Welcome podcast listeners. I'm Captain Jake Moraldi. In this week's podcast, I'm not going to be the host.

In an effort to include more cadets into the Modern War Institute and into the podcast more generally,

I'm going to be handing over hosting duties to cadet Mitchell McGill, who will be conducting our first cadet-led interview with Sebastian Younger.

Mitchell is a member of Company D4 class of 2018,

originally from Greenville, Tennessee,

and is a member of WKDT, the radio station here at West Point,

where he works on sports broadcasting.

Welcome to the Modern War Institute podcast.

Today we'll be interviewing Sebastian Younger,

the author of The Perfect Storm, War, and his most recently, Tribe. He also made the films Restrepo and

Corngal. Restrepo won several awards and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary.

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the respective participants

and do not reflect the position of the United States government.

This is the Modern War Institute podcast.

So, Mr. Younger, I appreciate you taking the time for this interview.

The first thing I want to ask is, what were your initial thoughts going into the

Coringal Valley?

Well, like the guys, like the soldiers that I was with, I'd never heard of the Corongol.

I thought all the fighting was down in Kandahar, and I anticipated that the Corongol would

be really quiet and uninteresting, and that would be

doing what always seems to happen in countries in the Middle East is you end up drinking a lot of tea with people.

And that's exactly what the soldiers worried would happen.

...