Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion 20141101

During this event. Is 90 minutes. Good afternoon. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us for this panel, the long shadow of war, veterans experiences on the home front. Our host and moderator will be joining us momentarily and we thought we would go ahead and get started in the meantime. I think we will go ahead and introduce ourselves one by one as we go along. My name is Kenneth Macleish and i teach at and the university. My research and is a subject of my book making war at fort hood, military uncertainty making war at fort hood life and uncertainty in a military community is about how people experience war and military institutions in their daily lives. Im interested in the way people experience war as something that is normal and routine and highly organized even as it is also incredibly intense, overwhelming and traumatic. My research and writing a mostly based on time that i spent at fort hood, an army base in central texas. It is one of the largest and busiest military installations in the world and one of the most centrally important u. S. Military installations in afghanistan. Is a place where for is that reason, it is close to everyday life. Through a combination of things like lanky and repeated deployments that can last for 12 months, 15 months or longer than that, often with a year or far less time in between all sorts of conditions people returned home from work with that affect their lives and relationships, where these basic structural features of how war is waged and organize, turned out to have very intimate and personal presences in peoples everyday lives and that was the subject of my work and my investigation which the book and agrees to illustrate. I am excited to be sharing this panel with such insightful and important fellow chroniclers of American Military experience and it is a thrilled to be here with you both and this is a realm of experience for people in the armed services, people who share their lives and their communities and experiences but also for all of us for whom war and the military, all of us as civilians for whom war and the military is a major significant abiding preoccupation. This realm of experience of military life and war more generally is something that is on the one hand kind of overburdened with cliches and assumptions and narratives that sort of tell us what we think we already know about the war and on the other hand paradoxically it is also something people tend to insist can never be understood except by people who were there to experience it. This weird kind of tension between on the one hand sort of assuming theres so much we can take for granted about what war is and what it consists of and on the other hand this insistence of not being able to understand which sometimes can turn into a refusal to try to understand. These two things are major reasons i feel it is important to try to tell stories about war and military life that those unsettle our assumptions and also try to speak across this perceived dividing experience and understanding. And so to that end one of the things that i really struck me in my work and that tried to talk about in my book where the ways that war is not necessarily limited to the people and places and times and actions we often associate most directly with that. Is not always terribly event for necessarily that conclusive. In ways we expect it to be especially if these wars in iraq and afghanistan which are notable for theyre extremely prolonged character and unconventional and asymmetric nature. And like i said, this is something that emerged from my concern and interest in the ways that war finds its way into really intimate and personal aspects of the blacks lives, that is the subject of the excerpt i wanted to share with you all and i will add one additional thing which is an expression of thanks and gratitude for the folks i spent time with and made their lives and stories available to meet and made it possible to write this book. The title of this section is tears of the mensa. The departure and return of deployments are called manifest. There is a bureaucratic rollcall combined with prolonged than devastating farewell or a quick and joyful reunion. They had the significance in military communities that as intensity that defines the collective experience that absence, anxiety, separation and attachment and the faith in humanity and war apparatus and the painful human frailties of the people, dennis. People wanted to know if i had gone they wanted to make sure i did go. A lot of the time manifests our health in june of which there are several in fort hood. The gym is such a familiar scene of eminent endangerment that its bleachers and burn walls often provide the setting for military licensure that appear in the times. It seems both on an appropriate that this ritual of the partition be set in a place laden with useful associations of sex, competition, discipline, accumulation and burgeoning bodily prowess. They look like normal good size high school ymca gyms with patriotic slogans and icons, soaring eagles, geometric designs of stars and stripes on their cinderblock walls about this act bleachers the day do so much duty for manifest the there are signs hanging up permanently, banners with big black letters messages specific to the occasion but serving as constant reminders to soldiers playing basketball or lifting weights. Above the door is the parking lot, come home safe. On the opposite wall the first thing you see when you enter, welcome home. These rooms are configured for coming from and going to of war. For whatever reason this manifest is out bourse in the parking lot on battalion avenue. There is a long line of Battalion Headquarters buildings stretching a mile or more to this part of the post and like all the others this one is square, bland and can inside and out. Not much to it but a long linoleum corridor, reception desk and a handful offices and the conference room. The walls are mostly bare. In front commit to this is street and behind a long stretch of parking lot filling with cars and a barracks and nick store in narrow eat lean on the script warehouse where and a couple of our soldiers will line up to receive their weapons. Several hundred soldiers, a good part of the Field Artillery battalion. Some others are deploying the next day and a smaller number of gone ahead. Field artillery is or was at the time of this writing the only combat arms branch position open to women but still the soldiers are mostly men. An acquaintance, danielle, invited me. Her husband is a senior and ceo who has already served two tool is. Danielle, tall, broad shoulders and with the disposition at once cheery and forceful has spotted me in the parking lot of volunteer organization where we spent time a few weeks previous, told me the unit was deploying and shepherd me along to a series of events leading to their departure. There was a massive briefing in the auditorium with power point slides outlining a soldiers family members, tedious but vital details of deployment, where the soldiers would be, when they could and couldnt be reached, who to contact with questions and problems and very limited circumstances that would merit emergency meetings. The army was taking these folders to iraq and would not bring them back until was done with them. The stephen was a family day, a Company Picnic for the entire brigade that gene described as mandatory. There was barbecued donated by a host of chefs from all over texas served under 10s on d. A. Weibring airfield walked over by the facade of the stadium at the giant water tower. If there was a football tournament with teams deploying dep battalions and speeches and award presentations and impromptu line dancing to copperhead road. And manifesting contrast isnt about getting ready or anything, just saying goodbye. The soldiers will gather, wait, a tinge to a few last duties and with little fanfare assemble information and aboard the plane white school buses that will carry them across the poster Robert Gray Army airfield where they will board a plane to kuwait and convoy to baghdad. The wise and sheldon and friends and parents of many of these soldiers will gather and wait with them and has an uneasy last couple of hours before a sudden and painful good bye. They will watch the buses depart and they themselves will disburse. Around 10 00 a. M. Soldiers showed up in uniform coating massive bags that they will carry with them, even bigger doubles the get them point thailand lowered into a plane. Soldiers cluster in groups and stand in line across the parking lot, the loading dock next door, waiting on squads of platoon leaders, comrades with clipboards to check their names off one or another list. A pass in and out the back door of the hq building that opens onto mr. Bose sidewalks and parking lot where the buses will pull up before long. The soldiers settle all over the lawn joined by wives and kids and parents and siblings and friends. Field and drab olive and crew cuts interspersed with blue jeans, tshirts, sneakers, bare limbs, long hair, two liberals in matching super grocers alternate between messy bights of chocolate cupcakes and clinging to their dad, a teenage boy told the leash of a pit bull copy with stores on its back. The crowd grows and spills across the lawn around the front of the building. It is a summer day in texas mostly overcast but still hot and people kraut into the shade. Soldiers without family members to see them off sit in groups by themselves. Families sprawled in multigenerational clusters, little kids run around playing tag. Couples will beat the other as closely as they can. It is an exercise in waiting, everyone stretching these last couple hours. As i skirt the edges of the crowd scenes from the outside surprisingly upbeat, not much different from the family day the week before, soldiers together with soldiers and families, Families Together with families. The odd mix of tedious official obligations and the pleasure of socializing the attention of the living deployment surprisingly not culpable or at least not to me. Daniel introduces me to the wives of the others, a couple officers, battalion commander, for many of them this is their third deployment. One of these ladies married to n e 5 and now and early 30s sells a lot of young couples wont make it. Another of the women justice to the crowd of soldiers and points out the most the patch and a right shoulder indicating they have not deployed before. Everyone has been told to expect this deployment to last 15 months and those they will end of coming home in 12 is preemptive extension a whole year plus another season weighs on everyones mind. The sergeants wife says to me that is how you get through. And acquaintance tells me i already cried once. At home she means, in private. When we talked a few months earlier she told me she preferred to stay away from the manifest, she and her husband and kids and want to be around other peoples negativity and crying or fighting or recriminations when they were trying to save their own good buys. People who had been through it before had done their talk at home, he said. May be that accounts for the sense of relative calm. Earlier this morning she read the notes from Midland High School age kids to their dad and she passed them for him to discover later. She was proud of them. They are old enough to express themselves really well now. Redeye quoted salt 31 in her note. Angels will watch over you. Time passes run as wikipedia and even fully. After a while a couple dozen soldiers are called into formation, then a couple dozen more and then they dispersed again. Two buses arrived. They look innocuous but they are icons of despair. Daniel jokes the Family Readiness group should have a fundraiser were wives could take money for a chance to smash the hell out of one of those buses. The this is if you fee from the curb with their engines of. Theres another formation and another. Everyone keeps telling me to just wait. I will see a lot of crying any minute. They said this a lot of the past couple days and now all morning long. Wait a few minutes, that is when all starts. Theres a feeling between scorn bay, the women, brought me here to see the crime i suppose. Families and little kids continue to mill around and get some signal that i missed the soldiers begin to shoulder their packs and weapons and move toward the buses. Little kids have comprehending please to not buy their dads and put back down. A couple twists into final agonizing clenches and hold on for dear life for a minute. One by one this shoulders pull themselves away from wives and kids, arms stretched out, hands gripped, and released. The soldiers walk across the asphalt and for a long orderly line around the side of the bus and file along. I look for the crime. Theres a little here and there. It wont the into the buses pulled away. Minutes dragged on as the soldiers board. Nothing about this melodrama happens cleanly or quickly or particularly dramatically. Some womenup to the line to still one last embrace. One couple lingers Holding Hands awkwardly to the window of the buzz. Theres a constant rack of activity, squats and platoons summoned, shouted questions, names called off, jokes. Soldiers are not crying, not that i can see. Some smiling, most of the little dazed, intense but they are with each other now on the other side of the strip of payment and on the sidewalk the families and wives and girlfriends are with each other. The obligations and boundaries that for the previous couple hours could be for gun and forgotten have snapped cleanly back into place producing a kind of intimate social alchemy. One moment the man in the ac belongs only to the people who have come to see him to their braces and smile and last words and the next moment he belongs only to the army. Again without preamble the buses drive down the parking lot. The soldiers are now deployed. I look around for the deluge of tears, afraid to look and doing it anyway. I see whiskey sendais, women hugging each other, hugging kids and dads and brothers and inlaws the there is no spectacle and the crowd has thinned. Many of them are already gone. On the one hand it seems like a classically limited moment but for everyone who didnt get on the buses theres no passage to the other side, no clear ending. There are signs, protocols, all that free sure but no flood of tears, no closure. Does the closure coming 12 months or 15 when the soldiers return . When they will be headed out again after a scant 12 months at home . Even that precious and far off time filled with long days of work and weekends in the field . There is no closure. Only whatever quantity and he is in persisting with the life with normalcy. In the face of the burden of fear, anxiety and absence that now lies the for the wives, girlfriends, parents, children and even in different form the soldiers themselves, instead of closure there is the daily work of not coming and done. Thanks. [applause] thank you all for coming. I am a journalist and author of the book the dean lind camp, demon camp a soldiers exorcism. My book follows one veterans homecoming from afghanistan and the spent six years with him following him around trying to make sense of his life. He got back home, divorced, broke, he had nowhere to go, no family who were supportive of him or willing to understand circumstances he had been through and started having terrible nightmares about his dead friends coming back in his bedroom at night. He said he was followed a round by a figure called the black think. What brought me to this soldier whose name was Kayla Daniels started with an article i read about a man named sergeant rand who basically killed an iraqi and they were talking, at least that is what he was telling his sister in stories about this goes so i was interested in this dialogue that was happening and trying to understand traumatic memory and if we think of a traumatic memory as sort of one that cant be fully familiar to the mind that happens over and over again and follows you and haunts you and coming from a path that is difficult and painful than what does that mean to still inhabit the present when it has fully been taken over by the past . And refusal to understand is an important word that i kept running into over and over again when i was reading about pete diaz they and its history and the history of our refusal to accept many things, capacity for violence, capacity for evil, willingness to understand difficult circumstances, the fact that war can be purposeless at times, the symbolic value and glory we give to it might not be might not fully followthrough for homecoming always. Had to make sense of that discrepancy. It was interesting because he sort of refuse to accept traditional definitions of posttraumatic stress which is a difficult history to follow when we because the terms are changing year after year so we have constantly revising what is any way. But what is most important is to understand it is a very normal reaction. A very normal part of the human condition and as civilians or society we dont tend to give pete tses that kind of space and so part of my attempt in this book is to sort of close that civilian divide between civilian and soldier and try to in have been someone who is still living in a nightmare and caleb certainly not a representative example necessarily at all, but he is someone that was in afghanistan and came back and wasnt able to fully be part of the world again and one of my main interests became the language we use to make sense of trauma too, the words we use to concealed or cloak meaning, language, and what happens, and so it is a narrative that didnt work for this guy. He went to try to find other narrative so it is sort of his constant attempt to redefine what was happening to him. I was going to read a quick section to start. I might read another one. If there is time. So this is the first time ive met caleb. Kayla told me a story about his exwife allison. While he was the ploy dog got pregnant and miscarried, the miss kerri puppies were in a pile on the floor and allison had to call him in iraq to ask what to do. He told her to put the dead dogs in the trash but she wouldnt do it. When he got home he found them everywhere, rotten and solid. That is what i had to come home to, he said. We were at a Mexican Restaurant industry lot outside atlanta eating cheese fetus and drinking coke out of plastic cups. He put a napkin to his mouth and his hands folded into its curves. It was clean against his skin. The armys nick name, no matter what the conditions after combat the helmet was on his life for days in the middle east and he. His hair was always immaculate, brushed and molded finally with his favorite joke. He served in directly to months, afghanistan four years. He was a machine gunner for the 160th special Operations Aviation regiment, one of the armys most of these trained units. On june 28, 2005, his entire aviation crew, eight men died in 8 chinook helicopter crashed on a rescue mission in eastern afghanistan. Wasnt on the flight because his superior kicked him off for no other reason than he wanted to fly that day. He was at the base listening to the radio when the chopper was gunned down and everyone burned alive. When i asked about his missions he said he didnt want to talk about special forces or saddam hussein, didnt want to talk about his buddies or how he had duck take it back on, brains and all or about the cat he ate off of the side of the road. He wanted to talk about the day his entire unit died. He heard their falling burning voices from a desk in an anteroom at headquarters. His exwife called him a murderer when he took out the trash. He wanted to talk about how it was sold there every day, the blood in his mouth, the screening, his dead bodies. You wanted to talk about after the war. When i got home three years ago, he said, i had this thing visit me in the middle of the may. You could hear it coming down the hallway. He hunched his shoulders and started walking in place. A few customers turned their heads. This thing, he told me, a big dark figure, opened my door. It was so tall it had to lean down to get its head through ended the voice it said i will kill you if you proceed to. Sounded like it wanted an answer back from me and i started laughing at this thing saying you have to be kidding me. The customer crossed from us got up to leave and spit into an empty cup. It came back every night. One time i was sitting in my room and walked in, shut the door and came after me. It starts to choke me, physically joking. My dead body comes in and wrestles it off of me. The kid wasnt stronger so it chokes him too. He missed taking punishment for me. I watching this and freaking out. Punishment for what, i asked . Killing, he said, and living. The airconditioner ground in the air, and he turned sideways and lead against the wall and rested his legs on the bose. I asked if he had ever gone to the va for help and he waited in line for two days and came home shooting pain killers. 140 i dead every week because of self like this and the va doesnt do anything. I got an article lot of my purse had been carrying around about 26yearold Sergeant Brian rand paul shot himself after being followed night after night by the ghost of the iraqi man he killed. Brian had been stationed at a checkpoint in volusia with his buddy, crisp. The guys were bored, not much happening that day until a white van started coming up the road with some picking up speed. Brian turns to chris and asked what he thought they should do. Chris replied shoot him, i guess. So brian shot him. The dead iraqi man visited brian north carolina, came mostly at night, joked brian while he slept, demanded brian apologize for the killings and when brian set i am sorry, the dead man wouldnt listen. He said you need to join me. Kenna brendel articles lily, quintin into a ball and threw it at me. This is the same thing that visited me, he said. Everything from how it is talking to him to his talking to himself. He needs to die. The further storythousands of times and no different from mine. Hallucinations are part of p t s d, i said. Each of from one side of his mouth to the other and you wave to the waitress. I know this will sound crazy to you, he said, leaning close to my face that this isnt pt s d. I was a little bit shocked by his story and wasnt expecting him to sort of he didnt tell me he believed psc was as he reveals to me caused by demons instead of anything going on in the brain or psychology. So i followed him to a town called portal,. And he was starting a program where he was trying to bring veterans through deliverance or exorcisms to try to get their demons out from the war and i hung out there for a while and it was interesting to look at how it was helping to caleb and others and looking at sort of how some of the language was for psychology and religion, trauma contracture, they talked about demons transferring from one person to the other hand so in the book end up seeing myself in this group and trying to get as close as i can to calebs psychology. A lot of that is free of academic language. It reads like a novel, very descriptive. A lot of dialogue between caleb and i where we talk about his belief system and how he is coming to terms with his past and in the end he continues to fight and sort of quick solution that makes sense though he just continues to fight these apparitions every day. I will stop there. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you business a two tough acts to follow. To any Service Members are veterans in the room, welcome home and to any military family members thank you for your service. My name is kayla williams. I enlisted in the army in 2000. It didnt seem terribly likely in that year that i would go to war. I read the fine print in the justin armies went to war but didnt seem very likely that i would go to war. I joined for a lot of reasons like most people. I wanted to serve my country but i was also looking for money to go to graduate school and access to the g i bill. I wanted to give Something Back to the larger community. I had grown up for on food stamps off and on so i felt the country that invested in me and i wanted to repay that. I was also looking to get out of the rut that i had carefully dug for myself. I wanted a challenge and i was looking to develop some emotional self control and i thought i could get that in basic training because i cry network a few times, didnt help you with professional success. A drill sergeant screaming in my face might help me to maintain my bearings. Network, by the way. I chose to become a linguist. I thought was cool that the military was willing to pay me to learn a Foreign Language instead of me paying someone to teach me one. Was random computeraided generated numbers i was assigned arabic as opposed to a korean or chinese and that was at the Defense Language Institute on 9 11. Was immediately apparent my military career was going to be different than i otherwise imagined. No longer a question of whether or not i would go to war, just when and swear. I was assigned to the 100 1st division which was just the road and took part of the initial invasion of iraq into 2003. This was in the ear of you go to war with the army you have. As a woman who by regulation was barred from direct arms jobs leonids the expectation was that i would not necessarily need the same level of protection that might infantry comrades might need. I was not issued plates but we also did not have nearly enough arabic language speakers so i ended up going on combat combat foot patrols with no place. Which was in retrospect the most rewarding thing i did in my military career. I got to see how the infantry did their job and my job i was trained to do so intelligence you call up reports on the Enemy Communications and you may not get any feedback on whether it did any good or with the united difference but going out and translating four infantry men in baghdad, i knew right away i was making a difference. I was able to translate between local people and my fellow soldiers and i could see the medias impact of knee being good at my job or bad end it was very rewarding. It was dangerous and there were some traumatic experiences proud of. We pushed farther north from baghdad to mozilla and beyond. You may have heard of that, things are not going so well and out to sin jar mountain where i lived, got to spend a lot of time with the local people in the middle of nowhere on the side of the mountain, eight person listening post, observation posts and i was the only woman out there for months at a time. We later moved to another site on the same mountain where i was the only woman with 20 or 30 men. At that point with a lot more down time than major combat operations. Tensions rose on people at that point. The brigade i was with had come back from afghanistan lot not long before we turned around and went to iraq, or until they had been to kosovo before that so for some of them was starting to wear on them being away from home and their families, dealing with trauma from afghanistan, we were not talking about that in 2003. When i was out there i met another young soldier, tall, handsome staff sgt, witty and sarcastic, he was angry and a lot of ways, but he as a soldiers soldier, the kind of in ceo that junior enlisted soldiers respected and officers mistrusted and i was immediately drawn to him but it was iraq, not like we could go as way nice dinner. At one point i confessed to him i want to get to know you better sunday. He said there is plenty of time for that when we get home and a couple months later the convoy he was on coming back was hit by one of the first organized insurgent attacks in our area of operation. Took small arms fire and was hit by an improvised explosive device and shrapnel from the roadside bomb entered the back of his skull, traveled forward and accident near his right thigh. We were told not to expect him to live. He was evacuated by helicopter to baghdad where he had neurosurgery and after three days they cautiously upgraded the assessment and said he would probably survive but not to expect much. He was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the united states. My team got tossed around a lot and eventually i was moved off of the mountain down to mozilla. In some ways we had flushed when its, pretty exciting after many months without Running Water and access to the internet and that was pretty great being able to use email land in time the insurgents were monitoring as all the time. That was not so great. They wanted us to stay forever. They built our fighting position for us which felt very bizarre and not quite right. While i was in those like got an email saying i want to let you know i survived and looks like everything is okay. I didnt know about bringing injuries. I took at face value is that he would be fine so it is a cautious flirtation and he was released from walter reed and sent to Fort Campbell around the same time the rest of the division got back from the middle east. We started dating at that point. I got a whole month of vacation. We hung out all the time. If there were hints that he had psychological or cognitive problems i was too drunk to notice them or willfully ignored them and it wasnt until i went back to work that i started to notice that things were wrong. I had to start training to go back to war if we were to read the ploy. Doing pc again. His unit did not make him start coming back to work. He still couldnt where his head year because the wound was too fresh and the army is big on people wearing their hats outside. She couldnt carry a weapon because he was developing p t s d. She couldnt do his job anymore and his chain of command said you are bringing the new guys down, just sent up from training, youre freaking them out about what might happen to them. Why dont you stay home. So he stayed home and sells medicated with jack daniels which is not an effective treatment for psd. I will read a brief excerpt of what that time was like for us. You want to watch a movie . I brought a french film called enemy. I dont like foreign movies, theyre boring. This what is different. It is quirky and fun. 20 minutes into it he turned off the television. What is the matter . I cant, he said. Then paused, side, started again. I cant follow what is going on. I cant read the subtitles and watch the action. It is for a string. Down his beer, opened another one immediately. The book you wanted me to read, i cant keep track of the characters are, cant keep track of what happens when i take a. Every time i pick up have to read the previous chapter. It is driving me crazy. Got up and started pacing the room, lit a cigarette, grabbed a bottle of jamison from the kitchen, what am i supposed to do . I cant even read this book. I read war and peace before we deploy. Because i got blown up by cant even watch a movie and follow what goes on, i cant do my job, i was going to make a career of the army. Now what . I am broken. Reopened the door and threw a beer bottle into the dumpster that is in his front yard. You are not broken, i said, lay my hand on his arm. I was sure the cognitive deficits from the brain injury were temporary and would feel the way a broken bone would, knitting back together. He pushed me away. You dont understand. You will never understand. I dont even know who i and many more. My head doesnt work right any more. I have a brain injury and i cant do anything any more. He punched the wall. I have no future, none. My heart ached for him. We have a future together, i offered. Get out, he said. What . I ask, astonished. Get out, go away, go home. I dont want to see or talk to you. He took a deep draft from a bottle of whiskey and glared at me, just leave me alone. Shaken and confused, i left. As i drove home my heart pounding and my mind raced. It was my fault. I tried to get him to watch a stupid for movie and it was too much. Hy for a lot of people to handle some titles. I should have known. He has a brain injury. He will be okay. We will be okay. I tried calling him. He wouldnt answer, tried again, he turned off his phone. I didnt hear from him for two days. Then he called as if nothing had happened. Want to go to get something to eat . I tried to be calm. Look, sometimes i get really increase. Sometimes i need my space. Cant you just tell me instead of screaming at me and refusing to talk to me . May be. Next time i feel it coming on i will tell you code black and you know to give me some time. I could sometimes see it coming. Usually happens when he was drinking heavily. I started to get nervous every time he switched from beer to liquor. His expressive face would harden into an angry masked. Invariably said you dont understand, shutting the out. Sometimes i could still reach him. Find a way to get past the wall and convince him to soften again but more often than not once i hit that point there was no turning back. He would be oblivious to my pain, indifferent to my tears, lost in his own rage and suffering, heading for code black meltdown followed by days of isolation. In the first half of the book i talk about the downward spiral went on where every bad thing fed on every other. Because of the pt std couldnt sleep and dont know about you but when i dont get sleet my brain doesnt work as well so the lack of sleep hurt his cognitive function. Were some kind of function made a more depressed about the lack of futures that he saw shrinking in front of him which made him drink more which made him angrier which made him lose his temper more which hurt his relationships. It got worse and eventually we hit a real rock bottom. Then i detail our slow climb back up woods as we were able eventually and gradually to reverse that spiral and have built on good things, started working again after he had been medically retired, got some treatment and we were able to very slowly form a community of fellow veterans and find some meaning in the suffering we had experienced in trying to improve thing this. Very slowly and gradually we were able to find that there is a flip to posttraumatic stress disorder which is posttraumatic growth. Not despite but because of our traumatic experiences we were able to feel a deeper level of connection to our fellow man, deeper sense of responsibility to our country and continue serving our community in new ways. The message i really hope to convey to people is with the right services and supports that all of us as citizens have an obligation to provide for those who have been severely wounded physically or mentally by the war we have an obligation to provide those supports to help the mind that journey home but it can be navigated for most people. There can be a new normal where you can continue to serve your community, continue to have fulfilling relationships, and find that way home. I also want to share with caregivers a word i had not heard of until i had been one for several years that it is okay to not be perfect. Is feeling the even when brian was being a real asshole that i wasnt allowed to be angry with him. He is a war hero, how can you be angry at a war hero even when he is screaming and punching the wall. It took a long time to realize it was okay to have a lot of complicated and sometimes ugly emotions about what was going on. What mattered was that i did. My ability to stay with him and support him while caring for myself. If i didnt take care of myself i would have burned out and not be able to support him either. I also want to communicate that there are resources that help both for Service Members, veterans and military family members and for most people ptsd is a treatable condition. It isnt easy for people to find something that works for them. I know a lot of people said i went to a psychiatrist, i went back to get any treatment again. If you got toothpaste and hated the flavor would you quit brushing your teeth forever or would you try and new flavor . If you have not clicked with a psychiatrist try psychologist, try busan principles therapy. I would not suggest exorcisms but try something, keep searching until you find the treatment modality or support system that helps you be able to live a functional and fulfilling life. Thank you all very much for coming. A [applause] you are our moderator . We have a moderator. If you dont have questions i have backup topics. I am zachary bell. I came out here to be with the people wow. It is all different when i got all the books this past week, i started to go through and learn more about all this and i myself as a marine corps veteran actively tried to reassess and constantly dig and try to make this putt of the man that i into an ocean. Somewhere between a pond and a lake. I tried to reassess but all these different perspectives are unique, wanted to thank you for doing that. The few questions here that i will open up as well and there will be a signing immediately following. Why did you want to do this . I have been in the marines, 2 afghanistan twice. I am anxious to help veterans because i fall into that category but what about you . Thanks for those kind words and that question. I finished underground, in spring of 2001 knowing that i wanted to go to grad school, knowing i was interested in social science and anthropology and really interested in these questions. And four months later 9 11 happened and the entire public discourse, everything everyone was talking about was devastation, and war. What both of those things should mean for all of us as a country and there was there was so much packed into what people were saying, there was really not a lot of room to talk about what does it mean to go to war, what is the nature of doing this work, what are the effects on the people who do it, on the people who live in places where it is being done, what are the consequences down the road, what is the relationship of civilians, citizens, to military service and warm. I have my own strong feelings but what frustrates me was the challenge of finding language to Say Something that wasnt already being said, didnt already seen complete the obvious or fall to one side or another of contentious and difficult public debates that were going on. At the same time i had been spending some time reading military memoir and biographies and journalistic accounts and i started a couple years later to read the first generation of memoirs that came from the wars iraq and afghanistan including kayla williamss first book and a lot of a really excellent literature is that came from this first generation of contemporary war memoirs and reporters. And started to have this sense of the activities that war actually consists of often strange, stranger cant find the word, they often dont relate in any direct way to the things we tend to talk about war as being about. Sometimes they do. Often they dont and so i was really interested in what kind of language all of us may find for talking about what war is for and what it does by looking at the activities and experiences and feelings actually consisted of. Knowing that so often those feelings of activities are either molded into stereotypical narratives or potentially ignored or neglected when they dont conform readily to those narratives. That was the spirit in which i took this on and it is something i still find myself thinking about a lot but thanks for that question. I get that question of law especially since i have no military background at all. I came to this book i mentioned before reading articles and be interested in traumatic memory and try to understand that. It was also around the time when newspapers were saying to release reports about suicide epidemic among soldiers. A kid killed himself not far from where i was living so i felt strangely complicitous and yet having no power to understand what was going on, people working around me and not able to understand their background or their pain or why this was happening. I would be fine to categorize the books as we so often do i would say this is a book length as a and when i say that i just mean everything i say goes back to the word to try. These series of attempts to empathize with someone whose life is very different from my own and i think one thing that frustrates me generally is when we are very decisive of other peoples realities and put our own experience or reality on a pedestal and i thought kind of this reality is easy to dismiss the taken to heart and try to lead this stands what are these apparitions, what are they representing . There is no way to say i am just from one hallucination to another throughout my life or his reality is necessarily the wrong one so we can see that disparity happening when we look at soldiers that pea on taliban corpses, we get a agree but if we look at the complicated world that existed prior to that moment mustnt most likely you could create a moment of empathy, chaos, lack of sleep, all of that can contribute to moments when the morals we apply to our world dont apply overs there. It is very complicated and too easy categorized as black and white or understood in a way that is blackandwhite. I want to get a new one spoke about experiencing trauma. One thing i say in my book is once you label something as ptsd it gives us permission to dismiss it because we feel we already understand it but here is a label, we love them. We put in iceboxes. Experiences are so varied i am not sure anyone fixed in those neat categories all the time. Trying to sort of break open that box and give room for experiences and pushed away the language that might be limiting our understanding of other human beings that have gone through difficult experiences in war. When i came home from iraq i felt invisible as a woman that. Groups of us would go out to get beers and someone would buy the guys a round of free beer plastic as they had gone back from the war and they literally meant the guys. They assumed the women who showed up were just wives or girlfriends or hangars on. People dont look at me and think combat veteran. I wrote my first book to try to show a little bit more what it means to be a woman in todays military. I did not want Jessica Lynch and libby england to be the only women most people could think of when they heard about a woman soldier and i wanted to give more nuanced and debt to it but i have written terrible poetry when i was in high school and i didnt understand writing a book and let it be published would mean i would have to talk about it in public with people with journalists a what is it like to watch someone bleed to death, unlike television. I was not emotionally prepared for that. It was a challenging experience for me. When i reach the point that i knew i wanted to tell my husbands story and our familys story about journey from war trauma to feeling i knew i had to wait until i had processed what i had been through instead of trying to process by writing in the middle of it. I wanted to pull back and see the arc of his recovery and put things in better context so i waited longer to right the second book compared to when the first one came out and i am glad i did. The other thing that is interesting, you both touched upon that gap between what civilians understand. Phil klein on the panel before this one roseanne and and say in the New York Times that really struck me about the failure of imagination that relates to what we think of as a Civil Military divide. It really struck me to read that because so many people said to me i cant imagine what you went through. I cant imagine going to war. I cant imagine that. We go see the movie avatar and imagine blue aliens. We are willing to be emotionally parcells there. We are willing to watch cartoons about smi her ascension robot. We are willing to inactions at but not willing to imagine what it was like to be a soldier and go to war . Why is that . Has Service Members and veterans and how we expect that. We let people say i cant imagine what that was like and no, you cant. You have to have been fair. That is a failure on our part too. I think i am trying to do my part to say here is what it was like and i would like civilians to take it and try to put some cells there and have the willingness to imagine. Also something that is fascinating it is it is rare you find people who display true just extraordinary levels of empathy and that is what i was able to find in the smallest amount of time, it is fascinating to me. Veterans, military culture we are our own worst enemy. You cant imagine, we keep everyone at arms difference. You werent there. This time, this time, whatever yet dont understand why people dont understand us. It tends to go around and ralph and round. Also to say circumstances you talked about where actually a good friend of mine, and it is just that you are not does the family died over there and that is a disconnect in between. Well, i yeah. What would you say to ptsd, if you could define it just like with what you have seen with the families and the soldiers, what would you put onto it . Well, so ill start my answer with a philosophical qualification, which is that theres, so theres this philosopher who writes about the history of Mental Illness, ian hacking, and one of the things so he has this great line. Hes writing about a different disorder, about multiple personality disorder, where he says, you know, people ask if this diagnosis is real or if this condition is real. And when people ask is a thing real, one of the important followup questions is, well, a real what . Real according to whom . Real for whom . Real in what ways . And so in that sense its not, like, i would never, i would never argue that ptsd is not real. It is a, its a name, its a diagnosis thats encoded in dsm, its something thats described by a set of experiences, its a label that a lot of people use to understand their experiences, its a label that a lot of Health Care Providers use to understand the experiences of their patients. Its a label that families use to understand the experiences of their loved ones. Its a diagnosis that because of its peculiar history, if you get it, it gives you access to certain kinds of treatment and benefits that you would not have access to if you were diagnosed with a, um, with a, with a similar disorder that is not as easily linked to military service or exposure to violence. And so all of those things, all of those things make ptsd real in very particular kinds of ways. And so one of the, one of the ways that it was originally described in the third edition of dsm which is the first time it was formalized as a psychiatric diagnosis in the early 1980s was as a, to sort of paraphrase the wording of the diagnosis, as a normal reaction to extreme circumstances. And i think theres a tremendous amount of value in describing traumatic, posttraumatic stress this that way. A lot of language of normalcy that people, that people invoke when they talk about posttraumatic stress to be able to say that, yes, to feel these particular ways after going through difficult experiences is normal. At the same time, so that can, that can help people, it can be very reassuring, it can normalize their experiences, it can remove the stigma from their experiences potentially. But at the same time, you might not feel normal actually youre going through it. While youre going through it. You might not seem normal to people around you. So just to sort of label something normal or not normal then, its easy to forget that then demands a whole lot of other work that has to follow afterwards, i mean, very much along the lines of what carol was describing a moment ago. And so, and i guess one last thing ill say about it is because, because of how we tend to think about Mental Illness diagnosis in the contemporary u. S. , theres sort of this notion that either you have something or you dont. And especially with Something Like ptsd which is so it is posttraumatic stress which is in many ways and for many folks is regarded as a normal response to extreme circumstances, but a response that many people may not suffer. But ptsd is a disorder version of that normal stress, and the threshold at which it becomes disorder has been changed multibillion times over the last multiple times over the last 30 years, and peoples own sense also changes subjectively or changes with people around them. And so theres this way sort of being attentive, being imaginative, being empathetic to peoples experience and sort of the dynamism and complexity of that experience, i think, is also thats actually maybe an invitation that ptsd gives us that we may not realize that were receiving. Because it sounds, it sounds straightforward, it sounds transparent, it has the authority of science and medicine, and just as jen was saying, it could potentially be an opportunity to just sort of to constitute an explanation in itself. And so one of the things that i think, you know, when you look at folks dee actual experiences folks actual experiences, you find the opposite of that. It is the, that label is the middle of something or the beginning of something rather than the end of something. So ill stop my answer there. No, that was perfect you said something about giving someone with ptsd space. What exactly did you mean by that . Enter part of it has to do part of it has to do with giving space to empathize with the soldiers coming home with ptsd, but also more literally space after homecoming. And theres just sort of i was doing a little bit of research into other cultures and how they respond to soldiers homecoming, and quite a few actually have, for example, in mozambique they have soldiers go and live away from the village for many weeks. And if they killed someone or if they did something thats been, you know, bothering them thats giving them flashbacks or nightmares, they have to reenact that event over and over again, and villagers can watch that. Theyre not separate with it, theyre in dialogue with it, theyre interacting with is the soldiers experience. You know, it doesnt seem like americans really allow for that kind of transition or even want to really have it. Its more of a lets go right back to the symbolic celebration of heroism that we first sent you off with right smack when you get home. And so i dont think we have that space for mourning in this culture at all. I think its we have a problem with being sad, and i think its okay, you know . Going back, you know, i really clung to this definition that ken was talking about, too, thats a normal experience to ab abnormal or extraordinary event. Unfortunately, we could say war is normal in some ways, its always happening, so its part of our, you know, its certainly part of my entire adult life now. And, you know, its a foreign war, and so, you know, somehow im going to have to take that step to engage with it more thoroughly. But, yeah, ptsd is whatever the dsm wants it to be on a more technical level. Health insurance, you know, cultural taboos all play a part in its definition. Jonathan shay has a new definition, moral injury, which we could probably talk about a little more which is sort of looking at it, um, as an intrusion into civilian life based on actions that would be considered immoral on the ground here. So, yeah, its a question that you end up, you know, if you decide a definition, that definition will pretty much break apart, and youll have to go to another definition. So its slippery. Yeah. Something that you touched on about caregivers and how i the general sense of feeling is its just for the guys, and its quite literal, but even so much the say as a caregiver, i always say that, like, my job was simple. It really was. I just walked around in a circle in afghanistan. Not really more detailed than that. I didnt punch bin laden or anything. Like, no one ever trained or told or taught my wife how to wait for three months at a time for a phone call or to give birth to two children and all the while just try to hold it all together with the fact that she might be a 20yearold widow. More so to the point which i find is a fascinating but true of just pure and honest strength, love and cowering is the fact that there are and caring is the fact there there are so many people who are able to love people like me who dont love themselves anymore. And its hard. Like, i dont understand. At any given point, if she would have left, i would have never been upset. But as someone whos been through that, what are some of you experiencing . Speak on that. Its this hid p part of military culture hidden part of military culture, spouses, kids, its everyone. Yeah. So among military women who are married, half are married to other Service Members. Its a shockingly high percentage. And so for me, my transition, my reintegration from iraq, i went from a war zone to america, which was weird, and then i got out of the army and went from being a sergeant to being a civilian and went from being a soldier to being a spouse. And those were weird. The first few times i went to the px with my new, like, ugly salmoncolored id card, i felt this obligation to tell the people checking ids that i was a vet. Like, im i was in the army before. Like they care. Like these ridiculous civilian women cared. I had a very hard time with that transition. It took me a long time to find my way as a Military Spouse. I never felt connected to the Military Spouse community, and that was tough for me. I didnt feel like i had anything in common with them, because id been to war. When i got home and i saw these stickers on cars at the commissary parking lot that said army wife, toughest job in the army, i wanted to key their cars. Because, like, nobody is shooting at you. It cant be that hard. I was not empathetic at all. Like, you have Free Health Insurance compared to how many other americans. You have a Family Readiness group thats here to support you. I had no empathy for them at all until way down the road, until probably i had my own kids. And my husband had become a volunteer firefighter, and hed be gone from six a. M. To six p. M. For a week, and i said, oh, god, theres women who do this for a year, for 15 months. Okay, yeah, im developing empathy for them. So it took time for that, for me to develop that. And i also wonder sometimes about whether my own military service helped or hurt us as a couple. In some ways i think having been in the army, part of the reason i stayed during the worst parts of brians recovery was because of the warrior e ethos and that ingrained in you message of leave no fallen comrade behind. The he had been wounded on the battlefield. Just because now we were now on the home front, i thought i cant leave him in the depths of his injury. But at the same time, i was imbued with that message of pain is just weakness leaving the body, theres plenty of time to sleep when youre dead, suck it up and drive on. So i didnt ask for help when i should have because i was so full of that mentality myself. And i wonder if id been a civilian, would i have broken sooner and said, please, help us, we cannot do this on our own. Which complicates it as well. But it wasnt actually until and this is so, like, weird and embarrassing to admit but it wasnt until id been home for the war for probably eight years, been married, had two children. When i was in iraq, i lived with just the constant daytoday knowledge that i could die at any moment, and i didnt care. It did not bother me. And everybody dies. What are you so upset about . Especially if you believe in heaven. Shouldnt you be actively excited about this . I did not understand. The its just death, we all die. Okay, deal with it. And then when my kids were, theyre about 18 months apart, so one time my son was two and my daughter was being six months old, and they were playing together, and he was tickling her, she was laughing, and it hit me, oh, my god, when i die, i never get to see them again. And i freaked out. It wasnt until that moment, like, eight years after i came home that i suddenly realized i dont want to die. And that was a shocking realization, that it took eight years before i was open to that level of feeling and that level of empathy and that level of connection to my spouse, to a man that i chose to marry, but i still didnt have that all the way. So i feel like i still dont fully understand what its like to be a Military Spouse whos never served who never goes through that closingoff point, who is always that open and then deals with somebody who comes home closed off. I think thats got to be an incredibly difficult challenge. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. That was amazing. So im just going to ask another question. So anybody else who wants to come up and ask questions, fine, but were also going to have a signing immediately following afterwards. If you could say, and this is for all of you, if you could say, like, what was the one thing that you gained the most from this in the sense that your own life or stories that youve seen just giving someone time of day just to be herald, its also to be heard, its also another problem i feel we have in military cultures, marginalized as a whole, and its tough to want to be able to find a way to stand out in a crowd and to be an individual and not just be [inaudible] voice of it. Man, thats a tough one. I guess, but your comment makes me think that, you know, one of the, one of the things that was the most kind of rewarding and incredible to me about doing this project was peoples willingness to share their experiences. And sometimes in really intense ways and sometimes with really minimal preamble and to, you know, to sit down with someone with a tape recorder and my list of questions and say, you know, okay, well, so the first question i usually like to ask is tell me about your service in iraq, because that was where just about everyone i was talking to had been. And they would Start Talking and wouldnt stop talking for, like, two hours. And to know that, you know, to know that i was being, to know that i was being trusted with stories that people felt like were worth sharing, and that was something that really, that, you know, that thinking about all these sort of these problems of empathy and communication and representation and stuff, like, you know, it takes, it seems like it takes a lot of trust, it takes a lot of showing up, it takes a lot of willingness just to sort of, you know, to open your mouth and tell a really difficult or complicated or intense or violent or awful story that, you know, that means something to you but that you may not know what its going to look like or sound like to the person on the other end. And so, actually, not sort of thats a big part of where my original sentiment that jen and kayla have also, have also, you know, expressed in other ways, this sense that, you know, there is this kind of artificially constructed divide. The fact that so many folks who i talked to were even as they might have, you know, even as they might have asserted the existence of that divide were willing to, were willing to share these really intense and difficult stories with someone who didnt share their experience and who they trusted to, you know, to do right with those stories. And so and so i think that really, you know, that also strongly informed my sense of what, you know, what is possible for work like this to do and, hopefully, why its important, you know, why it matters to people. Um, ive got so many different answers to that question, but a couple of things. First, it made me really distrust language and the language we use to define Mental Illness and that its now changes, you know, culture to culture and changes every generation and tracking that history really helped me sort of undo some of the stereotypes and narratives that we were relying on today to understand war and American Foreign policy and psychiatric studies. So that was really wonderful. And then to hear someone who, you know, was, you know, he dropped out of high school, he didnt care about any of that language anyway, and just to hear him talk about it in just a raw manner was, you know, whatever language was available to him was really beautiful and poetic. And to see him make sense of the world. And i really liked just giving someone that chance to speak and show me the world as it came to them as opposed to relying on other peoples language to construct the world. And in terms of, you know, this question representing suffering, the representation of suffering especially other people, you know, its a constant question that comes up when youre writing about grief, writing about other people. And one thing that caleb said to me early on when i also had sort of this reaction is like, well, your trauma is the same as my trauma. He didnt try to put his experience on a hire ary of hierarchy of grief really. He was trying to close that divide right away. He didnt label it at the civilian military divide, but he was saying you can understand this easily, etc. So i just really liked that invitation to his world and trying to sort of write about experiences like the military, you know, atrocity, anything thats outside our normal realm of experience and making it not just about the topic, but about how humans react to, you know, violence or love and grief and all these array of human emotions. And trying to, you know, create a portrait that was nuanced enough to transcend the topic. And that was really fulfilling to me as a writer, to try to fully envision him as a human being on the page and not just sort of a cliche, undoing that language. For me its been that ive gotten emails from people saying i read your book or i heard your interview on the radio, and im going for Mental Health treatment. Like that, for me, has been the most rewarding thing about this book. Should we take audience yeah. Yes, sir. I came in a little late, so i didnt get to hear [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] i came in a little bit late and missed, jen, i missed your presentation, but ive been very interested in what youve had to say. I came in during jennifers. I, you know, have tremendous respect for all of you for the work you do, have done to put a human face on what war does to people. And i think im coming from a little different perspective. Im a vietnam veteran. Im a member of an Organization Called veterans for peace, you may or may not be aware of. Ive met a lot of the iraq veterans in that organization although we tend to be overly represented by old folks like me. But i just want to say our perspective is really that we cant allow ourselves to say war is normal. And thats acceptable. And no one knows better than a veteran what the cost of war really is. Unfortunately, we have a country where thats 1 of the population at this point that have experienced it. So our mission is really trying to educate the American People that are ultimately accountable for sending you guys wherever you went. And to people to understand that, you know, we have to find alternatives to war as instruments of national policy. If anyone is interested in learning more about the organization, veterans for peace, if you google it, you can get our web site, but i just wanted to let people know that there are veterans who are, i think, finding, you know, some healing in doing work trying to prevent their kids from having to live through what theyve lived through. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Just a few more minutes if anybody has any more questions. Very quickly, air force vet, vietnam, father of a daughter who spent eight years in the navy, is married to a marine whos currently in baghdad working as a contractor, so some of this sounds familiar. I myself write civil war history, and im just wondering, all you folks who knowing what you know and have found out all that youve found out and experienced, do you ever look back a little bit and begin to think, hey, i kind of understand now some of these people that go back to vietnam and world war ii and all the way back to the civil war . We had a whole generation of people right here that came out of that war. They didnt know what to call it. I think of people like audie murphy, famous movie star, slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow for the rest of his life. He was a poster boy for this if they had known what to call it. Do you ever has this kind of informed your view of what you thought you knew about history of war . Do you mind if i take that really briefly . So jennifer mentioned jonathan shay, and his books have been very important for me in helping to contextualize war trauma. He wrote achilles in vietnam and to disus to disyous in america, exploring through the lens of american soldiers experiences in vietnam and is with homecoming and similarly exploring the iliad showing very clearly that what we now call ptsd existed back then. Right. Ive seen the persians put on, and you see very clearly that the trauma of war is something that we have always experienced, but we didnt label it for a long time. Thats been important for me partly because i have herald from some people, like, whats wrong with your generation . All these guys came back from world war ii, they were just fine. And im like, they were not fine. It was like dont bother dad while hes sitting in his chair with his whiskey. They werent fine, we just didnt talk about it. And vietnam vets had to fight so hard to get it recognized and put in the dsm even though, yeah, after the civil war soldiers heart, and George Carlin did a great bit talking about how it was shell shock in world war i, and then it was battle fatigue in the world war ii. He talks about how it became at the beginning you could picture what might cause it. Oh, shell shock, like a shell goes off, thats horrible. And then it gets more and more clinical until it sounds like something that might have happened to a vehicle. And its a really terrific bit. But, yeah, that learning more about it in historical terms helped me both understand my own familys experience better and also understand history a little better. And the challenges for people who were not allowed to talk about this. My dad wrote to my great uncle when i came home and was having trouble, and my great uncle wrote him back and said, oh, my god, i had no idea, but i definitely had ptsd reading about what your daughters going through, now i know what was wrong with me. He had never talked about it. I think it is helpful to be able to ground this in a historical and global context and see there are different ways to conceive of how to come back from war in time and space. Yeah. I would, i would just add to that both, yeah, the sort of crosscultural element and also, yeah, one of the things thats striking to me thinking about this in historical terms is the way that these efforts to both individually and collectively kind of negotiate and deal with the intense and potentially devastating experiences of war, that thats something that, yeah, that is perennial and that is widespread. And yet somehow and i think its the historian ben shepherd who makes some version of this argument where he says ever time we go to war, we act like were really surprised by the fact that this happens. And so in a way going back to the previous gentlemans comment, the way that these we imagine war as though it is always the same thing every time it happens when, in fact, the circumstances that a give rise to it, the people who are participating in it, the circumstances under which it happens, the diagnosis that we apply to it to try to make sense of it, all those things give us stories to tell about what peoples experiences mean when they come through to the other side. And that those, those stories can potentially be tremendously productive and useful and healing, and they can also be tremendously restrictive or confining or even stigmatizing or damaging. And, yeah, so just trying to sort of be attentive to the way that, you know, giving particular names to things, you know, conveys all sorts of meaning on its own, and so its worth thinking carefully and, you know, often critically about what the names are that we want to give to particular experiences and what stories they do or dont can help us tell dont help us tell. But thanks for that question. Well, thank all of you for coming and thank you so much to the panel here. Its been amazing. [applause] theres going to be a book signing immediately after. Hope everybody comes out, and if you have more questions, talk there with the authors. Thank you all so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top upon the knicks books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers