#100: The Kill Switch with Phil Zabriskie

The Art of Manliness

Society & Culture, Education, Philosophy

4.7 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2015

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it mean to kill for your country? How do you learn how to do it? What does it feel like in the moment? Once the killing starts, how do you control it? And what happens when you kill the wrong person, or don’t kill someone you wish you had, or look back, years later, at the people you killed? In this jarring and thought provoking book, journalist Phil Zabriskie interviews combat veterans the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and asks them what it's like to kill and what it has done to them and their families after they returned home. It's an interesting discussion about something that hardly anyone talks about.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.
0:19.6	So while back ago we had on the podcast, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, he wrote the book
0:24.2	on Killing where he goes into detail about the psychological effects that Killing has on soldiers
0:30.8	and law enforcement officers. And since his book there hasn't been too much else written about
0:36.4	the topic of killing from the context of war. I imagine because it's an unpleasant topic to
0:41.7	think research and write about. But our guest today has recently published an Amazon
0:46.2	Kindle book called The Kill Switch in which he interviews and talks to soldiers and veterans of
0:52.1	the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and asks them what it was like to kill and what
0:56.8	effect it's had on them and their lives after their service. Our guest is Phil Zabrisky. He's
1:02.2	spent nearly a decade working and doing journalism overseas. He has covered both Afghanistan and Iraq
1:10.2	along with news and events in Pakistan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Indonesia and the
1:15.2	Philippines. He's been a staff writer for Time Magazine. He's written for the National Geographic,
1:20.2	New York Magazine, Washington Post and he recently, again, his book is The Kill Switch and that's
1:24.8	what we're going to talk about today, a really fascinating discussion. So let's do this.
1:32.8	Phil Zabrisky, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. So your book is The Kill
1:37.2	Switch. It's about killing in combat, particularly in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
1:43.1	But can you tell us about your work that led up to this book and what caused you,
1:47.8	was there something specific that caused you to write this little Amazon Kindle single?
1:52.6	Sure. I had not set out to cover conflict. That wasn't my intention. I don't think of myself as a
1:59.6	war correspondent in any shape or form. It just so happened that I think like a number of people
2:05.8	of my generation, so to speak, got caught in this slipstream that happened after September 11th
2:11.8	and led to more stories that had to do with conflict. So I'd been spending time in conflict zones
	...

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