To grab his hard. There are these at the base of the pedal steel there are four captains meant to represent french and spaniards, prisoners of war. He goes off on this rift about how the reminded him of slaves and then its this almost, its almost a stream of conscious rift on the wrongs of africa and the wealth of liverpool and the wealth of virginia and carolina come and slavery creating it all. And i think the ideas interesting that slavery great the wealth of the western world but its almost what about free associating to show the way slavery kind of creates you know, a stream of associations and helps structure consciousness. Whats fascinating about that is, that statue was put up by a committee of some of the best liverpools men and merchants, and they were all slavers, including the slave john bolton who was responsible, who owned the ships that had been seized by the french and pirated in 1804. So in other words the statue that provoked melville to think about slavery in the first place was raised by the man most immediately responsible for bringing the west africans to the americas that would inspire melville years later to write this massive. So theres ways in which that story in itself embodies the presence of slavery in the western consequence. A good place to call it thank you. [applause] that was fun. I could listen to you all might. You made it so much more easier. [inaudible conversations] for more information visit the authors website. Iraq war veteran Kayla Williams is next on booktv. She talks about her and her husband returned from iraq and the major problems they faced we integrating into american society. Kayla williams husband returned home after receiving a serious head injury and both suffered from tts the. This is about 50 minutes. For salami to express our most profound regret for being late. I had an interview run late and then had the fund expense of traveling on the beltway which i think maybe sometimes more stressful than driving and the right because youre not allowed to carry a weapon on the beltway. As my introducer mentioned, i am also a veteran and before i get started i want to take a brief moment to thank all of you for coming. I really appreciate you taking the time to get out before were inundated with snow, have a little bit of fun before we get started. To all the troops and veterans in the room, i want to say welcome home. And to all the military families i want to say thank you for your service as well. Eyed and listed in the army in 2000, and although when you that i read the fine print either stood armies which armies which were picketed him like a big possibility acting. I was assigned to arabic and was studying it at the Defense Language Institute in monterey california, on a 9 11. It was immediately apparent my career would be profoundly different than an otherwise have expected. It was no longer a question of whether that i would go to war simply when and where. Where. I departed initial invasion of iraq as part of the 101st air worn division aerosol. And after spending some time in baghdad going out on combat controls with impotence of placing as a woman soldier i surely wouldnt have needed them. We pushed farther north to model and beyond and i was eventually assigned to an lpo become a listing post observation post on the site of a mountain and was the only female soldier with about seven male soldiers. We moved to the other side of the mountain late and there maybe 20 or 30 men there. Again until the female soldier for several more months of relative isolation. While i was out there i met this tall handsome nco. He was in charge of the observation post side of things. They were proud to call themselves the fire support team. I thought he was funny and handsome, witty, sarcastic smart. But iraq is not romantic but we couldnt exactly start dating couldnt go clubbing or anything like that. Any sort of flirtation we had was very gruff and not at all the type of gentle romantic flirtation that you might imagine here at home. One night on the side of the mountain i confessed to him that i really wanted to get to know him better. He said dont worry, theres plenty of time for that when we get over it wasnt too long after that his convoy was hit and one of the first really coordinated attacks of what later came to be known as the insurgency but in those days we did not yet call it that. We just wanted what the hell was going on. Shrapnel entered his skull 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 no surgery by, as chance would have, the same surgeon who later operate 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, in an email that was full of the type of typos and punctuation and spelling errors that i think a lot of people slip into an email so i just let that go and thought hes being lazy like people are in email and didnt have any sense of what it meant to have the traumatic brain injury. When he said looks like an going to be okay, i just took that at face value. These were the early days of the war, and what wouldnt have not been would be the early days of the war but they were. And the systems and services that returning Wounded Warriors need or really not in place. So when he had recovered to a point at which as the doctors told him he could walk and talk and wipe his own ass he was released from walter reed and sent back to Fort Campbell kentucky, where the 101st is based. He got there about two weeks before the rest of the division got back from the middle east and we started dating the day that my plane landed, figure eight, 2004. So just over a decade ago. Im sure there were signs then of this cognitive and psychological problems, but i whispered distractive by my own reintegration and did not necessarily notice of them. We were busy partying and getting drunk and staying up all night because we had a month of block leave. So in that haiti early time when were just thrilled to be alive and getting drunk a lot didnt notice what was coming. We were very quickly deeply, emotionally involved. Then i started going back to work and i did get up bright and early every morning to go and do pt. I had to go and do my job and train soldiers and get ready to redeploy, get our unit ready to go back overseas. Bryans unit told him to stay home. She was still newly, early enough in his recovery he wasnt allowed to wear headgear because the wound was so fresh with a shot had been and where the shrapnel had entered. Eastland get his head shaved i specially trained people. He had ptsd posttraumatic stress disorder, sabrina he couldnt carry a weapon. He had a profile a special piece of paper in the military if he can do anything, if you cant run for a while. It said he could not carry a weapon. So his leadership said, well, you cant wear headgear you cant carry a weapon you are too screwed up to do your job and your freaking out all the new guys because youre such a disaster so why did you stay home . This is not the army that i knew we had to show up every morning and people make sure you were where you were supposed to be. I was surprised that nobody was checking up on him. But they told him to stay home. As he lost his identity as a leader of soldiers, he lost his job, 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. He was not cognitively able to pay his bills or take care of himself, manages own life, and he was trying to self medicate. The profound psychological panic he was feeling with jack and champion, 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 as we all the time how and have to be honest looking back sometimes im still not sure. But with a lot of patience and commitments and love, we stayed together, we got married. He did heal and weve 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 im very honest about the worst parts of that recovery. Some of the terms are making a little trick of the people not want to buy it because they are focused on my honesty about those really bad stages, but for me this is a story of hope, healing, recovery in 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 wounds to be the man that he is today, a 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 messages that are really want to get out and that im convinced that anyone can read this book will absorb is that veterans are not a broken. I see this kind of taking root in the popular media narrative that veterans are unemployed, suicidal, homicidal, homeless, that were just really screwed up. And for many veterans though 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 there is a new normal in which we can still be contribute in 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 that caregivers are not saints. Ive gotten this kind of sense that people believe that those of us who choose to stand by Wounded Warriors, that we are perfect, that we do no wrong that we stand lovingly by our men, or women as the case baby, and thats not true. I didnt always do a good job. I get angry. Youre not supposed to get angry at a hero. You are not supposed to lose your temper as somebody who got blown up serving his country. But when things are horrible im a human being and i had a lot of those feelings that are not always proud of, and it didnt always handle things well. One time when i was really really angry at how badly he was managing our lives together how goes missing appointments and couldnt keep track of anything and things were just awful and i didnt have the ability to say any of that to him to say to him, im afraid i can never have children because you are so screwed up. I couldnt tell in any of those things i was really angry that. One day he was sitting there holding a refrigerator open critic we wanted to beat holding it open, and open and open. And i lost it and started kicking him in the shin asking him why he hated the environment. Because that makes sense. I wasnt even pregnant either way. So i try to be very honest about the fact that i am a person at that although i did stick with my husband through some really difficult times im not a saint. I did not nail across to myself and drag it around with it. Im a human being and have my own foibles. I also want to make sure that people know that there are resources out there to help. If you or a loved one are struggling you can call the Veterans Crisis line at 8273 talk and press one for immediate assistance 24 hours a day. If your spouse is struggling with ptsd and becoming violent 800273talk but if youre looking for a way to serve veterans are looking for resources in your local community, you can use National Resources directory which is online and has a vast compilation of resources that are available. If your military Family Member you can look them up on lines offer whatever resources they have available to help military families. I was told in us both to talk for too long. Im supposed to be because opportunity to ask questions. So i will type first tried to make a lot of ways of able you can connect with me, with the book, with my story in some kind of fun ways so you can follow me on twitter. You can find me or the book on facebook. You can go to my website and you can look me up on spotify and hit a playlist that i develop to go with this book so you can hear the music that i was listening to as this is going on, if that might be a different way for you to connect. Im happy to open up for question but let me warn you if you do not ask questions, my book club can tell you im very good at talking so i will continue to run off at the mouth about things that interest me. So thank you again for coming. Please come up and ask questions that you dont start doing that, again, im going to talk about what i think is interesting or read sections from the book. Notetakers, all right. Im going to grab my copy somebody is coming. Please, no. Make her stop. I dont even know how long i talked. I tried to squeeze 30 minutes into i showed up late, so let me make it fast. That was great. Im a reader of doonesbury comic strip, by garry trudeau. And im wondering if he ever contacted you . Because i keep thinking about it while you were talking, and its about characters that kind of did what you did. I love his strips as well. I think its been a great job bringing attention to military sexual trauma as well, which is a topic a lot of people dont want to talk about. He has a character that sustained a traumatic brain injury as well. We were in touch, this book a month into because of that i sent him a copy of the new one just last weeks im hoping that he enjoyed it. Thank you. I just wanted to say first of all that are loved your first book i read it at a really important time of my life and it just can motivate me to get off my butt and do things in the world. So thank you for that. He also said something really that i would love to talk more about, but the idea of military and veterans being broken. I will confess as a civilian i know that there is a civilian military divide and i want to breach it in with a dont want to do it in a patronizing way. However, accidentally patronizing. So you say utah cluster of a tv frame free reign. Like how shall we bridge this divide . Its a tough question i think a lot of People Struggle with. I read a great piece on why the other day that really spoke to me with the authors said two civilians, quit saying you cant understand it because we go to movies and 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 tried to put our minds into situations that we cant connect with on a regular basis. Basis. So when he talked with better venues i just cant imagine what you must of been through that increases the divide. Try to imagine try to put yourself in their books, mine of course or others. Read blogs the one line. There are a lot of voices out there, a growing number of voices, and tried to connect with what people are saying. Theres some exciting fiction being written now as well. When you have friends who are veterans come be willing to listen. Dont ask them if theyve ever killed anyone. Kind of frowned upon, consider tacky in a military community. Just let them know youre there and youre willing to listen. One of the things i encourage people to do in those situations, a lot of veterans struggle with ptsd, at least my husband, they have hard time with eye contact. But go do something. Sitting around and drinking, really bad coping mechanisms. Instead of saying to want to grab a beer and talk about this, the want to go for a hike and talk about this . Or some other type of activity where somebody can walk with you and share their stories but without the pressure of having to stare directly at your eyes and without having the temptation of overindulging in alcohol. Thank you. Thank you for writing your book and come to talk to us. I was in kentucky at the time the war started and i was a reporter and talk to a bunch of people from Fort Campbell. Im wondering if some the things we wrote about early on were some the worst case examples on the military not doing a good enough job Getting Mental Health treatment to people who needed it. Im thinking of fort bragg Domestic Violence sort of rash were people came out and they were afraid to seek help because they might be blacklisted. Wondering if all these years later it has been changed to . Because my husband was injured early in the war in october 2003, and from what ive heard when i was writing this book, i tracked down his neurosurgeon and his nurse one of the other provided and when i tracked down his narrow psychologist instead what happened, how did this happen, how did he slip through the cracks and he said Fort Campbell was one of the worst places for people with tbi to go in those early days. So for me and for brian one of the things that was really helpful as part of a recovery was to call attention to the gaps in services that we saw, and to tell our stories and attempt to make things better for troops continuing to come home after us. And do that as part of a larger community, to do that part of organizations of other veterans who working together for positive change. Things have changed. Bryan was sent back to his artillery battery for reasons completely gone by coverage. They had medical Holding Companies at the time. He shouldve 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 have Wounded Warriors and provide them with squad leaders platoon sergeants and case managers who knew how to better help them navigate assistance and go through them, medical evaluation board, physical process more smoother to whether or not that its always worked as was planned still remains to be seen but it made a lot of efforts to improve things. Its an ongoing struggle to convince troops and veterans even that its okay to seek help. Part of that is just military ethos. When you grew up in a culture that tells you suck it up and drive on paint is just weakness leaving the body theres plenty of time to sleep when youre dead, its really hard to put all of 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. The impression i get as an outside is some groups faced bigger challenges than others. I came from military intelligence, and out of concerns that people would not seek help because they didnt want to lose their clearances, now you dont have to report seeking psychological help for combat related trauma on the security clearance paperwork. I just redid my and its true. I checked it. Its in there. You dont have to report. Ive been led to believe that pilots, if theyre seeking Mental Health care cant fly and that is a huge barrier for them in terms of seeking help. Its not mike revealed. I cant say that for sure but thats what ive heard anecdotally. Certain groups may have a bigger challenges to overcome when it comes to seeking help. I think we will need more Senior Leaders who are willing to stand up and said i thought hell. Weve got a few examples, those are fantastic. We need more than. And we need more veterans and troops who are willing to say heres what i did that helps make it better. Part of the reason i told our story, and i have other friends have been part of campaigns getting out there and saying heres how i was struggling, is what i did and heres how im doing better. To help encourage people to know there are multiple avenues. Thats the other message i want to get out. If you bought to speak and you really hated the flavor, you wouldnt give up on brushing your teeth forever. You would buy a new flavor, a new brand. So if you tried therapy and you dont click with your therapist, dont give up on Mental Health care. Like try a new therapist. It can take a while to find somebody that you really click with. It can be challenging to find a good environment. You may have to try more than once. If the Va Medical Center isnt working, try a veteran center. If that isnt working, there are a lot of avenues to seek out. One of them down the road will work for you. You can find a new normal where you experience not just ptsd but posttraumatic growth. I firmly believe that it is only because i saw horrible things and experienced things that im 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 ive seen them at their worst. Its given me a better capacity to appreciate them at their best. You are staring at me because you the question or you want me to stop talking . I have a question. Can you talk about the process of writing this book . You describe so vividly and with a lot of dialogue, events that were cleared painful going back over a decade. Were you keeping notes . You have a photographic memory . Ive always been a journal or. I write a lot of journal entries and always have been and also when i decided to write this book, i interviewed people. I was on the bus when brian got her to a good fight people to get their sense of what happened because brians memory considering a little spotty at that event. I interviewed some of our other friends and Family Members that were there with us during this because based on what ive read, human memory is pretty fallible. Testimony is notoriously sketchy. So rather than assuming that had the perfect memory of the past decade, i went out and it did of the people who were there to get their perception of what happened and check it against my own, and tried to use so the combination of my own memories, things that he wrote at the time in interviews with other people to make sure that i had as accurate a picture as possible. Welcome back from yemen. Thanks. I had a question but if you could maybe compare and contrast the difference of transition from your experience with bryant. You guys were doing it at the same time. Unit to german expenses yet you are transitioning or healing. I imagine there were some things the same and something stupid. Im curious, where those gelled and meshed together. We able to provide support to him for things that he could not provide support to you . There are two parallel processes processes. I think i would need to have him here to answer it like accurately. I think, so i struggle with things that he didnt experience. For example, being invisible as a woman veteran. When i came home people asked me if i was allowed to carry a gun because i am a girl. People asked me if i was an infantry which is not authorized under current regulations still know theyre in the process of changing it. When we would all go out in groups to the bar to grab a beer, people would give the guys a free round. Literally the men would get free beers and they all look like veterans with a haircut and a posture, but women we dont need the stereotypical image of what a veteran look like so didnt get my free beer. I think that sense of being invisible and not having my own experience is recognized, made it harder for me. Even when we started spending time with other veterans. I was often the only woman in the room and people would assume i was just a spouse as if spouses they wouldnt assume automatically that i was a veteran. Funny story but once i was walking my dog in the park. We had a German Shepherd who got hit by a car and lost a leg. This old guy walked up to me and pointed at my German Shepherd and said was it an iud . I said what . And he said did she lose her leg from one of those iuds and iraqi . I said ied. No, she is not a retard but to work and talk. I realize more people have listened my dog is a combat veteran in the. Like theres something really messed up about that. So bright did have to deal with that aspect of things. He didnt have it was easy in some ways for him to come home and have him look at him and know to know his every wounded veteran but in a very beginning he had purple heart like to place a people as he was driving his dads car. People did know we were still at war. Pretty quickly he was visible as a veteran, visible as a wounded warrior, if he kept his hair cut short. He didnt experience that invisibility that i did, but for me, my symptoms of posttraumatic stress faded within about six months, which is really normal. When youre in a combat zone being hypervigilant and alert to possible danger and ready to respond with immediate violence if you are threatened this is a helpful and adaptive response but it keeps you on five. Its a good way to be. When you come back to america and your driving on the beltway, its no longer adaptive to be ready to kill somebody who cut you off in traffic. It becomes maladaptive. Does a nice words my therapist taught me. If youre able to dial that down, dial that like hyper response back down to normal levels within about six its totally normal, totally numb for to take time to come back to convey more even keel. That happened to me. I still have some symptoms but i never develop posttraumatic stress disorder. For me it never taken to the. For bryant they did. He had the addition of having experienced a much higher level of trauma, both physically and psychologically. Antigay develop . Guest and it feels like a struggle with losing his career, losing cognitive functions questioning who he was if he would ever be able to succeed in the world again. And he turned to alcohol a lot as a coping mechanism and alcohol abuse was a definitely very negative aspect of his recovery. The way i was able to see it later was that every bad thing for him build on every other bad thing. Negative downward spiral. So with ptsd he couldnt sleep not sleeping hurts your cognitive function. Having worsening cognitive function they do more to press which made him drink more made him drink or which may despite more. It just spiraled down worse and worse and worse. Where to find ways to turn that back the other direction later. But for brian it took a lot longer than it did for me both the physical psychological and cognitive. For him it was actually six years after was injured before he could read a book cover to cover again. When we were when you still a walter reed at one point when this case managers said when he was two years post injury oh its been more than 18 months, you will never see further gains. That was the most horrible thing we heard to be told that he wouldnt get any better. But he did. It just took a lot longer. There were ways, the fact were both veterans allowed us to help each other more. If we went to walmart and i had a complete meltdown from the awfulness of it he never judged me. He never what they like what is your problem . Why cant you just make it through the checkout line . You have a full cart of stuff. He never belittled me or like theres something wrong with me for not being able to handle it. That was great but because he was a fellow combat veteran he just understood, he got it and we didnt have to talk about. I did have to explain it. He just understood. And i could do that with him to an extent, though not obviously, i couldnt understand the injury. The downside, the flipside to that is that we both had the internal injunction against seeking help. I sometimes wonder if one of us had been a civilian if it wouldve been easier, if the civilian might have cracked earlier and said like no, no. , we had to go ask for help. We cant do this. I think it would be interesting in the book i think i lay out our parallel path to recovery. It would be interesting to lay out a timeline and see how that worked. It would be a neat thing to do because the other weird part of it, one of my coping mechanisms tend to be hyper controlling. Like i will manage every aspect of our lives and all the candidates will face out and everything will be perfectly organized at every moment in time. That was my way of handling the fact that things were in total crisis. And when he got better to the point 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 grow. And for me to step back. I had this feeling like i was holding a cats cradle and if i let go of one thread everything would fall apart, and it was really, really difficult for me to slowly, like let go and realize that, in fact the world will not burn down if im not personally responsible for it. I dont know if that was helpful. Yes, thank you so much. First, thanks for your service. But i just want to go back to the process, you know in the challenges of what you sort of, writing this book about ptsd and reliving your own expenses and writing about the Living Expenses while also having to actually we live as you write. Sort of what are the challenges of writing this book answered having to again face a lot of the same memories and experiences. So, i had a really good outline before i got started. That probably sounds like a weird place to begin but i had a really solid outline and actually knew like what chapters i wanted. If i couldnt handle something i would just put it aside and work on a different chapter for a while and then circle back to. So there were things that were so hard i couldnt engage with them right away and i would have to move on and address a different topic and then circle back at a later time. So thats really how i did it. My first book came out so soon after i was in the military, and so soon after i got back from iraq that they hadnt processed anything. I was still i had no empathy for like the really crappy squad leader i had. I was just mad at her for 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 but i waited until brian was further along in his recovery, and i had developed space, Emotional Depth to look at the arc of his recovery. If i try to get in the middle of it it wouldve been a disaster. I just would have been mad or not able to see it. I needed to have this distance in time and like emotional and mental space to be able to see the whole arc of our journey together. And to have really just been to therapy and copes with things a lot more before engaging with the. Im really glad i waited before trying to write this one. How did having kids change or impact the whole Recovery Process . So, there were a lot of years when i thought we could never have kids, because his ptsd symptoms could be really bad. I thought theres no way i could in good conscience bring in new born into a house with somebody has fits of rage like this. So we waited until he was doing really well, and then finally, okay, nothing is a good now we can try this. And then having kids ended up being more challenging than i thought it would be since i waited and i was no longer young. But sometimes i actually wonder if i were really wealthy i would fund a study on this because i think would be a really cool thing for somebody research but Everybody Knows that when women are pregnant and when they give birth and when theyre nursing, the brains kcal nine tons of oxytocin, this bonding chemical that makes them like their babies and not drown them very often. Apparently when men live with their partners and are exposed to the newborns their brains do too. It reduces the amount of testosterone in the brain and kicks at the amount of oxytocin in their brains. And for me brian, he always had called a flattened aspects of a tendency to have a kind of cold look on his face a lot of. Once we had kids, like that changed. When he would look at his son his face would light up and he was warm and interactive. I dont know if that is brain chemistry or partly just that, like the newborns dont judge you. Like that old humans, we judge each other. Even if we love one another we still, its not a pure love the way it is from children. I felt like being around our kids as babies like 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 that was like more fraught and she was older. I would love to see some studies to oxytocin treatment for ptsd. May be a nasal spray or something. I think it really helped his recovery. It helped me reconnect with the dealing feeling tainted because i worked really hard to feel tough, and having children reconnected me to those feelings and feeling a greater degree of empathy but it also made me feel more empathetic towards other military families. When i was in active duty soldier, i had no empathy for army wives. Like some of them have this sticker on the car this is army wife, toughest job in the army. I wanted to keep her car. I cannot empathize with you. Once i had kids, my husband was out of town overnight, it sucks to be alone. That really would be hard to do that for a whole year or 50 months or 18 months. And also like brians parents, i developed a lot more to the for brians mom what it mustve been like for her to have her son go to war and then get wounded. Like i cant imagine what its like to see your child that way. Thank you. Being active duty and assert in iraq myself i just want to personally thank you for giving a voice to a minority segment of the population but i just wanted to ask if you have any advice for any would be writers veterans, military females that want to start getting in its . The best advice i can give is to write as much as you can all the time. Write whenever you have the opportunity to there are not enough opportunity to sit down and have like the whole vision of having a writers retreat that may not happen to just write all the time. If he can get involved with other writers. Doesnt or position called the veterans writing project and keeping on where you are facing people out to teach sessions and help facilitate. They can help you get a group of other writers, other veteran riders and teach you how to share your writing with each other and evaluate and you can form a community where you can show your writing in a safe space and help develop your craft that would. If theres anything i wish i had done is to do Something Like that sooner. Good luck. Your manicure looks awesome by the way. Thank you spent what comes across in the book is that brians injury and his prognosis and his eventual recovery is somewhat unheard unheard of from the doctor facing the g20 he shouldnt have survived, he should be making the gains. Like look at the cat scan can you believe this guy is walking and talking . You also say in the book that you dont really know what the future will hold for your family. And i was just wondering like what your thoughts are on where brian might be a decade or so . Its true when the nurse or 10 thought that brian would never be functional independent nursery in, they would never have to take care of himself thought he might never walk again, might be confined to wheelchairs if he did walk him believe he would have a walker. My brother was a physicians assistant and want to be an interesting patient, and bright is an interesting patient governor beebe gofer fall of apartment the doctors were calling other doctors and like look at him, look, he walks and talks and look at his ct scan from iraq. Can you believe this . Thats a little freakish and weird. It made it tougher because when brian seeks help, when he says are there any services to help me get a further cognitive gains, the response he gets is pretty much like you should just be happy. Youre lucky to be alive and you are lucky to able to do anything. So wide you want to do even better . Just be happy with what you are. There arent and lot of Rehabilitative Services for people who are very high functioning. That is a gap that i dont know how anybody can bridge get. Theres not even a lot of research on it. Asked what the future holds, right now things are good and i have very high hopes that the next two decades will be good if you can keep his ptsd well managed, if he cannot drink too much i think the next two decades are probably going to be great. Beyond that i dont know. The prognosis is not a great for people with traumatic brain injuries. The chances of people have experienced tbi is developing early onset dementia are very high, and so that is something that we will always have to be concerned about, be aware. We dont know if the ptsd could return. Ive talked to veterans whose symptoms either recurve or developed when the iraq war came back. So exposure to a new trigger could bring his ptsd symptoms back in full raging force at any point. Theres still shrapnel in his brain. It could be shipped. We dont know. They didnt close the hole in his skull. He still has a hole in his skull and pretty well protected by muscle but that is still a literal weak spot. So long term future 30 40 years out, i have no idea. It might not be the best prognosis but im going to stay hopeful and hope that with all of the unfortunately high numbers of people that have come back with traumatic brain injuries that they there will be more research and we can learn more and maybe the dod or va would develop treatments that can help stave off things like dementia. Other questions . Shall we wrap up . We have time for at least one more. Yes, sir. If you could talk more about the problems 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 of whatever you know along that line . The gentleman had a question about the specific challenges that women face in the military. So a lot of the challenges that i faced when the first invaded iraq, like they are not being good ways for women to urinate with any amount of privacy on long convoys. Some of those challenges have been overcome. Theres just called the flood because the army les akram which stands for the the millionaire device which is part of the Army Logistics chain that allows women to peace to end up with a little device they can stick in. So Little Things like that i think is actually great because there were women who were modest enough that they would not drink enough water and then get urinary tract infection. So the fact that now its in the supply chain that women can get the fud which barely anyone has done a lot of camping is the money with. So some of those problems have been addressed. The military saw some gaps and it worked to address them. When women are integrated into close combat arms you know those supply personal may need additional training on the fact of these things exist. Those are out there. A lot of the problems that women face in the military are not exclusive to women, but disproportionately affect women. So the most probably wellknown example is Sexual Assault in the military your women experts Sexual Assault admitted at much higher rates than men, but because women are such a small minority in the military the raw numbers of those who expensed Sexual Harassment or assault in the military may be roughly equivalent between men and women. So again thats not the problem disproportionate but not exclusively affects women. The military is struggling as hard as College Campuses are right now to figure what to do about that, and how to make a dent in it, how to encourage reporting, increased rates of successful prosecution and drive down obviously the initial incidence of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment as well. Its kind of the 64 million question in my since. The military draws its members from society, and we see with with the steubenville rape case for example, this is not a problem that is exclusive to the military, but i do find it a concern that if you compare rates of nonSexual Assault, murder and other Violent Crimes within the military to those in a comparable civilian population, rates of other crime in the military are much lower, just a very small fraction. So if the rate of Sexual Assaults is the same as essence of an society it still shows that something is wrong. Something is not working if the rate of that particular type of assault has not been driven down the same amount that other types of assault have been driven down within the military community. If i knew how to solve that trust me i would. I dont. I hope that in the long run opening close combat