Terry Gross

He's now the area security manager for KBR, a division of Halliburton, a private military firm. Vargas has been stationed in Tikrit, Iraq, for the past year. He talks about the capture of Saddam Hussein, which took place in Tikrit. Vargas is a retired Command Sergeant Major of the U.S. Special Forces. He's written the foreword to the new book Hunting Down Saddam: the Inside Story of the Search and Capture, by Robin Moore.

His new book is At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. Reed recounts America's fight against communism at the height of the cold war. Reed was director of national reconnaissance, a special assistant to President Reagan for national security policy, and a consultant to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a well-known center for nuclear weapons research.

When Armstrong decided to leave the Roman Catholic convent where she was a nun in 1969, she entered a world vastly different than the one she had been isolated from for seven years. She had no idea what was going on in Vietnam and had little idea what was happening in popular culture. She's written a new memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, about her life in the convent and the spiritual quest that followed. Her other books include The Battle for God and A History of God.