If me and my wife saw someone like me talking about this and would probably make us feel less alone. Americans whisper the word alzheimer is because their government whispers the word alzheimers and although whispers better than the silence the alzheimers community has been facing for decades it is still not enough. Needs to be yelled and screamed to the point did finally get the attention and funding that it deserves and needs. I dream of the day when my charity is no longer necessary and i can go back to being the lazy self involve man child by was meant to be. People look to their government for hope and i ask when it comes to alzheimers disease we continue to take more steps to provide some more. This weekend actor seth rogan and capital those advocating increased awareness and support for alzheimers treatment. This morning at 10 25 eastern. Live sunday on booktv author rant University Professor pineal joseph will take questions and comments on black power studies at noon on cspan2. American history tv visits the National Gallery of art to learn about colonel Robert Gould Shaw the 54th massachusetts infantry. Sunday at 6 00 p. M. Iraq war veteran Kayla Williams is next talking about her and her husbands return from iraq. Integrating into american society. Kaylas husband returned home after a serious head injury and both suffered pete psc. This is about 50 minutes. [applause] allow me to express my profound regret for being late. I had an interview and the fun experience of traveling on the belt way which may be more stressful than driving around because not allowed to carry a weapon on the belt way. As my institutes mention, i am also a veteran and before i get started i want to take a moment to thank all of you for coming. I appreciate you taking the time to get out before we are inundated with snow, have a little fun before we get started. To all the troops and veterans of the room i want to say welcome home. To all the military families i want to say thank you for your service as well. I am listed in the army in 2000 and although i read the fine print, it didnt seem like a big possibility back then and the needs of the army, random chance assigned arabic and studying get at the Defense Institute in monterey, california on 911. Was immediately apparent my military career would be different from i might otherwise have expected. It was no longer a question whether or not i would go to war but simply when and where. I took part of the initial invasion of iraq as part of the 100 First Airborne Division air assault and after spending some time in baghdad going out on combat patrols with the infantry without as a woman soldier i surely wouldnt have used them. We pushed farther north and i was eventually assigned to a listening post observation post and with seven male soldiers we move to the other side of the mountain later and there were 20 or 30 men. I was the only female soldier for several more months of relative isolation. While i was out there i met this tall, handsome in ceo in charge of the observation post. They were proud to call themselves sisters, the support team. And i thought he was funny and handsome, witty, sarcastic, smart. But iraq is not romantic. We could start dating ago clubbing or anything like that. Any sort of flirtation we had was very gruff and not at all the type of gentle romantic flirtation you might imagine here at home. One night on the side of the mountain i confess to hand the unwanted to get to know him better and he said dont worry, theres plenty of time for that when we get home. And wasnt too long after that that his convoy on its way back was hit and one of the first really coordinated attacks of what later came to be known as the insurgency but in its early days we did not call it that the we just wondered what was going on since we were stability and support Operation Blue shrapnel entered his skull below the kevlar on the back of the right side of his life, travel for what and exited near his right eye. For three days we were all told not to expect him to survive. He was medically evacuated, luckily, down to baghdad where he had neurosurgery. As chance would have it, by the same neurosurgeon who later operated on bob woodruff. From there he was evacuated to germany and from there back to Walter Reed Army medical center. I stayed in iraq and completed my mission, heard from brian a few months later and an email that was full of the type of typos and punctuation and spelling errors that i think a lot of people slip into in email so i let that go, hes just being lazy like people are in email and didnt have any sense of what it meant to have a traumatic brain injury. When he said looks like im going to be okay, i took that face value. These were the early days of the work. What and have thought then would be the early days of the war but they were. And the systems and Services Bear returning when the warriors need not in place. So when he recovered to the point at which as the doctors told him he could walk and talk and wipe his he was released from walter reed and sent back to fort campbell, ky, he got there two weeks before the rest of the division got back from the middle east and we started dating, the day my plane landed, figure 82004, just over a decade ago. And i am sure there were signs than of his cognitive and psychological problems and but i was pretty distracted by my own reintegration and to not necessarily notice them and we were busy parting and getting drunk and staying up all night because we had a month of leaf. In that heady early time when we were just thrilled to be alive and getting drunk a lot, didnt notice what was coming and we were quickly, deeply into emotionally involved. Then i started going back to work and had to get up bright and early every morning to do pt and had to go and do my job van train soldiers and get ready to read deploy, get our unit ready to go back overseas. Brians unit told him to stay home. He was still early enough in his recovery that he wasnt allowed to wear head year because the wind was so fresh whether shunt had been and where the shrapnel into the back of his skull. He had to get his head shaved by specially trained people. He had psc, posttraumatic stress disorder severe enough that he couldnt carry a weapon. You get a special piece of paper in the military if you cant run for a while. On his profile it said he could not carry a weapon and so his leadership said you cant wear head gear or carry a weapon, you cant do your job and are freaking out all the new guys, because you are a disaster so stay home. This is not the armys that i knew where you had to show up every morning for accountability formation and the late show you where you were supposed to the. I was surprised nobody was checking up on him as but they told him to stay home. If he lost his identity as a leader of soldiers, he lost his job, he lost his place and he was questioning his ability to have a future, he spiraled deeper and deeper into depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and everything just fell apart. You was not cognitively able to pay his bills or take care of themselves, manages some life and he was trying to self medicate the profound psychological pain he was feeling with jack daniels, jim beam or whatever was handy. That doesnt work but it took quite a long time for him to figure that out. And somehow i stuck with him through this. People ask me all the time how and i have to be honest, i am still not sure. But with a lot of patience and commitment and love we stayed together, we got married. He did heal and we have been able to forge a new life together. I tell that story in this book. And a lot of the early reviews focus on the fact that i am very honest about worst parts of that recovery. Some of the terms are making me a little freaked out the people and not going to want to buy it because theyre focused on my honesty about those really bad stages but for me this is a story of hope, healing, recovery and love. This is a love story and this is a story about how my husband came back from profound injury, profound institutional neglect and really deep physiological cognitive and psychological woundss could be the man that he is today. And loving husband and father who just started using his g. I. Bill benefits to go back to college this semester which is an exciting new adventure for us to embark upon. The message i really want to get out that i am convinced that anyone who reads this book will absorb is vets are not broken. I see this kind of taking root in the pablo record popular media narrative that veterans are unemployed, suicidal, seidel, homeless, just really screwed up, and for many veterans, those certainly not all the process of reintegration of coming home, of healing can be a difficult one. But with Proper Services and support it can happen. And theres a new normal in which we can still be contributing members of society, valuable additions to our communities, fantastic employees. You should hire us because we are fantastic. The other message that i wanted to share is caregivers are not saints. I have gotten this sense that people believe that those of us who choose to stand by Wounded Warriors, that we are perfect, we do no wrong, we stand lovingly by our men or women as the case may be and that is not true. I didnt always do a good job. I got a angry and you are not supposed to get a angry at a hero, right . You are not supposed to lose your temper at somebody who got blown up serving his country but when things are horrible, i am a human being and i have a lot of those a lot of feelings im not always proud of and didnt always handle things well. One time when i was really, really is angry at how badly he was managing our lives together, how he was missing appointments and couldnt keep track of anything and things were just awful, i didnt have the ability to say any of that to him, to say to him i am afraid i can never have children because you are so screwed up, i couldnt tell him many of the things i was really in rabat. U. S. Holding refrigerator open trying to pick what he wanted to each, holding it open and open and open and i lost it and started kicking him in mission asking why he hated the environment because that makes sense. I wasnt even pregnant, by the way. So i try to be very honest about the fact that i am a person and although i did stick with my husband through some really difficult times i am not a saint. I did not nail lacrosse myself pendragon around with me. Im a human being and have my own foibles and i also want to make sure people know there are resources out there to help. If you or a loved one are struggling to you can call Veterans Crisis line at 800273talk, press one for immediate assistance 24 hours a day. If your spouse is struggling with pt s d and becoming violent you should call the Domestic Violence help line. You should not suffer in silence or alone. And if you are looking for a way to serve veterans or looking for resources in your local community, you can use the National Resource directory which is on line and has a vast compilation of resources that are available. If you are a military Family Member you can look up blooms of the stock families on line and see the resources they have available to all military families. I was told by not supposed to talk for too long to give you the opportunity to ask questions of why will tell you first i have tried to make a lot of ways available that you can connect with me, with the books, with my story in a fun way so you can follow me on twitter, you confined me or the book on facebook, go to my web site, Kayla Williams. Com and buckley on spotify, and hear the music that was going on, a different way for you to connect. I am happy to open up for questions but let me warn you, if you do not ask questions my book club until you im very good talking so i will continue to run off at the mouth about the things that interest me. Thank you again for coming. Please come up and ask questions. If you dont do that i will talk about what i think is interesting or start reading use sections of the book. No takers . I will grab my copy. Someone is please make response. I dont even know how long i talked, i it squeeze 30 minutes into i showed up late. That was great. Yes, sir . I am a reader of doonesbury and comic strips by Garry Trudeau and wondering if he ever contacted you because i keep thinking about it while you are talking, and it is about characters that kind of did what you did. I love his troops. He has done a great job bringing attention to military sexual trauma as well, Sexual Assault in the military which is the topic people dont want to talk about that he has a character that sustain the traumatic brain injury as well. Win in touch when my first book came out and i sent him a copy of the new one just last week so i am hoping that he enjoys it. Thank you. Yes, maam . Just wanted to say that i love your first book, i read it at an important time in my life and it motivated me to get off my butt and do sings well. Thank you for that. You also said something i would love to hear you talk about about the idea of the military and veterans being broken and i will confess as a civilian i know there is a civilian military divide and i want to bridge it in a way that is not patronizing but accidentally patronizing. You talk a lot so what should we know . How should we talk about this . How shall we. This divide . It is a tough question a lot of people struggling with. I read a piece on line that spoke to me where the author said 2 civilians quit saying you cant understand. We go to movies and we read books about things that are totally outside of our current understanding all the time. We read books about ancient history, we see movies about space aliens, we try to put our minds into situations we cant connect with on a regular basis so when you talk to a veteran and say you cant imagine what you mustve been through, that increases the divide. Try to imagine, try to put yourself there. Read books, read the logs. line. There are a lot of voices out there, growing number of voices, try to connect, there is an exciting fiction being written now as well. When you have friends who are in the military who are veterans, be willing to listen. Dont ask if they ever killed anyone. That is frowned upon and considered a little tacky in the military community but let them know you are there and willing to listen. And one of the things i encourage people to do in those situations. A lot of thats struggling with psd, at least my husband and my Friends Family have a problem with i contact. Sitting around and drinking, really bad cutting mechanisms that too many of door. Instead of saying go have a beer and talk about this, want to go for a hike and talk about this or some other type of activity where someone can walk with you and share their stories without the pressure of having to oyster directly at your eyes and without having the temptation of overindulging in alcohol. Thank you for writing your book and talk to us as the war started. Some of the things we talked about were the worst example of the military not doing a good enough job giving Mental Health treatment to people and needed it. I wonder if that has changed at all. I wonder if Domestic Violence sort of rash where people were back and afraid to seek help because they might be blacklisted. I wonder if that has changed. I think a lot of progress has been made. My husband was injured early in the war in october of 2003 and from what i heard, when i was writing this book i tracked down his neurosurgeon and narrow psychiatrist, one of his other providers and asked about it and when i tracked down his narrow psychologist, what happened . How did this happen . How did he slipped through the cracks . Fort campbell was one of the worst places for people for pd is to go in those days so for me and brian one of the things we really found helpful as part of our recovery was to try to call attention to the gaps and services that we saw and to tell our stories in an attempt to make things better for troops continuing to come home after us and to do that as part of a larger community, organizations of other veterans working together for positive change and things have changed. Brian was in back of his artillery battery for reasons completely beyond my comprehension. They had medical Holding Companies at the time. He should have been sent at a minimum to one of those but later on the Army Developed warrior transition units that were specifically designed to try to help Wounded Warriors and provide them with squad leaders, please and sergeants and cave managers to help them better navigate the systems and go through them, medical evaluation boards processed more smoothly. Whether or not that has always worked as well as planned remains to be seen, but they have made a lot of effort to improve things and it is an ongoing struggle to convince troops and veterans that is the case to seek help. Part of that is the military east coast that when you grow up and cultures that tells you suck it up and drive on, pain is weakness theres plenty of time to sleep when you are dead, it is really hard to put that aside and say i cant do this by myself and i need help. The institutional military is trying to send a message that people should seek help but it doesnt always get through at every level and the impression i get as an outsider is some groups face bigger challenges than others. I came from military intelligence and out of concerns people would not seek help because they did not want to lose their clearances, now you did not have to report seeking psychological help for combat related trauma on the security clearance paperwork. I redid mind, check it, it is in there, you dont have to report but i have been led to believe that pilots, if theyre seeking Mental Health care cant fly, that is the future barrier for them in terms of seeking help. Is not my career field but that is what i heard anecdotally. Certain groups may have bigger challenges to overcome plan it comes to seeking help. We will need more Senior Leaders who are willing to stand up and we had a few examples that are fantastic. We need more of them and more veterans and troops who are willing to say here is what i did to help me get better. Part of the reason i told our story and other friends have been part of campaigns getting out there and saying here is how i was struggling, here is how i am doing better, to help encourage people to know there are multiple avenues. That is the other message i want to get out. If you bought toothpaste and really hated the flavor you wouldnt give up on brush in your teeth forever. You would buy new flavor, a new brand so if you try therapy and dont click with your therapist dont give up on Mental Health care. Try a new therapist. It can take a while to find somebody you click with. It can be challenging to find a good environment. You may have to try more than once. Of the Va Medical Center is not working, try give an hour. There are a lot of avenues to seek help and one of them down the road will work for you and you can find a new normal where you experience not just posttraumatic stress disorder but posttraumatic growth. I firmly believe that it is only because i saw horrible things and experienced real privation that i am able to appreciate how privileged we are in america as fully as i do. I believe that i am more connected to my fellow humans because i have seen them at their worst. It has given me a better capacity to appreciate them at their best. You are staring at me because you have a question or want me to stop talking . I will tell you to stop talking when i am over there but over here i have a question. You talk about the process of writing this book, you described so vividly and with a lot of dialogue events that were clearly painful going back over a decade. Were you keeping notes . Do you have a photographic memory . I have always been a journal urban. I write a lot of journal entries and i always have. Also, when i decided to write this book, i interviewed people. I wasnt on the bus when brian got hurt. I interviewed five people who were on the bus to get their sense because brians memories considering the shrapnel in the brain, i interviewed some of our other friends and Family Members that were taser with us during this because based on what i read, human memory is pretty fallible. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously sketchy so rather than assuming i had the perfect memory of the past decade i went out and interviewed other people who were in there to get their perception of what happened and check it against my own and try to use combination of my memories, things i wrote at the time and interviews with other people to make sure i had as accurate picture as possible. Thank you. Welcome back. I had a question. If you could compare and contrast the difference of transition from your experience with brians, you doing it at the same time, had two experience as yet your transition and healing i imagined some things that were the same and some things that were completely different. I am curious where those jelled and meshed together and were you able to provide support for things that he could not provide support to you for, and how that effectively to parallel processes. Good question. I would need to have him here to answer it accurately. I struggled with things he didnt experience for example being invisible as a woman veteran. When i came home people ask me if i was allowed to carry guns because im just a girl, i had people ask if i was in the interest infantry which is not authorized under current regulations so there in the process of changing that. When we would all go out in groups to the bar to grab a beer people would give the guys a free round, very literally the men would get free beers and they all looked like it with their hair cut and posture, but women, we dont meet the stereotypical image of what a veteran looks like so i didnt get my free beer, still owed. That sense of being invisible and not having my experience recognized made it harder for me even when we started spending time with other fats i was ultimately a woman in the room and people would assume i was just the spouse as if spouses dont go plenty on their own but they wouldnt assume automatically that i was a that. Funny story was i was walking my dog in the park, we had a German Shepherd who got hit by a car and lost a leg and this old guy walked up to me and pointed at my German Shepherd and said was that and i e d . I said what . He said did she lose her leg from one of the i e ds in iraq and i said idd, no, she is not a retired military working dog and i realize more people have assumed my dog is a combat that than me. There is something messed up about that. Brian didnt have to deal with that aspect, he didnt have to it was easier for someone like him to come home and have people look at him and know he was a that and when he keeps his hair cut short, to know that he is a wounded veteran. In the very beginning, he has purple heart license plates and people asking is driving his dads, people didnt know we were still at war. Pretty quickly he was visible as a veteran, visible as a wounded warrior, and if he kept his hair cut short. So we didnt experience the in visibility. But for me, my symptoms of posttraumatic stress faded with in six months which is really normal. When you are in a combat zone being hypervigilant and other possible danger and ready to respond with immediate violence if you are threatens, this is a helpful and adaptive response. It keeps you alive. It is a good way to be. When you come back to america and are driving on the beltway is no longer adaptive to be ready to kill somebody cuts you off in traffic. It becomes maladaptive. Those are nice words. Adaptive and maladaptive. So if those symptoms if you are able to ramp down that dials that hyperresponse back down to normal levels within six months, it is totally normal to take time to come back, to have a more even keel. That happened for me. I still have that about trash in the road and some symptoms but never developed prose posttraumatic stress disorder. It never kicked into that. For brian it did. He had the addition of having experienced a higher level of trauma both physical and psychological and he did develop posttraumatic stress disorder. He also had to struggle with losing his career, losing cognitive function, questioning who he was, if he would never be able to succeed in the world again, and he turned to alcohol a lot as a coping mechanism and the alcohol abuse was definitely very negative aspect of his recovery. The way that i was able to see it later was that every bad thing for him build on every other bad thing and the negative downward spiral so with pt std couldnt sleep, not sleeping hurts your cognitive functions, having worse and cognitive function made him more depressed which made him drink more which made us fight more so it spiraled down worse and worse and we had to find ways to turn that back the other direction but for brian, it took a lot longer than it did for me, both the physical, psychological and cognitive for him was actually six years after his injury before he could read a book cover to cover again. When he was at walter reed one of his case managers said when he was two years post injury it has been 18 months, youll never see further gains. That was the most horrible thing we heard, to be told if he wouldnt get any better. But he did. It just took a lot longer. There were definitely ways, the fact we were both that allow us to help each other more. If we went to walmart and i had a complete meltdown from the awfulness of it, he never judge to me. He would never say what is your problem . Why cant you just make it through the checkout line . You have a full cart of stuff. He never made me be little to me or made me feel like there was something wrong with me for not being able to handle it. That was great. He was a fellow combat that, he understood, he got it and we didnt have to talk about it, i didnt have to explain it. He just understood. And i could do that with him to an extent though not obviouslyi couldnt understand the injury. The downside, the flip side to that is we both had the internal injunction against seeking help. I sometimes wonder if one of us had been a civilian, if the civilian might have cracked earlier and said no, no, we have to go ask for help, we cant do this. It would be interesting. In the book i lay out our parallel paths to recovery. Body would be interesting to lay out a time line and see how that worked. Because the weird part of it is one of my coping mechanisms came to the hypercontrolling. I will manage every aspect of our lives and the canned goods will phase out and everyone will be perfectly organized every moment in time. That was my way of handling the fact that things were in total crisis. When he got better to the point that he could start doing things again it was really hard for me to let go and to let him get better, to let him take over responsibilities, to let him crawl and for me to step back. I had this feeling because like holding a cats cradle and if i let go of one thread everything would fall apart and it was really difficult for me to slowly let go and realize that in fact the world will not burn down if i am not personally responsible for it. I dont know if that was helpful. Thanks for your service. I wanted to go back to the process, the challenge of you writing this book about psc and reliving those Early Experiences and writing about reliving the experiences while also having to actually relive as you write and what are the challenges of writing this book and having to again face a lot of the same memories and experiences . I had a really good outline before i got started. Something, a weird place to begin, i had a really solid outline and i wanted i knew what chapters i wanted and if i couldnt handle something i would just put it aside and work on a different chapter for awhile and then circle back to it. There were definitely things that so hard, i couldnt engage with them right away and i would have to move on and address a different topic and circled back at a later time. That is how i did it and my first book came out so soon after i was in the military and so soon after i got back from iraq that i havent processed anything. I was still i had no empathy for the crappy squad leader i had, i was just mad at her full being crappy. I had no empathy for where she was as a leader in that situation and with this book i waited a lot longer. I waited until brian was further along in his recovery and i had developed this space. Emotional depth to look at the arc of his recovery. If i tried to do it in the middle of it would have been a disaster. I would have just been bad or not able to see it. I needed to have this distance in time and emotional and mental space to be able to seek the hole mark of our journey together. And to have really just been the therapy and cope with things a lot more before engaging with it. I am really glad that i waited before trying to write this one. Thanks. Hy, rachel. How did having kids change or impact Recovery Process for you individually and together . A lot of years i thought we could never have kids because his pds these symptoms could be really bad. There is no way i can in good conscience bring a new born into a house where somebody has fits of rage like this so we waited until he was doing really well and finally okay, now things are good, now we can try this. And then having kids ended up being more challenging than i thought it would be since i waited until i was no longer young. Sometimes i wonder if i were really wealthy i would fund a study on this because i think it would be a cool thing to research but everybody pretty much knows when women are pregnant and give birth and are nursing their brains kick out like tons of boxy towson, this bonding chemical that makes them like their babies and not drown them very often. But apparently when men with live with their partners and are exposed to the newborns their brains do too. It reduces the amount of testosterone in the brain and totally kicks up the amount of autos and in their brain and for me, with brian, he always had a flat and affectless though he had a tendency to have a kind of cold look on his face a lot and once we had kids that changed. When he would look at his son in his face would light up and he was warm and interactive. I dont know if that is brain chemistry or partly just newborns dont judge you. Adult humans, we judge each other even if we love one another, it is not pure love the way it is from children and it felt like being around our kids as babies let him feel soft again, let him feel nurturing and loving in a way that had been closed off to him in a lot of ways. He had a daughter from his first marriage but she was older. These lots each chosen treatments would be fun. Not necessarily by exposing people with severe psd to newborns but nasal spray or something. I think it really helps his recovery it helped me reconnect with feeling tender because i worked really hard to feel tough, and having children reconnected me to those feelings and feeling a greater degree of empathy and also made me feel more empathetic to other military families. When i was in active duty, i had no empathy fur army wives. Some had a sticker that says army wife, i wanted to keep their cars. Nobody shoots at you. I cannot sympathize with you. Once i had kids my husband goes out of town overnight and it sucks to be stuck with them, that really would be hard to do that for all whole year or 15 months or 18 months of for brians parent i developed a lot more empathy for brians mom and what it was like for her to have her son go to war and get wounded. I cant imagine what it was like to see her child that way. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Being asked toserve in iraq myself. I wanted to thank you for giving a voice to our minority segment of the population and i wanted to ask do you have any advice for wouldbe riders, veterans, military females that want to start getting into this topic . The best advice i can give is to write, to write as much as you can, carry on a book, to write when you have an opportunity because there arent enough opportunities to sit down, this vision of having a writers retreat, that may not happen. If you cant get involved and other writers theres an Organization Called veterans writing project, depending on where you why they sent people out to teachins and help facilitate and get a group of underwriters, other veteran writers and teach you how to share your riding with each other and form a community where you can share your riding in a safe space and develop your craft that way. If theres anything i wish i had done it is to do Something Like that sooner. Thank you, good luck. Dramatic your looks awesome. Thank you. What comes across in the book is brians injury and his prognosis and the eventual recovery is somewhat unheard of. He shouldnt have survived, shouldnt be making gains, look at this cat scan, can you believe this guy is walking and talking to, you dont really know what the future holds, i was just wondering, what are your thoughts on where brian might be in a decade . It is true. When the neurosurgeon thought that brian would never be functionally independent, that he would never take care of himself. If he did walk believe he had a walker. My brother who is a physicians assistant said never be an interesting patient and brian is an interesting patient. The doctors would call in other doctors, look at him, he walks and talks, look at his ct scan from iraq, can you believe it . It is a little freakish and weird. Are there any services to help me get further cognitive gains the response is pretty much you should be happy. You are lucky to be alive and lucky to be able to do anything so why do you want to do even better . Just be happy with what you are. There arent a lot of Rehabilitative Services for people who are carry high functioning. That is a gap i dont know how anybody can bridge, theres not a lot of research on it. As for what the future holds, right now things are good. I have very high hopes that the next two decades will be good. If he can keep his p t s d well managed, if he cannot drink too much i think the next week to decades are going to be great ridge beyond that i dont know. The prognosis is not great for people with traumatic brain injuries. The chances of people who have experienced it developing early onset dementia are very high, so that is something we will always have to be concerned about, be aware of the. We dont know if the psd could return. I talked to vietnam vet to symptoms either recur or developed when the iraq war kicked off. Exposure to a new trigger could bring his psc ptsd symptoms that. Their shrapnel in his brain that could shift. They didnt close the hole in his skull. He has a hole in his skull and pretty well protected by muscle but that is still a literal weak spot. Longterm future, 30, 40 years out i have no idea. Might not be the best prognosis but i will stay hopeful and hope with all the unfortunately high numbers of people have come back with traumatic brain injury there will be more research and we can learn more and the dod or va will develop treatments to stave off things like dementia. Thank you. Other questions . Shall we wrap up . We have time for one more. I dont know what time it is. Time for one more than one has questions. Talk more about women have in the military, they seem to have been pretty well neglected over a long period of time from what i read in the newspaper and could you elaborate on any of your experiences or whatever you know along that line . The gentleman had a question about specific challenges women face in the military. Still a lot of challenges that i faced when we first invaded iraq, theyre not being ways for women to urinate with any amount of privacy on long convoys. Those challenges have been overcome. There is the army loves acronyms, the familiar urinary device which is part of the Army Logistics change that allows women to be standing up with a little device they can stick in. Little things like that, i think, are actually great because there were women who were modest enough that they would not drink enough water and get urinary tract infections. The fact that it is in a supply chain, apparently anyone camping is familiar with. Some of those problems have been addressed. The military saw some gaps and worked to address them. When women are integrated into close combat arms unit, those applied personnel needed digital training not affect these things exist but those are out there. A lot of problems women face in the military are not exclusive to women but disproportionately affect women, the most wellknown example is Sexual Assault in the military. The women are small minority in the military. The raw numbers of those experienced in the military may be roughly equivalent between men and women so again