Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. I've been talking to veterans about how they recover from war because I think we all, to some extent, need to recover from these wars that have been fought in our name,

and I think part of our recovery will be admitting and accepting that we have lost these wars. Today I have a conversation with

Elliot Woods, a veteran who is also a very fine journalist. He spent a year as a combat engineer in Northern Iraq, 2004, 2005. Then he came home and went to school at the University of Virginia, studying history and religion, earning a degree in English literature.

He thought about staying in school and becoming a professor, but he decided he wanted to go back to war, this time as a journalist.

He embedded with combat units in Afghanistan and spent time living as a civilian among the people in Baghdad and Gaza.

In 2011, he won the National magazine award for a series of stories published by the Virginia Quarterly Review.

He's an excellent writer and photographer.

No stancing or beating around the bush.

He has a way of grabbing you by the shoulders and slapping you upside the head.

I called him on the phone in Ann Arbor, where he's spending a year as a night, Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan.

All right, I'm recording.

All right.

So the main idea is, you know, that I said in the introduction is I think we should admit that we've

lost and I don't know whether you agree with that or not is are did we lose

these wars that's a question do you think we lost these wars?

Yeah, I do. I really do.

And I think that there was no chance that we could win them. I think they were unwinnable.

I think we won them for as long as we could, but our winning was always contingent on the

maintenance of huge numbers of troops on the ground, which was something that would be impossible to sustain forever.

So, you know, it's really easy to take terrain when you have superior force or you have initiative, you know, you have the

superior initiative or you have some advantage that allows you, whether it's surprise or whether

it's overwhelming military force, whatever it is, taking terrain is not not so much the difficult part,

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