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From that day a huge cross-section of people can draw a line to their own proximity to, or roles in, an extraordinary amount of uncharted violence. For then-Captain Parker of the Second Force Reconnaissance Company, the opening experience became “seven months of blood and fire and broken glass,” a life of fighting “in the homes of our enemies, among their families” and then, back in the safety of the United States, the startling and yet woefully common quandary of being unsure how to share with a loved one a particular memory. In his case it was the lingering recollection of a “2-year-old child toddling through window glass shattered by an explosive charge and leaving tiny, bloody footprints on the polished concrete floor of his home.”

Many veterans know something that the Pentagon and the politicians who speak for military action often do not: that regardless of the organizing ideas behind a military campaign, for those who do the fighting, war is often reduced to who is near and whatever happens. And the rest of a life can be spent trying to make sense of it all.

TIMES EVENT: Civilian Casualties of the War on Terror

Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019 | New York City

A rare convergence of experts on the human costs of war will discuss the often-ignored outgrowth of the global war on terror: two decades of civilian casualties. Times journalist and Marine Corps infantry veteran C. J. Chivers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 story about an Afghan war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, will moderate the discussion. The panelists are Alissa J. Rubin, the Times Paris bureau chief who won a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting on Afghanistan in 2015; Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter and New York Times Magazine contributor, who uncovered civilian casualties among nearly 150 airstrike sites across northern Iraq; and writer Brian Castner, a veteran of the Iraq war and weapons expert for Amnesty International’s crisis team, who also investigates war crimes and human rights violations.

Get tickets here.

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