation, but almost like I just, I didn't like it, but, you know, I understand that that's what the, young people do. Did he get most of them when he was in the army? Yeah, probably. It's a little, I mean, in the seal community, I can say tattoos are kind of part of the culture as well, too, so that might have had a little bit of an aspect to it. So in August 28, 2010, he took his life.

And that's, that was it. So it's very heavy. And I'm sorry that you had to or have to continue to live through this. Yes, I think someone said to me recently, and he's a public figure to a certain extent, and he has had attempts that he talks about or has talked about openly. He said that reading the book made him realize what he would be doing to other people, to his loved ones. that had not been necessarily my intent. I didn't say I'm going to prove, I'm going to show people all people who might be contemplating suicide

that how much it hurts others. I just didn't consciously think that. But he said that that would have stopped him or now he realizes how much it would hurt other people. I don't think he would attempt again anyway. I think he's past that point in his life. And it's very important to get past that point. Like you say when you're 20, 21, 22, you don't know yourself.

You're just, you're almost, he was like a child and they say some males are slower to mature, maybe, with their brains. Proven time and time again by every single male on the face of the planet. They're evidence of that. Did your son talk to anybody before he took his life? Did he give anybody indication that that is what he was planning on doing? not to my knowledge because i assume now you guys have probably talked to friends of his or his wife or it and i asked that because of the people that i know i haven't i haven't been able to put together a pattern or a breadcrum because the people that i do know who have said that it's an

immediate all hands on deck rush to try to do everything that you possibly can do which i think maybe why some people don't say anything because they want the op they don't want to want that to happen. Right. Because they know it might change their mind or they don't want people to know about that. But yeah, so far I haven't, I haven't encountered anybody who did take their life, who truly left much of an indication that they were going to do so. Right. Did he ever growing up with the struggles that he was having in school, did he ever have suicidal ideations that he talked to you guys about. Did it ever come up? I think he did. And in the book, I say that he had a couple of experiences that were attempts or like attempts, but we were never sure that they really

were. Yeah, maybe a call for help or something like that. Yeah. Are you talking about by behavior? Yes. But after he died, I eventually found a poem that where he writes, as a teenager he writes, about wanting to take his life at a very young age, which is very unusual. About eight years old, he wanted to take his life. But I never saw that poem until after his death. I took it to a therapist, and she said, what I already knew, which was that for an eight-year-old, it's very unusual. It's very out of the ordinary.

But I agree with you that you see a lot of times there are no signs. but the experts say that there are signs, but you have to be, I don't know, very attuned to those signs, to know that somebody is seriously planning to make an attempt. And we were geographically a long way away from him, even though he had been home recently. And, you know, in that time, I didn't see anything.

I don't think his wife saw anything. And I just think he would have, he wasn't going to do a cry for help thing. He wasn't going to do a failed attempt. He was going to make sure to do it. And it looked like it had been planned. But then at the same time, it also looked like it could have been impulsive.

Yeah. Which I write about in the book. He just goes out, goes to a friend's, and he could have, And he normally did that on a Friday night. He went to a friend's off the base. And that could have happened, that could have just been a normal night.

He went with another soldier who drove because he didn't want to be driving, drinking and driving. He's very careful about that anyway. So it could look like he planned it, but it could also look like it was just a typical Friday night for him. but and he did leave leave a note which I don't print in the book the whole thing but I reference it I sort of reference the contents briefly and apparently only about 15% of people leave a note and he put his on Facebook so in that sense it wasn't private and you know he denied

that it had anything to do with deployment. And he repeated how much he loved his wife and daughter. Didn't blame anyone. That was basically the gist of it, a paragraph. But with no explanation other than that? No explanation except, I believe, referencing, again, like back to that poem, this is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but not saying how long. It's so hard to see inside of somebody like that.

Yeah. Like I said, the last guy that I know that took his life, he would be what most people in the seal community would aspire to be like. And from an outside perspective, if you looked at him in his uniform, you know, spit and polish the shining example of what a seal would be and there's nothing left but questions and I just I can only imagine how devastating that was yeah it was you know it was just it was unbelievable and that's where kind of like I'm sure you've been in those situations time slows down and you really literally feel like you're moving in slow motion and that's the part of the book where I just kind of

go through it literally almost moment by moment, which is kind of, kind of agonizing, you know, and I didn't, I didn't mean to write it that way necessarily, but it just was me processing and kind of just going through the moments, literally moment by moment. And yeah, but I didn't want to write something that was going to be too agonizing. You know, this would like, I wasn't wanting to upset people. All of us, I hope the book is, I don't believe it is upsetting. People have told me that when they reach the end, they find it uplifting in a way. But that was just the way I had to write it. It was just, this happened, this happened, this happened. And then it speeds back up. And I tried to write it just in the scenes. Just, I don't go into long lectures about suicide or suicide.

suicide prevention or facts about suicide, of which there are many, of how many die. And they're readily available? Yes. There are a lot of myths about suicide, all that. I never step out of the narrative. The narrative is always a scene in a present day sense and then with flashbacks, flashbacks to earlier times. Because I wanted to keep the reader. I just wanted to engage the reader.

I wanted people to read because they have suffered a loss or have suffered no loss. They've all probably suffered some kind of loss if they've lived to a certain age. It's for memoirs for the community of loss. Anyone who's experienced loss, it doesn't have to be military. So I didn't want it to be, oh, well, this is only for mothers who've lost children who were active duty service members. otherwise nobody's going to run to read this book. It's just not going to be of interest. So it was challenging because I had to suspend a lot of things about journalism

because I had to recreate dialogue. And you don't do that in journalism. You know, you take very careful notes or transcribe, record, check, backstop, everything. So I had to be somewhat creative. I had to recreate dialogue. But it didn't, you know, actually start. that way. It just started as a, I'll just write some of this stuff down, you know, just to, just to process. But that's, everything about it was deeply, deeply traumatic because we were,

the main thing was we were not notified in the standard Army way. And my husband had always said, I mean, we'd been on this road for 18 months or so with Karen. He'd been enlisted for about 18 months he he wouldn't really share with me but did later that I just feared those guys walking up to the door it's just you know that image you almost think it's like a movie or something but they always come in person they're supposed to always and I've talked to so many people in the army about this since they never never never want a survivor to be notified told over the phone no matter what it doesn't matter where they are in the world. And you were notified by your daughter-in-law, correct?

Correct. Yes, so it would be primary next-of-kin notification. And given that situation, it would be primary to his wife. And they probably, it was at nighttime, correct? No, it was daytime. So they probably would have had to, they're called Kako officers, casualty assistance call officers. They would have had to find their way to you,

which requires time. But they will not delay telling the primary next of Kim, which was his wife. Did they try to send somebody in person or they never did? They did. They did. But I suppose they should have told her, don't tell over the phone. I mean, you know, it's so confusing. No.

I wouldn't either. Right. They may have told her that. She may not even remember them telling her that. Right. And it's a matter of geography at that point, of, the speed of a telephone call on a cell phone versus a KCO team making it to your residence for notification. Right. And I don't know. She might have just been so much in shock that she didn't know

that she was calling. They didn't say don't call. They didn't say someone was with her. My understanding is in those moments. They may not have said anything to her because it is my understanding in those moments that they try to keep it pretty precise and not overload and overwhelm. You're not talking about preference and burial. You know, like those conversations are for later. The benefits that come from that, they're all, they're all from later. But that's, that's a rough way to find out for sure. I've been notified of many, a friend dying, either over text message or phone call. And it's literally had people say, hey, man, are you sitting down? And just tell me who it is. I mean, that's a shitty way to find out for sure.

But it is, I mean, in the age, yeah, the age of cell phones and stuff like that, we are going to find out things. We can find things out more quickly. Again, I know someone was with her from the Army, but I don't know if they said don't call or it's okay to call or just let her do whatever she wanted to do. I don't even know she knew what she was doing. She might have been so much in shock.

so she called me and I was at home pretty much I was by myself except for Matt was upstairs I had just picked him up from football practice my younger son and so I knew he was in the house but I felt alone and I was terrified that I just wasn't going to make it yeah I just didn't think I mean you've been through this experience so you know can I make it can I say survive the next breath. So I did have to make that same decision. I had to decide to tell my husband over the phone because he was at work. And he was in a simulator and he doesn't have his phone on in the simulator.

So I thought, what do I say? I couldn't even think. My brain was going crazy. Just do I tell him come home? There's been, just come home. There's an emergency. And then he would worry more. and he have a half hour drive home wondering what in the world is going on or do I just tell

him. So it's kind of, I guess, maybe more surgical just to go ahead and say it. I find in my experience you have to be very precise with your language saying things, and I think you said this in your book, you know, he's gone. There's nothing wrong with that by any stretch of the imagination, but I've had people say, what do you mean? And if it gets to the point, where I have to notify people, I'm like, listen, this is what happened, fill in the blank name, he's dead. Just so there's no question in the mind. But it's not, those are the worst phone calls ever, ever. The only thing worse than that, face-to-face notification. You think that's worse.

It's harder because it's the emotions are thrown right into your face and you can watch somebody melt from the inside out. Yeah, I was very afraid of the, soldiers coming to the door. The Kato officers, yeah. And I wanted to leave. And so we did. We just, I don't think my husband wanted to see them either. Nobody does.

I think that's the worst nightmare of any parents is to see two people walking up to your house or a person walking up to your house and dress uniform. Mm-hmm. So we just, it was just, my body felt on fire. I just felt like my body was burning up or I was just could,

I wanted to crawl out of my skin, you know, just to get away, to get away from the pain somehow get away from it. And it helps to have something to do. So we just started planning to fly up to Fort Bragg as soon as we could. And if she hadn't told us, his wife, we probably wouldn't have gotten up there that day, but we had enough time to get a flight to Raleigh and then drive from there. Otherwise, we might not have made it out until the next day. And we were just like, we want to help, we want to help, we want to help. We wanted to, We wanted to support her, you know, as much as we could. And so it was just, it was really grueling to have to have to fly, have to get on an airplane. And under those circumstances, I'm sure you've experienced that too.

And I know I'm not the first person. I'm not the first mother who this has happened to, which kind of ended up causing inner conflict. in me about writing the book because I was like, well, my story, how is my story different? Because it's yours. But why should I write mine and why shouldn't all the other people write theirs? They should. Yeah. I think they should.

I think they should. I think every story has validity. And that's what, you know, you ask yourself as a reporter when you go out, you say, is there a story in this? Is there a story? Yes. you will fashion the material, not manipulate it, but you will shape it into a story that makes sense when people read it. And that's all there is to it. It's not a hard thing, but it's not an easy

thing to do either. But I just felt like documenting. And so we went up there and by the time we got up to Fort Bragg, it was late. Our daughter-in-law's sister was with her and had come up. So we went to a hotel and then we saw her the next day, but we just drove to the base. We had no idea. We had no idea where anything was. I'd been there that one time before. We were just, you know, I guess in shock and just the base was, the base was so big and so foreign. Yeah, for Bragg is massive. It's so massive. And, you know, we just had no idea what to do. But really the upshot of that part of the book is that we were never assigned a casualty assistance officer, but we should have had our own. And that would have made a big difference. And at least to me,

we had no advocate, but in recent years, as I understand it, they assigned CAOs to the parents and they're separate from the CAO for the spouse, the casualty assistance officer. So you each have your own because sometimes people don't get along or they're not in our case not close not really family situations yeah very complex very very complex so i think the army recognized the parents need one and so we never got one that's unfortunate yeah it's going to make it more difficult how would you say absent that that the military handled it kind of up and down you know good things bad things I think that we and our daughter-in-law, we were not real happy with the CAO, but that person in particular, you know, the Army's appointing someone from a vast pool of people.

They get everybody above a certain rank has to be trained as a CAO for their convenience, because they want to be able just to send them out and have plenty of them. And some people are not well suited to being CIOs. Agreed. It's not a good fit for them. And so we didn't know anything. Again, my husband had been in the Navy, but I had this assumption that a CAO is a full-time job.

That's what you do. Tertiary duty at best. That's it. So some are going to do a better job than others, and some are temperamentally not suited. And I've heard that if you feel you're not suited to that job and you're asked to do it and you're having problems at home

or you have other things going on. Be honest and tell whoever at the CAC, whoever is in charge at the Casualty Assistance Center that you don't feel like you can do it. And I think that's a better choice, but this person just didn't feel they weren't knowledgeable,

they weren't comfortable in what they were doing. A lot of people, I think, are not comfortable with issues surrounding death. and then they're not comfortable with issues surrounding suicide. You layer that on top. So we didn't have any guidance, and she didn't have great guidance. We just...

Had she ever done it before? The CAO never. No, it was a gentleman, and he, a sergeant, I think, was shrank, and he had not. That was one of the things. He told us that. and that caused us to lose confidence in him right away. And when the family's lost confidence in you or their confidence is shaken, then it's tough.

It's just tough. It's tough later on top of tough, later on top of tough, like you said. Yeah. So we felt we had, my husband and I, that we had to do a lot. We had to contact the cack about certain things. I had to learn all that lingo. like the cack, I was the jag, I was the, you know, talking in those acronyms that I don't know and I don't understand just to try to speak the language with people.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the worst thing was I wanted to see my son, and I kept saying that to people, but it felt like we were hitting this wall. Did they not want to allow you to see him? I didn't even know. I don't think so. I didn't even know how to go about doing that. I was so scared to say anything in front of my daughter-in-law.

I just didn't want to upset her that we couldn't convey the information, the desire to see him to the CAO because he was always with her. And we couldn't speak privately to him. Did she ever end up seeing him or did she not want to, your daughter-in-law? She did not. No, but it was never even discussed. Her CAO never even brought it up. In my own personal experience, it may be better that you didn't.

And I say that because I wish I hadn't have seen some of my friends for the last time. I wish I would have remembered them for who they were because the image that I struggle with is what I saw them as and what they looked like versus who they were to me and the friendship and the amazing memories. is and it has scrambled my eggs since the day that it has happened or that multiple times that it has happened. You might have, you might be better off. Remembering your son just for the last memory that you have in your head. It's very hard to get around some of those last sites. I agree.

And the commander of the hospital eventually wrote me and said that, what you're saying. but it was probably not the best, not the best venue, not the best time in place. It might not have helped you in your process of healing and moving through and hopefully eventually past it. It might have been an anchor that tugged you back. It has been for me in my life and some of my experiences.

I'm really sorry that you had to go through those experiences. It's part of it makes me who I am. You know, and why I view the world the way that I do and why I try to behave the way that I do. I mean, I'm a product of the environment that's around me. But in those particular situations, I would generally advise people against it because the negative outweighs the benefit, or it has in my life. And all that time, I felt like I was failing him, that I was not honoring him. But I was doing, you know, you're just moving in that time and space, doing what you think is the best thing to. do at that moment.

There's survivors' guilt for I didn't go and see him in that situation. I didn't know that he was at the base hospital because this happened off base. Yeah. I just didn't know. I didn't know where he was. And it just felt like I would have had to just storm the hospital doors and gone in and just demanded to see him. And I say in the book that, well, some mothers would have done that.

that. And I've heard of that. And I've heard of wives doing that saying, I want to see him, even if there's only like this much left. Finger now. I've seen it happen. And it's not always the result that they're looking for. Yeah. Not good. No. Death is an ugly thing, especially when we're talking about that type of death, a ballistically related death. It's, they're not this, they're not this. They're not this. same person after that. They don't look the same. It's I, if you can, ever, hopefully you'd be able to put down the guilt about not seeing your son. I suspect he probably would not have wanted you to. I think that's right. And that whole time I was just like I say moving through time and space

going, is what I'm doing right, wrong? Should I be doing this? Should I be, should I be demanding? should I be, I was, you know, I was doing things that just felt like required superhuman strength just to pick up the phone and call mortuary affairs and say, okay, is my son's body going to the funeral home now? And then when it goes to the funeral home, it's going to be transported by air to Nashville. Then just all of those, my husband and I felt we had to know. every step because we didn't have confidence in the CAO. So they're backstopping and backstopping and backstopping and backstopping everything along the way.

And, you know, we had, we did have the chaplain with us a lot. And he was, he was very good support. And we had hoped that he would come down to Nashville and do the funeral there, be a part of the funeral there. But he couldn't be released from. the unit because or whoever he served, I think it was obviously more than just my son's unit. But with the unit, they were concerned, very concerned about contagion factor, which were others going to be influenced by my son's death.

And I just couldn't help but feel so responsible. And so I know he was grown. He was responsible for his own actions, but I was still like he's my child and he did this, and now other people are suffering and other people are experiencing very bad reactions, even to the point of being hospitalized others. And I felt so the guilt was just incredible. I can only imagine, but absolutely none of it was your fault. Thank you for saying that. I mean, and it's probably hard to hear and hard to accept, but that is the reality of it. And I can only say that because I wasn't directly involved.

And I've seen enough of these situations that are similar or identical. I think everybody has survival's guilt. I do, for sure. But I don't know what else you could have possibly done. I just didn't think about the contagion factor of things and, you know, that, that that that was a possibility. And it was just a really hard week, as you can imagine, the week of the week that we spent,

we spent a week up at Fort Bragg, just getting everything settled and having the unit memorial. They moved up the unit memorial. Normally it would have been possibly as long as two months. Yeah, it takes some time after. But they just kind of slammed it all together, which was okay. You know, I was just going to go with the four.

flow of that if that was going to happen then we wouldn't have to go back we wouldn't have to go back to fort brag our daughter-in-law wouldn't have to go back so we packed up everything but it just still felt like it felt like the army was just avoiding us you know it felt like that everybody was just avoiding us and you're not the only people that i've ever spoken to that have said that the military is incredibly good at some things. And like I said earlier, not great at others. And that's what I didn't want to, the book to be, well, this is just a slamming the army and slamming, you know, the way they do everything and they were so inept or they were so insensitive or this didn't go right and that didn't go right. It's a stressful time. You know, I had already buried both my parents. I know

funerals don't always go like you want them to. People get hurt feelings. things don't happen just like you want and you're just trying to be sensitive and go with with really just go with a flow with a flow of it because it was so much out of our hands and so much in the control of the army but you know all we saw all week were the CAO in the chaplain and we saw and met his his unit members at the unit memorial and it was just a lot to pack in in a week and then we had two more services after that we had a funeral regular funeral and uh he's buried in a in west tennessee veterans cemetery in i'm sorry middle Tennessee middle Tennessee state veterans and uh i think that was the right decision that's where we live now and his uh his daughter lives

and his wife live close so they can visit how old is she now now his daughter now his daughter is 12. So it's just, you know, life goes on, it can go on a long time, you know, and he didn't get to see all the changes that would have occurred in himself, in his marriage, maybe, in his daughter's life. She was, yeah, the world. Sometimes, well, with the coronavirus, I say, I'm glad my parents aren't alive for it. Not, you know, just it's, I really do say that, and that's kind of bad, I guess, to say, but his daughter was two at the time, and I think two is a very, very challenging age, too, very, she was a challenging child at that age. And so he couldn't see that was just a moment in time. She was not going to be two forever. He couldn't see that he'd just gotten the worst,

news or bad news for him, maybe the worst news ever, that he was going to go as one of five medics to support the Marines in a Hellman province, whereas I understand it, there were actual buildings, and it wasn't just tents or anything at that stage, it's actual buildings, and it wasn't so terrible. But I think he was just so feeling the weight of that responsibility. I'm responsible for 60 other guys and their health and well-being and how I perform as a medic. And he would have had that success that's how I see it, that he denied himself the success that was right there. Like you said, that feeling of being deployed and that the comradeship and the bonding and the experience of the words that you've used like, exhilaration or the purpose.

The purpose. Yes. It's hard to describe, actually, but. That's what we experienced, too, as journalists. I've never had that sense of purpose again in my life that you know, I'm covering a war and I'm telling people about it and that sort of thing.

I haven't either. I haven't either and I think a lot of guys get stuck chasing it. And the problem is I don't, it's just such a bizarre and unique occupation. I think it's impossible to do so. And again, you have to get out of the comparative mindset. and maybe in that instance you're comparing yourself against your former self, which I think is a good thing because that's the only metric that matters, but maybe not in that exact, specific, one precise way. Did write in the book help you move on? Not move on. That's not the right word. Move through all of this to be able to hopefully help other people and move forward, I would say, with your life.

I do. I think so. I think so, but there were so many times when I questioned it. I questioned it. Was this, was this the right thing to do? Was this, it was an instinct or an impulse I had, which I think is it at the very basis is to make sense of the senseless, to make suicide in particular is a senseless act. So can you, can you make, how do you make, sense of it. A friend of mine texted me the other day, like my best friend, she said, you wrote that book because it was a search for meaning. You were searching for meaning. And I think that's pretty much it. That's fundamental. And how do you find meaning or make sense of a seemingly senseless act? Are there, what layers are there in that? So it's really like then it turns into kind of an excavation project, you know. You're digging and trying to get to the bottom of something, almost like a sleuthing. You know, I mentioned liking the Nancy Drew mysteries.

You're trying to find out, but you're knowing you never will. I mean, I think all suicide law survivors have to come to terms with the fact that they will never have definitive answers. And that is a tough cookie to crack. Mm-hmm. you've probably experienced that with the people you've lost. You're left with questions. You're left with a lot of questions and no answers. And even if they do leave something behind,

it's not like that answers all the questions I have. It's, yeah. Right. There are just layers and layers of that. So that's what I did. And I just worked through it. But it was always, I had an ambivalence about it. It wasn't like, hey, I'm going to sit down and write a book.

And this is going to be great. and this is going to be cathartic and this is going to help people. I think that would have, those are motivations people ascribe to me, but they weren't necessarily my motivations just because it's not that I don't want to help people, but I wouldn't presume that something I would write would have the ability to do that, to achieve that. You might be surprised. You may be surprised the impact that it will have.

I mean, what you're describing with the Army and going through, those situations and the notification and the slowing of time. There's not a lot of people who will, well, everybody at some point in their life will experience loss, but that particular situation, although it's not common, thankfully, the things that you write about are helpful and they're beneficial. And I think it'll touch more people than you might realize. Well, I hope it's not too intense. And I didn't put this disclaimer in there. I talked to my publisher about it, but we didn't. Just the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

And some people say you should always, always mention that if you're in a discussion about suicide, the 1-800-273-3-8-255 or 273-8-25-5 or text home to 741, 7-4-1. I mean, I could have had that written in the front of the book, but I'm not too big on disclaimers because I'm like, I want people to judge, make their own judgments. And I also have confidence in people.

I have confidence in the reader that if the reader finds something too intense, it's not for them. They can put it down. They can put it down. They don't have to read it. It's not for them. Individual accountability and responsibility is a thing. It's okay to make your own decisions based off the information presented to you. I agree.

I think people should be able to decide whether it's enough or not enough or too much. it's a hard call because at first you know you think well if i just put if if i just put that in the beginning of the book that prejudice it creates a prejudice really possibly against the story right away when people have said to me i'm glad i read it i found it uplifting some suicide lost survivors even recent ones have embraced it they didn't have a military loss There have been other survivors who said, I'm not ready for that. Or they look at it like it's a snake. That's not, you know, that book is not for me.

But I definitely didn't, I wrote the whole thing and did not include the disclaimer, even up to the last minute I didn't. What I did include was in the back something about the coronavirus of all things. Because when I got the book, when I got what they call the arcs, advanced reader copies in a box, and it was about February. And my husband Tim and I knew the virus was coming because he had been traveling to China quite a bit and he was hearing more and more about it.

So we were a little bit ahead of people on that. And I saw the cover and I said, the world looks different now. It was very ominous. Do you get it? I did just get it. And then it's, what would that be a daisy? But then I'm like, oh my God, it looks like DNA strains.

Oh, I love it. Yes, DNA. Oh, that's so crazy. Yeah. Yeah, from the angle before you can tell it's a daisy. That's not a daisy. What is that? What do you call those things?

That is a dandelion. God, I am so dumb. You can blow in a daisy if you want two people. Just don't expect the dandelion result. And I'm not good on botany at all. But, I mean, a dandelion, I don't know. Some people in my publishing world have said that that's a cliched image. You shouldn't have used that, you know, or they weren't crazy about it.

But I became obsessed with it, even though. though it was a similar image was used on a book in 2017, not a book on this subject. It's your book, Margaret. You tell those people to shut up. I just went with it. Yeah, but these are, these are called parachutes. The little things that fly off, you probably remember that. Yeah. I was like, okay, I remember that. I get it. So in the book, there is a parachute jump. I go and do a tandem parachute jump. I like this story so far.

Tell me more. This story has everything. This book has everything that you are interested in, Andy. Mental health issues, parachute jumps, got the whole thing. So I do that. It's kind of a spoiler, I guess, but I have to say it because I know you've done a lot of that. So I get a chance to do that with the Army and with a group called Leap of Faith, which allows survivors,

not just a suicide, but any military survivors of any loss, and maybe veterans too, you can sign up to do this thing. That's awesome. It was. It was awesome, but I was so scared. Very common. Very common. I was like, so I described that, I described that whole experience. And that's, that's near the end.

It's not the, it's not how the book ends like, oh, it's this parachute jump. And that's the end, and they live happily ever after. but it was a life-changing moment, a cathartic moment. It was a moment of exhilaration, and that occurs about almost exactly two years from after Karen's death. And it's through that and through other experiences with the Army that the Army emerges as the hero of the book. I did not plan that. I did not write it that way. That's why I like to just let things evolve, not say, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to sit down and write something that's going to prove the army is good or the army is bad or it's just let it write it and let those scenes speak for themselves. And that's what it said

at the end. Because the army helped me. The army helped me tons. And I'm a civilian. I didn't do anything. I talked to them. I've explained and my husband has too what our grievances were and we we got an outbrief with the colonel. It came from Fort Bragg and it was all just very kind, respectful healing, helped with the healing process. And even before that I started going to Fort Campbell, which is about four hours from Memphis, but now I can drive up there in less than an hour and I started talking to the CAAOs. Because once I got an email saying

any survivor wants to come talk to the CIOs in their training, in the end, as they wind up their training phase. That's critical. It was amazing. It was amazing. So they just tell you the survivors, you know, this is most important part of their training.

And it's critical to their training. to their training that they see survivors that that we're real we have a face and we're really everything they've learned maybe has been from manuals manuals and books and now they hear the survivor stories and they just they just let you talk which is kind of dangerous for some of us but you know just like you're letting me talk you just you just tell your story the way you want to tell your story or however it comes out you just kind of ramble it out this happened this happen this happened so I do try to shape it in a way so they get something out of it the message that hey if you see parents and they

don't have a casualty assistance officer you notify somebody tell the cack and take take very specific take very specific actions and so that that was the first thing I really started doing with the army thanks to Fort Campbell and then they told me at Fort Campbell the S.O. office. I usually interact with them a lot. They're very good. They tell me about about the leap of faith. And so I did that and the title sort of plays off of that. I didn't intend that, but it does. The world looks different now because I jumped out of a helicopter, Chinook, and just, you know, you're seeing, you're seeing a different perspective. You're lifted up. You're looking around. I mean, I can't imagine all the things you've done.

Incredible. You're seeing literally. Somebody's pulled you up and you're seeing everything. So I needed that. I needed to be pulled out of that. And I think it's important to do things and not just, I was really in my head. And that's what concerned me about the book.

I was always, it was this thing of wrestling. Is this healthy? or when is this crossing the line? And this is mentally, mentally this is not healthy. I shouldn't be sitting in a room, torturing words all day long and trying to capture experiences in words. And so it took me a long time to write it for that reason. Like I would say, about nine years, but I had two, years off in the middle when we moved to Middle Tennessee to be closer to our granddaughter, which, you know, turned out to be a good thing. but the parachute jump was, it was transformational.

So that's just a hint. Nobody's going to get it, except you and me now, that those are what they call little parachutes, but it just captures to me the delicacy of life and how delicate and how fragile it can be. And also the feeling, these little parachutes of flying through space. and just also some people say it looks like an explosion it could also look like something quite violent

but I knew I didn't want something really literal on the cover like the actual parachute I researched all these different types of parachutes that is a way better yeah something a step back not not to write up on top of the subject too much so all I can say is I am so I am so so incredibly sorry for your loss and that you had to experience that. But what exceeds that feeling of sorrow is gratefulness that you were able to write that book. Like I said, I haven't been able to finish it yet, but I will get through it probably in the next day or two. And I know for a fact that it will help people. And, you know, some people respond better to reading about it. Some people respond better to watching a video on it or hearing about it.

But I think the true struggle is to never stop trying to talk about this stuff and hopefully make a difference in somebody's life who they can make a left turn with this decision instead of a right. Exactly. And it sucks that you guys had to live through that. But I'm grateful that book is the end result of it. I'm grateful for you guys for making the travel appear. And I'm going to let you close this out with whatever you want to.

I'm going to have, first off, let's have a guess. How long do you think you and I have been chatting? I don't know. Probably about three hours. Oh, wow. I can't believe that. Three and a half hours. Wow.

The time's really flown. That's how you know you had a good conversation. What would you, what do you want mothers out there to know? Well, you can't control your child's life and they're... What? Rewind that. Yes, you can. As a father, you can.

And what you will do is push. them away. I hijacked your message. It was going to be amazing. That's my own personal experience speaking through. I agree. The harder you try to control, I think, the farther they go away. It's what's that space sand stuff when you squeeze it, it starts coming out in between your fingers? Hard to describe that when you try to do that with your kids, that's what's going to happen. Yeah. I think you do. You have to let them go. It's painful. as that is you've got to let them go and live their own lives and be the people that they are. I agree. As hard as that may be. They'll make decisions that you won't agree with or that you

won't appreciate, but those are those, those are their decisions to make. Yes, I agree with that. Thank you for coming up here. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. If you read another book. You're coming back up. All right, Margaret, thank you. Thank you.

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And hopefully my kids aren't listening to this. I have two teenage boys. Their stocking is going to be stuffed with just about everything on this website. Because spoiler alert, teenage boys don't smell great. Shocker, I know. And before I ramble on for another 20 minutes, that is it. See you all on Monday.