Kinder will look at the way hollywood has shied away from graphic war wounds sorry, look at the way that the hollywood has shied away from graphic war wounds and how a military propaganda can downplay the wars relentless consumption of life and limb and how they deserved to be removed from the margins to the center of the american war story. In this talk, he will explore the history of american war through the bodies of five disabled veterans. What emerges is a portrait of a nations struggling and often failing to mitigate the human cost of military conflict. We welcome dr. Kinder from Oklahoma State university where hes an associate professor of history and american studies. Hes the author of paying with their bodies, american war and the problem of the disabled veteran. Which came out two years ago from the university of chicago press. Hes currently completing a book on the history of zoos during world war ii. Please welcome john kinder. [ applause ] thank you. Let me just arrange this real quick. Okay. So first off, i want to thank the new york academy of medicine for inviting me to speak with you this evening. This is a a real pleasure and i look forward to the day when im able to come back here. Hopefully soon as a researcher to use this amazing collection. I want to point out from the start that im not a physician. Im a historian. And a culture historian at that. When it comes to war, im less interested in medical advancements. The kinds of nuts and bolts of putting people back together than in how we make sense of wars trauma. The extent to grapple with what happens when troops head into battle and come home injured. So thats what im about. And so with that in mind, i thought we might begin todays talk with hollywood, which i consider ground zero for military myth making. Its 1949, four years after the end of world war ii, and sands of iojima just made theatres. It starts john wayne asmarine sergeant, john striker, part father, part dictator. Hes tasked with leading his platoon in attacks on the japanese strong hold of iojima, at the time critics praised it for its real onscreen combat. Today, however, the film is perhaps best known for its ending. For those of you who havent seen it, i apologize because im about to spoil the ending. Nearing the top of the mountain, striker pauses to have a cigarette, right, and is shot through the chest. It happens so quickly you dont really know whats happening. One moment all of them are there. They are celebrating and then, bam, the unthinkable has happened. John wayne is dead. How could this be . And despite its ending, the film was catnip for the generation raised in the immediate afterglow of world war ii. Even today its easy to understand why this film was so appealing. It makes american war seem heroic, it seems honorable. It seems like a fast track to manhood for those brave enough to follow in john waynes boot prints. Plus, and this cant be discounted, the movie makes his final seconds appear virtually pain free. Strikers death, the audience is told, is instantaneous, and his corpse is kept out of view of the camera. The young platoon crowds around him so you really dont see anything. Perhaps his organs were ripped apart as the bullet tumbled through his chest. Perhaps his back exploded in a volcano of blood and bone. Perhaps as he tumbled back wards, groping for the place the bullet hit his body, he evacuated his bowels like so many others, but well never know. Hollywood shied away from showing war injuries. Those who died did so quickly often with little more than a squirt of chocolate syrup to g signify theyd be hit. Raised on a diet of john waynes films, you would never know that enmie fire destroyed spines, faces and genitals. In this case it can be chalked up to the hollywood production code which restricted all bibut the most benign bodily trauma. But i think his bloodless demise is symptomatic of a much larger and longer trend in American Culture. And that is an unwillingness to acknowledge what happens to bodies in military conflict. We just dont think about it. We just dont see it. When it comes to bodily trauma, Many Americans live in a world of euphemism or, lets face it, willful ignorance. Tv journalists dont speak of gut shots, severed limbs. Were more likely to hear about losses and sacrifices and tragedies. As if the whole point of war were to not out injure the other side. Revisit the world war ii memorial in washington d. C. And you would be hard pressed to discover to americas war dead, although, tom hanks assures us they gave their life in a fight for freedom. So we have that. Were told their deaths were good, they meant something. And none of this can be blamed on some kind of conspiracy. Theres no sort of larger forceout there acting to keep this information away. As comforting as that thought might seem to some of us, yes, in wartime the federal government has maintained a long tradition of sensors the worst of the slaughter in order to maintain moral. World war ii was a conflict in which 50 Million People were killed yet americans at home did not see photos of g. I. Corpses until 1943. These were free of signs of bodily mutilation. They were men who had been killed and theyre laying down in the sand, their faces absent, but you cant see them. Today technology has rendered most forms of sensorship outdated and in 2009 the Obama Administration lifted a ban on photographing flag covered coffins at Dover Air Force base. Sharing individual details of their physical and mental trauma. On the whole however American Culture has long engaged in what i think of a selfsensorship, most of us dont think about wartime suffering, thinking about it is unpleasant. Doing so would plolitical size the suffering. Supporting the troops were told, focussing on the positive, the good things. And because, this is my theory, weve been trained not to care. War for the vast majority of americans has been and continues to be out of sight and out of mind. Thus, i want to use our time together tonight to take a brief tour of the history of american war. Our guide posts will be five u. S. Veterans. Some famous, others forgotten. Whose bodies were permanently altered in wartime. And what emerges from all of this, i believe, is a portrait of a nation struggling and failing to come to terms with the human cost of military conflict. What emerges is a portrait of war that looks quite different from what you would see in a hollywood movie starring someone like john wayne. Thats what i want us to get a sense of tonight. Well start in the depths of the United States bloodiest confl t conflict, the civil war. On may 6th, a sould soldier was fighting when he was hit with a bullet, what was left behind was a gaping hole. Harvey fell into southern hands and held prisoner for 11 days before he was finally admitted to a hospital where doctors removed bits of freefloating bone from the open cavity. It was basically a month and a half before he saw any kind of real doctor. Discharged on account of physical disability in may 1865, thus two years later, harvey took a job as a night watchman. When this photo was taken the following month, liquids and saliva continued to leak from the wound and much of the right side of his face was numb. I found harveys story in a 6,000 page history of surgical and medical advancements of the civil war. I chose harvey to show you for a couple reasons. He fulfills many of our expectations we have of our disabled veterans. He was injured in battle, for one, and he suffered a physical wound. One that remained visible after the wars end. And on top of that, he embodies many of the cliches that we gravitate toward when were talking about disabled vets. Some wounds never heal. War lives on in the bodies of those who fought. Thats the case of Joseph Harvey. Scholars talk about how the body is a sight of traumatic memory. Unhealed wounds, opening and closing, erupting sometimes after years of dormancy. These are like portals to an earlier time. Evidence that the past is never really past. And that was the case for Joseph Harvey. He would never be able to move on from the war. He would never become what he once was. Not as long as spit continued to dribble from the hole in his face. So harvey is sometimes what i i like to think of as, you know, our expectation, the stereo type of a disabled veteran, its visible, it happened in battle, it lives on in his body. Yet for all of that, harvey is also something of an outlier, during the civil war, twice as many troops were killed by disease as by wounds. Battlefields and camps had disintear and malaria and typhoid fever, which left many permanently impaired. Medical technology was quite crude in the civil war, as one might imagine, and sometimes the cure was worse than the sickness. This is carlton burrgan. He lost his eye and upper jaw after ingesting mercury to treat a bout of pneumonia. And i say this, i bring up cases like this, not to down play the brutality of the civil war battlefield, far from it. Advancements in manufacturing enabled both sides to equip, deploy and blast apart troops with unprecedented speed. High casualties werent a tragic buy product of civil war battles, they were the point of civil war battles. If we only focus omen like Joseph Harvey we miss another part of the war story, the everyday dangers that plague american war making to this day. So for the 10,000 or so Union Soldiers that suffered wounds to the face, thousands of others we dont really like to think about, were permanently disabled far from the battlefield when they were hit by trains, when limbs fell on their heads, or when they were kicked in the face by mules. In the decades following harveys death, in 1868, americans struggled to come to terms with the civil wars legacy of destruction. By the centurys end however something strange began to happen, something we dont think about. Growing numbers began to see the conflict as an aberration. It was the last outburst in a brutal age. In the future wars between civilized nations, by which they meant white, would be shorter and more survivable. No nation would repeat the civil wars formula of mass armies and Industrial Age weaponry, not when the guns and bombs would only get more lethal. This was the prediction. The most optimistic predicted that arbitration would replace blood letting. At the least, military physicians could take comfort in the medical lessons they had learned from harvey and thousands like him. So this was the dream, that mass warfare and mass casualties would disappear in the 20th century. Which brings us to world war i and our second disabled veteran, horace pippen. A generation removed from slafry, rerose to become one of the most important artists in the century. The date was september 30, 1918. Barely a month after the ceasefire. His regiment was fighting northeast of paris when he was hit by german machine gun fire. Bullets smashed through his right shoulder. He spent hours awaiting rez csc. At one point he fell in a ditch and was pinned beneath a corpse for hours before he was evacuated beyond the front lines. After months of treatment he was discharged with a steel plate in his shoulder and a pension of 22. 50 a month. Over the next decade he scraped by working a series of odd jobs spending his night decorating cigarette boxes as a crude form of occupational therapy. In 1930 at the age of 43, pippin took up painting. By the time of his death in 1946, his portraits and scenes of africanamerican life had been featured in magazines, today you can find his work not far from here at the metropolitan museum of art. When the u. S. Entered world war i in 1817 many believed that men like pippin did not belong in uniform. I wouldnt be the first person to bring up the iron any of the fact that the United States fought the war to make the world safe for democracy with a white army. Racism was baked into all aspects of military life, to the harassment of blacks in uniform to the race science. A postboard study of draft board data diagnosed africanamericans with high rates of hysteria, poor emotional control and ve nar yal disease. For men like davenport and others like him, africanamericans lacked the emotional discipline to be fighters. Instead they were suited for one thing, manual labor. That was it. And pippins regiment, the infantry, better known as the harlem hell fighters saw action under french command. White troops refused to fight along their africanamerican countryman. They were so successful that the entire regiment won a citation for the french government and in february of 1919, a quarter Million People cheered as they marched up fifth avenue. But such displays werent enough to alter the nation and the militarys devaluing of black bodies and black minds. 13 africanamerican vets were lynched after world war i, co t countless more were beaten, harassed, houses set aflame. With his arm, Horace Pippin survived 1919. However it would take another world war before they decided to dese g dezest seg gre grate the military. Despite this record, they determined they had little place in war. This is the story of world war i and into world war ii. So we have two figures. Now you might not recognize the name of our next veteran, but its likely that many tonight are family wiiar with his work. Harold resle. Perhaps the most famous disabled veteran of world war ii never saw action overseas. He was serving as an Army Instructor in North Carolina when a defective explosive blew off both of his hands. He was sent to Walter Reed Medical Center in washington d. C. Where he spent months recovering from his injuries, he was bored, in pain, and he was worried about spending the rest of his life as an amputee. As he wrote in his autobiography. For a disabled veteran in 1944, rehabilitation was not a realistic prospect. For all i knew, i was better off dead. And i had plenty of time to figure out if i was right. This was his attitude. I want to pause for a second to point out this term he uses, rehabilitation, this isnt a generic term for any kind of medical treatment. It meant something very specific tp adopted in world war i, rehabilitation was an integrated set of practices, orthopedics, jobs training, psychological counseling that was aimed at helping disabled veterans reintegrate into society. It was conceived as a modern approach to what they called at the time, the problem of the disabled veteran. It was when the government was consigned to pensions and old soldiers home. Tonight we take it for granted that the government will put you back on your feet and get you working again. This idea of rehabilitation has been the backbone of federal policy toward veterans to this day. During world war i, this was considered an experiment if successful it would transform war itself. It would eliminate the burden of disability from war far. Teddy roosevelto pined, in the sense of being a helpless or e useless cripple will be eliminated, and a slow step of man kind towards a better and just life. World war i era rehabilitation didnt live up to this lofty promise, at least not for most disabled vets. But with each new war, new cohorts of physical therapist, counselors have all recycled the same promise you get from Teddy Roosevelt. Which is todays Wounded Warriors have the best care ever, right . And thanks to advanced technology and research, the disabled veteran will soon be a thing of the past. They believed with each new war we will not have disabled veterans, well put you back together and youll be better than you were before the war. So back to harold russell. One day he happened to see a documentary film about a world war i vet who had been successfully rehabilitated. He was intrigued and he went on to star in his own film which hes shown performing tasks with his iron hook prosthetics. This caught the attention of a director who asked him to perform in a 1946 me low drama about three world war ii vets attempting to transition to civilian life. It was a Box Office Smash in 1946 for the portrayal of homer parish, he won two academy awards, one for best actor and another for being aid and comfort to disabled veterans. And his portion of the film focuses on his character homer and his anxieties about burd burdening his family, especially his fiancee with his disability. And his mobiggest scene, hes struggling to take off his hooks and his fiancee tucks him in like a baby. Weir not sure whats going to happen to homer down the road, we have a sense hes going to get married and get better, but theres still doubt. Yet the trajectory for russell, his transfer from depression to rehabilitation, seemed to mirror the optimism of post world war ii victory culture. He was a disabled veteran for what some call the good war and he seemed to embody so many traits of it. So thats three. Few veterans have carried as much weight as that of our fourth figure. On october 26, 1967, navy pilot, John Sidney Mccain iii, was flying a mission when his plane was down. He ejected breaking both arms and a knee in the process. He was attacked by locals and later trucked to a prison which was nicknamed the hanoi hilton. Medical care as you can imagine was scarce. Doctors failed to set his broken bones. He lost a third of his body weight. He was the son of an admiral. Yet he thwarted his captors efforts to use him as a political pawn. At one point he refused to go home early, saying that he had no right to do so ahead of other men. Right. But then came the torture. The beatings, the agonizing nights spent in stress positions. Mccain tried to commit suicide twice, but as he later wrote, quote, every man has his breaking point and i had reached mine. He signed a confession, thanking the vietnamese people and calling himself a black criminal. Mccain spent a total of five and a half years as a prisoner of war. Four decades later he still has limited flexibility in his knee and difficulty raising his arms much higher than we can see in this photo. In fact, hes noted for his difficulty in fixing his shirt collar. One cant talk about his pow experience without reflecting on the relationship between war and politics. After the korean war, pows returned home under a cloud of suspici suspicion, this was because this came from collaborating with the enemy or the sense they might have done so. John mccain was a national hero. His broken body and prematurely whitened hair, evidence of his willingness to suffer on americas behalf. Its important to point out that the politics of the disabled body saturated wartime u. S. Cultu culture, right, on the one hand you have figures like ron kovic, who was paralyzed, him and many others on the antiwar left, displayed their bodies as signs of protest. Signs to protest the inhumanity of the vietnam war. So you have that on one side. But mccains injuries were meant to symbolize something different. They symbolize faith, faith that the war had been worth it. Faith in duty and country and the righteousness of america. So to this day, mccains identity of an expow is essential to his credibility. Its the hammer he uses to beat down war doubters. You cant understand mccain and his political clout without understanding his disabled body. Now recently recordings of north vietnamese propaganda featuring john mccains voice have been circulating online. The main stream press has largely ignored these broadcast, for good reasons. For one thing he admitted to taping a false confession after days of abuse. Yet some of the darker corners of the right wing internet has seized on the recordings as evidence of what they had long maintained, that mccain was a song bird. He was a traitor who deserved to be, and im quoting, hung by the neck until dead. And id ask i dont want to make any assumptions here, but i ask that you set aside for a moment whatever you think about john mccain and his politics and focus on what it takes to make that claim. Theres a lack of empathy, almost a sociopath ic military code of conduct, but to those who would say those things about mccain, i see something more insidious going on, which is a failure to take the body seriously. Those who would criticize mccain or anyone who, breaks and i hate this term, from torture do so from the belief that minds are more powerful than bodies that a strong mind can hold out against anything. This is not the case. Bodies matter. This is one thing i like to emphasize again and again. Bodies matter. Burn them, mutilate them, starve them, torture them, overpower them, expose them to heat or cold or the humiliating gaze of others and even the strongest of us will do things, feel things we never thought possible. To make this claim about mccain or any others, i see it as a reluctance to take the body seriously. Thats dangerous. So thats four. Were coming to our fifth. I want to acknowledge my trepidation about including my our fifth disabled vet of this evening. It follows an account of sexual violence. A story so recent that i could not locate a photo in the public domain. Im not sure i would show it even if i could. Kate ka xena joined the navy at 21. The following year, she was rained at knife point by one of her shipmates in a San Diego Hotel room. She reported the assault to her superiors but according to her mother was told, its not that we dont believe you, but he outranks you. The trauma drove her from the navy and she was treated for depression and post Traumatic Stress disorder. All the while fearing her rainest wouraipest would attack again. She wrote, i would like to dedicate this book to the United States navy and all the men and women who served our country with human millty and have been raped and were brave enough to tell someone. But she did not finish the book. In 2001, then only 21, committed suicide. And she used a gun. Her story is significant on several levels worth talking about. Shes a member of whats been the largest cohort of disabled veterans and americans, that is those with invisible injuries. Although theres no such thing as a purely mental trauma, the brain is a part of the body, most disabled veterans dont look like Joseph Harvey, harold russell. I see this as part of the reason that disabled vets continue to struggle in the United States and why its so easy to disregard wars legacy of violence. We dont see many disabled vets for what they really are, they pass by us, invisible and thus wars violence is invisible as well. But her case shines a light on military culture and that is sexual violence, both against perceived enemies and against other americans in uniform. Statistics vary, of course, but a 2012 department of Defense Survey found that nearly one quarter of active duty women experienced some form of sexual assault. That same year roughry 26,000 rains took place in the u. S. Military though only about one in seven were reported to higher ups and one in ten went to trial. As one might expect, female Service Personnel are far more likely to be raped thats said because men make up 90 of the military. They represent the largest population of rape victims in the u. S. Military. A huge number of men raped in the u. S. Military as well as women. Theres a name for the psychological toll of these type of attacks. Military sexual trauma or mst. Its defined as psychological trauma resulting from a physical assault of a sexual nature, battery of a sexual nature or sexual harassment, symptoms include depression, difficulty sleeping, selfmedication and heightened rates of ptsd and heightened rates of suicide. Claims for sexually related ptsd are granted at lower rates than nonsexual trauma. The myth that men dont get raped proves to be irretract able in the military. Theres the original rape followed by the command rape. The threats of retaliation, the unwillingness of commanders to take action. The Boys Club Mentality that would rather shame the victim than prosecute the perpetrator. And many who have been interviewed about this say that the command rape is far more traumatizing, in fact. Katy lynn is one of tens of thousands of the casualties on the war on terror. Lives traumatized not by radical islam, or whatever the u. S. Claims to be fighting but a rape culture. So what does this all add up to . What is the history of american war look like if its stitched together through the bodies of Joseph Harvey, pippin, russell, mccain, and cassina. Perhaps the most generous would be to think about the history of war as a story of progress or medical progress at the very least. There can be little doubt that todays surgeons would be able to restore harveys face or pippins shoulder. This upward trajectory isnt new. During the early years of the iraq war news outlets gushed about the latest in surgery, these medical miracles meant to put back together what war had torn apart. I see these stories as part of the apparatus of american innocence that companies all u. S. Conflicts, at least early on. The expectations that americas wars are different, better, purer rigpur purer, righteous, and the failings have been resolved. If you go off to war, its not your daddys war. Its something better, right. Thats one interpretation. Another would be to highlight by contrast, the failure of efforts to eliminate disability from the cal cue louse of american war. 100 years of Teddy Roosevelt predicted the passing of the cripple, his term, the u. S. Is no closer to solving the disabled veteran. More than 4 million Service Members have a disability. If anything, every new war seems to produce, at least an acknowledgement of, new categories of disability. From traumatic brain injury to military sexual trauma. So its not going away. In addition, several of our figures hint at an often ignored aspect of the war story, that is the history of division and violence between u. S. Citizens in wartime. Many of us are raised on the notion, the myth that americans set aside their differences, that they come together in times of military conflict. But prewar antagonisms over race, gender, sexuality, which bodies belong and who belongs, dont fade away when people put on uniforms. In pinpins days, racism dictated that africanamericans were not worthy of fighting alongside their country men. The repeal in 2010 of dont askdont tell is a step in the right direction, at least in my mind it is. However the recently announced transgender ban, along with skyrocketing mst rates suggest that the fight for justice in the military and civilian life is far from over. Ultimately i think our five bodies point to the need for what i call in my book, a new veteranology. I mean a field of study not only aimed at improving the lives of veterans but asking tough questions about the values underlying the work on their behalf. What does it mean to readjust in the wake of traumatic impairment. To what extent does the u. S. Military use disabled veterans in recruiting literature, football halftime shows, to smooth over anxieties about past and future conflicts. As they outsource functions to private contractors how does it e vofl between the government and veterans. So on that note i want to conclude by drawing attention to another category of bodies. The title of my talk is a bit misleading. Its not just five. These include the bodies of americas enemies. Those killed and maimed as collateral damage. Those whose pain and suffering is meant to force the nations opponents to the bargaining table. Americans dont spend much time fretting about the nations history of asymmetrical violence, about how in failed military campaigns, the United States dishes out far more death and destruction than it ever sustains. In the run up to u. S. Involvement to korea, vietnam, iraq and elsewhere, there wasnt a lot of hand wringing about how many outside the u. S. Would be killed if the u. S. Took up arms. This goes beyond i think a patriotic instinct so many of us have to prioritize the lives on our own. It hinges on almost a pathological indifference to suffering. A willingness to sacrifice them so one of your own could be saved. Journalist Derrick Jackson called this the west more land mind set. A reference to a quote general William Westmoreland delivered in the 1974 documentary hearts and minds. Its an outstanding image. He declares, quote, the oriental doesnt put the same price on life as does a westerner. This as the director cuts to the scenes of a vietnamese woman trying to crawl into the grave of a loved one and shes weeping and tearing at her hair. Its a chilling moment. Chilling in westmorelands seeming indifference here. I believe jacksons characterization is a bit unfair. Not because westmoreland didnt deserve it but because so many u. S. Leaders do too. We could point to Andrew Jackson or Henry Kissinger or madeleine albright, who when asked about the 500,000 iraqi children who died because of u. S. Sanctions replied that, quote, the price is worth it. We can point to architects of the iraq war, which caused nearly 200,000 civilian deaths in the first ten years. If we include infrastructure damage and disease, that number tops 500,000. Future generations might speak about the trump mindset. One that would have us do unto others, destroy north korea, for example, on the off, off chance they might do something to us. If we really want to take war seriously, we need to think about the bodies and lives of all of those involved. Not just those who fight on americas behalf. At the very least, i think i hope that putting the body at the center of the american war story reminds us that the nations marbnatio nations marshal history is more devastating to life and limb, more reflective of who we are as a people, both for good, if were thinking about the 369th, or for ill, as we think about military sexual trauma. Than movies that sands of iwo j ima would lead us to believe. Thank you. I hope we can have a conversation about this. That was a moving lecture. I want to compliment you. You start out talking about how the media fought many different areas, focus not on informing people about the severity and the horror of war. One of the things that ive always sort of heard or thought is that war in the past was perhaps more gentlemenly or less h horrendous than war in the present. Certainly detruckive capabilities have increased. But i wonder is it true that in the past armies were any less focussed on causing death and destruction to their enemies than we are now . Thats a terrific question. So the question is, were wars of the past more gentlemanly. Certainly theres a sense in which older wars were more rule based. There were asunsumptions about when a battle would take place, and there was a sense in which the battle was over and you would go on and there would be a time, maybe a moment to go collect the dead, the wounded and so forth. And that continues to the civil war. You can see moments of that into world war i and so forth. The problem is by the time you get to the u. S. Civil war, so many things are changing. You have so many more people fighting, you have people who you have so much more powerful weaponry, right, and the destruction is almost beyond anything that can be controlled. So, yes, there is a sense in which there still seems to be some rule as to how war would be fought by the way, all of these sort of things apply to for the most for most of u. S. History and history of war in the west, theres almost been two kinds of wars. Wars between other nations, other western nations, and wars between western nations and people of color or who were viewed as savages, those had no rules. Rules about slaughtering the enemy, removing the dead, utter destruction, these things fall out the window. In fact, there were different tools, weaponry, that were viewed as uncivilized, could only be used against people of color, that sort of thing. By the time you get to world war i, whatever sense of there is still a real expectation that war would have a set of clearcut rules and would be gentlemanly, and over four years, that really gets worn down. And one thing that a lot of scholars have looked at, when thing about what transforms modern war is the development of aerial bombing. If you read memoirs from the early 20th century, they rail against aerial bombing than any thing. They cite the same thing, i understand a war that someone is right in front of me. I know when the war is going to happen, theres a logic to it. But someone flies overhead and maybe theyre trying to bomb something a mile away, and they drop a bomb and because of wind it hits me. And i cant do anything about it, theres a real sense of powerlessness. Theres a sense in which the logic of the machine has taken over the logic of people. And this gets even more and more and more accelerated as things go on. So by the time you get to world war ii, yes, there still are there is still a sense in which there are occasions which this gentlemanly war youre talking about is still around. But it gets beaten out by the machines and the level of destruction. So i dont think im hesitant to fully embrace the idea that war in the past was ever that much better than it is today. But there are certain moments. Sometimes theyre tech knnology and one is the development of aerial bombing. Along with that, development of gas. Any kind of weapon that you have that its not meant to hit someone, right, its meant to hit anything, right, and that goes from machine guns in the civil war to gas to aerial bomb this eventually leads to the atomic bomb. Youre not aiming at anyone in particular. Which is why there is such an emphasis today in transforming our ideas about bombing, about war, by emphasizing control. That is the Surgical Strike. Were going to have a Surgical Strike on north korea. Its not going to be this thing thats out of control. Were able to contain the violence, aim the violence, focus the violence, right, and thats a kind of war i can get behind, versus a war in which were going to randomly kill until they give up, right. Thats why theres such emphasis on drone strikes and surgical attacks and decapitation. This is the language of making war accessible once again, thinkable once again. Are you able, in your book, to get into the question of the volunteer army and, therefore, how not taking bodies seriously becomes not taking the bodies of people who feel they can only get into the army as a way forward . I mean, thats thats where this all ends up, right. In some ways my book is wrestling with this question of coming out of the civil war, theres such destruction, more than 600,000 people killed, 1 Million People severely injured. By the time you get to world war i people are saying we cant do this again. We cant have wars like this in the future, not with improved technology and so forth. So how do we remove the calculus of disability from war. Were always going to have some death, but how do we remove disability. Well, one way to remove it is to remove the significance of those bodies and the political will behind those bodies. And the development of the all volunteer force in 1973 is sort of the culmination of that. One lesson that many in the government and military took from the vietnam war was this, the u. S. Didnt loose in vietnam, the u. S. Lost on the streets of new york and washington d. C. And they lost on the streets of new york and washington d. C. Because enough people at home said, wait, maybe i might be willing to pay with my body for a good war like world war ii, maybe i might be willing to do this if i think im going to be fighting nazis, but this war in vietnam, theres nothing like that. Theres no good thats going to come of it and you can try to sell me on fighting this idea of come muniti communism. If you get rid of the draft, you have the war in iraq, people are getting killed, what do i care . Im not going. The people who are going are signing up. Thats on them. Its a small number of people, we dont know them. I live in oklahoma, theres a larger percentage of veterans there, but even in oklahoma, its nothing like in wars of the past. So by getting by developing the all volunteer force what you do is get rid of so much of the anger at home and so much the feeling that individual investment in war what happens now is that, you know, the u. S. Can fight wars for 16 years. And they just kind of keep going. And for many people, for the vast majority of people, they have absolutely no impact on them. And this trend is even going to get more exaggerated with the development of robotics and corporate armies. So in the future, the u. S. Military is going to fight wars with machines, computers and with the poor largely. So youre not going to have big parades rallying against that, right. Theyre going to go off and get killed. So its a recipe for having your war while also having a contended nation at home. Were a nation that doesnt really care. So part of what i do in my work is try to think about, if those are the conditions, how do i get people to care about these things . Im not a veteran. I have family who are veterans and so forth. How do i get ordinary people who are raised in this environment where they dont think about wars as having anything to do with them how do i get them to care about the plight of disabled veterans, homelessness, military sexual trauma. How do i get them to care about this long history of violence on all sides . And its very, very difficult. Today you can say hollywood is better. Its much more focussed on homecomings and on instead of the violence at home. So the conditions have changed, too. When john wayne was fighting, there was a generation in which the generation that watched that film would be going into the military and thus it was important for them to have a sense of what the military was and why americas wars were worth fighting. Today its very, very difficult. So thats kind of the situation were in. I was interested in the designation of mst, was that the Surgeon General . The military itself . Thats the term that the Veterans Administration uses. Okay. The reason i was interested, it seems unusually transparent these days because i remember when shell shock was a term, but now we just have ptsd for civilians and for people in the military. And i wondered if that was a political decision or if, in fact, it is indistinguishable from civilian trauma, or do you think it minimizes the role of war when soldiers are described as having ptsd and its the same designation that civilians have . Thats often a political designation. You know, a number of veterans groups disabled veterans groups, Wounded Warrior project, have been very vested in keeping control of these terms, right . They want to define, you know, what disability is, who disabled veterans are, what counts as a disabled veteran. There was a lot of lobbying to say invisible injuries count too. Ptsd counts, too. Traumatic brain injury counts, too. Because theres almost a hierarchy of injury, things that are most important. Things to the body that are visible, that ranks number one, especially if it comes in wartime. Below that, maybe injury to the mind but that has physical symptoms. And maybe at the bottom, kicked in the face by a mule. The person kicked in the face by a mule might require as much as if not more therapy and pension work than the person at the top. But because pensions and and these disability ratings are always political, you have to lobby the government to get funding and so forth, they want to control what a disabled veteran is, a heroic vision of the disabled veteran. The military is in a strange place. I dont think icon vaed the complexity of the military. The military has been on the cutting edge of a lot of this research, increasingly they are invested in this idea of military sexual trauma as an important obstacle for what they want to do going forward. The military knows that its not booing to have the high numbers forever, right. It knows that its membership is going to be increasingly diverse. Coming from an increasingly different backgrounds and having different sexual and gender identities and its important for the u. S. Military if its going to work to be able to address the complexity of all of their issues and so forth. The military tends to be on, at least when it comes to definitions and when it comes to sort of pronouncements, quite good about recognizing things and being quite blunt about them and part of the reason is why is that veterans groups and others hold them you know. The american legion, the Wounded Warrior project. There are are had these groups trat incredibly powerful or have been at lobbying, raising awareness, drawing attention to Veterans Issues and so forth. And so they tend to be quite good at pushing it u. S. Military to recognize a lot of these issues. But as you said traditionally, historically veterans groups have tended to sort of say well, there are disabilities and then theres the rest of the worlds disabilities and if the fwum government as to fund one of them, they fund us. And the argument is quite simple which is you might be disabled because you were born that way or you might be disabled because you stepped off the curb that wrong time or you simply had had had a heart attack or all these sorts of things. I was disabled because i put my body on the line in service of my country. My disability is a product of National Service and thus if anyone is going to be funded, we are going to be funded and for this reason disabled veterans groups have and sometimes in the past been host tool joining forces with nonveterans disability groups. That worked in the 20th century and the 19th century. Thats not going to work in the 21st because theyre small. As the u. S. Military represents a smaller and smaller nofrgz country. The civilian groups are going to be much, much better. Its not in the veterans groups best interest to remain isolated. They need to reach out and they need to reach out those who are addressing military trauma should reach out to those addressing sexual trauma in all walks of life and not be so careful about reserving sanktifying their disabilities as somehow different. But this is, as the military evolves, so must these groups evolve. Im intrigued by the term you used, the corporate army which you see as the future. And it makes me think about what does that mean for the demillitation. It seems to me in the civil war where veterans were given pensions, which was and then by the time they got to world war i, were not going to give them pensions anymore and therefore were going to rehabilitate them to make them self sufficient. So if we have a corporate military and the government is no longer involved with running the military but merely paying for it, what happens to rehabilitation in the idea of getting these veterans back to these corporate veterans. What do you think would happen . I think many in the military would say youre a private worker. You signed a contract. You are not like someone who entered at 18 because he or she wanted to go to college or serve his country or wanted to get away from her small town. So they would i think the u. S. Military increasingly tries to draw a divisioning between those two groups and for the most part the United States is throughout the 20th century as involved private workers, contractors. But lot of times they were setting up bases or cooking the food, doing the laundry, all these kinds of jobs. We dont want marines who are trained to kill to be spending their time doing setting up tents. Well hire people to set up the tents. Well have it marines do what the marines do. Theyre hiring corporate contractors. And i think many in the military but increasingly within ordinary citizens would say we owe something to these disabled veterans who deserve to be rehabilitated, thats the very least we can do. That was the will of the marketplace. Now they get paid a lot more. I dont know about what kind of insurance they have. I imagine its quite good. Today one televise big issues tends to be that a lot of people in the u. S. Military are saying wait a minute im only getting paid a couple of hundred dollars and theyre getting paid 10 times as much and were doing the same thing. So i dont think i think the rehabilitation will be private. But who knows. They have been so successful at making inroads into the u. S. Military and so successful at blending what was this clear cut division between the citizen soldier and the private, what used to be called it private mercenary. This has become so blended that 20 years from down the road, who knows. We might be paying taxes for their rehabilitation. But theyre private contract s should distinguish them. I think a lot of americans believe the u. S. Has a moral duty, if you want to frame it that way, to rehabilitate those injured in war and so forth. Do americans feel a moral duty for those that work for some Corporate Firm . I dont Many Americans would say yes, yes we do. Im actually going to ask it last question which is you asked about this dissocative attitude, making it easy to not see veterans. Is that a peculiarly american attitude or does that exist elsewhere or elsewhere in the western world . I want to say its a peculiarly american attitude because thats my answer for most things and my real answer should probably be i dont know. I havent done enough comparative work to actually say that with any sense of security about that. That said, i will plunge ahead and give my best guess and i would say for the most part thats rar pekulialerly american attitude and part of that stems from the fact that with the exception of sichcivil war and most american war takes place over there. And thats why the phrase is so useful and over there and in fact just this a couple of weeks ago South Carolina republican senator Lindsey Graham was talking about future attacks in north korea and he said if theres going to bow a war, its going to happen over there. Theres not going to be killing here. The killing is going to be there. Well, if you go to great britain, england, france, germany, japan, you go toaustralia, the war took place here. So not only did you have more injured bodies, you had more people injured civilians. People who werent even in the military. For the most part in the United States if youre injured, say youre injured in world war ii. You might go to a hospital. If youre in europe, you might go to a hospital in britain and be there for months and you might stay there. So you might not get home for a year 1 2. Injury. And so a lot of time has gone by in terms of experiencing the open wounds and that sort of thing. But that rr not the case in france, spain, across the had entire global south. These two oceans have buffered the United States from so much of the violence of the wars its taken part in. And so for that reason and because of the civilian attacks, it would be my strong, strong, strong guess that the United States attitude is maybe one little bit of american exceptionalism. I want you to join me in thanking john kinder for the presentation. Thank you. Senator mccain, when you look back 50 years ago when your plane went down in hanoi and the last 50 years, what today, in your opinion, are the legacies of vietnam, good and bad. Before we get into a conflict we better have a strategy and a capability to