Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On The American Military 20140330

Fact that she can stay in the background. One of the surprises that she was a maintainer of on relationships. She had a brief marriage that may have laughed at possibly not any longer than the honeymoon. There were cables were shoe wrote very friendly ones to the exhusband. She was a very generous person to children and grandchildren and family employees and friends. When you say requisite big of a person who wasnt interested in people. But she was on the phone with people all the time and she was great comfortable and elegant in her conversations. So if you just talk to your attorney through the door never meet him, then you have issues with people. But shes quite comfortable in letter and on the phone and a steadfast friend as well. Bill and paul, we thank you very much. Absolutely fascinating discussion. We have some bucks and there were some books that were available right outside to be autographed. And that is number one, they will be signing books there in purchasing as well. And you might want to learn more about the festival by going onto the website. His new book, thank you for your service, is a follow up to that book and focuses on the lives of soldiers when they return home. Thank you for your service is a finalist for the 2013 national brook critics circle award. Thanks for being here, guys, and i think we should start by just each of you give a little brief overview of your books, and well start with ann. Okay. Let me say, first, its a big honor to be on this panel. Im a great admirer of davids book, and im also just happy to be here pause i take the presence because with i take the presence of all these people in the audience as a real transcribe piewt to books and writers tribute to books and writers. And in this kind of solitary profession, we dont often get that. So thank you all for being here. My book, they were soldiers, follows not soldiers home from the war, but follows the wounds of soldiers. My book tends to see, i tend to see the soldiers not so much as individuals whose whole stories i need to tell, but rather as i give little snapshots, because i see them as interchangeable parts in the Great American war making machine which is how the pentagon kind of regards them as well despite public statements to the contrary. I want to tell you how, a little bit about how i came to write this book. I went to afghanistan in 2002 as a humanitarian aid worker. I was a new yorker. I didnt approve of our policy after the attack on new york. I taught it was immoral and illegal and frightening and all of those things. So i walked my talk and went to afghanistan to help or try to be of assistance to women who had been victims of soviet and afghan and american violation there. Violence there. I should say that prior to this time my earlier career as a writer has been as a feminist writer of books about women and chiefly about violence against women. And then in 2006 i wrote a book about my experiences with women and others as a humanitarian aid worker there called kabul in winter. Thats an old book now. It came out in 2006. But if i say so myself, its still a pretty damn good guide to why things have gone belly up in afghanistan. In 2010 the military got the bright be idea of putting women soldiers outside the wire to make friends with afghan women and gather intelligence that would help us win the war once and for all. And i thought that was another, in the long line of misguided military strategies, and i got for the first time then i embedded with american soldiers in order to cover and participate in the training of the first of those teams of women. They were called female engagement teams or fets, and as i suspected, they did turn out to be a really misguided idea. But what happened when i went to forward bases to cover the training of those women was i found myself on bases that might have a handful of women, half a dozen, babe a dozen women soldiers maybe a dozen women soldiers in the midst of hundreds of men. And apart from my observations of american soldiers in kabul where they were extremely aggressive and in your face and made everybody really angry, made enemies everywhere they went, this was my first time spent among american soldiers. And i saw some of them melting down which started to change the way i looked at them. And then we happened to be most of that time on the border with pakistan which was very hot at the time. And so every day soldiers or were being wounded and killed. And what happens when someone, when a group, a squad goes outside the wire and someone is cut down, theyre picked up by a medevac helicopter, and the members of their own squad return to base in their Armored Vehicles and park and sit there for a long time. Trying to come to terms with the buddy or buddy cans who have dis buddies who have disappeared from their squad on that day. And it mayweeks or days may be weeks or days or even weeks before the squad finds out what happens to the wounded they left behind or sent off in a helicopter. So i wanted to foe what happened to those to know what happened to those wounded. And so it took me a year then to get permission from the military to embed in the medevac experience. So my book is about following Wounded Soldiers from the time theyre wounded in the field, taken to bagram, the central base, and then to, flown with full medical attention to the Military Hospital in germany which is americas largest hospital outside the United States. Where the operations and the treatment continues and then theyre flown on again to Dover Air Base in delaware and taken from there by ambulance to walter reed and bethesda. And then from there i went on to the homes of soldiers who were suffering psychological and physical wounds and looked at the impacts on the family and on the communities of which those soldiers had been members. And also visited families who had lost their sons to, sons and daughters to suicide after today had returned from combat. So thats what, thats mainly what this book is about. But i do, i should stress, too, that there is a lot about the medics and the medical personnel who treat these soldiers all the way home. Because one of the great surprises and revelations to me in following this story was to see the impact upon the medical personnel who have to treat the soldiers. And it is extreme. Extreme. Because theyve never seen such catastrophic injuries to the human body before. Yes. I think tucson, the doctor who came who worked on Gabby Giffords came out of iraq or afghanistan. David, why dont you talk to us about your book which has some similar things. Maybe a slightly different approach. First, thanks for onlying. I appreciate this for coming. I appreciate this very much. Ive been at this particular story since early 2007 when the iraq war it seems like a long time ago now, hmm. But at that point there had been several versions of the iraq war, and the consensus seemed to be that it had reached its last chance moment, perhaps its lost moment or to a writers way of thinking, its tragic moment. And in january of 2007 when george w. Bush announced instead of withdrawing, receding, he was going to try this thing called the surge and more troops were headed into this war, that interested me as a writer. And as a journalist. Pardon we. And so i wanted to write about that. First i did an article for the Washington Post where i work, and that turn bed into a book called the good soldiers. And basically what happened is i got in touch with a battalion commander, a guy named ralph, Lieutenant Colonel out of fort be reilly because his guys were going into this thing. And i said i want to go along. I want to write a book not a policy book, not a book with any kind of agenda. Im not out to say the war is good or the war is bad or the surge was a success or the surge was a failure. Thats not the point. Its not a first person book. I just want to see what happens to you guys. I want to write about your corner of the war. The far end of policy. He said, all right, if thats your deal, if you promise me you really dont have an agenda, come along, and my promise to you is you can have full run of the place. And he was good to his word. So away went 800 members of the 216 Infantry Battalion out of fort reilly. Pardon me. This is a group, or most of these guys were, what, 19, 20 years old, firstdeployment, and theres this line somewhere that war wouldnt be possible without the 19yearold male. Well, this was a battalion of 19yearold males, and they had a young mans invincibility, and they were going to go, and they were going to be fine, and they were going to win the thing. And then what happened is what happened. War happened. They lost their first guy, they lost their second guy. The bombs kept going off. They began losing arms and legs and eyes and toes. And bit by bit the invincibility was replaced, was transformed. And when they came home 15 months later, i think its fair to say and they would not disagree with this characterization that the experience had not only transformed them, but in many cases had degraded them. And when they came home, it wasnt about winning or losing, it was about im in it for the guy next to me. I dont care about the mission, but be i love this man next to me, and im going to fight. So that was it. Thats the story of the good soldiers. And i wrote it, it came out, i figured i was done with it. I had done my job as a journalist, i thought. I had paid attention to this corner. I had written a fair book. I find these to be significant wars, and i had added to the archive of Information Available down the line for people when they think about these wars and try to flush out what they meant. And then i started hearing from some of these guys. They werent sleeping. They were feeling anxious. Depression was settling in. And, look, you all may understand this is what happens, but these guys didnt understand that was going to happen. And it was happening. So these books, and so that led to the second book which is, it can stand on its own, but its basically a follow up to the good soldiers. Its called thank you for your service. And its the ongoing story of what i call the after war. Yeah. Its storytelling. Again, these arent policy books, there arent big numbers, but i do want to recite a couple numbers just to set some context, and then ill be done. Since 9 11 about 2. 5 million americans have enlisted in the various branches of service. And of the 2. 5 million, about 2 million have gone directly into iraq or afghanistan or both. Of those 2 million, according to the best estimates, about 1. 5 million have come home fine. Theyre okay. And this is a military community, so this is not going to be unfamiliar to you. In many cases, they have come home better for their experiences. That leaves, though, if these estimates are right, about 500,000 people who have fought in these wars and have come back with some type of mental or psychological wound. And what theyre now trying to do and will be doing for some time as happens in any war is recover. Recover from what they did, what they saw, what they didnt do, any sense of mission, any sense of guilt, shame. All the internal stuff we feel as human beings. And it was ramped up and amped up in the most extreme ways there. And now theyre back here, and now theyre trying to get better, and i guess what this book is about if i bring it down to anything, its not so much a litany of sad stories, although theres sadness in the book, but its, maybe its a litany of trying, of whats going on in households across the country. People trying to get better after experiencing what they experienced. And just to pick up that idea of the numbers, im just going to read a few numbers, and you guys can maybe comment on them just to kind of further the numbers. Nearly a million active Service Members since 2000 are diagnosed with Mental Health disorder. Among half of those, 22 veterans commit suicide every day, 2013 more u. S. Personnel died by their own hand than by the hands of others. Thats a first. Then there are the high numbers of unemployment, homelessness and a picture of complete neglect and disfunction in those people. Dysfunction in those people. I just, these numbers are pretty i mean, for most of us the overwhelming number is the suicide. And a lot of it has to do with when they come home, is it you guys answer this for me, is it because they dont were not equipped to deal with them . Its too many of them . The army doesnt its a new phenomenon . But it cant be a new phenomenon because wars old to. Is it just whats going on . Why does this problem exist between their Mental Health and the va or whoever takes care of them this. Do you mind if i take a swung at this real quick . Swing at this real quick . Go ahead. The vets committing suicide is a number im familiar with because the number for a while had been 19 vets a day, and what i do between books is i edit a small group of reporters, and one of my reporters drilled down into that number and came up with 22. So now its 22 thanks to the good work of greg jaffe. But look, look, the worrisome thing about that number is it sounds like 22 vets a day are killing themselves directly because of their war experience, and i dont think thats fair. Because some of these vets, you know, theyve liveed many versions of life since theyve come home. All kinds of things could have gone differently or wrong to heed to their suicide. So to lead to their suicide. So whenever i hear that number or see that number, i wince a bit because it sounds like directly because of war 22 vets a day in america are killing themselves. And i think we have to be careful with all of these numbers, including the ones i was just talking about, the 500,000 who were mentally wounded. We dont know. We dont know. Certainly, theres something significant going on, and there are plenty of people trying to figure it out. But its just and thisll be the other part of the answer. But i do caution you when you hear these numbers, bring a good skepticism to any number. Think instead about the intent under the number. Clearly, theres a problem. And clearly, people are trying to work on it and trying hard. And unlike any other war in american history, at least now there is some system in place to help these mentally wounded folks get better. But if you talk to the people in the system, they will acknowledge they are overwhelmed. It is a messy, haphazard system where some people get great help and some people get lousy help. But its not like walter reed and the hospital in san antonio where if youre burned or shot or you lose a limb, your medical care is just off the charts uniformly great. The Mental Health system for these returning soldiers, and, lets be honest, their families is a unfolding, messy thing. Well, i have a different response to that number. In the first place, most i agree that all of those numbers are dodgy, but i think theyre on the low side because they dont include when they count those suicides members who have already resigned from the service. They also dont factor in things that may be even larger causes of death that are certainly connect with the the war experience; the high Risk Behavior that veterans commonly engage in from drug abuse and be alcohol abuse to motorcycle accidents. The number of veterans killed on motorcycles near military bases is extraordinary across the country. And nobody, the pentagon doesnt keep track of any of those numbers. They are dug up by everyday working journalists at small papers across the country. And if you look hard enough, you can start to put those numbers together and see that this is really a very, very troubling thing. And the pent develops response has been the pentagons response has been to say theyre very concerned about it, but also to make, to fund a high profile study that now has come up with the new information that guess what, folks, most of these people were suffering from preexisting conditions. How they work that out when they havent tested anybody on their preexisting conditions beforehand, i dont know. But its clearly an effort to get off the hook. In the course of my research, i went to va hospitals across the country and talked to the people who are doing the treatment of these veterans or blowing them off in some cases. And in fairness to the va, we have to say that at the time veterans started coming home from these wars, the va was still chock a block with veterans from the vietnam war and others. And they had to immediately start a massive Building Campaign and staffing campaign all across the country. And that was admirable, but the result is that many of the counselors who were hired in to treat these guys were fresh out of grad school. And so knowing that that staff was not fully trained, protocols were established for treating the presenting systems of the symptoms of the veterans. And many of the oldtimers, many of whom were veterans of vietnam themselves who became psychologists to help out their old buddies didnt agree with the new forms of protocol at all and said we were simply retraumatizing our veterans. So this is part of the mess that david speaks about. And some people are getting one treatment, some another. Nobodys keeping track. Some are not getting any treatment at all. And it is, indeed, a great mess. But one other thing, if i may, that i discuss in my book is something thats been dug up by some of these reporters across the country that we ought to give a lot to of credit to. And that is the establishment by the pharmaceutical industry of foundations in which the pharmaceutical Companies Pay for doctors and psychiatrists to present themselves as scientific researchers at foundations that have been researching pain and wish to prescribe for all the people in the va whether their symptoms are mental or physical medication for the pain they are experiencing. Well, its the pharmaceutical industries that fund these foundations, and the doctors who are giving this advice. These protocols have been adopted by the va with the result that veterans are being extraordinarily overmedicated, and these drugs particularly the opioid painkillers are now implicated in these high rates of suicide. So theres just the possibility that we may be killing off our own veterans by prescriptions from the veterans administration. But we wont know this because since that question became a matter of congressional investigation about a year and a half or two years ago, we cant talk about it anymore. Well, go ahead. I mean, theres no doubt that guys are being medicated out the wazoo. And certainly, anecdotally, the ones i embedded with for my new book, everybody was on, was on some assortment of pills. And some were glad to be on them, but, you know, there was one guy, he was taking like 45, 46 pills a day. And he was and several versions of antidepressants, several versions of antianxieties. And he would go someplace, and they would modify it, but it would get screwed up somewhere down the line. When i say the haphazard nature of this, let me underscore it with three quick stories if i can because, again, what im trying to do is in this book, its not my powers of a journalist arent to stand back in an investigative way, its to try to get as close as i can to people who are undergoing something and, basically, hang out with them, watch them, skeptical empathy might be a way to describe it. So heres a guy, heres what i mean by the haphazard nature. Theres one soldier who one day was in a humvee that was blown up, and it was blown sky high, and it came down hard. And this guy when it came down and, look, ive been in these explosions. I e no i know how disorienting this is. And if youve been, you know this too. But everythings fine and then theres light and sound and weird things moving through you and nothing makes sense, and you dont know if youre up or down or what, alive or dead, and you kind of start patting around, and awareness comes back x. This guys awareness, he realized he had to get the hell out of this humvee. It was catching on fire, rounds were going to be cooking off. He had a broken leg. Gets out of the humvee, realizes there are a couple of guys still in the humvee. Makes his way back to it despite his broken leg, pulls a couple guys out. Pretty amazing. And then he hears somebody yelling the name harrelson. And as he wrote when he he finally had to go into a program, ah, shit, harrelson. The driver. 19 years old. Nobody could get to him, and he burned to death. So heres this guy, broken leg, made his way back, pulled out two guys. As far as im concerned, you cant do much better than that. What happens is he starts having a dream which he tells no one until he finally breaks down a couple of years later, and the dream is always the same guy, a dream of the guy who died. Not the ones he saved, but the guy who died on fire in the dream saying why didnt you save me . Thats his dream. Had it enough times, he wrecked his apartment, he was hospitalized. He was put in a ptsd program run by the va that lasts seven weeks. So he gets seven weeks to get better. Another guy reaches the point where after his deployment he comes home. Hes turning suicidal. He needs help. And im telling you, these are tough guys. And its hard enough to get them to say out loud they need help at all because of the stigma. But it got to the point he needed help. This seven week program was full. The waiting list long. So his was long. So his caseworker looks around, finds him a program in pueblo, colorado, with an opening. Supposed to be a good program, four weeks. Okay. So he gets four weeks to work it out. The other guy, seven weeks. Not because of tear specific injuries that one their specific injuries that one place is better than the other, it comes down to theres an opening in this overwhelming system. The third guy, seven week program, full. Four week program, full. So his caseworker looks around, and then she finds this Little Program in Northern California thats not part of the va, thats not run by insurance in any way or supported by insurance. Its entirely donor supported. And the guy runs out and says you can come here, but heres the deal. You stay four months minimum, and then you actually stay here as long as it takes to get better. So one guy gets seven weeks, one guy gets four weeks, one guy gets four months or longer. Tsa what i mean by the haphazard nature of this. Yes, theres a system, but thats whats going on. When people need help, it kind of comes down to the luck of the draw. And others get no help at all. A quick anecdote from my book, one of the suicidal soldiers, his family fought. He was a veteran of iraq. His family fought and fought and fought with the local va to get him some sort of treatment, and they knew he was suicidal. They said he wasnt suicidal enough to be hospitalized. So he was successful in his suicide, and the family immediately gets a call from the va to say we have to tell you that we did everything for which we were legally responsible. So thats the, thats the condolences you get. And many, many others are just turned away because in some way they dont meet the terms of the protocol. And many families are on tear own trying on their own trying to get help. And very often because these, so many of the kids in this allvolunteer military come from very poor families, uneducated fam lues, families that families, families that dont have the resources to know how to approach this system, they just cant cope, and theyre excluded from treatment altogether. So many of those who need it most are the ones who dont get it. I want to just, you both have wrought brought up something that i think is the best part of these books, for me, im a fan of reeding, is when they both reach into the families which makes these books really human. And i would even say its a very human experience. And id love to have you guys talk about really theres a whole bat that would goes on secretly and battle that goes on secretly and privately in these homes every day, every week with, every month with these guys, and some of its just horrendous, and some of its just real. You know, you have of a problem guy in your house. And id love you guys to talk about that. I had a problem guy in my own house, if i could mention that. [laughter] i grew up in the household of a highly deck crated relate zap of deck decorated veteran of the first world war. So that war, almost a hundred years later now, still haunts me having grown up in that violent household. And i raids that to make this point, that we earlier gave these figures on how its about, only about 500,000 of the veterans who have come home with some kind of mental incapacity. But having group up in that home grown up in that home and seeing that in public my father was very highly regarded in our community, he was known as a great good time guy, really smart guy, businessman of great integrity, really publicspirited fellow. So by any standards he had recovered brilliantly from his his stay in the first world war. But we who lived at home with his violence, the kind of violence and rage and abuse and so on which david describes in his book and i do some of that in mine as well that was secret from the public. So i dont trust those statistics, and i think that far more, far more veterans are affected deeply by their war experience than its ever let on to us. And, david, when you comment, davids book is known as, like, a long narrative form. So its interesting because hes not really ever present in a first person way, but you feel like youre in the room almost like a documentary camera, like a cspan camera going on and on and on. So just give us your feel about the whole family issue. Well, when you say long form, i assure you its a fast, jolly read. [laughter] yes. So the type of reporting i do, again, its based on mostly based on being present, observing. And spending a lot of time with these folks. Look, some of the stuff in the book it is, it is, its intimate, its, can feel painful to read. It can be brutal at times because, as i said, these are families trying to recover from something. There is the main people i write about are a soldier named adam schuman who had, by all accounts he was a great soldier in this battalion. Highly regarded. He was midway through his third deployment. He had been in combat for about a thousand days when, for a variety of reasons, he just, he couldnt fight anymore. He had to come home. And it didnt matter how well he had done. I was with him when he went to the helicopter to leaf the war to leave the war. And quite facility ridden guilt ridden that he had to come home. He leaves the war, he comes home, and the new book kind of picks up what happened to a couple of years later after that moment. And its this night in kansas, the middle of the night, and adam and his wife have just had a baby. His babys four days old. His wife is exhausted. Theyre in bed, and she is tired, and she says to adam, can you hold the baby in and he said, ive got it, get some rest. He takes the baby. The last thing she sees, as i write in the book based on my reporting, is a man smiling on the edge of the bed holding the baby as if contentment for this wounded man were possible at last. And she closed her eyes, and then soon after he closed his, because he was so tired. And their baby rolled out of his arms and off his chest and off the side of the bed. And only when there was the sound of something hitting the floor did his wife wake up and realize what happened, and then adam realized what had happened. The baby, i should tell you, was okay. But the family was not okay because soon after that adam, just feeling so bad about everything, what he had come home to, what he had become, was outside in a Truck Driving around kansas with a shotgun pointed at himself, and his wife trying to figure out what had gone wrong as she was soothing the baby, what were the sounds, what was the crack . What was the thud . What happened . So her husbands out there driving around trying to reckon with his war, and her war is underway too. And be shes, what the hell happened . And she starts collecting things in the house and dropping them off the edge of the bed to see if it replicates the sound she heard in her sleep that kind of woke her up. She drops a basketball, she drops a jug of water. Everything that happens unfolds from that moment through years of, as i said at the beginning, not just sadness, but hoping. Hoping to get better. Yeah. May yeah. I would just like to underscore one thing, and and that is that in both of these books you see that the responsibility of taking care of these soldiers and figuring out whats happened falls to women. It falls to the wives, to the of girlfriends, to the mothers. And i write about a woman who her fulltime job became taking care of her son who came home looking just fine and did very well for a year and then suddenly seemed to collapse. And came home to his mothers house and spent four years in bed. And without any help from the va. And also when those mothers are so deeply involved and wives are so deeply involved in many cases that reverberates out into the community as well. The wound is not manager is not something that just stays inside the household. This mother that i mentioned who takes care of her son full time was a psychotherapist. And her job was as the psychotherapy u. S. , the therapist in her large urban high school in charge of helping atrisk youth. So in this whole segment of atrisk young people in the Community Goes without treatment because she has to take care of her son, and she cannot be replaced in her job. So theres story after story like that that spreads farther that we know in all of our communities. I want to hang on one second, were almost to questions. I want to ask one last question and i want asking ask them to answer as short as they can which is hard because this is a difficult topic. But then well go to the microphones, okay . The last thought before we get to questions is, is there any part of this whole thing thats going on and the american public, you know, one of the things it seems like from your stories is soldiers come home, and they have a hard time with the concepts of coffee shops and, you know, going to a normal restaurant. Is there a disconnect between in world war ii people came home to, people who had also worked for the effort of the wars. Now were in a situation where is there a disconnect from the citizens that finance these wars and the soldiers that are coming home . Is there, do you find theres any sort of issue there, or is that not really in play . What do you say . Yes. This militarys completely different from the military that has fought different wars because it is an allvolunteer military. And what has happened with this allvolunteer force and with the congressional abrogation of its responsibility to be the government body that delares wars is that the military has been treated by our president s as kind of its own personal, or their own personal pray to have yang forward to be sent off on whatever these president s have in mind. The military has been misused. Soldiers have never experienced the long terms of service, the repeated terms of service in the way that they have in these past two wars, and soldiers have even been subjected to stop loss which means, of course, as you know that they had to stay, they were compelled to stay longer than the terms of their contract. That amounts to indentured servitude or slavery. These soldiers have been treated extremely badly by the government that sent them to war, and our citizens seem so remote from them that we seem to think that we can get a kind of cheap grace for ourselves by going and waving flags when they come home. As if thats going to make amends for what we and our government have done. David, your thoughts on the citizen yeah. I think, yeah. I mean, sure, its an allvolunteer force, its a professional army. Its been that way for some time. If you look at who joins now, who serves in i think its Something Like twothirds of the cases, theres a strong history of Prior Military Service in the family. Fathers, grandfathers, brothers. So, sure. I mean, no one disputes a growing divide between the military and the be civilian population. It doesnt mean that theyre separate camps. Its not like two different countries, theres no communication between the two. But, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. Questions, if you have a question, be sure to go to the mic. Go ahead. Hello . Yeah. Okay. I think the numbers thing is tough, but its 500,000, i think its a very hidden, strange way to look at it. Im a 20year psychotherapist working with ptsd and depression. We look at the great medical care of the physical wounds because theres a protocol. This burn, this surgery, this injury. And there are no protocols that make any sense in that same level of scientific expertise for depression, ptsd, anger management. And whatever the reporting is that we get out for the numbers that are reported, i can tell you that in the families that i deal with and then are going to prison and on like that, it just goes on and on. And we as a society, im sort of making a speech, but we sort of think what is the greatest why arent they having the treatment necessary . As if the treatment was sort of there as it is for someone whos lost a limb. Is there a question for these guys . Yeah, yeah. I mean, id just like you to explore that a little bit and leave the audience with the sense of concern and dont leave the sense of, gee, if walter reed just had a little more money, then that soldier would have gotten what they needed. Thank you. Just keep them short so we can get more questions. Go ahead, ann. I dont want to leave that impression. I think ive said several times that a lot of people just dont get any treatment. And weve said they get a variety of treatments. Its a big problem and an ongoing problem. You have anything . It seems like some people are trying to figure out if there is some protocol, you know, one size fits all and one, the answer seems to be inevitably when it comes to mental issues that doesnt quite happen. So the military seems to support cognitive processing therapy as its number one choice. Emdr, theres some support of that institutionally within dod. A couple of other forums. But, you know, sometimes and you know this. If youve been doing this work, its, it isnt a broken leg. A broken mind is a little more complicated to treat than a broken leg. So, and im not trying believe me, im not making excuses for anybody. I do know from my reporting which wasnt just in kansas, but was also watching this guy named pete corelli who ran the war in iraq for a while. Then he came home, and he was promoted to vice chief of staff for the army. And part of his brief was to take on medical wounds and suicide in particular. So he began convening this monthly meeting deep in the pentagon, 20 people around a table, video linkups around the world. And this meeting went for two hours, and different commanders had five minutes five minutes. Youve got to tell me what happened, you have got to tell us the lessons learned, maybe we can learn from this and move on, you know . One of the interesting things about that meeting is they always ran out of time before they got through all the listed suicides. So is, again, when i say its clunky, im not trying to excuse be it when i say there are people trying, but there are people trying. But it is clunky. But there are people trying. And then underneath that, its not a broken leg, its a broken mind. Yeah, go ahead. As the daughter of a 1929 aggravated assault from west point graduate from west point, im most interested and congratulate you. On what you have reported especially when it hits women as hard or harder than the men in our world, and we dont bring that out. My question when we knew about vietnam, why we went into two trumpedup wars and bankrupted our country. Now that we have our senator from arizona calling the president a chicken and the United States not brave enough to go into syria and the ukraine. What do you think of that . Well, im not going near that, im sorry. Yeah, right. [laughter] thanks for the question and thanks for telling us about your family. But its a very good question, maybe at a different time. I would like to answer that question. Okay. Unlike david, i do have an act to grind in my book. My book does object to wars. My book is not a book that says we can support our troops just by getting them some treatment. My idea of supporting the troops is you go out and support veterans against the war, afghanistan and iraq veterans against the war, vietnam vets against the war. [applause] theyre all still out there. War can be stopped. War is a human invention. We invented it, and we can set it aside and, indeed, most of the world already has. Except when the u. S. , you know, coerces people into some kind of phony coalition. So, and this attitude that we are not tough enough if we do not resort immediately to some kind of military force, although were now turning around and calling putin barbaric for trying to do the same thing. In this has got to go. This has really got to go. And if there are any lessons to be learned from the this war, i think thats it. We have to stop that nonsense. Okay. Weve only got a few minutes left, so right over here. Yeah. Several years ago i read a book called achilles of vietnam, i dont know if you know of it. Its about trauma, and somebody went through and looked at the parts ascribing achilles experience, and he ended up having classing symptoms of some kind of posttraumatic stress. So war is old, as you said earlier. In your experience in talking to these soldiers and their families whether it was battle fatigue or shell something or ptsz, its always been there ptsz, its always been there. Are we just learning about it, or is there something about modern warfare that has made it somehow more virulent and somehow more of a problem . Because i, all i know about world war ii veterans, some guys i know say their father was silent, taciturn and then was rageful, you know, as you were describing. Okay. Real quick, because were running out of time. Yeah, so real quick, there was and thank you for your service. Eventually this guy, adam schuman, ends up at this Treatment Program in Northern California. And its on the grounds of californias veterans home. Beautiful place. So here 24 guys from iraq and afghanistan surrounded by a thousand other survivors from experiences that werent iraq and afghanistan. Some world war ii guys, a lot from vietnam. A guy from guyana, that was his difficulty. Its just what youre saying, yeah. Of course its always opinion around. It gets different names. There may be more people going through it now because body armors a little better so people who might have died in previous wars are now alive not just with physical injuries, but with traumatic brain injury. There may be a higher percentage in this what are that needs some kind of help, but no, no, we know this. We know that this has been around for quite a while. Its just a little more in the open now. Its not the guy living upstairs in the attic who screams now and then or the neighbor down the street who seemed to have gone to vietnam. I mean, we grow up with these stories. But its more present now. And theres maybe more of a willingness to acknowledge it and to try to engage the with it. But when i said at the beginning nothings new here, nothings new here. Yeah, i have to one more question. This has to be our last question. Arthur jones. You mentioned that some lower income vets and their families have fewer resources sometimes to cope with the medical needs. Dodo you have any hope that the Affordable Care act will address some of that problem . Im, i dont feel qualified to respond to that, im sorry to say. I dont live in the United States, and i havent followed the obamacare discussion as closely as i should have. So im really not qualified to answer that question. Yeah. Oh, do you have well, yeah, i mean, theres we can think what we want about how bloated the va is, but the vas out there, and so thats available for varying stripes of service depending where you live and how good your hospital and providers are. Thats not an Affordable Care act answer, its more of a va answer. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Great, great panel, you guys. Just one question. Would you competent on how you feel american artists, writers, film makers, tv are dealing with these wars and these people weve been talking about, the issues . Ive run into a lot of artists in all, lots of different fields who are devoting themselves to helping vets in various ways and, of course, there are others making films. There have been some wonderful documentary films like the invisible war, for example. So, yeah, artists have been pitching in in all sorts of ways and making extraordinary contributions. Its another cost of war, in my book with, because i like to think of what those artists also could be doing if we didnt have all these wars. I think the journalism out of these wars has been phenomenal. Great. I think the books coming out, very strong. Fiction and nonfiction. The films that are out there, documentaries are out there. Theres no shortage. And then memoirs started to come out, poetry, paintings. Its there. The difficult thing is not the number of people trying to make sense or make literary or artistic sense of these past 12 years, the difficulty is getting people to Pay Attention. Thats the hard part. These have been unpopular wars. And i know, i know the difficulty of trying to get people to Pay Attention to the consequences of these things. And i said this to the panel yesterday, ill say it again. Whenever i talk, some of the people who ive written about will inevitably email me and say, so was anybody there . Was anybody paying attention . And as i said yesterday and ill say again today, yes. Today some people were here, and some people paid attention. Go ahead. I dont know how many folks are here, but itd be interesting to see how many people until this audience is dealing with it. Im one of them. Anybody else a veteran or dealing with family members family members, yeah. I lost a soninlaw a year ago yesterday to ptsd. To ptsd. Well, im glad youre here. Probably the last question. Thank you. I read mr. Finkels book, i havent gotten around to ms. Jones. It seems to me that the last Treatment Facility that adam went to was the most successful, yet it was privately funded and as with a lot of problems in this country, money seems to be a factor. Do you have any suggestions on what we can do to try to generate money, have our country fund this as as opposed to a private endeavor having to fund it . I dont, im sorry. You know, i get asked this a lot, different versions of it. Not specific to money always, but, okay, so ive read your book, and im quite affected by these peoples stories, and what do i do about it . The book isnt prescriptive, and i dont know. I dont know what you do except other than, as i said a minute ago, the fact that youre even paying attention, thats a big deal. And then its sort of up to you. If these people who have opened themselves up, if they continue to reside in you, if now, if theyve moved the vague to the specific because of these characterizations, then maybe itll motivate you to try to figure the next thing out. The just but, i mean, the program in california, its a very good program. But everybody understands there are too many people right now who need help. And you cant that is not a model. I mean, you cant just have an openended program. For all the people that need help. So thats not the answer except for the specific people who manage to find their way into it. Yeah. And, app, you get the ann, you get the last words, about a minute left or so. A minute. Sorry. Minute and ten. [laughter] well, i do have to issue the warning that a lot of the or a number of the private programs that have billed themselves as raising money to help veterans have been just raising money to help themselves. So you need to be careful where you donate your money. And i suggested before that you can donate it to vets existence the war who are against the war who are trying to keep people out of the war. And i have to say that another way in which these wars are not just business as usual, but are different from past wars is that they both are wars of choice that were chosen for us by and we didnt have any voice in it. And the soldiers know that. They learn that very quickly after they get over there. So imagine what its like to be fighting for something you dont believe in and know is based on a lie. And as david said earlier, you wind up just fighting for the guy next to you. And thats not very much on which to base a recovery. We need to think too, on the money issue about the way in which these wars have been used as an extremely efficient vehicle for transferring money from our public treasury to the pockets of the already rich in this country. [applause] it is these wars have become a major source of contributing to the inequity, the social inequity that as we know is increasing all over the country. And we need to keep in mind that the people at the top would like very much to have that continue, pause they draw their allvolunteer army from the people at the bottom who dont see any other option in life. So thats my little axe to grind. That was great. [applause] may i please make a pitch for a local tucson organization . I have to close because we have cspan, i cant youre going to have to wait a minute. Im sorry. If i may, there is a local organization, the Purple Mountain institute, and you can find them at purplemountaininstitute. Org. They offer free courses for veterans in mindfulnessbased stress reduction. You may have heard about it. Its a form of meditation. Mbsr. Classes are free for vets and their families, and its offered throughout the year through the community, and i highly recommend it. Im a van