Over nearly thirty years, Sean Naylor has reported from war zones. As a student he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to cover the mujahideen fighting Soviet troops. In the early 1990s, he accompanied the first US Army battalion into Somalia and joined US servicemembers on their air assault into Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was the 1st Armored Division in Bosnia, and later returned to Afghanistan after the US-led invasion.
Based on his time embedded with US soldiers during Operation Anaconda in 2002, he wrote Not a Good Day to Die. More recently, he authored the best-selling Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, which won the 2015 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for Unit History. In this conversation, he discusses his career as a journalist, his view of the reporter’s role to inform citizens what their government is doing during times of war, and the unique challenges associated with writing about security, intelligence, and special operations.
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