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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Motherlove, Money, and War
00:57:13
A gambler with a destructive streak tells himself he can beat the odds one last time, best-selling author Jamaica Kincaid is sent to live with her aunt after the birth of her little brother, and award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Sebast...
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- [00:00]
Sponsor Representative
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- [02:21]
Sarah Austin Janess
From P TRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin Janess, producing director of the Moth and I'll be your host this time. At the Moth, people tell true stories from their lives. They stand on stage in bars, clubs and theaters and they tell these stories without notes to audiences all around the country. This hour we have three stories for you. We'll hear from the writer Jamaica Kincaid on her trip to visit her aunt as a nine year old. As punishment. Journalist Sebastian Younger remembers his final story from the front lines of war. And Josh Axelrod, a former professional card player, tells our first story Josh spent years as a card counter with a team of blackjack players. But the story you're about to hear takes place well after that, when Josh found himself alone in a tiny run down casino, desperately waiting for two lucky ladies. He told the story at a moth night called Sense and Sensibility. Stories about Currency. Here's Josh Axelrod live at the mall.
- [03:29]
Josh Axelrod
Righty tighty.
- [03:30]
Katherine Burns
Okay.
- [03:35]
Josh Axelrod
Two months ago, I was in a casino in Southern Washington state. Feeling ill, I'd driven down from Seattle, where I live now. A friend of mine was visiting Portland, Oregon, and so I'd driven down to see him, but I'd also brought along $10,000 in cash with me, because you never know. And I stopped in this casino on the way, gambled a little bit, and then went to Portland, hung out with him, spent the night. And now I was back in the casino. And I was hungover and ill, in part because I was in a casino. And casinos are a little bit sad, and small casinos in impoverished rural areas are a little bit extra sad. And I was also concerned about my own gambling and my relationship to what I was doing at that moment. I used to play blackjack for a living. I was a card counter, which is card counting as a legitimate, mathematically valid method for winning at the casino game, a blackjack. And I. I used to do that for a living. And then, and then my life took an unexpected course. And so I'm sitting at this table thinking about these things, and suddenly the man next to me is dealt a hand. He gets a 20. That's his hand, but it's not an ordinary 20. It's made up of two queens of hearts, queen of hearts on top of another queen of hearts. And as soon as I saw that hand hit the table, I thought, maybe everything's going to be all right now. I used to count cards for a living. And I was taught to do that by a group of friends, mentors, who were some extraordinary people, very brilliant, very poised, prosperous, and sort of beautiful in a way. And they incorporated me into a blackjack team that they had been operating for some time and taught me how to go into casinos and win money. And my job was to go in and win and take the money out of the casino, which you take in cash. You take it and you stuff it into your pockets. You stuff it into money belts. You put it in your breast pocket of your shirt or jacket, and you walk out with it, and you feel physically enhanced. When that happens, it's almost like a part of your body, and you bring it back to your teammates. We share our winnings. And so you distribute a $5,000 strap here or a $10,000 strap there, and everybody gathers around ecstatic, and it's almost like they're feeding off your own flesh.
- [05:56]
Katherine Burns
And.
- [05:57]
Josh Axelrod
And after earning my living that way for several years, I sold a book about the experience of memoir. And I sat down to write it. But I thought that I should procrastinate first. And so I played, started playing a little bit of poker on the Internet, which is. Poker is a game like blackjack, that one can win if one acquires a certain skill set that I had never happened to acquire. So I was playing poker badly, and I managed to lose, lose a couple thousand dollars, and I became upset that I had lost a couple thousand dollars. And so I proceeded to lose $10,000 out of anger. And that made me really furious. And I spent the next year sitting at the computer in a pathological stupor, just pressing this button, going broken. By the end of the year, I'd vaporized 50 grand. I was in debt. And I was surrounded not by these extraordinary mentors that I used to have around me, but by these other people who were strangers, whose last names I didn't even know, who had these haunted eyes and these woe begone expressions in a Gambler's anonymous meeting. And I was suddenly peers with the exact sort of people that I used to pride myself and sort of feather my ego, regarding myself as the very opposite of. And that's how I finished my poker career. And sometime after that, I finished my book. It was published. And then I got a job. It was a freelance job, but still they paid me. They sent me a check every couple weeks, which I found off putting at first, until I learned that those are fungible as well. And I decided to close the door on gambling, blackjack, poker, it didn't matter what form that part of my life was now over. I fell in love and I moved to Seattle to be with this woman. And you know, Seattle is a different. Is a little bit different from New York, the city. It is a city where nobody is trying to accomplish anything.
- [08:02]
Katherine Burns
And.
- [08:05]
Josh Axelrod
So it was a good place for the state of mind that I was entering. I was simply walk and contemplate evergreen trees. Or on the. On the rare occasions when it was a clear day, I could contemplate the mountains or the sound. And I was, every day at a certain time, I was practicing a form of Buddhistic meditation. So I would sit for an hour in a state of equanimity. And one day during the time that I usually reserve for equanimity, I wandered into a casino because in Washington, they have what they call mini casinos, these small, independently operated places with low betting limits. And they have blackjack and a couple other games. And I knew from my card counting days that small, private, independent operations are often sources of unusual value for card counters. They have special vulnerabilities in their games from time to time. They have some procedural errors or extravagances that can be beneficial. And so I was going around and I started playing a little bit of blackjack, and I won a little bit of money. And when you win a little bit of money, the next logical step is to win a large amount of money. And the amount of money I had in mind that would be good as a goal was $50,000, the money that I lost playing online poker. I should make myself whole. And this idea both thrilled me, but it gave me a little bit of trepidation. Because when you're a skilled gambler, when you're a card counter or a competent poker player, what have you, if you lose money, it's absolutely consistent with your own rational self interests to play that much harder and that much longer in an effort to win back what you have lost. Because you will, the long run will be good to you. But if you're a pathological gambler or just a normal losing gambler, the worst idea you can possibly have is the idea that you must be made whole, because the whole will continue to grow. And this is the very source of the pathological spiral that had absorbed my entire identity just a couple of years earlier. So I was a little unsure of where I stood. But to be honest, but I started to play. And the one thing I was sure of was that the value of the play that I was putting down was not very high because I didn't have access to a large team bankroll, which is what you really need to make reasonable amounts of money at blackjack with a small amount of capital, my personal money that I had, I was earning something equivalent, at least theoretically, to minimum wage in the casino. I was actually. I got a little bit lucky, so I won a bit more than that. And I was playing. And then my friend, old friend Todd, flew out to Portland and I drove down to visit him. And I stopped in this casino on the way to check it out. It was a new place. It had just opened a couple months earlier. And they happened to have a shuffle that was imperfect. It was interesting. It didn't sufficiently randomize the cart. So I sat Down. And I attacked the shuffle the first day I got there. Lost a couple GS, which is normal swing in blackjack. Went to Portland, Oregon, and saw Todd, and we ordered a round of drinks. And he said, how are you doing? What have you been up to? And I said, well, you know, I'm good. A little this, a little that I've been playing, playing a little bit of blackjack. And I could tell that this question was sort of forming in his mind, and he was wondering, I knew he was wondering, what blackjack? How, like, what does this mean and what context? Like with a team, with other people, are you on your own? And so I just preempted the entire thing. And I said, you know, on my own, my own bankroll, my own money, just a little bit of play. And he was silent. And I felt so angry at him and through him, at everybody else who he was representing, all my friends, the people who loved me, my mom and dad, all these people who I was. You know, I'd basically been keeping it pretty quiet that I was playing a little cards on the side. And the thing is that there is a dark side and a light side in gambling. And I had thoroughly explored both sides. I knew the difference. But the difficult thing about advantage gambling or gambling with an edge is that the situations that emerge when you're doing that and the circumstances that come up and the stories that you come back with are so far out and extravagant and frankly incredible, that if you admit to any vulnerability or any uncertainty about what it is that you are doing in a casino, nobody will believe you that you have an edge. They won't see you as this thing that you're representing yourself as. They will see you as the stone cold opposite of that. And so I didn't talk about it anymore. I ordered the next round. We drank the next day. I was hungover back in the casino. And the shuffle, as I say, was not random. It's what you call a sequenceable shuffle. And in a sequenceable shuffle, everything you see comes back to you again. It's essentially a shuffle where it is possible to identify with a reasonable degree of certainty the exact moment specific individual cards are going to appear. That's a little bit different from ordinary card counting. It's very cool. And this game had an additional feature, which is that besides just being an ordinary blackjack game, they had a side bet attached to the blackjack game called the lucky ladies. And the lucky lady side bet. You placed it right next to your blackjack bet. And if you were dealt a Queen of hearts on top of another queen of hearts. The bet would pay off at 100 to 1. And when I saw that, I knew immediately, this makes sense. What you want to do in this game is to sequence the ladies, sequence the queens of hearts. There are only six of them in the deck, but they're very, very valuable. And so for the previous day and a half, I'd been betting for queens of hearts, and I'd caught a few, but nothing had ever lined up in this way to win the jackpot. But I was. I was confident. I had a significant edge doing this. And suddenly, at this moment, the man next to me was actually dealt the hand of hands, queen of hearts on top of another queen of hearts. And what that means is that there's a good likelihood that those two cards are going to appear within reasonable proximity of each other again after the shuffle. And so I sequenced them. I burned an image into my head. Sequencing is a mnemonic technique, and you use visual mnemonics. You associate people from your life with each card and put them in a scene to remember the order. And so I burned this image. And as the dealer was shuffling, I was alone in this small casino in a remote place. But I wasn't entirely alone, because in front of me, in my mind, were these images of the people that I used when sequencing, and they were all my old blackjack colleagues. So I saw these prosperous, astute, kind of brilliant people that I had always held in such awe floating past me. And I also. I was not alone in a literal sense, because next to me at the table was this other guy who'd been in the casino all morning, this was a Wednesday morning, for hours gambling. And he had that same glazed look that the people I used to sit across the table from at Gamblers Anonymous meetings had. And the dealer finished shuffling and started to deal. And I saw the cards come out that indicated the queens were, in theory, due. And I placed two bets, table maximum, at this place. It was $300 on two consecutive lucky lady squares. And sure enough, in the first round, one queen of heart was dealt on one of my bets, which had happened a number of times before. I'd never won anything from it, so I didn't get too excited. The dealer kept going around. And on the second round, on top of my queen of hearts, she put another queen of hearts. And then she stopped, and she looked at the table, and she called over the pit boss. And he came and he looked at the table. And what they eventually figured out was something I already knew which is that 100 times a $300 wager pays $30,000. And around the time they figured that out, I absorbed the notion that I had in fact just won that amount. And in fact, in the turn of a single card on one hand, had gone within crying distance of this $50,000 nut I was trying to recover. Eventually, somewhat begrudgingly, they paid me, they cashed me out. I took away. I took every hundred dollar bill that they had in that casino. It was a small place. I also took every $50 bill and a lot of the 20s. And I took this wad and just stuffed it down my pants so that I was physically expanded in this weird protuberant way, sort of like in the old days. But I turned around and I wasn't in Las Vegas. I was in this toilet, this small place where there were 25 or 30 people all staring at me. Customers of the casino, people who worked there. Word had gone around and everybody there knew exactly what I had just won. And they had seen me at the cashier. They knew I was getting paid in cash. And so I moved briskly for the exit and briskly across the parking lot. And I started the engine of my car, drove out, made a series of strategic U turns to ensure I wasn't being followed, and then got on the Interstate 5 north towards Seattle through the woods in the dark of night. It was 5pm but it's the Pacific Northwest, so. And I felt expanded in this way, as I said, but also I felt this tingling, this sense of paranoia verging on terror. And I kept looking back in the rear view mirror, examining the headlights in the distance, trying to intuit if any of the cars back there looked menacing. And I kept asking myself again and again, is everything going to be all right? Thank you.
- [17:45]
Sarah Austin Janess
That was Josh Axelrod. Josh is the author of Repeat Until Rich, a raucous and fairly dark memoir of his life as a professional card counting blackjack player. Katherine Burns, the Moth's artistic director, sat down to talk to Josh about his history with the Moth. Here's Katherine remembering the first time she heard him tell a story at a party.
- [18:07]
Sponsor Representative
It was totally silent, with everybody turned to you, holding their attention, telling this unbelievably riveting story and thinking, that's it. This party is actually what we want the Moth to be and he has to come do this at the Players Club in front of 250 people instead of 25. And then blessed. Bless your heart, you did agree to do that and did it and were brilliant.
- [18:30]
Josh Axelrod
Well, I Think part of whatever might happen with card counting stories, specifically in a room, has a lot to do with the nature of the stories themselves, because people, when they're hearing them, are, I think, struck with the possibility. They just can't decide if the person is in fact a lunatic who thinks that he goes around winning at casinos and has paranoid delusions of being chased by casino personnel, or in fact, a deft, you know, genuine professional.
- [19:00]
Sponsor Representative
So you. So you had been telling stories like this to groups of friends at dinner parties for years and years, clearly. But what was it like the first time you actually stepped out on stage with the purpose of telling a story to a crowd of strangers?
- [19:15]
Josh Axelrod
It was harrowing. It's like a disembodied experience. You're there and the spotlight is on. You're not really aware of your limbs or the rest of your body in the normal way that you would be.
- [19:25]
Sarah Austin Janess
When Josh Axelrod was on a no playlist at casinos, he was appearing on the Moth stage under an assumed name, Lee Aaron Blair.
- [19:33]
Josh Axelrod
I did it under a pseudonym in part because my name at that time still had some value. The sort of value of a card counter's real name tends to deteriorate over time as casinos become increasingly aware of it, but also because it's long been obvious to me that a card counter, if he legally changes his name, should change it to three or more first names so that when he presents a piece of ID to a person at a casino, he can claim that any one of the names is actually the first name. And depending on how familiar the casino personnel is with that particular form of ID, they're often they see IDs from all over the country. They're often confused so that you can create from one legal name multiple aliases based on a genuine id.
- [20:21]
Sarah Austin Janess
To hear the rest of this interview and for bonus material related to all the stories you hear on the Moth Radio hour, go to themoth.org in a moment. We'll be back with a story about a young girl's efforts to keep her mom all to herself.
- [21:18]
Sebastian Younger
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by prx.
- [21:28]
Sarah Austin Janess
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- [22:57]
Josh Axelrod
The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.
- [22:59]
Katherine Burns
It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your.
- [23:06]
Josh Axelrod
Wrist whether you're running, swimming or sleeping.
- [23:09]
Katherine Burns
And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.
- [23:14]
Josh Axelrod
The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations.
- [23:21]
Katherine Burns
IPhone Xs are later required.
- [23:23]
Josh Axelrod
Charge time and actual results will vary.
- [23:28]
Sarah Austin Janess
This is the Moth Radio hour from prx. I'm Sarah Austengeness. This next story was told in Burlington, Vermont at a touring Moth show we produced with PH International and Vermont Public Radio. The theme was Building a Bridge. Here's Jamaica Kincaid live at the Mall.
- [23:52]
Jamaica Kincaid
Well, I was hoping I would have an accident and I wouldn't be able to come up here. But try as I might, nothing worked. The tea didn't spill. Here I am. Like most people in the world. I had a mother and she had a sister and they were very unlike each other. And so they quarreled all the time. My mother lived in Antigua and her sister, where I was born and grew up, and her sister lived in Dominica, where she was born and where she grew up. They quarreled by letters they wrote to each other, letters that they would seal up in an envelope and post. And the letters would be taken on a boat that would make weekly stops on the island, the Leeward Islands, I think. Leeward and Windward Islands. And the letters that they sent to each other was written in English, proper English, but the language they spoke, the spoken language, was French patois. The letters. I never knew what the quarrel was about. Because when they received the letter in English, they received each other's letters in English. They then would respond to the letters verbally in French patois. So I couldn't understand French patois and I was never shown the letters. But only I knew, certainly from my mother's side, the reaction of the letters. This was incredibly interesting to me. Everything my mother did was interesting to me. I adored her.
- [26:00]
Sarah Austin Janess
But.
- [26:01]
Jamaica Kincaid
But mostly what I adored about her is that she adored me. So I liked to see her angry or it was interesting to me to see her angry and speaking in this language which I had no interest in learning at all. Because in any case, it wasn't a proper language. It was just a broken language, or so we were told. Eventually. Well, as I say, I was very. I adored this person. Eventually, when I was around nine years of age, I should say, my mother became pregnant. I don't know how this happened. I did have a stepfather, her husband. But still, this pregnancy was a mystery to me and I had nothing to do with it. I wanted nothing to do with it. I quite, in fact, ignored it. And so it was a surprise to me that she gave birth to a boy, a son, her other child. My parents tried very hard to, you know, make me like him and would tell me to hold him and so on. And I must have done a number of things that were not kind to him because one day when they asked me to hold him, he slipped out of my arms and fell on his head. They were very angry at that, I think, because they made me eat my supper all by myself outside. That was the first punishment. Then the second punishment was I was sent to live with my mother's sister, my aunt, because I didn't like my brother, they said. And I was put on a boat with my little valise with my little things in it. I was put on a boat. It so happened to be the very boat on which the angry letters went back and forth. And it's quite possible that I was a letter myself. I went. I arrived in Dominica. Dominica, incidentally, is named because Christopher Columbus discovered it on a Sunday. So it's named Dominica. He had, by that time run out of names he liked better. In any case, when I got to this island, it was very strange. My mother had told me about her growing up, you know, various things. But I thought that these things only happened to my mother. The carrying a snake unknowingly to her on her head for many miles. This sort of thing would only happen to my mother or her description of fish that flew out of the water. This would only happen to her. But it turns out that Dominica was just as she described it, which is why she fled from it. It rained all the time. The beaches had no sand. They had little black pebbles because the island is volcanic, formed from an old volcano. And the skies were not gray. There was water everywhere. Whereas Antigua, as you well know, because you've been there on your holiday, it never rains. It has beautiful beaches, a blue sea and an especially blue sky. And so Dominica was the opposite of this place that I had just been banished from. And worse, my aunt wasn't there to meet me on the jetty. Somehow I was taken to her house and where my grandparents also lived, in Maho Dominica. And there I met my aunt, who was the complete opposite of my mother. For one thing, she had red hair and gray eyes. And that's when I first came to realize that my mother was something called a Richardson. They have that mark. Red hair and gray eyes. And also my aunt seemed incredibly coarse to me. She didn't have my mother's graceful ways. My mother, incidentally, had long black hair. She took after the Carib side of her family. And she was very graceful and very. Even though we were very poor, she had very bourgeois ways. We ate with napkins and knife and fork and spoke properly and so on. My aunt was the opposite of that. And I naturally, you know, missed my mother very much and couldn't understand my banishment. I began to write to my mother things that were not true. I would say that my aunt had mistreated me, had denied me food, had made me go without sleep. All sorts of things that were not true. And then I would fold the letters up and take them with me out of the yard on my way to school, which was five miles away from my house in a village called Massac. Really massacre. But that has a whole other story, which I'll save for another time. In any case, I would put the letters under a stone just outside the gate. I never posted them. I had no way of posting them. And they were all the same, you know, Dear Mammy, I miss you so much. And I'm very badly treated. They give me no food, they treat me like a dog. All of it completely untrue. But then I would fold them up and put them them under the stone and then walk off to school. Apparently, one day my aunt saw me do this without my knowing. She saw me secrete these pieces of paper under a stone and she let me go off to school. But she retrieved them. And when I returned that afternoon from school, the letters were on a table and there was this red haired, gray eyed woman in flames at me, angry at me. And I think I cried and said I was sorry and so on. But in any case, it didn't matter. She packed up my things and the next time the boat arrived it was called the MV Ripon. The next time it arrived she put me on it and sent me back to my mother, which is just what I wanted. I wanted to go back to my mother. And so I arrived in Antigua and waiting for me on the pier was my mother. And I was very happy to see her, except that, yes, she had another child. Child. And so even though my letters had gotten me back to my mother's side in every way, I was further away from her than before. Thank you.
- [34:22]
Sarah Austin Janess
That was novelist Jamaica Kinkaid. Kinkaid's short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and the New Yorker, where her novel Lucy was originally serialized. Her first book, at the Bottom of the river, was nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction. She lives and teaches in Vermont. She said that the letters she describes in the story complaining of imaginary abuses were possibly the first fiction she ever wrote. In all, Jamaica's mother gave birth to three sons, making her the oldest of four and giving her in effect, one fourth of the mother she once had. She never regained the sense of closeness with her mother and that's a theme she explores in many of her novels. Jamaica said, if I hadn't become a writer, I don't know what would have happened to me. That was a kind of self rescuing. Coming up next, a A journalist tries for years to uncover the truth about war until suddenly he understands it all too well.
- [35:33]
Sebastian Younger
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by prx.
- [35:43]
Sarah Austin Janess
This is the Moth Radio Hour from prx. I'm Sarah Austin. Janess from the Moth. Our next and final story is told by Sebastian Younger. Sebastian had been a war reporter for more than 20 years, but this was his first time on stage at the Moth. Moth stories are personal. In fact, stories told on the Moth stage are most times the most important, most defining stories from a person's life. Here's Sebastian on crafting this story.
- [36:10]
Katherine Burns
You know, I do a lot of public speaking and I'm used to sort of talking and explaining how things work. And then I started to understand that that's not what the moth is. What you're really doing is telling a story that allow people to understand something more deeply.
- [36:26]
Sarah Austin Janess
The story that you're about to hear includes images of war, and it's not suitable for children. It was told at a moth night called Stories from the Front Line. Here's Sebastian Younger live at the mall.
- [36:46]
Katherine Burns
I first went to war when I was 31. I grew up in a wealthy suburb. I spent my twenties writing short stories and trying to wait tables. And I got to 30. And I guess the best way to say it is I didn't feel like a man. I didn't feel like I was a man. And I thought war would be exciting and intense and that it would transform me in some way. And so I got a backpack and I put a sleeping bag in it and some notebooks and pens and a few thousand dollars. And I went to Bosnia during the civil war, to Sarajevo, to try to learn to be a war reporter. And war was all those things that I thought it would be. I mean, the thing about war is it does not disappoint, but it's also way more than you bargained for. For example, this the first time I saw a dead body. It wasn't a fighter. Most of the people who die in wars are civilians. And it was in Kosovo during the civil war. It was a girl, 16, 17 years old. I always imagined that she was probably really beautiful. She'd been taken by Serb paramilitary forces, and they took her up to a field above a town called Suareka, and they did whatever they did to her, and then they cut her throat. And when I saw her, it was a couple weeks later. It was summer, it was hot. And the only way you could tell she was a girl, or really even the only way you could tell she was human was that you could still see the red fingernail polish on her fingernails. And that girl stayed with me for a while. She was more than I bargained for. I remember the first time I got ready to die, prepared myself to die. I was in Sierra Leone during the civil war, and I'd been out at the front lines, and it was getting pretty bad out there. And I tried to get back to Freetown, and I got in a jeep with a few Sierra Leonean soldiers who really weren't good for much, and another couple of journalists. And we were driving down this empty road back towards Freetown, and these rebels stepped out of the jungle in front of us with their guns leveled at us. And we came to a stop, and we just stared straight ahead while they argued about whether to kill us. And I tried to get ready. I was hollow. I was numb. And I didn't have any grand thoughts. I just kept thinking, I hope this doesn't hurt. That's all I thought. And the guns were pointed at us. And you never see a gun like this. But I could see the little black hole that the bullet comes out of. You know, at one point a guy racked his gun and started to shoot. And another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it up. I mean, he was like that for 15 minutes. Well, all these little black holes are staring at us. And I thought, there's eternity inside those holes. And they're so small, the thickness of a pencil. And eternity is in there. And I couldn't look at them. I couldn't bring myself to look at them. For some reason, they didn't kill us. And we drove back to Freetown and I kept going back for more. I kept going to more wars. I felt like there was something, something I needed to understand about war that I didn't understand yet. And I kept looking for it. I kept going back. I remember the first time I froze in combat. You go to war, you think you're going to be brave. If you don't think that, you probably don't go to war. And sometimes you are brave, but then other times you're not. And so this time I was out at a small American outpost in Afghanistan, an outpost called Restrepo. 20 man position up on this ridge. They were getting attacked all the time. But this day was a really quiet, hot day. Nothing was going on. I was leaning against some sandbags and some dirt flew in the side of my face. And what you have to understand about bullets is that they go much faster than the speed of sound. So if someone shoots at you, someone shoots at you from 400 meters, 500 meters, the first thing that happens is you ask yourself, am I getting shot at? Because the sound that bullets make when they go past you is pretty subtle. And then the gunfire arrives a moment later. Yes, I am getting shot at. And then everything goes crazy. Well, the bullet, the bullet. A bullet hit two inches from the side of my head and kicked dirt in my face. That's what I had felt. What's the angle of deviation at 500 meters? That gives you 2 inches to the right. What's the math on that angle? You don't even want to think about it. And then it's all you can think about. Well, I was paralyzed. Bullets were coming in, hitting the ground, hitting the sandbags, smacking into everything. I was paralyzed. I was behind some sandbags and our gear was right, right over there, just a few feet away. Cameras Bulletproof vest. We're getting attacked from three sides. They're coming up into the wire. It's really bad, and we can't get to our gear. There's too much gunfire and I'm paralyzed. And the guy I was working with, Tim Hetherington, photographer, we were on assignment out there. He finally jumps across that gap and he grabs stuff. He throws my camera to me and he throws my bulletproof vest and he grabs his stuff. He's throwing ammo to soldiers because the soldiers are pinned down too. And he gets back and I have my camera in my hand and I start shooting. I start working and then I'm fine. I'm not scared anymore. Tim was an amazing photographer and obviously very, very brave. A lot braver than me. But he was also really kind of thoughtful about war. And I remember at one point he said to me, you know, war might be the only situation where young men are free to love each other unreservedly without it being mistaken for something else. That was Tim, and that's why we were working together. We decided to make a documentary about this little outpost. We were going to call it Restrepo. And we were going to spend as much of the deployment as possible in this little spot on this ridge in eastern Afghanistan. So we were going to alternate trips. And I had torn my Achilles on this trip, so I had to go home to kind of heal up. So Tim took the next trip. He was on a combat operation, a week long combat operation up in the mountains on foot, very bad scene. A lot of guys got killed. A lot of American soldiers got killed and wounded. At one point, the American positions got overrun. They dragged off a wounded American soldier at night in the middle of a firefight. They got him back, but it was bad out there, way worse than anyone back home really knew, you know. And in the middle of all that, Tim broke his leg. He's at 10,000ft up on the Abasgar with a broken leg. And the platoon is moving down the mountain all night long. And the medic examines his foot and says, well, it's broken and we can't get a medevac and we have to be off this mountain by dawn or we're going to get hammered. Here's to Advil. And Tim knew. Tim knew that if you're not prepared to walk all night on a broken leg for the sake of 30 men, you shouldn't be out there. And he did it. I don't know how, but he did it. He got down off that mountain. So we finished up Our deployment. And that's how we started to think of it. Our deployment and the rest of it was okay. The worst was in the beginning, actually, and we started making our film, Restrepo. And. And the film did really well. And it started with this scene that was very. Took me a long time to be able to watch it, actually. I would always close my eyes when it came. It was the scene where I'm riding in a Humvee because I took the next trip after Tim broke his leg. I'm riding in a Humvee, and all of a sudden everything goes orange and black. And the Humvee got blown up. It went off under the engine block, though, instead of under us. So we lived. And that whole rest of the day, I was just on this crazy, jagged high. I mean, there's nothing like not getting killed to crank you up. It's incredible. And that night, I just sank. I spiraled down into this black hole. War is a lot of things. It's incredibly exciting, and I hate to put it that way, but I'm not up here to lie to you. It's really exciting and it's really scary, and it's really intense, and it's really meaningful, but it's also incredibly sad. And sadness is a kind of delicate emotion that's easily. Easily trampled by other feelings. And that night, I got in touch with the sadness of the whole thing. Politics aside, just the fact that people are doing this to each other, it crushed me. And that sadness lasted exactly until the next time we got shot at. Then I was back in the game. But I had the camera rolling when we got blown up. And that bit of footage, I could not bring myself to watch because when I tried to watch it, my heart rate went to 180. I just couldn't do it. But we put that in the beginning of the movie, and the movie came out and it did really well. And Tim and I were just on this amazing ride. You know, it was incredible. But the Arab world is in flames now, right? This is a little more than a year ago, the Arab Spring. Just this incredible, incredibly important upheaval in the world. And Tim and I were dying to get back to work, to get back out there. You know, we're journalists. We decided to go to Libya to cover the civil war in Libya. At the last minute, I couldn't go. And Tim went on his own. And on April 20th last year, I got the news through the Internet. On Twitter, actually, which is way. I hope I never get bad news again that my good friend Tim had been killed in the city of Misrata. An 81 millimeter mortar had come in and hit a group of fighters and journalists in Masrata and killed and wounded a bunch of them. And Tim was hit in the groin, and he bled out in the back of a pickup truck. Back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Misrata hospital. And I felt nothing. I was hollow again. Just like in that jeep in Sierra Leone when I was waiting to see if I was going to die. Completely hollow. I felt bad that I didn't feel bad. I was in shock. I mean, I realized later I was in shock. And, you know, it spares you for a little while, the things you're going to have to feel later. In the middle of that. That awful day, I got an email from a Vietnam vet that I'd met in Texas. And Tim had met him, too, and he'd really liked Restrepo, and he'd been through a lot of bad stuff, and he read my book and Tim's book, and he just liked our work. And he sent me an email and he said, sebastian, I'm so sorry about Tim, but I have to tell you something. It might sound callous, but I got to tell you, you guys with your books and your movie, you came very close to understanding the truth about war. But you didn't get all the way. The core reality of war isn't that you might get killed out there. It's that you're guaranteed to lose your brothers. And in some ways, you guys didn't understand the first thing about war. And now, Sebastian, you've lost a brother, and you understand everything there is to know about it. And he was right. It wasn't callous. It's the truth. The truth can't be callous. And now I know the truth about war, and I'm never going back again. Thank you.
- [50:23]
Sarah Austin Janess
That was Sebastian Younger. Sebastian is the author of the Perfect Storm and other nonfiction books with Tim Hetherington. He co directed the documentary film Restrepo, which won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. After the Moth event. He had this to say about telling his story.
- [50:44]
Katherine Burns
You're really trying to stay in the sort of emotional, sort of white hot core of the story and really stay in the experience. And the stories that I told are very. They're all very, very upsetting to me. And I usually sort of keep them in different places in my head. I don't think about them all at the same time. I sort of keep them apart. And this is the first time that I've taken those stories and put them all together. And it was, you know, emotionally, it was very hard, actually.
- [51:16]
Sarah Austin Janess
In reaction to his friend Tim Hetherington's death, Sebastian started a non profit called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, which trains freelance journalists in battlefield medicine. For more information and and the link seethemoth.org to share any of the stories you've heard on this hour, go to themoth.org where you can stream the stories for free and send a link to your friends and family. And while you're there, you can pitch us your own story or learn all about all of our other programs. Visit the moth's website, themoth.org Here's a pitch we liked. I was studying abroad with my semi boyfriend and after a fairly disastrous spring break trip where I wanted to punch him in the face approximately 60 times, he came to visit me in my home city where I broke up with him. And about a week later I got a call saying that he was in the ICU because he'd gotten hit by a car. I didn't see him for another month after that where we went out to dinner like, you know, friends do. And he greeted me by kissing me on the mouth. And I was like, okay, well, maybe adults do this with their ex when they're, you know, trying to be friendly. And then we were talking about the accident and he said he couldn't remember anything recent, including when he came to visit me in my city, including any conversations we had in said city. So though I only dated him once, I broke up with him twice. Remember? You can pitch us your story@themost.org Record it right on our site or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. The best pitches are developed for moth shows all around the country. All of the stories you've heard this hour are available at the iTunes store. Just search for the best of the moth. That's it for the Moth Radio hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from.
- [53:35]
Sebastian Younger
Your host this hour was Sarah Austin. Janess. The stories in the show were directed by Sarah and by Maggie Sino. The rest of the Moss directorial staff included Katherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Laura Haddon and Whitney Jones. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from the Smokin Joe Cube Band, Louis Armstrong and Little Bang. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Casting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange prx.org for more about our podcast. For information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.