Jake Tapper, a White House correspondent for ABC News said he covered the war in Afghanistan from the "comfort of the North Lawn of the White House." However, after his son was born, he caught a live report on television on the attack on Combat Outpost Keating

His new novel "The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor" is the result of curiosity that led the correspondent to learn more about the attack. He shares some of his experiences with NPR.

On The flora and the fauna at Combat Outpost Keating

"I wanted to get across how otherworldly it was for the men to live there. This part of Afghanistan is gorgeous. It's mountains with cedar and walnut and fir trees and beautiful rivers, but ... for a lot of these troops it's like walking into another dimension where the creatures are just, you haven't ever seen anything like that. The lizards, the horned vipers - snakes that look like they have horns - there are monkeys in trees, there are leopards. The lizards would get as long as 6 feet, and then there's all these weird insects. Centipedes that were longer than a man's foot, different kinds of ants.

On the extension of the tours of duty in 2007

"When the tours were extended ... especially in 2007, all these troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were about to go home, and then their tours were extended three or four months. It wasn't something that really registered for me as a reporter in Washington, D.C., at the time, but when I was reporting this book it became very clear that it was one of the more traumatic events of the deployment for the troops there in 2006-2007. They thought they were going home: 'We have survived. We made it. I only have two more days and then I'm going home. I will see my wife. I will see my baby. I survived. I lived.' ... And all of a sudden word came in that their tours were extended three or four months. It was crushing ... because they were convinced that this decision would mean somebody would lose their life who ultimately would not have."

On writing explicitly about the effect of weapons like RPGs on the human body

"I just thought it was important that people actually know what the effect of a rocket propelled grenade on the human body is. It's amazing to me that I'm in my 40s and I'm a journalist and I've covered these wars, and I had no idea and I really couldn't find much description out there. I had to go to a special Army medical journal to find what the effect of an RPG is on the human body: the fact that first comes the shock wave and then comes the shrapnel."

On how covering an on-the-ground story about Afghanistan changed the way he thinks about the way the war is discussed domestically

"I had been covering the back and forth with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai and the White House and President Obama, and I had been covering the White House's views of the election in Afghanistan in August 2009 and how corrupt it was and how riddled with problems the entire process was, but what was missing from my coverage - and this is one of the reasons I wrote this book - is what does that mean for Pfc. Kevin Thomson, stationed in the mortar pit at the bottom of three steep mountains in Kamdesh? What does that mean for Spc. Stephan Mace? Because it did have a direct effect."