Slate has partnered with Brooklyn Brewery and RISC to bring its hit war correspondent interview series to our readers. In this special sixth installment, Sebastian Junger—founder of RISC, and a best-selling author and journalist—sits down with Elliott Ackerman (author, Green on Blue), Jennifer Percy (author, Demon Camp), and Peter van Agtmael (photojournalist and author, Disco Night Sept. 11).
“Many would call me a dishonest man, but I’ve always kept faith with myself. There’s an honesty in that, I think,” reads the first line of Elliott Ackerman’s novel, Green on Blue. Based on his time as an advisor to Afghan commando units while serving in special operations in Afghanistan, the book was written as an ode to the friendships built with his foreign counterparts. In the clip above, Ackerman discusses those at-times-fraught relationships, the inherent unreasonableness of Afghanistan, and why he chose to write about insider attacks from an Afghan soldier’s point of view.
