Transcripts For CSPAN Iraq Afghanistan Vietnam War Veterans 20240713

Afghanistan, and vietnam discussed the complexities of war. This is hosted by the Nixon Library and the Orange County navy league. Good evening, everyone. I am director of this program at Chapman University and i want to thank you for coming out tonight. Just over four years ago, i came to Chapman University from the department at west point. Studiest a new graduate program conceived by jennifer keane. Started from the presupposition based on comments from civilian policymakers and senior military that we were in an era of enduring war and had to undertake a study of the relationship between war and society. Moreover, it seemed few could argue war hadnt made an indelible impact on our National Character on who we are as americans. So the program we built started from the mission that we would examine the social, moral, and cultural aspects of how societies go to war, how they experience war, and perhaps most importantly how they deal with wars consequences. We also believe our program had global applications. In understanding the implications of war, by examining conflicts that have transpired as human phenomenon. We wanted to take a serious approach to the problems posed by war. Was for Chapman University to become a National Resource for practitioners, a Program Designed with the ultimate aim of understanding the role and the costs of war around the globe. That vision is on full view this evening. As we examine three american the anon, afghanistan, and iraq, from those who have fought in them. Thought long and hard about their experiences and written honest and important works about what it is like to serve in wars that have defined our nation, our politics, and our culture. It is my distinct honor to introduce you tonight to our veteran authors. First, a graduate from Yale University and Rhodes Scholar at oxford university. He served as a marine in vietnam, where he was awarded the navy cross, the bronze star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, and medals for valor. Author of matterhorn, which won numerous prizes. The 2011 indys choice award for adult debut book of the year, and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation james webb award for distinguished fiction. He is also author of the highly acclaimed fiction book, what it is like to go to war. Please as well as the new novel deep river, which was released in july. Please welcome him. [applause] Marjorie K Eastman is the awardwinning water author of the frontline generation, of how we serve post 9 11. She served 10 years as an Intelligence Officer and commander. Started out as enlisted before being awarded a direct commission within her first two years in uniform. Artery deplored deployed twice and is the recipient of the combat badge. She has her ba in Political Science from the university of california san diego. Mbaa from the graduate school of vanderbilt university. In 2018, she was selected as one of the nations top 25 theuencers supporting military community, known as the mighty 25 and was named one of the 2019 10 Outstanding Young americans by the Junior Chamber international usa. Please join me in welcoming marjorie. [applause] and finally, scott is a retired u. S. Army oh my god. [laughter] pushups, now. [laughter] a retired u. S. Marine. 20 years of Honorable Service as an enlisted and commission officer. Tended deployments to 60 countries worldwide. Bestselling book is a story of echo companys second battalion marines in scott has 2006. Written articles, editorials and scholarly pieces for usa today, fox news channel, and the marine corps gazette, military times, townhall, and daily signal. He is the executive director of a certified nonprofit that connects veterans to outreach programs and a nonprofit that helps veterans and activeduty marines. Please join me in welcoming marine scott. [applause] im going to join our panelists. I will start off and ask a specific question to each of our panelists as sort of a warmup, then we will move into general questions for the panel to discuss, then ultimately we will have a dialogue with you all and the audience will have a chance to participate with their own questions. West point, was that a Preparatory School . [laughter] id like to start with you, if i can. Metal sincewanted a i looked at my fathers medals from world war ii. It wasnt enough to do heroic things, i had to be recognized for them. Can you help us understand this as a young man. I hope i can. It is hard for me to understand it myself. First of all, my father, i think all young men we got some bad feedback here. Is this going to get fixed . My father was in world war ii and he had medals, and he never would talk about it, so there was a lot of mystery to the medals. I was sort of like, i wonder if i could do that. It was sort of like, i wonder how i would be and the medal is sort of a symbol of that. I was 15, and my father, it was christmas time, and my dad was saying, they were fighting the battle of the bulge at that time and he looks up and he says, yeah, i was in that. It was the first time i knew. If i sneak in and see his medals, he would not show them or anything. First of all, it is sons and fathers. I think it is almost genetic. It is like, am i as good as my father . Can i do it . The wanting to see it part, i thought about that. It is sort of a combination, i think of societal genetics and that is all mixed up, but you think about kids in high school. The girls do not want to be in the right group, they want people to know they are in the right group. I have three daughters and they would spend an hour getting ready for school and it would not look like anything happened to me. [laughter] it was very clear to them that they were in this group, and they wanted people to know it. And the boys, it is sort of the same thing. I got a lettermans jacket. What is that all about . It is about status. It is about being recognized as a member of the group, and it is about being an alpha female and an alpha male. Which i think is genetic, but society takes over and we have different ways of doing it, we just do not go beat somebody up. We wear jeans with holes in them so that we can show that we are this kind of kid, and i think it is the same sort of thing from medals. Could id lit, but if i did do it, would people see that i did it . We all know, those of you in the military, you have it all right here and believe me, people check it out. So youike, hmm. Immediately can sort of put somebody in a place, and i think that showing you have done it is part of it but it is part of saying, i am of this special group, look up to me, and that is about status. I talk about the fact that it is too bad that we all have to do that because if we just realize how special we are from childhood, but somehow, our society does tend to beat that out of us. By the time you get a college, you are not special at all, and you want to be special. I think it is just genetic drive, i do not know any other way to explain it. Unless you are a saint but i dont think we are born saints. Did that appeal change as you got older . Did what did that attraction, did that change at all as you got older . Well, no. When i was in combat, every once in a while i thought, it would be nice to get a medal. I wrote about that in matterhorn, the main character wants to get a medal and the issue is, why do you want to get . Part of the medal growing up is, if you are doing it for the right reasons, that is to save somebody in your unit to get yourself out of trouble. And usually people understand of if a medal is being given up given out, somebody messed up and things are not going well, or you are really unlucky. I talk about it and what it is like to go to war, and i did when i was the young man, and i a guy was trapped underneath a machine gun and i didnt have to go get him. I thought, if i go get him, maybe somebody would write me up for a medal. I literally thought that. It is no secret, when i turned to my platoon sergeant, and i said if i go get him, are you going to write me up for a medal . He said yeah, posthumously. [laughter] but i went anyway. It turned out quite tragic because i had to keep the machine gun from shooting at me as i was going up the hill. The kid had gone up and cut the and the fields of fire, he got nervous and i pointed it out to him and they shot his legs out from under him. I was firing to keep the machine guns head down. I got him, we rolled down the hill and i realized there was a bullet hole in his head. It was not until later that night, he cried out, how could he have cried out with a bullet hole in his head . Maybe i put the bullet hole in his head. The whole thing about trying to get the medal, it turned to sort of ashes because it was for the wrong motivation. It was a very tough lesson for me. To this day, i dont know. The second medal, the navy cross, it was with the opposite because i had already learned that lesson. The thing about that medal, we had been on an assault and it bogged down and it happened. It happens in the marine corps, it is bogged down and they were hitting us with mortars and they had machine guns up in front of us, and the marines do not look backwards. It was either stay there and get slaughtered all grow up the hill so i had to figure out something. I had to figure out something to get us out of the pickle. So i stood up and started running up the hill, and it was almost like an out of body experience. I talk about in the book. What was amazing to me is that i was probably running up the hill for a machine gun bunker for maybe five or eight seconds and i caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and i rolled to shoot what i would assume was an enemy soldier and it was one of my squad leaders and the whole company was coming up behind him. The whole company was coming up behind him. We got out of the pickle. That was the right way to get a medal and unfortunately, they do not come cheap. It is a hard lesson. In the frontline generation, marjorie, you share a slightly different route is in reason for joining the military. One was your parents were decidedly unhappy about. What drew you to the uniform and what was it like to have proud parents who nonetheless work skeptical about you serving . You are referring to the line i think where my mom says, you have a college degree, you should not have to go. She was from the vietnam generation. You know a little bit about that, right . My mom and my dad were born and raised in part of big, midwest farm families. At one point in time, my mom had four of her brothers serving in vietnam. It was very difficult for her and my father. My father who was unable to go to vietnam because of medical disqualification, but he still has his draft card on his bedside stand to this day, because all of his brothers went. So they were decidedly unhappy, but they also knew that i was doing it for the right reasons. I joined the military after 9 11 because of 9 11. I just, i saw what happened on that day, and no one does that to our country. No one does that to our country. So i needed to do something and i did not want to sit on the bench. I knew things were going to change and president bush at the time, he said something very important. He said as americans, you have to continue on with your way of life because the terrorists want us to change our way of life. They are trying to terrorize us. He said something very important. But also, they left no call to action. We needed a call to action because we just spent the 1990s cutting the forest down and everything was about to change. His call to say continue with your regular lifestyle, go to the mall, continue to shop, he said Something Like that, and i did not just want to go shopping. I started looking at my options, and it turned out that the army was the right fit for me, and i stepped up and stepped into my generations history. You opened your book with a phone call that you had to make to a mother in your unit. Why did you start the book that booky did you start the there and what does this tell us about the responsibility that military leaders have to society . Greg is trying to get me to cry on cspan. [laughter] better have tried and failed, but i love you for having us here today and the panelists, and all of you for showing up, because without you, the stories of our nations heroes, and greg is absolutely one of them. He plays a slick professor on tv by day, but he is a warrior at heart. This is a great event for that. It is an interesting question because you have to let me leave by 9 30 so i can get to lax, so i can catch a flight to maine so annualo to the first corporal memorial run, and he was the first marine in ramadi in 2006, and i havent seen his mom and dad since 2007 when we came home. It is going to be pretty emotional, we wont have cameras there for that. His brother and i kept in touch, but starting the story off with the real personal aspects of what all of us here and every veteran and every person deals with those small pieces of trauma in life and are important to share. I have never been a writer or storyteller about events and things and chronology. That is not what i am great at. Greg is great at that, he is a historian. My skill is telling stories of people and the emotion and what it felt like to have that happen in your life, and the huge train wrecks that rolled through at times. And then how to not just talk about the bad things, but really, how they affected you, and how you move through that. Everybody has been a drunk at some point, or crash to their car, or failed in a relationship, or gotten bad grades. Great. I dont want to hear about those stories, i want to hear about how you got better through that and how you share those wins and everybody that reads your work or listens to your stories or all those problems and how you get better. I think as a society, as a veteran community, those are absolutely vital stories to share. I think three generations of war fighting and this culture that we have been immersed in, we are so very fortunate to share our stories now without having to wait four decades. Or to see Vietnam Veterans on stage at the white house getting a medal of honor five decades later. We have a responsibility to do that and when i open the book with what is probably the most gut wrenching story. I have gotten plenty of phone marines calling me from the air force saying thanks plane,ing me cry on the that is an important thing to tell. I tell them to suck it up and break out the kleenex, and move on. I think those are really the important things that we need to talk about. We should never shy away from it. Carl is a master at sharing that human emotion, although there are characters in those books, but we get it. I think those are great. I would like to open this up for all three of you now. There are elements of what we would call a command philosophy in each of your books. Marjorie notes that there is no or onele of leadership set of traits. What did your service teach you about leadership and what were the key elements in your leadership philosophy . Marjorie i like it when marines go in front of me. [laughter] i will take this one. What a gentleman. Ladies first, i love that. The chapter in my book is you see a light, you dont hear one. I think we all get what that means. It is simple and fundamental about leadership. You can say it this way as well. How you lead your own life has more influence on others and any than any command philosophy that you may one day espouse. Character matters. How you walk the walk matters, and by the way, each and every one of us has a sphere of influence. Every rank, every walk of life, and the big secret is that you do not need a title to be a leader. I saw this time and time again, every day i was in the military and my favorite example of that that i can share is one with Staff Sergeant joshua eldridge. He was dr. Eldridge as his day job as a chiropractor. He was also in the reserves. And after a battle update brief we informed the colonel that in one area of operation where i had some teams, there was an orphanage. So there might be an opportunity to do a Good Community building Relationship Building type of mission. My company was doing fullspectrum intelligence operations, so that was perfect. Any given day, it could be offensive, defensive, stability or support. So that would absolutely fall into one of those buckets that we were doing. What did the colonel say, great, make it happen, captain. At no point in training do you go through like a briefing or you have a little skills manual that says this is how you perform a mission to an orphanage. So i am walking out of the briefing thinking, how am i going to do this . Eldridge is giving me that eye, like, we have to talk. And my team, my soldiers were amazing and they looked out for me. I was so fortunate to serve with such wonderful and outstanding men and women. We get out of the briefing room, and eldridge is like, i have an idea. He says let me call my Church Back Home and we will figure out how to rally and we will get some gloves, hats, scarves, jackets because it is really cold this time of year and when the team goes up, they can deliver the humanitarian aid as a warm welcome and say, we are new to the area, we are doing operations in the area, but we want to bring this as a peaceful gesture. I am thinking, can we do that . The last thing you want is American Christian Church Giving cold weather gear to islamic blah blah. Im like, great. But i see this energy and in eldridges eyes, and i knew. One of the things about being a leader is you have to incite an initiative with those who lead with those you lead and that means you have to be uncomfortable, and you have to say yes. And you not only ask why we do it that way, but you have to say why not . Why not . I said you know what, make it happen. [laughter] marjorie i said let me go and figure out some of the paperwork process, call your church. Literally, a month and a half, we had box upon box arriving and my sergeants delivering the mail were like, thanks. Nearly 70 children benefited when my team went up to the province and we delivered that. And we built great relationships. You will hear stories throughout momentsthat talk about and opportunities about how you can lead and do it well. Remember, how you lead your own life, start there. Scott what was the question again . [laughter] scott i am like overwhelmed and inspired. Craig knows i take notes in his class. Leadership philosophy. Yeah, there are so many great examples sitting right in front of me. They train you in schools as young lieutenants and as captains and majors on how to write a leadership philosophy, but i kind of broke from the mold of that. I never wanted it to be a page long soliloquy in a urinal. Here marines are like, great im really going to read this. Because to inspire young men and women 18 to 20yearolds who are doing our nations bidding, who have the immense responsibility to ultimately take another human life, which we ordered them to do as commanders, you have to inspire them and you have to understand that you need to do that in your absence. My leadership philosophy was very clear. It was very short. I said we will train hard, we will fight, and we will win. That was it. I think if they could not remember that in my absence, i did something terribly wrong. I always envisioned it Something Like this. We were both lance corporals hunkered down in ramadi, things are going pretty bad, going sideways and carl looks over at me and says, it is getting pretty bad, man. They are getting close. It is not looking good for us. So i turned to him and say, yeah, what should we do. He looks to me and says, i dont know. What do you think the boss would want us to do . And i say, win. We win. That is the guidance i wanted to impart on that guy in my absence. Being a strong leader and i talk about this all the time people will look at my book and they will see this marine who looks like he will kick your door in in the middle of the night, which marines are trained to do, it is a book about leadership and Team Building and overcoming adversity and people. And this amazing power of human connection. If anybody asked me what that message of the book is, it is meeting people like tom and saying i remember we came to that panel discussion. That is the power. Through meeting young people in combat, respecting the parents that send a manned and trust us to leave their young men and women in some of the worst conditions, if you are not doing that every single day, you are failing as a leader. I will call anyone out on that. There is no room for error. If you drop a couple of sales orders at xerox, the company is not going under. If you fail as a leader in combat in the marine corps or army, it is a lot different. There are two things that come to my mind. One is confidence. The other is authenticity. These kids, and they are kids, their lives depend on you. If you cannot call in the airstrike in the right place, it is bad. And they do not have any control over your confidence, and that competency it has to be demonstrated. You cant just say you went to school, and i learned it. They will say, yeah right. Lets see about this. If you want to strip the machine gun down, you have to show them that you know how to strip the machine gun down. Competency really is a lot because it builds confidence. You are not going to lead them astray. The authenticity part is really interesting because these kids lshit detectors that will detect a cow fart five miles away. You cannot put the wool over their eyes, and if you try to, it will not work. I see new lieutenants or new sergeants show up and within a minute, their fate is sealed. You think it is almost mystical but the kids are looking, and their lives depend on this person and they are going to make a judgment on whether they are going to follow them or not. What i think is i notice is the ones who succeed in winning them over are the ones who are totally authentic. Here is who i am, i got this job, we will get through this together, i am not going to bullshit you about it. We are going to get this done. So competency and authenticity are the two keys in my mind. Gregory i think we have all seen the phenomenon of modern wars and combat being intertwined with civilian world. I wonder if you could share what it is like being in the battlefield inhibited by civilians and how that influenced your missions. Scott for me, we had been hanging out for the last few we have knownmet, each other for years, me and greg hangout all the time, but social media and sharing the network, we talk about these things and the different types of war where you are sliding through the jungles of vietnam and the sky is raining on you every day and night and it is humid versus an environment where you are fighting this urban asymmetric threedimensional war where you are literally fighting every single day, two to three to four to 5 six times a day and very direct contact and close proximity with a welltrained force. How you deal with that and those conditions is something that you honestly learn as you go. All the preparatory training you get from entrylevel to advanced level training as a young marine i think does not ever prepare you for the dynamic nature of that type of warfare, and i think as we were thrust into this city of ramadi, it was also populated by 300,000 iraqis. These were people. They were not collateral damage. They were husbands and wives, sons and daughters, and they wanted their kids to grow up and drivers license and play soccer and go to school and go to university. They were never collateral damage, they were people. At times, they took us in, they information gave us at times when their lives were at risk. I think that was a unique experience because our military day and age, we have fought for 14 years in iraq and we have a unique understanding of the culture that we were fighting in. I think that is different in a large degree in the vietnam and world war ii and korean generations on how these guys were trained and we dance around the issues of dehumanizing the enemy and making it easier to kill, but my analogy is i can always give a young marine or soldier a box of ammunition and have him go with a little bit of training and some drive to go from zero to 60 and attack and kill the enemy. Kid to go frome 60 to zero is a real leadership challenge as a commander. Even as a captain with 35 years experience, multiple wars, to not view that enemy that is living next door the same as the guy you just killed. That needed to be killed. That is a tough challenge, in that type of urban environment. Marjorie when you asked the question about civilians being intertwined and the conflict today, i thought of it from a different perspective. I thought of the civilians on our team as we were going in. That is part of the conversation, especially post 9 11 that is very different about the global war on terrorism. At any given time, there would be just as many defense contractors, Government Agency workers, state department plane flying the over and it is unbelievable. I think about it as a force multiplier, but we also need to ask questions of the militaryindustrial complex circa 21st century. If we cannot fulfill our Foreign Policy commitments, but if we with soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, not that we should have to do so entirely but if we are augmenting half the force with other civilian entities, come on. We need to talk about this. Those civilian teammates of ours, they need to have just as much respect. It does not matter if they are contractors or work for the state department. They were helping in their way. They found ways to serve, and they need an incredible amount of respect. When i think about how civilians are intertwined, i think about the team members that we have that were a part of the equation and they still are today. I think there is a moral issue here that we would have to think about. Civilian contractors and there is a whole bell shaped curve of them, but you take someone that , like blackwater on one extreme or someone running a Bowling Alley for whoever on the other extreme the coffee company. That is right. If we are at war, we are killing people. Normally if you are killing people, it is called murder. It is only if a state decides that it has to defend itself, that you are allowing its military to kill people, and most people are under the sort protection of the moral authority that this is a military that is constituted by the civilians to defend the civilians. If you are killing somebody for pay, that is called being an assassin. I think it is a very big difference and i think that we are starting to be very loose about just where these lines are drawn. When i was in vietnam, the marines did their own dishes, and they cooked their own food. We did not have mcdonalds. You have to start wondering about, well if you are going to pay mcdonalds to actually participate in the war effort, obviously people back home are making food dissented the military. If you go out on the battlefield, where is that line between being an assassin and being a newly constituted member of a republic that is trying to defend a republic . I think we are losing sight of it and i think we have to do some careful thinking about it. I am completely against having paid mercenaries do our fighting for us. I think it is really morally wrong. Period. I wonder if i can shift slightly to talk about the one unfortunate necessity of war which is killing. I think all of you, scott in particular, you say, i was ordering my marines to kill and it was going to be my burden to carry. You discussed the weight as well. How did you all deal with this burden of killing, not just for yourselves, but for your soldiers and marines who are dealing with this burden and the unfortunate necessity of war . We jokingly say that a as writers, nothing is original. And that certainly was not an original thought. It was garnered from years of great mentors and marines that i was surrounded with that i knew , that when i led 250 marines and sailors into iraq, and that is not hyperbole we lost more marines and sailors in that city than any other during the search the surge strike in 2006, 2007. I knew how important that was to these young men who are about to be thrust into the chasm of war. They had never seen it, all they knew was from hollywood. It looks all glamorous and the medals are attractive. When you are a young kid. That were thrust into city, i got that meant nothing to me. The only thing that mattered was bringing as many marines home as possible. One of the ways to do that when i sat them down and i looked at them in the eye and i ordered them to kill, i said, you will kill. I am ordering you to kill. Because i never ever wanted that marine to hesitate when he had to put that rifle in his shoulder, put his finger on the trigger, look through the scope and make the conscious, lifechanging decision to take another human life. It is a terrible and horrific thing to do, and to ask an 18yearold kid who is probably playing football on the High School Team in the year before, that is a hard thing to do, and that is something that i felt as a commander, that was my burden to carry. I never wanted them to leave that space, that horrible place of war that humans create to think that it was their fault. That was my burden. One of the things that i have come to understand and we talk a lot about bringing people home and bringing veterans back into the community, there is this rifle, it is built in factories by factory workers who are fed by farmers and the people who designed it were taught by secondgrade school teachers, and the whole rifle is this sort of buddhist chain of events that eventually gets in the hands of some 18yearold and at the end of this long chain where everybody is involved to pay their taxes to pay for the rifles, the kid pulls the trigger. He did the killing. Nuhuh. Some say he did the killing. I think we have to get more conscious about it. We did the killing. That rifle, he did not make it. He did not pay for it. Sorry to everybody in this room. Everybody in the room is responsible for all of the killing over there. You voted for the people who sent us there. He paid the taxes. You drove the car that burned the gasoline. So the idea that some 18yearold does the killing, we have to get it out of our heads. He was part of a chain that did the killing. It is a very important distinction we are not dealing with. Marjorie i was in the intelligence community, i was not combat arms, however, i have a combat action badge like tens and thousands of other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who are not combat action. Within just a couple of days of arriving in the country of afghanistan, the base we were on received rocket attacks. Those rocket attacks repeated the entire time we were there and it would depend on your location if it was weekly or daily. Within a couple of weeks of being there, about two and a half, one of the soldiers in my battalion, an intelligence professional, died when his mrap when his mrap drove over an iud. An ied. In this sense of killing and when you think about killing, and you get back to the aspect of a greater purpose, the greater purpose pretty quickly, when you are on the ground, is about a person to your left into and to your right. It always has been, and always will be. Every generation. It is timeless. On why yoube enough are there and why you are fighting. There needs to be a greater purpose. Myhink about well into deployment in afghanistan, if you have been deployed, who has been deployed, by the way . Can you raise your hand . Great. Thank you. Thank you. You also know that we get a lot of care packages, especially after halloween, you get all of the junk candy. The dentists want to get it out of there. One of the care packages we received at least halfway into my tour, wonderful teachers had their students write letters to Service Members overseas. Someone in my unit grabbed one of the letters and taped it on the wall, like, go read the letter. I walked in after, i dont know what i was doing, i walked into the joint Operations Center and i go over and see it on the wall and it is obviously a very young human being learning how to write, and they are saying, thank you, trooper, troops, for freeing us from al qaedas evil grasp. Al quaeda was spelled alkida. This child at home understood the greater purpose and they were writing this to us. It was fascinating and it was entertaining, and it was absolutely a great reminder because you do get into, it is about the person to your left and right, but you have to get back to the greater purpose. Each of you in your own war and way faced a committed enemy am the battlefield, one that inspired a great deal of emotion that you have written about. Marjorie, you wrote in one journal entry that after one episode, tonight, i hate the taliban more than ever. Carl, you note that there was always this potential for evil to become very ordinary in war given that combat, as you say, that allout aggression will save your life. Scott, you recall your men seeking retribution after a marine was killed in battle. You deals, how did with this anchor, if not hatred, toward your enemy without allowing the violence to spiral out of control . Carl i cant even step into that. I failed once. I got into the same mode with a particularly popular guy who was , he became the character vancouver in my novel, he was killed saving his platoon. Everybody was just furious. On the next assault, we just decided not to take any prisoners. And i went, that is fine. And i regret that. Because i slipped into that. It is real easy. It is real easy because it is like well ill kill him and we will kill all of them. I think what we have to understand is, as a civilized people, we are all capable of this. Civilization is the sort of spider web that hangs over us and keeps us under control. Without that control, that civilizing influence, laws, morality, i call it the mad monkey, it just comes out. We are not the top animal on the food chain because we are nice. We are at the top because we are vicious. We are also a wonderful, kind, caring species but we have this part of us. A leaders job is to try to maintain what i call that spider web of civilization, the order, the laws. We have the geneva convention, a lot of people who dont understand war will say every thing is fair in war. You dont go out if there are no rules. Nonsense. They will do it to you if you do it to them. It works both ways. We come up with conventions about not killing prisoners because you dont want them to kill our prisoners. We have to play by the rules. There are rules. This idea of, i told this story more than once, it is an important story because we have was a verynded, it bad six or seven days, and there people below the fighting holes. I was doing a line check, and a couple of our kids had gone down and cut the ears off the bodies. Time, i had just turned 23. I was not as mature as i was now. I knew we couldnt like that go on. I have seen horrible stuff. , you see a stack of bodies hit by a mortar, that is carnage. I knew it couldnt last. I said to these kids, look. I know they killed your friends. But you killed their friends, andthey are just humans, you cut their years off and we this. To we cant allow this to happen. I didnt go, we are going to courtmartial you, because i said we are going to go down and bury the bodies. This was not trivial. It was maybe 20 meters below the fighting holes. We were still getting fired at. There would be the occasional potshot. They had to go down there with the shovels and they started digging a grave for the bodies, and theyith the ears. Both started crying. They started crying as they were digging the hole. Burial is a civilizing, civilized ritual. We care for our dead. Suddenly, they were doing a theal of human beings, not orel heads or the krauts whatever. You do that because you have to. An ordinary person cant kill another person. You outip has to bring of it quickly and that is what was happening. We have rules, we dont do things like this. The minute that happened, that mad monkey that had gotten a hold of them, i recognized it, its back in place. If you repress it and say, we dont have that, it is worse. You watch it come out in mobs, in hatred. You have to understand that it is there. You also have to understand that your job is to keep it under control. I call it the spider web of civilization. Thats the point of leadership in war and about killing is keeping it sane that way. Scott thats part of the training that we get, even as a young lieutenant and being a guy that manages several lieutenants and Young Marines that think theyre doing the right thing or you have to control that type of chaos where you have all this friction surrounding you at any given time. And those experiences of war are absolutely timeless, that carl experienced, that our world war ii vets experienced, korean war vets experienced. I experienced those things. We see this playing out even to this day in the media where theres u. S. Service members, whether its desecrating bodies or there is a conflict of a Service Member killing a captured prisoner. Theres one thing that we have a responsibility to do, not just as officers who take an oath. But as people and responsible people of our culture and our way of life, is that you absolutely have to enforce not only the uniform code of military justice and the law of war and our code of conduct and our oath of office that we swear to but the basic american rule of law that once you capture someone and put handcuffs on them or flexi cuffs, you own them. You literally own them. And at that point you accept full responsibility for that human life, to care for it at that stage, not harm it, maim it, whatever it is you do. And i think that the public can easily get emotional about certain issues when they see this as, like why is this Service Member being tried for this . At the end of the day i dont want to serve in a marine corps that allowed murderers to be cut loose on society. I dont want to bring those type of people, sociopaths, back here and reintegrate them into society because we have enough problems reintegrating guys that have compartmentalized all these pieces of trauma doing the legitimate killing of enemies in combat. So thats a tough thing that as this war, this discussion, this theme of protracted war how long do we pull these wars up, when is enough enough and how do we define winning at the political and strategic levels so we dont have these second and Third Order Effects of the from of war on the individual soldier and the public, the American People accepting our veteran Community Back in knowing full well they built the rifles, they signed the orders and gassed up the airplanes and sent young men and women over there so we can build rifles at cars and tvs and xboxs. Thats what we do. But we can never lose sight of that as an element of leadership within our military, those basic tenets and the Core Principles are essential so we continue to survive for another 240 three years as a marine corps and a nation. 250 more christmases. Unless we figure it out. One of the things thats important to me that i wish people would understand, you start sending young men to their seventh and ninth tours, at some point theyre going to break. At some point somethings going to go wrong. That doesnt mean you excuse them. Im in agreement with scott on this. You cannot excuse it but you cannot do it with disdain or some kind of moral superiority, oh, this person committed this horrible thing, he killed a prisoner or peed on a dead body or whatever it was. You have to say its part of the same tragedy as the war itself punish them. Ave to you have to punish them, because otherwise that civilizing thread is broken and you never get it back. But you punish them without hate or without moral superiority. You punish them with sadness because they finally broke down and they did something wrong. But you cant let it slide but the attitude that they were horrible people, they werent horrible people. They just broke. Most of the time they were just really young and its a tragedy that theyre in jail but theyre in jail for a reason. Marjorie i think these guys really covered that question really well. Lets do another one. Marjorie argues in her work that showing compassion is not a weakness. And that theme is really shared by our panelists as well. Scott, you note that breaking down after a marine was killed yet wanting to be emotionally rl, you talk about the need for empathy. How did you each deal with the emotional side of war as a leader, finding that balance between sharing your own emotions, yet being reliable and steady in front of your soldiers and marines . Marjorie you have to show, i mean, you are human. You have to have compassion in you, right . Just, you talked earlier and you asked about dehumanizing. Let me say this, let me back up. Especially as a woman, were often reviewed and graded that she has great compassion as a leader and whatnot. Thats great but youre not going to be promoted if you have excellent compassion, right . Its been proven by studies. I encourage you to read an excellent book called athena rising why men should mentor women written by two awesome ph. D. s at the Naval Academy and it speaks to this because men typically are reviewed as analytical and who are you going to promote at the end of the day . If you have to cut jobs, who do you want on the team . Analytical, right . Think about it that way. What i will say, you will go further, you have to have both. You have to know when to drop the hammer and you have to absolutely know when you need to hold someone and hug them because you just delivered a red cross message that someone they love dearly back home just died. You have to have these tools in your tool kit. You have to just be human because by the way that helps you in your job. One of my soldiers, ashley, she was just a phenomenal interrogator and one Early Morning, it was an Early Morning report, we had a local National Come up to the base and they wanted to give us some information. Kind of nervous, right, as most of the walkups are. Ashley was on call at the time and she sat with him in what we call the booth, getting the information. And it was through compassion and being analytical and not dehumanizing this source that walked up, this local national, that she was able to figure out why he wanted to talk. Now, this is a person that most likely been a taliban sympathizer or fighter or whatever at some point in his history, ok. But she still worked with this individual. At the end of the day, figured out and empathized enough to realize he had information about the largest weapons cache outside of bagram airfield, and his kids were playing near and he didnt want them near it and she figured out how to do that because she was so good at her job and within 24 hours i was on the the convoy with her. We went to the edge of the cleared landmine field and we removed and detonated on site that cache of weapons, over 600 munitions. That was in 2010. You must have both tools in your tool kit and ashley was a wonderful example that day and she continues to be so. Karl im reminded of a story, all right. This is a marine corps, how they show compassion. [laughter] gregory will this be a short answer . So smithers mother died and the captain called him in and said smithers mother died and you have to figure out how to break the news to smithers so it goes easy on him. Youve just got to do it. Ok. So the gunny goes out and lines up the platoon and he says everybody with a living mother, one step forward. Not so fast, smithers. [laughter] gregory scott, do you have anything to add . Scott nothing to add, thats tough to top. But there is a mask of command. A friend of my wrote about it, the mask of command. You cant cross boundaries. Each level of command, you know this, because you were a lieutenant. You werent born a colonel. You have a closer familiarity at the platoon level, company and battalion. As you rise, you increase more responsibility and you have to absolutely know that, and i applied this as i was leading 250 marines in combat, i wasnt there to be their friend. I was there to be their commander. Theyve got enough friends. They only have one commander. They have one guy that will make those decisions that will bring the majority of them home alive and i think thats a tough thing to balance because we all agree on the aspect of its absolutely vital to be authentic. I dont want to sit up here and have a bunch of bullet points and buzz words and talking points every time i speak. I think that the message has to be clear, but being authentic in everything you do and everything you write and communicate at every level, i think theres a way to filter that and still maintain boundaries so the marines dont think that me and tom are drinking buddies and at end of the day, that just aint the case because hes been in the marine corps 18 months and i have been in 15 years. There are vast areas of gray in there. And you have to know that. But as a great leader, you also have to understand that the textbooks that we learn all these great leadership tools, theres words that arent written there, and those words are the ones in between the lines like love and compassion and caring and concern and the really great leaders can see in between the lines and they apply that and i think thats what sets the good ones apart from the great ones. Gregory i have two more questions and id like to turn it over to the audience to join in the conversation. The first and really supporting our theme this evening about the United States being in this era of perpetual war, are we becoming increasingly more comfortable with this idea of enduring war and if so, what are the implications of that, especially on those who serve . Theorie well, since i was representative tonight for afghanistan and we have been fighting in afghanistan for 18 years and we continue to fight there today, in fact on monday, we lost a First Sergeant. His name is jeremy. How Many Americans do you think know that . Thank you. We are still fighting this war. In fact, we have had 775,000 Service Members that are worn a that have worn a uniform that have been deployed to afghanistan and been in theater over the last 18 years. The most revealing part of this number, and this is a terrific article from the washington post, i think the name was donna mos, the journalist that wrote this, the most revealing fact about that number is nearly half of those Service Members who have been deployed in the longest war in our history have served multiple deployments, multiple deployments. So as i ask you to remember a name, First Sergeant jeremy, you need to remember names like schmitty and graf and vazquez, and tess. Tess being one of my soldiers they were all my soldiers but tess took four oneyear combat deployments by the age of 25 when he was with me in 2010 in afghanistan. I served two tours. How many did you serve, scott . Scott 10. Marjorie my husband served 17 combat tours. So there are names and prevailing, enduring war has a face and if americas comfortable with it, we need to ask ourselves why are we comfortable with this . Because less than 1 of americans are performing our Foreign Policy commitments overseas. So im all about talking about enduring conflict. And the second aspect of enduring conflict and endless wars is not putting a time line in 2009 through 2010 when i was in afghanistan, president obama said we will draw down forces in 2011. The very next day, my intelligence collectors couldnt get anything because they were talking to villagers, community, all of our sources and they said you guys are leaving in two years, why would i work with you . Because youre leaving in two years and i have to still live down the road from the taliban fighters. So you never, never put a time line on enduring conflict like this. And last thought on this is that you dont fight a war, an 18year war one year at a time. We need to think about what is our Greater Vision . Scott mentioned it earlier. What are our goals, objectives . And we need to, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, we dont go to war to fight wars. We go to war to win them. And thats what we want to do. Scott karl is cogitating. Karl i am, i am thinking. Speechless. [laughter] while hes milling around, coming up with some 20pound brain club answer. I will deal with it. Illinois state, not yale. We talked about this, and i actually wrote an article about it and karl and i were talking about it earlier. It was pretty simple. It was walmart wins the war, because im a Firm Believer that we have to go into these areas of conflict and we have to show people what right looks like. Not iraqi democracy or afghan democracy but democracy. Theres only one flavor and the guys in the marine corps and the army and what we do in the infantry, we are really good at doing a few things. One of them is breaking stuff up and blowing stuff up. Were not great at building stuff up. Thats not what were great at. And i write about this, and it bothered me when i would see senior military officials who were geniuses like me who had a criminal justice degree, worth absolutely nothing, by the way, in the military, talking about governance and infrastructure and rebuilding countries. Really galled me to no end and i thought, until we get to the level where the administration is going to implement the right people for the right job for the right reason, our political power, do you see any senators or congressmen going over to iraq or afghanistan, saying hey, this is how you build a congress . No. Do you see anyone from walmart or home depot or google going over there to say this is how you build infrastructure and build these small little megastores of commerce and that creates throughput and money . No. They wont risk their bottom line to support our national security. Thats way too crazy of a concept, so crazy, right, it just might work, right, brother . You know this. What if there was a walmart in iraq and a kids like oh, a soccer ball is not the only toy in the free world . Amazing, right . [laughter] its so crazy it just might work, but until we get to that point where we have a world war ii mentality where people are literally turning in metal goods to support the war effort and if we can get back and be great students of our history from the Pacific Theater and the european theater that we have to stay, we have to be committed to win and show people what right looks like. I like that fan back there. Shes shaking her head yes. I think thats really the end state, not just my vision but i think i share that with a lot of people that have sacrificed. Karl i think one of the problems with the 18, 19year war is its a chicken and egg problem which is that youve got a professional military that is over there doing its job and you get the feeling that its like outsourcing. Its outsourcing the responsibilities of the republic. I dont think we would be in 18 and 19year long wars if we didnt have the ability to outsource it to a professional military, if kids that went to harvard and yale were also over there fighting. I think the war would last way shorter. So the problem of perpetual war is aided and abetted by a small, tiny percentage of the country carrying the burden. If they didnt carry the burden, the rest of us would have to carry it and i dont think wed have perpetual war. I think youve got the equivalent of the praetorian guard now, the president can send the military where he wants with no blowback because those parents of the kids who work at you go to harvard and yale do not care. Those kids, their parents work at walmart. I think were in danger of a terrible class structure thats increasing, its making wars last longer because were in this pickle. We talked yesterday about National Service, the only fair way to sort of break ourselves of this continuing to grow problem. I dont want everybody to join the marine corps. Because i mean i have three kids out of five i wouldnt want anywhere near the marine corps but they can certainly teach kids how to read in the inner city and dig fire trails for the forest service. There are all kinds of service we can do and then i think we would start to get out of this problem. Its not just tiny its a half of 1 of the population is carrying the burden. Seven Southern States account for more than half of the military. Seven. We have 50. Hello . And the other one that is damning is that if you take the top three deciles in terms of income, their neighborhoods, the higher earning neighborhoods compared to the bottom three deciles, and you would suspect, the bottom three deciles take more of the hits. In world war ii, it was 1. 2 times the top three. By vietnam, it was 1. 4 times. Now its 1. 7 times. Thats a very bad trend, that the poor kids are taking the hit increasingly. Is the republic at war . Or are we just outsourcing it to the poor and im not talking about ghetto kids. Im talking about lower middle class, working class kids. Those are the ones that carry the burden. I think weve got to break that or were going to be in big trouble. Alright. In one sentence or less [laughter] what is the most important thing that you want everyone here tonight to take away from a conversation about the relationships between war and society . One sentence or less. Thats yours. [laughter] yes. Carls books are like this. [laughter] my gosh. Our country will not survive if we do not have some form of National Service going forward. [applause] and ill keep last thought. I just need to say this, because weve had a lot of current news about the peace talks in afghanistan. We need to have women im not saying this because im a woman but the studies show throughout several decades of research, go to the council on Foreign Relations website and find this research, find it we need toelse, have women at the table for these peace talks and building out the agreements because when we do, these agreements have a 35 chance of lasting. [applause] and i dont know about you, but i want it to last. So, just a thought. My one sentence would be, i think we have to start remembering that were a republic and that everybody in the republic is responsible for fighting the republics wars. Being able to train and teach a lot of things over my career, to shoot the rifle straighter and run faster and take care of Young Marines, but i can never, ever teach anyone to care. You cant teach someone to care. If you dont care about being an american, if you dont care about what you do in your profession, in your life, its all completely worthless to me. So it starts here as a community. It starts taking action and having the compassion and care and that ability to share the message and not think that nobody wants to listen and go out there and do something and make a change, and were simply doing it through one medium of writing. All of us do that on a daily basis at some structure. But you have to care. If youre not willing to do that, i think you dont get a voice. So care. I need to be respectful of scotts time, because he needs to head to the airport, so join me in a round of applause. [applause] so [applause] so for those of you that are that have served in the military, you understand the importance of unit coins, challenge coins. We have those here in the is aam, and what they are token of appreciation, but also a token of you joining the family, and i cant think of a better way to say thank you for joining the chapman war society family. Karl, thank you. [applause] our authors will stay here this evening for a little bit longer to have a conversation with you and will be available to sign their books. On your table, you have a flier for a followup event, on the 23rd of october at Chapman University on the psychological cost of war. I can tell you it will be just as great as the conversation you heard this evening. Thank you so much for the support, and coming out this evening. Thank you for engaging in this conversation and have a safe trip home. Thank you so much for coming. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer cspans washington journal live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up wednesday morning, the author of the price we pay talks about efforts to fix the u. S. Health care system. Be sure to watch washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern wednesday morning. Be sure to watch all this week starting at 8 00 a. M. Is a look atre some of our featured programming this holiday week on cspan. On christmas day, at 10 00 a. M. Eastern, this years white house decorations with first lady melania trump. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern john miller on the history of journalism and fake news at the liberty forum. , a joint Economic Committee hearing on the high cost of raising a family. Watch this holiday week on cspan. Next, a discussion about religious liberty and the law and thely shekel for former general counsel don clark. This was held in beaver creek, colorado. [applause] dr. Thistlethwaite good evening. Now, i have taught religion in america for more than 35 years. And i believe that the First Amendment has played a vital role in the vitality of this nation. And i shall read it for you