[Janet] I'm Janet Givens and I live in Danville. [Woody] And I'm Woody Starkweather. And I'm with her. [Janet] okay! [Woody] We'd been at our place in Chincoteague, Virginia, when and been visited by a number of our friends and people, various people, and had a wonderful weekend. And somehow, the perfectness of that weekend made me think about - that we needed to do something, to make some effort, some sacrifice, really, in response to 9/11. And so I suggested to Janet that we should go in the Peace Corps, and she had mentioned it earlier, it wasn't really my idea to begin with. But that was a long time ago. And I think she'd probably forgotten that you mentioned it. [Janet] Back when we were dating, we had said we wanted to go into the Peace Corps in our 60s the way Lillian Carter had, except that Woody hit his 60s ten years before I hit mine, so he was ready, and I wasn't quite, but once I looked at the website, peace corps.gov basically, I got hooked. And I remembered all the reasons I wanted to go. And I remember we were interviewed shortly before we left by the local newspaper who asked Woody, why are we going and he came out with “to make friends for America,” which I know a lot of former Peace Corps volunteers think was kind of naive. But I actually think that we did that. We're still in touch with a lot of people from that era where we were. And coming back because of some other idio... kind of oddities, we wound up driving through Vermont. And here we are. So I don't think that would have happened either had we not gone in Peace Corps, and we would not have gone in Peace Corps when we did had it not been for 9/11. [Janet] We were sent to Kazakhstan, which was part of the former Soviet Union, and learned Russian, learned a little Kazak but mostly Russian while we were there. And we both taught English. I taught at a teacher's college and Woody taught at the local university in Zhezkazgan. I wrote a memoir after we were settled here in Vermont, just I wanted to kind of relive the experience and understand it a little bit better. So I wrote a book, it took me a few years, it's called At Home on the Kazak Steppe. And it's essentially about cultural differences and how exhausting they are, and how enlightening they can be and how they enlarge our life. The thing that really bothered me was our was our reaction at after 9/11, which I'm also seeing now, frankly, with the with the recent ISIS suicide bombing the the almost knee jerk reaction for revenge, rather than a more rational, bigger picture, step back. I was always interested in understanding why the suicide bombers that had the commercial airlines on 9/11 what they thought they were going to accomplish, why they hated us so much. I wanted to understand that. And yet our country didn't seem at all interested in understanding. They seemed more interested in showing that we were boss. How about you? [Woody] Yeah, I disagree. Actually, I think if you in the larger sense, one really needs to make sure that the people who carried out that attack and other attacks, understand that this is not something that we will not respond to, we will not accept, because otherwise it just encourages people to do the same thing again. And I think it's very important to find those who perpetrated the act and deal with it appropriately. So that just to make sure that another one doesn't happen, you know, in another couple of weeks or whatever. [Janet] Do you think we did that after 911? That we dealt with it appropriately? [Woody] Yes, there was a very thorough investigation. I don't know exactly what all the details of what our response was. So I'm not... [Janet] We invaded Iraq, and we went into Afghanistan and spent 20 years there, and trillions of dollars. [Woody] Well, yes. [Janet] And they just did it again. I mean, they didn't go into the... [Woody] Oh, there are many details about it that I would disagree with, but not responding would be a mistake. [Janet] And I never said we shouldn't have consequences. I just want to add that in. But do they just need to be thoughtful, more thoughtful than they were after 9/11, I think.

Janet Givens and Woody Starkweather