Telling the Stories of War
The Center for Veteran Transition and Integration (CVTI) and the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism are proud to host the Civil-Military Relations Center and students from the US Army War College for a panel discussion on the evolution of the narratives of war over the past 20+ years of conflict.
The panel will include the NYT Pulitzer Prize winner, Azmat Khan, National Book Award winner, Phil Klay, and veteran and author Adrian Bonenberger. The conversation will be moderated by the Executive Director of CVTI, Jason Dempsey.
Adrian Bonenberger is a writer and journalist. He served with the Army as an infantry officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and 10th Mountain Division, with which he deployed twice to Afghanistan and was valorously decorated. He lived in and reported on Ukraine between 2015-2017 and his journalism has been published in many publications including New York’s own The New York Times. When Russia invaded again in 2022, he trained civilians in Lviv with two other veterans. In 2023 he returned to Ukraine to train two reconnaissance battalions prior to the summer counteroffensive. He edits a newsletter, Military Media, for Context, a venture capital group out of San Francisco, and is working on a memoir/manifesto about training in Ukraine.
Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. She is an investigative reporter with the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, a Carnegie Fellow, and the Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she is also the director of the Li Center for Global Journalism. Khan is writing a book for Random House investigating America's air wars. Her investigations have prompted widespread policy impact and won more than a dozen awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Magazine Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, the Polk Award, and the Hillman Prize.
Jason Dempsey is the Executive Director of the Center for Veteran Transition and Integration at Columbia University. Previously he served as an infantry officer in the US Army with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the author of Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations and also writes and speaks regularly on the failures of the US military in Afghanistan. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and earned his PhD from Columbia University.
Phil Klay is novelist and a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. His first book, Redeployment, received the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. He teaches at Fairfield University.