Male Speaker: In 1996, Gods and Generals was published and stayed on the best seller list for 15 weeks. Two years later he followed up with The Last Full Measure and enjoyed the same popular and critical success. And, of course, he's gone on to write about the Civil War, the American Revolution and World War I. His novel To the Last Man was awarded the American Library Association's Prize for Excellence in Military History -- Military Fiction. Sorry. It's hard to tell with him. [laughter] His current project, a trilogy about World War II, began last year with The Rising Tide. Particularly in a time of war, his novels seem more relevant than ever. A critic writing in The Book World a few years ago said "Shaara portrays the daily dilemmas of ordinary people faced during the war. He shows deep sympathy for those who seemed indifferent to the cause but, in actuality, simply may have been too caught up in staying alive and keeping food on their table." Please join me in welcoming Jeff Shaara. [applause] Jeff Shaara: Wow, there are a lot of you. Thank you. Yes, I do not write history. For those of you who suffered through your high school history textbook, that's precisely what I don't do. That really is not any more of interest to me than it was to most of you. What Michael Shaara did with The Killer Angels changed the way an awful lot of people saw the American Civil War. What Michael Shaara did -- Historical fiction is fairly typical of what happens. What happens is a writer will take you to a real spot, a real historical place, with fictitious characters. These fictitious characters down on the field -- Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front -- I mean, that's typically what historical fiction is. What my father did was to take you to Gettysburg but tell you that story, not from a fictitious point of view, but from the points of view of the characters who were there, the real people. Not just real people, the principal players - Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, John Buford, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain - the people who made the history. Nobody had really done that before. The Civil War guy at Florida State University, my father was teaching literature there, you know, every history department has its Civil War guy, the "Chair for the Civil War." Well, this guy gets in my father's face when The Killer Angels comes out in 1974. My father, he's been a science fiction writer, he's written police drama, a lot of short stories, no history at all. This guy -- "Who are you? Who do you think you are telling us what Robert E. Lee is thinking? The Killer Angels is a book that should never have been written." Sort of that's what you call a feud -- that's how you start a feud. [laughter] Well, then, of course, the telegram comes to my father's house in 1975 -- "Congratulations. The Killer Angels has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction." [laughter] Now I don't know if my father took that telegram over to the History Department at Florida State, and you know. [laughter] Actually, that professor is still there to this day, which shows you sometimes what happens with professors. They tend to stay around a long time. Well, never mind - you get my point. [laughter] When I began doing this, I had no idea what I was doing. I'm often asked "How did you know how to write a book?" I don't know. I didn't have a clue. But I knew that what my father had done is he had gotten into the heads of his characters and he told you their story as they would tell the story. There is no imprint of Michael Shaara in The Killer Angels and I knew, that's the point, it's not about me. This is not "I'm going to tell you what I think of Robert E. Lee." I need to hear that voice. Someone said to me, I was talking to me last night, someone said to me "How dare you put words in the mouth of Robert E. Lee?" Okay. I take that very seriously. If I "dare" to put words in the mouths of Lee or George Washington, I had better believe that those words are authentic. At least those words could have been said and it's true to the character. If I don't believe it, you won't believe it and the book simply won't work. To do that -- the question I get a lot of "What's your research?" -- diaries, letters, memoirs, the accounts of the people who were there. It does me no good, with all due respect, a lot of modern biographers, David McCulloch people like this, it does me no good to read that book to read who John Adams is. I have to read the letters of John and Abigail. I have to stand in those footprints and then walk the ground -- I'll talk a little more about that in a second - but walk in the footsteps of these characters. That's what my father did in The Killer Angels. He put you on the battlefield at Gettysburg. He put you with Louis Armistead during Pickett's Charge, walking across a mile of open ground, the Confederate Army up there, the Union Army behind the rocks and guys are shooting and what it is like to walk, not run -- none of this Hollywood charge-scream-and-yell, try that for a mile. You know, you're not going to be in really good shape when you get to the end. They walk, one step at a time, and as they're walking across the open ground, the cannon balls are coming; you can see them, they're bouncing. You can hear the musket fire as it begins, the zip and ping of the musket ball, and the guy next to you goes down, and you keep walking, and five guys over here suddenly are taken out by a cannon blast, and you keep walking. What is that like? Why do you keep walking? I mean, would I do that? I don't know. I actually had some cadets at West Point ask me, "Do you think we would do that today?" I didn't want to hear that from cadets at West Point. [laughter] But, I mean, that's the story. Growing up in the house of a writer, my sister and I, the children sitting there at the dinner table every night, my father would tell the stories before he ever wrote them down. I think that was his way of congealing it in his own mind. That's the lesson I learned, is just tell a good story. Well, I mentioned the American Revolution. I went back and worked on that. I didn't know if there was a story, and, boy, is there ever. John Adams, I mean, here are names you know Ben Franklin, George Washington, John and Abigail, Charles Cornwallis, Nathaniel Green, I mean, there's a name you may not know. What a shame because Nathaniel Green's a man you need to know about. Lighthorse Harry Lee, Robert E.'s father, I mean, Lighthorse Harry, magnificent character. I have his memoir, published in 1812. There's a source. Well, I started to go more modern and the First World War, what I began to hear from people that I really liked, the compliment was "You know? I didn't know that." [laughter] That generic phrase "I didn't know that." People talking about the Mexican War and the American Revolution. Well, World War I, I got a lot of that because nobody knows World War I. Why? Hollywood has basically ignored World War I. I mean, you've got "Sargeant York" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" and a few -- "The Blue Max," which is a miserable movie -- a lot of bad movies. Well, "Sargeant York," I mean, that's Gary Cooper in the 1930's. You know, that's probably the best known World War I film, but, by and large, when I got into the stories and started looking at the characters -- The Red Baron, I mean, what a character! Then I went around the Country doing book signings and I was appalled at how many people thought the Red Baron was just a cartoon character, and a pizza chain, I found out. [laughter] And the guy -- the logo of the Red Baron Pizza, not to pick on the poor pizza people, but the logo is this guy with this big swarthy moustache who looks nothing like the Red Baron. I don't know where they got that. But the point is that's a story you don't know. Manfred von Richthofen, he has a name, the Red Baron, this man has a marvelous three-dimensional character. Black Jack Pershing, the man -- and I have made this statement and waited for some historian to stand up and want to debate it and I'm ready -- Black Jack Pershing is the man who won the First World War. He's responsible for winning the First World War more than any individual. So far, nobody's argued that with me which is a shame because I'm... [laughter] The Lafayette Escadrille, if you saw the movie "Fly Boys" a couple years ago? You still don't know anything about the Lafayette Escadrille. That's a fabulous story. Raoul Lufbery, a man most of you have never heard of? Raoul Lufbery is the finest flying ace we ever produced in this Country. This is the man who taught Eddie Rickenbacker how to fly a plane. Eddie Rickenbacker is a guy -- good self-promoter, President of Eastern Airlines, famous man for most of the 20th Century -- Eddie Rickenbacker, most of you might have heard the name. But you don't know Raoul Lufbery, the man who taught him. Wonderful, wonderful story. When we began talking about World War II, I was really nervous. What could I possibly, you know "I didn't know that?" I'm not going to hear that from World War II. You know World War II just Hollywood has given you, I don't know how many countless, hundreds of movies about World War II. What can I add to that that you don't know? John Wayne, I mean, just take the John Wayne movies and you get a history. That's most people's perception of World War II. I think, you know, if I go into this story, what can I tell you you don't know? Then I began researching Dwight Eisenhower and I'm here to make the same statement that I just made about Black Jack Pershing and I'm waiting again for somebody to argue. Yah, the Russians probably did more to defeat the Germans than anything, but if you talk about a single individual? The one man responsible for winning the Second World War, for defeating Hitler, was Dwight Eisenhower. And, again, I'll argue that with anybody. I'm militant about it. [laughter] I've got Eisenhower's diary, his memoirs, his letters to Mamie, the memoirs, accounts, diaries of those around him on his staff, Patton's papers, Mark Clark's memoir, Montgomery -- I start reeling these names off to you -- Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler, Rommel -- you talk about a cast of characters. What I decided to do was to make a trilogy out of this in Europe. Eventually there'll be a fourth book on the War in the Pacific. I can't ignore -- I mean, a lot of Marines have said to me, you know "We're not in Europe, pal." [laughter] Yes, I understand. Yeah, I want to tell that story, the end of the war, so it'll be a four-book trilogy. [laughter] When I got into this, well, I was really nervous because suddenly I'm dealing with a character, Erwin Rommel -- there's always a voice on the other side -- in the Revolution, there's a British voice, in the Mexican War, there's a Mexican voice. There has to be that, you know, the Red Baron, the German voice. I wanted the voice on the other side. There's a challenge in doing that in World War II. There's the issue called "political correctness." How do I take you and put you into the head of a character like Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, probably the finest German field commander of the War. How do I do that because, you know, he's a bad guy. It's a little different when you're a bad guy in World War I than when you're a bad guy in World War II, because in World War II, you're fighting for this guy named Hitler. Well, I found out that Rommel, first of all, is not, you know, this goose-stepping Nazi. He's not a Nazi at all. He never joins the Nazi party. Then I found this wonderful account of one of his staff officers, Siegfried Westfahl, writes "Rommel receives this order from Hitler to stand and fight. Rommel's been defeated at the battle at El Alamein in North Africa by Montgomery and the British and Rommel retreated, this masterful orderly retreat, and Rommel gets an order -- he's saving his army is what he's doing -- and he gets an order from Hitler "No. Stand and fight to the last man." Rommel says, according to Siegfried Westfahl, "The man is insane." Thank you. [laughter] That's the third dimension of the character. He's a human being. He understands that what he's fighting for is a lost cause, but he's a soldier. He's doing his duty. That made the character real to me and that allowed me to get into his head and present him to you. I'm surprised how many people have said to me, "You know, I didn't read that book because I thought I was going to like the Germans." That's not the point. But the fact is Rommel, he's an interesting guy. That was the goal. When you get into the 20th Century, all my books prior to that had been told from the top down. I mean, that's what my father did -- the generals, I mean the head guys. The more modern you go in warfare, the farther the general is from the front lines. So it makes no sense to tell the story of World War I, and certainly World War II, just from Eisenhower's point of view, or Rommel or Patton or Montgomery, you need the guy out there, the grunt. Well, I found a grunt. I found a couple of them. A tank gunner. This is a guy who sits in the tank, a 24-year old American named Jack Logan. This guy goes into North Africa and the tanks we give our soldiers, the American's driving a Stewart M3 light tank. The Stewart has a gun, 37mm cannon, that's about a golf-ball size shell. When they go into North Africa, full of cockiness because, you know, "We've arrived and we're going to send that guy Rommel packing", and they go up against the German tanks and they find out that the German tanks have a 75mm cannon, which is roughly the size of a baseball. When the Stewarts go up in battle against the German tanks, they find out that that 37mm gun bounces off the armor of the German tanks. Now, if you're the gunner firing your gun at the German tank who's also firing at you, that's not a good feeling. Well, the story of Jack Logan is a key part of this. Then, I got into the story of the paratroopers, when we go into Sicily in 1943, and this is a story people don't know. We're going to invade Sicily because it's our stepping stone to go into Southern Europe. Churchill wants to rip open the under-belly of Europe -- that's how we're going to get in there -- this is long before D-Day, long before the battle for France -- we're going to start in the South, going into Sicily. So we have Patton, George Patton, leading Americans on the beach in the southern part of Sicily and over on the East, you have Montgomery and the Brits and they're going in, this big amphibious assault. What we find out is that the Germans are waiting for us. They have an enormous number of tanks, just perched there, the Italians, the Germans, together. It's not going to be pretty unless we can keep those people away from the beach and get our people on the beaches. So what we're going to do is we're going to send 3400 paratroopers into Sicily, the brand-new 82nd Airborne Division, and we're going to send these people into Sicily, and we're going to do it in the dark. They're going to land in a place, course none of them had ever seen, at night. They have no idea what they're landing amongst and what they're going to find when they get there, and that story is told from the point of view of a 20-year old paratroop sergeant named Jesse Adams. Now, at the risk of cutting into your question time, I want to read to you, this is a little gritty, I read last night in an event to the President and the First Lady. This will take about 4 or 5 minutes. I beg your indulgence, but I just need to give you a taste of what this story is like from the point of view, not of the generals, but of the grunt. Now, when these guys jump out of airplanes, how do you find each other in the dark? Thirty-four hundred guys? Well, you have a call sign. The call sign happens to be "George Marshall." You say, "George", your buddy, the guy in the bushes, says "Marshall". George Marshall is the Chief of Staff. The question, of course, raises itself why we didn't come up with something like Rita Hayworth, you know, something somebody will remember? [laughter] This is what it's like when Jesse Adams lands in the dark in Sicily. "Adams lay still, his heart pounding hard, sort of through the pains, held tightly to the straps pulled the parachute toward him, flattening it, slow steady rhythm. He stayed on his back, could see streaks of white fire, the rattle of machine guns, no direction, no aim, they were everywhere. The parachute was flat now and he slipped out of the harness, rolled away, pulled the Thompson from the straps behind his back (a machine gun), felt the pockets, the heavy bulges, ammo clips, grenades, everything still where it was supposed to be. He rolled over to one side, eased a clip into the machine gun, pulled the bolt back slow and easy, the click making him flinch. "The gun was loaded now, ready, thank God, at least I can fight somebody." He rolled over to his back again, stared up, stars, the moon low on the horizon, sinking, the white streaks fewer now. He saw tree limbs silhouetted to one side of him. Thought "Woods. Alright. That's a good place to be." He rolled over to his knees, raised himself up, tried to see anything, kept himself motionless, an animal, listening for prey, for any movement. The only sound, the quick hard thumps in his ears, his own heart. The machine guns rattled on but farther away now, much farther, no danger, and he looked toward the black woods, gripped the Thompson in his hand, touched the cloth bag of grenades, again, and began to move. The ground was grassy and he was moving downhill, slow and steady soft steps, eyes sharp, nothing to see, black trees, brush and now a low wall. He stopped, squatted, peeked up over the wall. Good cover. Good place to sit. He listened again. No sounds. Felt a sudden burst of fear: "Where the hell is everybody?" He wanted to call out, what, something, the call sign, "George." No, not yet. Krauts could be anywhere. Machine guns." He looked up searching the sky, saw the Big Dipper, the edge of the cup pointing to the North Star. It was procedure that, once they were on the ground, the last man in the stick would move the opposite direction the plane had flown, the best way to find the others, and when he jumped he thought "We were flying North." He leaned against the wall, tried to calm himself breathing, "Good wall. Thick rock. Dammit, I can't stay here. Where's everyone else? There were too many planes. Had to be guys all over the place. There's got to be somebody hurt. There's always somebody hurt, but keep quiet. No screaming. Not now. Not here." He heard sounds now, a motor. He steered towards the noise, a reflection, a truck. The truck moved slowly past, no more than 50 yards away. No lights. He gripped the Thompson. Froze. Perfect stillness. Good cover against the rock. "Don't go shooting at anything. There could be a hundred more. Just look around. They know we're out here. No search light, thank God." He was breathing heavily still, closed his eyes, clamped his arms close in tight, "Slow easy. Just find somebody." The truck was gone. Silence. Then gun fire in the distance and now, voices behind him, beyond the wall. He froze again, heard one man, foreign, meaningless words, soft-spoken whisper. Adams felt ice in his guts, sweating hands holding the Thompson, the grenades beneath him, unreachable. "Damn." There were footsteps close behind the wall and Adams stared at his own legs, realized one was extended, the wall barely three feet high, his boot reflecting moonlight. "Dammit! Dammit!" The footsteps moved past him, moving away and now a voice beyond the wall, from the trees "George!" The man at the wall stopped, silent, and Adams tried to see him in his mind staring at the strange sound pointing silent commands. Adams was pulsing with anger, thought "No, you jackass! You stupid! What the hell's the matter with you? Don't just call out!" The footsteps moved quickly away, the rustle of grass, the men away from the wall and Adams pulled his leg in close, one long, slow breath, pulled himself to his knees, raised up, peered over the wall. There was nothing. Black woods. Moonlight on gnarled trees. He waited, listened, pulled himself up, stepped high, swung his legs over the wall, on the other side now. He dropped down, strained to hear. The voice again, "George!" He felt his insides turning over. "No! No! Damn you!" and now another cry, the same voice, "Hey!" and then a short, high scream. He stared at the sounds, the voices coming again, foreign words, shadows emerging, four men, moonlight on rifles, helmets, the men a few yards away, moving off. He pointed the Thompson and thought "A quick burst. Take them all." But there was another truck now on the road beyond the wall, coming fast, and he pulled the machine gun back close to his chest. "No, don't be stupid." He stayed low, moved away from the wall, slipped into the tall grass then past, the ground hard and flat. The trees were around him, a low limb punching his helmet. He ducked, dropped to one knee, moonlight broken by the thick clusters of branches realized "An orchard. Rows of trees." He moved farther in to where the sounds had been. Soft steps, the Thompson pointed forward, saw a bright mass, moonlight on a parachute, the chute draped across the top of a tangled tree. He moved closer, saw the dark mass beneath it, the man hanging a few feet above the ground, silent, still and Adams was there, put a hand on the man's boots, felt cold wetness, the hard smell of blood and urine. The smell of death." It's not a feel-good story. Well, thank you. [Applause] I want to wrap this up because I very much want to hear from you. The actor, Steven Lange, is a good friend of mine, portrayed Stonewall Jackson in the film "Gods and Generals." He's done much theater work. Steven does a one-man play called Beyond Glory in which he portrays Medal of Honor recipients as old men, as they would be now, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. One of them is this feisty, fiery guy who just loved it and he talks about what it was like when he charges with his bayonet and he teaches his men how to jam that bayonet into the head of an enemy and he describes the sound as "splitting a cantaloupe." Then he stops and realizes what he's just said to this horrified audience and he says "It is war, you know." That's really the point of what I just read. It is war, you know. I don't write anti-war books. I don't write with a political agenda. I have no axe to grind. This is not about setting the record straight. I get a lot of Vietnam vets writing me saying, "My regiment did this thing in Vietnam and the government covered it up. You need to tell that story." That's not what I do. My point is to just get into the heads of these people and be as honest as possible and tell you their story, tell you that story as Jesse Adams would tell it today. When I was 12 years old walking across the field at Gettysburg with my father when he was researching The Killer Angels, we're walking across the ground where Pickett's Charge took place. Michael Shaara's telling me the story of what it was like, what I touched on a little while ago about Louis Armistead leading his men across that ground and his best friend up there, the Union General Winfield Hancock's waiting for him. I'm the 12-year old following my father and we're walking along, we cross the Emmitsberg Road, we start going up the hill where the Confederates were really running out of energy. We get to the stone wall where the Union soldiers were and my father's telling me this story and he's totally caught up in it and I'm fascinated, the old man's a good storyteller, we step over the wall and he's telling me about Armistead, General Armistead, Confederate general stepping over the Union wall and we see a monument and there's a Confederate flag, strange place for that to be. My father walks over and looks at the monument. It's the place where Armistead fell, where he went down, and two days later he was dead. My father began to cry. Now, when you're 12-years old, you're not really used to seeing the old man cry. I realized something, this was important. I've never forgotten that moment. Every time I go to Gettysburg, I've been there twice this year already and I'll be there in November, every time I go to Gettysburg, I go to that monument. That lesson has stayed me in every story I've done. What I'm working on now, the D-Day book, the sequel to this, again, what can I tell you about D-Day you don't already know? Lots. It's not just "Private Ryan" and "The Longest Day." There are some good stories there. I've been to Omaha Beach and I've walked in the American Cemetery. That's a place, if you ever get the chance, go there. That's a place every American should go. Walking in the footsteps of these characters, that's the lesson my father taught me but beyond that, he taught me that if you want to talk about these characters and want to pay homage to the heroes, to the people who are responsible for us being able to sit here, on this unbelievable gorgeous day, in this place, and enjoy what we have here, these people must be remembered. Thank you. [applause] We have time for just maybe one or two quick questions. I went over my time. I'm sorry about that. Anyone wants to spit out a question, they have the microphone set up over here. I'll try to repeat the question. [inaudible] The favorite place I've been? There are three. Gettysburg definitely. The North Bridge at Concord, you know, west of Boston? Go there. "By the rood bridge that arched the flood their flag to April's breeze unfurled here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the World." That monument is there with that Emerson poem on it. Stand on that bridge, read that poem and try not to choke up. You can't. Valley Forge and Normandy. I mean, every American should visit these places. Yes. Female Speaker: Were you able to actually interview the gentleman from World War II? The tank fellow and the paratrooper? Jeff Shaara: The tank commander and the paratrooper in these stories are composite characters. Now I have talked to a number of veterans, I also have diaries, enormous... That's the thing about World War II, there's almost too much material. At some point you have to stop, it's okay, I have enough to tell the story. They're composite characters because it's almost impossible, unlike Eisenhower or Rommel, it was almost impossible to find one guy who was everywhere I needed him to be to tell the story. Now that's not crossing the line into creating a bogus story, I promise you. Every event and every officer and every casualty in the story is real and that man died on the day he's portrayed and those are real people. But the voices have to be composite characters. Female Speaker: Are you tempted to tell some stories about Vietnam? Jeff Shaara: No. I get lots of e-mails asking me. First of all, I grew up in the Vietnam generation. There's just too much politics with that and that's just not what I do. Maybe some day. I'm sorry. They're telling me I'm over time. Thank you all very much. I really appreciate it. I'm going to sign some books down here. [applause] [end of transcript]