Q&A with counterinsurgency expert John Nagl

John Nagl, a leading counterinsurgency expert, served in the U.S. Army for two decades. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.

Q: Your study, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam," has been very influential as the United States fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What would you say are the most important counterinsurgency lessons the U.S. military applied from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan?

A: The single most important thing to remember about counterinsurgency is that it is messy and slow—“like eating soup with a knife,” in T.E. Lawrence’s words.  It is hugely important that political decisionmakers and military strategists understand how grindingly difficult and expensive counterinsurgency campaigns are.   They rarely intend to fight a counterinsurgency campaign when an intervention begins, and tend to be slow in both recognizing and adapting to defeat an insurgency when one erupts. In Vietnam, the U.S. military was typically slow to recognize and adapt to the demands of the counterinsurgency campaign it confronted. 

Over time, it improved its performance, particularly under the command of General Creighton Abrams.  The lessons it learned—about the importance of building capable local forces, linking political and military lines of effort, conducting information operations, protecting the population rather than focusing exclusively on killing insurgents, holding the terrain you’ve cleared rather than allowing the insurgents to reoccupy it—were forgotten in the wake of the Vietnam War, and only relearned several years into the experience in Iraq.  It took several more years to apply them to the campaign in Afghanistan. 

Q: Do you feel that counterinsurgency was/has been given enough of a chance in Iraq and Afghanistan?

A: The lessons of Vietnam were applied to the Iraq campaign under the leadership of General David Petraeus, who had written his doctoral dissertation on Vietnam.  He later had the chance to practice counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which had been starved of resources for many years.  Counterinsurgency worked where it was resourced, particularly in southern Afghanistan, albeit slowly and at great cost.  It was not applied across all of Afghanistan, and even in the south American forces are being withdrawn and Afghan troops thrust into the lead more rapidly than many observers would recommend.  Whether the Afghans will be able to hold what Americans and NATO troops have cleared of insurgents at such cost will depend largely on the American commitment to Afghanistan after the formal transfer of authority in 2014.

Q: As someone who served in the military for two decades, do you think the lessons of Vietnam were applied to each conflict in which you served, or was the Vietnam legacy more of a factor in some than in others?

A: Early in my career I served in Operation Desert Storm, a war that was heavily influenced by perceived lessons of Vietnam—fight with overwhelming forces, win decisively, then withdraw rapidly.  It was the war that the Pentagon had wanted to fight ever since Vietnam—a war against a conventional enemy on a battlefield all but devoid of civilians.  Satisfying as it seemed at the time, however, Desert Storm was a military triumph without a political victory; Saddam Hussein remained in power to threaten his neighbors, a low-level air war continued for a decade, and ultimately we had to fight again to remove him from power—and face the messy reality that it is much harder to build a new government than it is to destroy one of which we don’t approve.

Q: What do you see as a "good enough" outcome for Afghanistan?

A: I recently published an article, which argued that Afghanistan was far more likely to end like the Iraq war than like Vietnam.  America is likely to leave behind a substantial force of advisors helping Afghan security forces fight a weakening but still dangerous Taliban; Pakistan will continue to be schizophrenic, alternately helping the Taliban and fighting against them; and the Afghan government that follows President Karzai will remain corrupt.  As long as America maintains a significant force in country, however, the central government will stand.  Ultimate defeat of the Taliban depends mostly upon the actions of Pakistan, which is the most dangerous country in the world for the United States, and is likely to remain so.

Q: In this presidential election, neither candidate has served in the military. Do you think military experience is important for a president, and do you think it affects presidents' decision-making and/or interactions with the Pentagon?

A: Interestingly, in every election since the end of the Cold War, the presidential candidate with the less distinguished military record has been elected.  I believe that this is another unfortunate legacy of the war in Vietnam, and am hopeful that this generation of military veterans will bring more military experience back into a government that would benefit from the spirit of service and sacrifice demonstrated so fiercely by the post-September 11th generation of veterans.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: After the Vietnam War, the United States intentionally turned away from the lessons it had learned at such a cost in blood and treasure.  It has paid the price for those lessons again in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are promising signs that it will not forget them again in the recent Joint Staff “A Decade of War” study.  There is every chance that America will fight another counterinsurgency campaign, in a generation or perhaps much sooner; we must ensure that we do not have to pay for the lessons of counterinsurgency yet again.

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Q&A with novelist Tatjana Soli

Tatjana Soli is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel The Lotus Eaters, published in 2010.

Q: Your book The Lotus Eaters is set in Vietnam during the war. What inspired you to write about that war, and what kind of historical research did you do for the book?

A: The initial inspiration really came when as a young child I lived on Fort Ord military base in the late sixties. As an adult, it became kind of a personal quest to make sense of that time for myself. Of course it is one of those subjects where the deeper you go, the more there is, until it is an obsession. Since the book came out, many people have contacted me that are still obsessed by the war, whether through first-hand experiences, or those only involved peripherally, through other family members, like myself. As far as research, I needed so much factual information that would never find a place in the final book, but that I needed to ground the story in. Besides documentaries, I read newspapers and magazines, which were invaluable for the simple fact that they were written in the moment. I read many of the later memoirs of the journalists who covered the conflict and had the benefit of hindsight. Military pamphlets, soldier testimony, histories of colonialism, Vietnamese food, Vietnamese and American music. It was fairly exhaustive. I used whatever gave me a feeling for the time and place so it was a bit like an actor getting into a part. 

Q: The main character, Helen, works as a photojournalist. Why did the idea of a female war photographer appeal to you, and what do you think of the role women journalists played in the Vietnam War and subsequent conflicts?

A: I was interested in using the viewpoint of a female journalist for a novelist's reasons: she would be a perfect outsider character. Beyond that, as a woman writer, I wanted very much to have a female inhabit the central moral conflict in the traditionally male territory of a war novel. Researching the lives of journalists I was in awe how brave many of these people were then and are today. In the particular area of war photojournalism, women had just started to have a presence in Vietnam. I believe I read somewhere that today the figure is twenty-five percent of journalists are women. It is a very difficult life for a man or a woman. 

Q: Your writing is very cinematic; a reader feels transported to the locations you describe. Had you been to Vietnam before writing the book? And are there plans for a movie version of The Lotus Eaters?

A: I had been to other parts of Southeast Asia, but not Vietnam. I didn't have a contract for the book so I put off going until a later point. After years of living with the story, I decided almost superstitiously that visiting might destroy the world I had created — the Vietnam of the sixties and seventies at war. I've gone subsequently, and I feel that the book would not have materially changed. A few small details at most. I tell my students that place is always filtered through character and story. If you've created a vivid reality in a book, it is not a place that can be visited. Which doesn't keep my mom from asking if I visited the yellow building in Cholon! The book has been optioned for a movie, and I have my fingers crossed. 

Q: Your second novel, The Forgetting Tree, to be published this September, takes place in a very different locale. How do you choose your settings, and is it difficult to switch from one to another?

A: I worked on and off The Lotus Eaters for 10 years, so I was immersed in that setting though pictures, movies, documentaries for a long time, and it's emotionally draining material. That was part of the reason I finally went to Vietnam — to experience it in a healing way. I very consciously wanted to stay away from a loaded setting and also anything historical for my next book. My second book takes place in contemporary Southern California on a citrus farm. It is a setting that I've lived near for years, that I love deeply, and that creates different kinds of resonances than a place mostly imagined. Again, I'd say that the place in my book is not a place you can visit.

Q: What other novels about the Vietnam War do you recommend, and why?

A: I sound like a broken record, but I will forever be an evangelist for Tim O'Brien's novels. Especially with younger audiences who are only exposed to whatever is currently being published. I don't believe there will ever be a better account of the soldier's experience, or the toll of that experience, than in his work. Of course, there is The Things They Carried, but equally important is Going After Cacciato, and then further into the aftereffects of war in the book In the Lake of the Woods. Next, Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone, because he is a master novelist, and he makes you understand the time from the inside out. 

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Tatjana Soli

Q&A with The Huffington Post's Andrea Stone

Andrea Stone, senior national correspondent for The Huffington Post, spent more than two decades with USA Today; she has covered a variety of stories, including U.S. troops in combat.

Q: As someone who has covered several wars, did you have a sense that the Vietnam legacy played a role in how the military waged those later wars, and if so, how?

A: As a reporter for USA TODAY, I was in the White House Rose Garden when President George H.W. Bush named Gen. Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although he will always be known as the first African-American in that position, he would later be known for the so-called Powell Doctrine. It says that military force should only be used after all else fails and then only when there is a direct threat to national security -- not just for humanitarian purposes.

Taking lessons learned as a young Army officer in Vietnam, Powell insisted that there be strong public support for going to war and that the U.S. spare no expense to overwhelm the enemy with disproportionate force. He also called for a clear exit strategy before going in. The Powell Doctrine informed the 1991 Persian Gulf War -- a short, massive blow against Iraq that liberated Kuwait even as it left Saddam Hussein to fight another day.

But it was soon discarded by the Clinton administration, which intervened in the Balkans over Powell's objections. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said to him, ''What's the point of having this superb military that you've always been talking about if we can't use it?'' I was embedded with U.S. ground forces in Albania during the Kosovo War, a conflict that NATO fought and won from the air. There was much debate over sending in those Apache helicopter gunships amid fears the American public wouldn't stand for the kind of casualties deploying the might bring. In the end, they were never used and advocates for limited war -- from the air -- won the day.

The Vietnam legacy doctrine took an even greater pummeling under President George W. Bush, when his secretary of State, Colin Powell, was put in the unenviable position of arguing for war at the United Nations under the pretense that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. I was in Doha, Qatar, at the time, reporting from U.S. Central Command headquarters. Just a few months before, I had been in Kabul, Afghanistan, where allied forces went in with a Powell-like "shock-and-awe" campaign to oust the Taliban after 9/11. It was December 2002 and most of the war correspondents had already decamped to Baghdad. It was then that the war in Afghanistan turned into just the sort of quagmire those who fought in Vietnam vowed should never happen again.

Q: Do you think their Vietnam service was a negative factor for Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain during their presidential bids?

A: Al Gore's service in Vietnam played a bigger part in his father's unsuccessful bid to be reelected to the Senate as a leading anti-war voice on Capitol Hill. By the time the younger Gore ran for president -- and I traveled with his running mate Joe Lieberman as a reporter for USA TODAY -- most of the focus related to Vietnam was about George W. Bush and his service during the war in the Texas Air National Guard. In the end, the controversy wasn't enough to deny Bush the presidency.

Vietnam war service was a much bigger factor for John Kerry and contributed, inconceivably to his supporters, to his resounding defeat in 2004. I wrote about Kerry's Vietnam experience for the newspaper and covered the charges by the partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that the Navy veteran lied about his record. Kerry symbolized a nation torn from within over the war. He was a decorated and combat-tested veteran with three Purple Hearts who burst onto the national stage by turning against the war, throwing away his medals and famously asking a Senate committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Fast forward nearly three decades. Stung by right-wing charges that Bill Clinton had been a draft dodger, Democrats in 2004 thought they could easily neutralize the political Achilles Heel of the baby boomer generation by nominating a bona fide war hero in Kerry. Boy, were they wrong. What happened next would make "swiftboating" a shorthand noun for false and scurrilous political attacks. Four years later, when former POW John McCain ran for president, Vietnam was relegated again, perhaps once and for all, to the back-burner.

Having never questioned the war and taken his place as the Senate's leading hawk, McCain's service would have little impact on the campaign -- except in that it underscored for younger voters of how old the Republican candidate was and how, compared to the post-boomer Barack Obama, he came from another, passing generation.

Q: If a veteran of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars were to seek the White House in the future, do you think their service would be viewed in a favorable light, and if so, why?

A: I do think so, but I no longer believe war service is the resume builder it once was, especially for Democrats. I covered the pre-Swift Boat swiftboating of Sen. Max Cleland -- a triple amputee from Vietnam whose GOP opponent, the current senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, unseated him with TV ads picturing him with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 2006, I was on the campaign trail in Illinois with Tammy Duckworth, an Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq and was one of several recent veterans running that year. She lost and, after a stint at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is running again for Congress against a Tea Party incumbent, Rep. Joe Walsh.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, the first Iraq War veteran elected to Congress, found that credential went only so far during his rematch with Republican Mike Fitzpatrick. The two-term congressman, whose 2010 re-election campaign I covered for Politics Daily, was unseated. In April, the former military lawyer lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania attorney general against a political newcomer with no military record, former Lackawanna County prosecutor Kathleen Kane.

At a time when those under the age of 40 grew up without the fear of being drafted and fewer and fewer Americans, let alone elected officials, know anyone in or have served in the  all-volunteer military, having a war record has become less important for those with political aspirations. That said, despite the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, the veterans of the post-9/11 wars have been treated far better than those who returned from Vietnam. Back then, opponents of the war often failed to separate the war from the warrior, even though many who fought had no choice. Today, because few want to return to the more egalitarian draft, there is a greater appreciation for the sacrifices of those who voluntarily join the military and fight for the rest of us. But that also means voters are less likely to consider military service as a must-have on a politician's resume.

Q: What has and hasn't changed for women war correspondents over the course of your career?

A: First, I don't see myself as a war correspondent as much as someone who has covered wars as part of a larger career that has included national news and politics. That said, I would say that war reporting has become a common choice for many young women, a "no-brainer" if you will, for a generation of journalists that grew up assuming they could cover anything. I imagine it was tougher for the women of the Vietnam generation, who were just getting off the society pages and filing lawsuits to be treated equally with men in the newsroom.

One challenge for the current generation of Western women combat correspondents is navigating the cultural norms and expectations of the Muslim world, where many of the most recent conflicts have taken place. As a woman reporter in the Middle East, I’ve always felt like “the third sex” because I could go where native women could not but still wasn’t considered one of the men. But aside from knowing not to shake hands with a devout Muslim and dressing appropriately for the setting -- abayas and scarves to lower your profile -- the rules are the same as for men.

And the main one is how to keep yourself safe. Despite all the ink and gigabytes used up when CBS correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Cairo during Arab Spring protests, I agree with my friend Tina Susman. A veteran combat correspondent who was kidnapped in Somalia and is a former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Baghdad, she says women journalists are less concerned about being raped as maimed or killed by a bomb -- just like their male counterparts.

Q: As someone who worked for USA Today for many years and now works for the Huffington Post, do you think daily newspapers can survive?

A: I do, but not in the form of dead trees. For years, newspaper people -- including myself -- fought against the digital tide, to no avail. Newspapers, with a few exceptions, will not exist as we knew them growing up. USA TODAY, which once was the cutting-edge technology of its day, is struggling to survive. That saddens me for I spent most of my career there. But I left nearly three years ago because I saw the handwriting on the wall and it was etched in digital. I believe we should worry less about the form that our news arrives in and more about the content of it.

While The Huffington Post under AOL has made an admirable effort to hire journalists -- and gave veteran print journalist David Wood enough time and space to write a series on wounded soldiers that one the website its first Pulitzer Prize -- it remains to be seen whether the resources and ambitions of such websites can match traditional print media's ability to get the news. HuffPost sets the standard for social media and interactive, two-way journalism. There is much to be said for this democratizing trend. But I also reject the notion that everyone is or can be a journalist and I worry that readers don't always see the distinction -- especially in a world where bad information as well as good can go viral in instants. And then there is the changing philosophy from mainstream objectivity toward "point of view" journalism. Older journalists may question the trend but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Q: Anything else you'd like to tell us?

A. I appreciate your asking for my take. And since you two make such a great father and daughter duo, I thought you might find this piece I did about my father's World War II service interesting. It doesn't touch on such lofty themes as presidential decision-making as does your book. But it does address, in personal terms, another "haunting legacy" of Vietnam: how a generation soured by that conflict has come to reclaim the stories of their parents' "good war" and, in the process, find a piece of themselves.

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Andrea Stone ©Matt Mendelsohn Photography

Q&A with Matt Bai of The New York Times

Matt Bai is chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine.

Q: This presidential election is the first since 1944 in which neither major-party candidate has military experience. Do you think this will become a more frequent occurrence, and, if so, what does that mean for American politics?

A: It's funny you ask, because I though about this a lot recently when I was spending some time with Bob Kerrey in Nebraska for the magazine. I do think this is a turning point, and that from here on out more of our candidates will probably lack military experience, and that's a simple function of generational change. If you're 50 today, then you're too young to have ever been drafted, and so naturally politicians of that age are going to be less likely to have served. 

Do I think it has an effect on our political culture? Yes, personally, I do. I think our politics throughout the 20th century was more civil and more readily met the challenges of the nation in part because so many of our leaders had that sense of perspective that comes from mortal danger. Like Kerrey and the other Vietnam vets who served, they understood that there were worse things in life than losing an election over something you believed. And I really think we're losing that sense of perspective in our politics. At one point during our recent travels, I suggested to Kerrey that something he had said would anger his own party's leaders, and he looked surprised. He told me, "So we have an argument, that's all. Nobody's going to DIE."

He's right, of course, and I think a lot of the problem with out current political culture is that too many politicians act like losing their seats is the same thing as dying.  I'm not saying I want to reinstitute the draft and send my son off to war when he's 18 so we can incubate better leaders. I'm just saying that there probably was a positive impact from having so many leaders who had also fought for the country.

Q: During the 2008 campaign, you wrote about the huge impact Vietnam had on GOP nominee John McCain, who was a POW in Hanoi. How did McCain's identification with the Vietnam War help or hurt him in the election?

A: It's a good question, and I guess I don't really think it had much impact one way or the other, mostly because of the strategy he pursued as a nominee. The real benefit McCain got from his status as a war hero, for much of his career, is that it established him as a natural, cultural leader for conservatives, and that enabled him to take some contrary positions without alienating large portions of his base. Thus he could position himself as a kind of reformer with independent voters without having most conservatives question his core values, as they would some other candidate who hadn't been a legendary prisoner in Saigon.

For a long time, this made McCain a singular and really fascinating politician, and I think he had the potential to really affect our political dynamic. As a nominee, though, he banked hard right and really tried to win over those conservatives in a more traditional fashion, with social and economic issues. And so his image as a war hero and patriot really didn't come into play as much as it might have if he had continued to hold himself out as a more unorthodox kind of reformer. Plus the economic issues that emerged late in the campaign more or less drowned out everything else.

Q: President Obama is trying to appeal to veterans, traditionally seen as a more conservative voting bloc, this election year. Do you think he will be successful in winning a larger percentage of veterans' votes than other recent Democratic nominees?

A: No, my guess is not in any measurable way, but this is only because most veterans are older. This president has always had a sharp generational divide in his support, which I've written about a lot, and which probably stems from a bunch of causes. Generally speaking, the older you are in America, the less likely you are to support President Obama, and so I think that makes it hard for him to do substantially better among veterans than other Democrats have. But I could be wrong about that.

Q: How much of an impact do you think the Swift Boat ads against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry had on the outcome of the 2004 presidential election?

A: Those ads had some impact, but this had less to do with the war than it did with questions about his character. And the Bush folks were very sharp about exploiting this, even though they didn’t make that ad. They very skillfully portrayed Kerry as a guy who couldn't be trusted to do the right thing at a critical moment, who would act according to his own image and ambition first. And so this idea that he had taken credit for things he didn't deserve and then protested the war when it was politically expedient really played into that. Everything they did to Kerry in that campaign underscored that one central theme. It was nasty and it was brilliant, and even then Bush barely won.

Q:  Will foreign-policy issues play a major role in this year's election, or will economic issues be completely dominant?

A: That's impossible to answer, because none of us knows what crises lay in our path between now and November. There are so many unstable places in the world, and so many potential terrorism threats, and any one of those could instantly become a critical issue in the campaign. Clearly, if you held the election today, though, it would be much more about economic issues.

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Matt Bai

Q&A with Ron Capps, writer, veteran, former diplomat, and founder of the Veterans Writing Project

Q&A with Ron Capps, writer, veteran, former diplomat, and founder of the Veterans Writing Project, which offers writing seminars to veterans, service members, and military families.

Q: What inspired you to start the Veterans Writing Project, and what role did your own experiences play?

A: My personal experience was one of the primary drivers to my founding the Project. I went to five different wars in ten years and did so with insufficient home or down time. I was treated for PTSD in Afghanistan in 2003, went to Iraq in 2004, and to Darfur in 2005. By 2006, amid the ongoing genocide in Darfur, I was at the nadir of a crushing PTSD relapse. I came very close to killing myself; I was actually interrupted in the act. After I was medevac’d home and my career was cut short, I started writing. Over time I realized that writing about the violence I saw and took part in helped me control the traumatic memories, and I wanted to help others do the same thing. Also, I used my VA benefits to go to graduate school and I wanted to make sure that I gave something back to the Americans whose tax dollars supported me. Giving away what I learned in school seemed a pretty efficient way of doing that.

Q: You have written about your experiences with PTSD. With so many veterans suffering from that same condition, what therapies or strategies are effective in helping them?

A: Well, first, I’m a writer and so I won’t give medical advice. But as a survivor of PTSD, my advice to others is usually this: If you need help go get it; don’t wait, don’t be afraid to ask for help, don’t try to sort this stuff out on your own. Service members are trained from their first day in the military to always work as a team. But so many of us come home from the war and try to sort out our problems alone. This is the worst possible thing that can happen. Reservists are especially susceptible to this phenomenon because when they come home they are often completely outside the safety net of the unit. There isn’t anyone who they can lean on, anyone who they think understands what they’ve been through.

Q: Do you work with veterans from all wars and all age groups, or are some wars particularly represented?

A: We are open to any veteran regardless of when or where they served. In our seminars we see a lot of Vietnam veterans and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. But we also have Cold War veterans, service members who never deployed outside of CONUS [Continental United States], and we’ve had a couple Korean War veterans come through. I should add that we are also open to family members. I think they are too often left out of the circle when organizations provide services to veterans. We invite spouses, parents and children. We want to get the information out to as many people as we can.

Q: Could you describe a few of the writers and their projects, and what their accomplishments mean to you?

A: A few of our participants have really stood out, but I’ll just mention two. We had a Vietnam veteran who came up from Florida to attend our seminar at the George Washington University (in Washington, DC). He wanted to simply write down his story for his family, but he was having trouble with the structure. We were able to give him ideas about narrative structure and voice that he said were helpful. I understand that he’s still hard at work getting a 30-year military career on the page.

The other was a young Iraq veteran who had some health issues from TBI [traumatic brain injury] and PTSD. He came through our program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center as a skeptic; he said he didn’t read and didn’t write, but he was willing to try anything to help himself get better. He left the program convinced of the healing value of writing (and more broadly, the creative arts). He’s now working on a novel.

As for me, I’ve said all along in this endeavor that if what we do in the VWP helps one person get through the night a little more easily, that it’s worth all the hard work. These two stories keep me going when the little struggles to keep this thing going start to pile up.

Q:  What does your organization have planned for this Memorial Day?

A: We’ll hold a public reading by some of our participants and some other veterans at 1pm on Saturday May 26th at the Navy Memorial (701 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC). Plus several of us will take part in the Memorial Day Writer’s Project readings near the Vietnam Memorial on Monday.

Q: Anything else we should know about?

A: We’re always looking to expand our work. Anyone with questions or who is interested in bringing us out to teach in their town or on their base can find us on Facebook, or on the web at www.veteranswriting.org. We are a very small organization and we rely on individual supporters both in terms of volunteers--we could really use some help improving our websites--and in terms of funding. We don’t charge participants in our seminars, but there are still costs involved in terms of getting people to the seminars, providing child care when necessary, creating the curriculum, and all the logistics and administrative costs involved.

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Ron Capps