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>> which experienced some of their lives fighting in iraq and the psychological damage that members of the regiment sustained after completing multiple tours there. mr. phil spoke at the national press club here in washington. >> i'm here not to talk about an issue, i'm hopefully her to tell you a story. it is a story of my hometown recently. i grew up in colorado springs right outside of fort carson, which is a very large army base. right now it has around 32000 active duty. when i was growing up in the '80s and had a lot of friends

who are in military families there, getting deployed agenda that may be spending a year or two in west germany. my friends would come back with superior knowledge of types of chocolate i had never heard of the. it was not a bad gig. and when i moved back to colorado springs when i was an adult things were very different. i started working for the colorado springs gazette. and being deployed met going to the sunni triangle or going to the pashtun river valley, places that standard fairly good chance of dying every day. it's not something that i ever knew about or it was my job to know about at the newspaper. my job at the newspaper, i thought i had this we skied in the world. they hired me, and there actually is a job for this in

colorado. they hired me as their ski rider. [laughter] and in the summer i did things like mountain biking, climbing mountains and thing like that. essentially my job was to write about how to enjoy yourself in the rocky mountains. and people who do it particularly well. which is great. and then these murders started. fort carson had one murder and then another and another. strange murders and murders that were strange not in the way that they happen, but because when you looked for reasons it was very little reason for that to happen. and at the newspaper we dutifully reported it. as these things would happen. this was set up for trial and we would report on whether the person was guilty or not guilty, and they were always found

guilty. but we weren't as a newspaper telling the story, what was the story. why was this happening? and as a journalist you could ask, fort carson, they have a whole office of spokespeople who are ready to tell you without saying very much about, you know, try to explain to what was going on. and they would say, well, this is a big population and soldiers are like anybody else. you're going to have some bad apples in there were going to get into trouble. and that was their line four years. and so finally decided, well, who would really know about this? the soldiers who were there would know about it. since many of them are just sitting in prison, maybe they would be willing to talk to me. i brought this idea up to my editor, and the editor said, philips, you're the ski writer.

essentially, go sit down. so this is something that i started to do in my free time. contacting guys in prison, tracking them down, sitting down with him and talking sometimes for a whole afternoon. let's start in high school. tell me when you joined up and lets him in prison. tell me what happened in between. then i would ask them who else was there with you. who else could tell me about the store there and start to use rebuild pieces of the platoon that scattered over time. if the guy so gotten arrested or guys who'd gotten out of the army and gone home and tried to rebuild the story. i thought it was an important story both for my city and for the army, and ultimately for all of us to learn and what had happened with the soldiers at fort carson had created a string of murders. i'm not talking a couple of murders. i'm talking within this brigade, and i quickly learned after tracking and soldiers that it was one combat brigade that all this was happening in.

within this brigade there was one particular battalion and i was all the cards came out of that. that's about 500 soldiers. entity tag with the murder rate, it wasn't one or two bad apples. the murder rate of about 100 times the national average. and if you adjust it and you say look, it's all young men, they are all young, all male. that's highest risk of violent crime of any section of population. if you adjust it for that, it was just 20 times greater than the very high risk group. so we're talking about a big problem. so, i started to piece together what had happened. and i'm going to read to you a little bit about and then i would say what's happened since. because as i may to sure what i was at the pentagon today, the army repeatedly said that it's a learning organization. and there's a number of individuals where that's really true, people that saw what was going on, we've got to fix it.

and i really hasn't started to happen at fort carson to the point where the things that about about, which is sort of war experience and the immigration, failures of integration at their worst, those things have now turned red where fort carson is looked up almost as a model. people from big army come out of fort carson and say oh, wow, things are really working here. let's see what's working so we can spread it, army wife. some going to carry all of it of the story of this brigade. i'm going to speak for just a minute. let me give you some background. all the guys that i'm talking about, almost all of them are 19, 20 years old. all of the enjoyed right out of high school and were off immediately sent to korea, not iraq. and they were expected to stay in korea for a couple of years

guarding the north korean border. but this was back in 2003, early 2004. and all of a sudden folks at the pentagon realized that the iraq war was not going very well and they might need some extra troops in there. so these guys were very suddenly called up from korea and sent to the worst part of iraq at the time. they were in what's called the sunni triangle, right between ramadi in falluja. so i'm just going to tell you a few, i have a few vocabulary words here that i had to learn a whole language was talking to these guys. one of them, the active duty folks here will know, i refer to something called saw. not something you cut down trees with. it stands for squad automatic weapon. essentially like a medium-size machine gun that soldiers

carried. i'm also going to refer to something called -- this is a four lane i would just like an interstate that connected ramadi and baghdad. and it was this italian job to do highway patrol there. but highway patrol there was so full of firefights and burnt out cars pushed to the side of the road that they quickly renamed it can make all the operation mad max after the '80s movie. they need all their operations after old '80s movies. so i'm going to read to you a particularly bad day on mad max. and afterwards i'm going to just briefly explain how, kind of echo through that time.

and excuse me are using some names that i have and introduce you to the characters, but whenever you picture them, picture me, but 10 years ago. these are all very young, skinny guys. their helmets look too big for them. unit, so don't picture rambo because he won't have the right image in your head. i'm taking you back to 2004 in the sunni triangle. by the end of the week, with 10 east ridge learned his platoon was going back on three days of mad max, everyone was on edge. they had been trained early on to protect themselves from ambushes by watching for anything out of the ordinary, the problem was they soon also learned that almost everything in the corner of iraq was out of the ordinary. every day the soldiers struggled to find meaningful hints of what normal was in their patrol area.

and what normal was not. three people dressed head to toe in black robes, their faces covered except for glaring eyes, was that normal? seven men in headscarves packed into a tiny taxi, was that normal? a burning mound of trash in the middle of the neighborhood with goats forging bonds the smoldering edges. was that normal? and in some of the things that appeared most normal, with the most deadly. a person on a cell phone, a boy on a bicycle, a lone driver in the car, a clear strip of highway. any of them could be a sign of an imminent bomb attack, or not. there was no normal. the first few weeks here or there you have a fear you're going to die any minute. your hyper alert, said private

reaction. but at some point you just don't care anymore either you accept your fate. you wake up in the market say, yup, i feel it. this is the date i get ass wax. i want to pause here and say the language that the young infantrymen use, is not necessarily the language i would choose at the national press club but i want to be true to who these guys were. so i find it easier to read it i apologize for some of it first. several hours into the patrol, the platoon's captain called on the radio. the battalion had a tip that a group of insurgents in a car packed with explosives was on its way from ramadi to falluja. he wanted to meet the platoon just west and set up a roadblock. the platoon rolled towards the stretch of there would michigan just blocks down. they pack their -- they park

their three humvees alongside the highway at around 1 p.m. to block off all traffic coming out of ramadi. private jose barco and two other soldiers pulled on leather gloves. they heaved a big coil of razor wire off the hood of one of the humvees and begin string it across the pavement. eastridge stood guard a few feet away with his big saw at the ready. on his side of the street a few bullet riddled houses big in the sun. on the other side, a cluster of pathetic looking shops rippled in the heat. their owners staring at the soldiers through dusty windows. east ridge's job was to stand watch over his platoon sergeant, strickland. while the sergeant directed the traffic search. at the moment, strickland was conferring with another platoon leader. sergeant sean healy about where to put an observation post.

the street was full of people and cars, women in long black warp, a group of children played nearby in the desperate if they were normal, this was close to a. it was a sign that despite the previous days of violence, all is well. the platoon medic, specialist ryan, walked up next to eastridge and asked the platoon sergeant if you smoke a cigarette. sergeant strickland replied that he knew soldiers were not allowed to smoke in public and since the captain was there, he had to be strict. he nodded his head towards the humvee of the road where the captain had just pulled up. the company commander was adamant that soldiers present professionalism and respect to the civilians, and that meant among other things no smoking. but the platoon had been out initiatives for hours, and the

doctor said he really needed to smoke. eastridge, strickland barked, go take this guy down the alley for a smoke. eastridge and krebs touch pass the platoon sergeant sunday which was parked at the mouth of a narrow mud brick alley and walked several paces down the corridor to sit on the toppled wall. on the wide lanes of michigan, jose barco pulled the dancing goat of razor wire across the hot pavement. other soldiers stood in waves of heat. a group of iraqi men who had been circled in the tense conversation on the far side of the road walked up to barco in the other's string the water and asked them to move the humvees blocking the alley. so the locals could get through to their houses. the platoon sergeant look at the iraqis, he looked at the humvee, and then he told them they could go around. the truck wasn't moving.

then hurried back across the highway and arguing in arabic. a barco, can i borrow your gloves, a soldier said. jose barco turned his head to answer, it was the last thing he remembers. at that moment a suicide bomber speeding down would michigan went across them medium, aimed at the humvee blocking the alley and released its detonation trigger. instantly a flash of heat and concussion shattered the shop window. soldiers felt it before they heard as a shock we slapped them to the ground. glass and metal flew everywhere, fire swallowed the roadblock. the fourth rippled up the alley and hurled krebs and eastridge into the dirt. they were hit so hard that first they thought someone had tossed a grenade on them. everyone laid days in a fog of dust as their shaken brains we set. it lasted only a second or two, but it seemed to stretch minutes.

are you okay? eastridge finally said to the medic as he pulled himself up to his knees, yeah, yeah, i am okay, are you? gretzky and eastridge for wounds and he glanced up over his head to a huge thick cloud of black smoke rising over the street. oh, he said. eastridge whipped around and saw smoke.y he grabbed crabs by the shoulder and he sprinted down the alley into the cloud. confusion hung as big a smoke. the army's combat medic training had drilled tools needed to sort through the bloody chaos of war into krebs' head over and over but nothing prepared him for what he saw. he filed eastridge as they squeeze past the mangled burning wreck of the humvee. the suicide bombers car was nowhere to be seen. the blast that destroyed it almost completely. as krebs and eastridge edged into the street tiny pieces of

metal pelted them through the mist of smoke and dust like scorching rain. silhouettes of bodies materialized in the haze, some moving, some not. an iraqi woman appeared weeping as she tried to drag two children out of the road, the length racquet bodies had been cut into pieces, limbs left on the asphalt, fuel and blood. krebs growth pass the woman farther into the kill zone. district priorities of combat medics mandated his soldiers always come first. from every direction members of the platoon dashed toward the blast site while waiting civilians stumbled away. krebs and eastridge found their platoon sergeant, sergeant strickland yelling for soldiers to get the rivals up and ready for another attack. the sergeant sat on the ground with his hands raised in the air. it look like several of his fingers on only by strips of

skin. bloodstreams out of his mouth, shrapnel had torn open his calf leaving ribbons of red muscle. spreading blotches on his uniform, showed were shards of the now obliterated car had shot into his body. all army medics are trained to divide casualties into three subcategories. those are going to make it no matter what you do, those who are not going to make it no matter what you do, and those who may make it or may not, depending on what you do at that moment. medics are told to ignore the first two categories and focus on the last. bloody or not, strickland was going to live, at least for now. the medic told a nearby soldier to give the sergeant some morphine and bandaged his wounds, and then pushed on. he passed another soldier his cheek and then sliced open by shrapnel and hunt down we dealing a blow job and keep your

a shard of metal stuck in his job own. he, too, was going to make it. krebs kept going to another soldier was bleeding from his face and yelling i can't see, i can't see. he was going to make it. the medic hurled to -- hurried towards a pile of burning wreckage with the captain and some other soldiers were wrestling, blistering hot razor wire off a table of soldiers. krebs took a half step to help them and saw his squad leader, john huey, had been standing crumpled to the ground. and that occurred over and knelt down. he saw blood spurting from the soldiers left by. the sergeant was hit in gulping air like a truck. krebs provolone his right leg, a chunk of carp punch to both thighs clipping both the moral arteries are blood was spreading

a pool on the ground if he didn't take you right now, he was going to die. this is what krebs had trained for. krebs tried to apply pressure without the bleeding and watch his whole hand sink into the womb. he tried again. krebs yell for a nearby soldier, and he said, help, help, i need you to breathe while i hold pressure. eastridge stood near them scanning his saw along the boulevard buildings learn down on tonight. he was waiting for the rest of the ambush. his burial passed over krebs and butler frantically working on his favorite sergeant. and passed over charter ragged iraqis bleeding in the road. it passed over the smoking wreckage or a soldier was blood dripping with customization they are burning, they're burning. help me, they are burning. in the wreckage, eastridge his eyes fell on jose barco, the 19

year-old cuban kid from miami was penned by the flaming front and of the suicide car. eastridge watched our good deeds outweigh the wreckage with the help of two soldier. the private and somehow stood up, wobbling in shock, blood soaking into his uniform from 100 jagged bits of car that had hit him like a shotgun blast. to his amazement, eastridge richard vargo start yelling, i'll kill those mothers he said, i will kill those mothers. gave me my weapon and i will kill those mothers. half of his uniform was still on fire. other soldiers frantically padded out the flames and lay the smoking private on a stretcher. eastridge could smell the burning flesh. krebs and butler put the sergeant into a medevac truck that had just arrived. sergeant strickland with his mangled hands stacked right below him. just before they pulled away, the captain put kiwi slip hand down from the stretcher and

placed it on strickland's bandaged one. talk to him the whole way. tell him he's going to make it. they drove off to the hospital. eastridge kept his gun level of a growing cloud -- crowd of locals gathered on the scene to collect a debt. little scraps of flesh that had been a suicide bomber now litter the road got a couple of potential out of company provide an split up so have to control the crowd while the others cowered the surrounding alleys for the attackers. eastridge watched his captain walked slowly out into the open third meeting of the highway come up with use of the danger tom and you buy a limp body. it was an iraqi boy who looked to be about six. a pool of blood surrounded his body and the whole right side of his head was smashed in. the captain searched. sir, he's dead. the soldier next to the captain said.

i felt him take his last breath. the captain looked at the ground and started to weep. when he stood up, he told his sergeant that no one in the platoon was leaving until after sundown. they were going to guard the chunks of the suicide bomber's body now flung all over the block. in the muslim faith, the captain said, a person must be buried before sundown can go to heaven. he suspected the friends of the suicide bomber were waiting to bury the latest martyr, and the unit was not going to let that happen. they stay for hours guarding the a few locals try to collect pieces of the suicide bomber's body in buckets. the soldiers raised their rifles and ordered him to dump their buckets back on the asphalt. i'm going to skip a few paragraphs and just say that sergeant hewey and sergeant strickland and jose barco were taken to the hospital.

hewey and sergeant strickland lived but were medevac back to the united states. and sergeant hewey who had been the squad leader and father figure really for all the guys that i've mentioned died there. so i'm going to join up where kenneth eastridge had just gotten. as the sun would have eastridge tried to keep himself squared away. he was guarding the same alley where the blast knocked him to the dirt. now in the failing light, us by late in the narrow passage between the wall. no flash, no risk, no explanation, just a human spine. eastridge his battalion had spent months preparing for iraq, and here they were totally unprepared he was trained to shoot and he had been in an attack that wounded several soldiers and killed the man who hidden he counted on most. but it not been able to fire a

shot. guns were almost useless. does no good way to defend against a roadside bomb or a suicide bomber. all the training to outshoot, outmaneuver, and outthink enemy soldiers proved futile because the enemy in iraq was not a soldier. he was a shadow. a disease that wafted him visibly through the civilian population. it made eastridge furious that locals let scumbags hide in their midst. he was enraged that they killed sergeant hewey, his mentor, his leader, the one he looked to for answers. and now sergeant strickland, the platoon leader, was out of the picture to. they still have eight months left other two in iraq, eastridge thought to himself. who will lead the platoon? what will they do? he felt faint. he put his hand down on the crumbled wall to steady itself

and felt something warm and wet in his palm. he had leaned into a piece of lung or liver or something he didn't know what. oh, god, he said. and he jerked his hand away and wiped the blood. this was not what he had signed up for. he felt even fainter. he went just that he himself and put his hand right back into the liver. so this is a story that continues through a hold of the tour that is action worse than the first one. and at some point most of the guys that i mentioned decided to adhere to a very old infantry credo that is not as far as i know if any part of official army education, and that is do unto others before they do unto you.

they were in impossible situations, fighting against an enemy that was very lethal and yet often unarmed. and so the rules of engagement did not allow them often to engage. and these guys, remember, we're talking young guys, guys are most interested in protecting themselves and their friends. by the second two are were often killing unarmed people and planting weapons on them, or through various tricks making the command believed that they have been attacked so that they could respond. and they probably killed a lot of people unnecessarily. i don't think we will ever know how many, but i wanted to redo that passage that you could get a sense of how that sense and that response might develop. and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to tell you can each of these guys mention ended up.

because one of the failings, i don't know if there's any press here, anyone? raise your hand, reporters? none at the national press club. one of the failings of our report on the iraqi war is we've been really good at embedding. we've been really good at writing detailed accounts of major military acts, such as the assault on falluja. we've been really bad at telling the whole story, which is that our military forces are going back and forth and back and forth all the time. and the stress but that puts on an of living in two worlds and what happens to them when their back year, and. on and how do you live in this duality. i don't think that we talk about that much. but it is something that these people and their families live. so i'll start with one of the good ones. sergeant strickland, the platoon sergeant who had his hands mangled was flown to walter

reed. he was patched up. he healed in time to go, to be deployed with the unit again in 2006. where he was blown up again in and once again, he healed very well but was medically retired and is now doing quite well. married, out of the army, not anybody else was so lucky. brian krebs, the medic, obviously -- orderlies i think you can imagine had a lot of shame and guilt not being able to save everyone that he laid his hands on. started abusing drugs mostly cocaine and alcohol when he got back to the united states. it was under the radar enough that he again, a year later, was allowed to deploy with the battalion but by then he was so

troubled by his war experience that he essentially became he stopped reloading his weapon. and they were assigned to a very, very violent place in baghdad what they saw contact every day. so not loading your weapon is a deliberate act. and he did that both because he wanted no more to do with any type of killing, and because he hoped to some extent that he would be killed. it didn't happen. he came home. he was reassigned out of the battalion to a job in a clinic. and was eventually medically retired for ptsd. shortly after he retired, he overdosed on some of the drugs that he was getting for behavioral health issues. and suicide attempts, but he did not die at and he's actually doing very well now. he lives in denver. he has a wife and a child, and

he's on the g.i. bill going back to school. so, he is in a much better place than he was and became an instrument person for me in helping to tell this story. jose barco, the fellas would then by the burning car, he was flown back to the united states to a burn center. yet to get skin grafts and get patched up and was in the burn center to get -- for several months but got back to his unit where he was supposed to be medically retired, but because everybody in the unit like him and he really wanted to go, he sort of snuck his way back into the next deployment. where he became one of the people i described who felt he was justified in shooting people who were unarmed. primarily to people on rooftops, which he felt were working with the insurgency, and many of them

may well have been. you know, they would alert and surgeons to where the americans were so they could bomb them. so he would do things like that. and he made it unscathed through the whole second tour, despite two very close calls with ieds. when he got back, he was sort of a classic case of posttraumatic stress. you know, he avoided going to places with any crowds. he carried a gun all the time because of paranoia that someone was going to attack them. you know, what had been ace survival instinct and a very useful one in baghdad was now a liability. you know, he was drinking, and he had a rage to him. and it quickly led to him getting divorced and then a few months after his deployment in

in the fight at a party where they threw him out for essentially getting drunk and obnoxious. and when this happened at a party, of course everyone who's throwing him out the front door then goes out the front door off to the lawn to watch him leave. and he got in his car and then emptied his whole clip of his pistol at the crowd, only shooting one person who was a pregnant woman. she was seven months pregnant. he was charged with attempted murder. she did not die, but she was 52 years. the judge maxed it out. called him a disgrace. josh butler who played a very small part in this scene, he was a guy who gave mouth-to-mouth to the sergeant who died. the sergeant had been his father figure, like krebs he started abusing drugs and alcohol when he got home. he couldn't bear the thought of going back on another tour, but

he signed up for two and it look like he was going so he got jose barco to shoot him. barco shot him in the leg thinking that he would be medically retired. he actually only missed a few days and they put him back and. he eventually was kicked out for using cocaine. he also is having a lot of the classic symptoms associated with posttraumatic stress, and got in a lot of physical fights with his wife. eventually one that was bad enough that would send him to prison, and she was pregnant at the time, had a miscarriage shortly after, a short time after, that he blames himself for. he thought if he had been in those fights, the child would have lived. he's now out of prison, but lives a very marginal existence, moving in and out of unemployment, lives in a

motorhome. and that just leaves kenneth eastridge. he came back with the same sentence as a lot of these guys, the drug abuse, carrying weapons, you name it. and was arrested after the first two are for pointing a gun at his girlfriend. he dealt himself out of jail, and rather than awaiting trial, which is what he was supposed to do, he deployed with the rest of the unit back to iraq where he continued to spiral downhill. he was one of the do unto others before they do unto you people. he lost any faith in the people that they were assigned to protect. he told me that he and others would rob houses that they were supposed to being searching. they would stockpile weapons which they would then sell back to rival factions and use the money to buy booze and drugs,

and they would also sometimes out of rage and sometimes just out of boredom, what should people. this is based and stories from the platoon. the army investigated this after the colorado springs gazette wrote about this the first time. officially they have never found anything about it. i think that some of it has happened. anyway, at some point he was so unstable in iraq that they put him on duty guarding the father, the operating basis. and there he was caught with valium just available across the counter in iraq. and he was court-martialed. and they essentially decided that he was too bad of a soldier, too much of a liability, too dangerous to keep in iraq so they sent him back to colorado springs. and they did this repeatedly with kaiser mr. gates.

the guys in colorado springs in very worried. if they're too unstable to stay in baghdad, sent into us. and that's actually a good move. if you have a robust behavioral health system, and they could rear detachment at the brigade that can keep track of these guys. need of those was in place in colorado springs. frankly, we still had a behavioral health office at fort carson that was the size it had been in the cold war. and our ptsd cases have increased 700%. so it was overwhelmed. if you fell through the cracks and the cracks were this big, no one was going to come looking for you. and that's what these guys did. they medicate themselves instead with drugs and alcohol are they gravitated towards guys who in a similar boat, as the east ridge

was finally arrested because he had been running around with two other soldiers from his company put all been sent back for similar reasons. they were finally arrested for two counts of first degree murder, both for killing other soldiers from fort carson. at least one count of armed robbery, and then a bizarre crime in which they ran over a woman they didn't even know and and one of the soldiers, the young medic, jumped out and stabbed her several times before they left her for dead. these were random, random crimes. and it's a terrible story except, this is very important, except that it got so bad that the army as a whole anti-people at fort carson in particular said, we've got to do something. we have got to fix this. what is wrong? a key person there was a general.

the general in charge of all fort carson, and he had this unique experience that i don't think anyone else would ever want to have that allowed him to see what was happening and realized he had to do something. his name is general mark graham. you still in the army. no longer at fort carson. his sons grew up, moving around like army brats, and they were young officers. by the time he took over fort carson, both of them were dead. one had been blown up just a few meters from the scene i described to you in the book in the sunni triangle, and killed. the other had been killed -- or had killed himself after struggling with depression and being afraid to openly treat it because he was an officer in the army, and especially at that time, to an extent still, that just didn't fly. so here was this man who had lost his family, one to the

horror of war, one to behavioral health, he had nothing to lose. he had only to gain. because he felt like everyday when he looked at the soldiers, all of the soldiers, he saw his sons. he said, what would i do for these guys rex and so, the top to the bottom, remained behavioral health, how the commander deals with mental health. not only that, he got the army to commission a big study epidemiologic of consultation. that brought in all sorts of scientist to look at what was going wrong. what wasn't working and how can we fix it. this seems like an obvious thing to do, but the army doesn't obvious they do that, right? because if you're the general in charge and you do that, you know that what they're going to find is going to be bad and you're going to have to with all the

stress people out there, talk about the murders and what we did wrong. and no one wants to move up the chain of command would ever willingly do that. and i think it is just the generals deep inherent feeling that he said it doesn't matter. it's something we have to do. and so now things are remarkably different at fort carson. i'm not going to say that war doesn't still have the ability to ruin people. i'm not going to say that there are no problems. but if you look at the numbers, this brigade that a vote about just came back from afghanistan. just as bad as a fight they had in iraq. they lost 40 men. but the numbers are very different. suicides are down by 70%. the number of people who are attempting suicide are doing something so crazy that they put

in a mental hospital, is down about 70%. at the same time, the number of treatment, where they are talking to a therapist, maybe going to group therapy, may be getting antidepressants, he's way up. they are breaking down the stigma, people getting treatment early. they're never getting to the point or rarely getting to the point of having to go to the hospital, and murders are also way, way down. it's very important, you know, whether you're a huge supporter of what we're doing in iraq and afghanistan or not, this is an issue that i think anyone can agree we need to make progress on. and, unfortunately, -- and fortunately, that is really starting to happen. i write a little bit about the other steps they're taking in his book, but i'm going to stop there because i don't want to

run too long. any kind of questions, i know have a couple of active duty folks here, and hopefully some questions. >> has this ptsd been with us ever since we've been at war, second world war? it is something we've just identified? >> were you in -- >> no. i was in the army. >> yeah. i mean, i think everybody in the room probably, probably has some sense that is true, but it's awesome different. i mean, ptsd has been around -- our brains have not changed for a very long time, essentially since we got hold of a really good source of protein, our brains haven't changed, our emotions have not change. but something has changed which is why i think we hear about

than maybe we did right after vietnam, or right after world war ii. and that's warfare is fundamentally changed. in world war ii if you were wounded, when my grandfather was in more water, you only had one in three chance of making it out alive. and by my father's generation in did not come if you were wounded and had gotten slightly better but not much. one in four chance that your wounded in battle. you lived from your bones. now it improve so vastly that the last numbers i saw were one in 20, and to make i should be a lot better than that. and not only that because of body armor and armored humvees, there are a lot of people are never officially injured in the first place. and so we have many more people who have seen combat and our

work -- and are walking among us who don't have to scratch. they may have been in several firefights, they may have even been shot and not have a scar. and yet the human psyche has not changed. and so you can understand that we still have to carry all the burden. you are, more of us are around. yeah, please. >> i'm active duty. isn't interesting phenomenon that if you compare this war and other wars, i can be in a firefight at home within 18 to 24 hours. if you compare to previous conflicts, in particular world war ii, my uncles came back on the ship that was three weeks, they had to sever cisco after horrific fighting, very

comparable to what we are seeing today. you know, kick back and sever cisco they made it across the country to their wives and families. there was a period of decompression. is not a factor at all as you look at these soldiers that that might have helped in this case or not? >> my short answer is i don't know. but it's interesting that the things that come every brigade that deploys to iraq and afghanistan now, combat stress team. and what they would do a lot of times after they've been any serious firefight or something, they will have a debriefing were they just have everybody go around and talk about what happened, and it's actually a really helpful thing for people because it creates a narrative and it sort of helps your brain on a conscious and subconscious level sort of digest that, define it.

and isn't it funny that that's what they were doing on the ship's home without the combat stress teams. and when i talk to guys about this, and i said, what could what could the army do differently? these are young guys who, they are now in prison after rising to the rank of specialist, and they all try to articulate to me that that would be a good thing. for a period of a week or two have some sort of decompressing. but it's tough because on the other hand you wouldn't give up your 10 days of r&r, or 14 days of r&r where you fly back on and you're there with her family and you go back. it's a tough line to walk don't you think keeping people away from their families longer than you have to and trying to give him some structure. but i agree, and i think more good leaders are starting to sort of build those debriefings,

de- stressing times into return. anyone else? [inaudible] >> okay, first let me do a big disclaimer. we generally use ptsd that means anything that is wrong with johnny and he came home from the war. he came back different, right? ptsd is really specific. it's essentially like a memory unable to suppress art you are avoiding a traumatic memory and it is causing bad things to happen in your life. has a lot of really proper treatments that all involve exposure to come in some ways, that traumatic event, whether talking about or writing about or even going through the military now has essentially

like a virtual reality, go through the streets of iraq type of thing, that will help you dead in your abnormal response to that memory. but there are different things obviously we are more complex than that, and when johnny comes home different, it's not that, you know, he hides under the bed when he hears a loud noise. shame, guilt, depression. i like to describe it this way, i assume that almost everybody in this room went to college. think of yourself the day that you got there, freshman year, and what a fool you were and so innocent. and then think of all the formative expenses you had we learned, he made mistakes, you may different community mentors and you grew. think about how different you were when you graduate work and then place all of that with iraq because that's what happened

with these guys. these guys were in iraq more than they were in the united states. and, you know had their friends killed in front of in front of them in horrific ways. and maybe kill people that they don't think, having to look back on if they should've killed. and you have to live with that stuff. and that's not necessarily ptsd. but it is the things that, you know, were also human beings are resilient. and we can deal with stuff. we can even remake our character after we feel that it's been destroyed. if it comes to that. the key to success there or was the most most basic ease, there's got to be stable place to rebuild from come at these guys hang out with of the guys who are all screwed up from the war, drinking and carrying weapons, they will never have that chance. and so it's really, it's a command issued more than like a therapeutic issue, how do you create an assignment for

success. >> the films that have come out in the past couple of years, particularly with our current wars, how have you reacted? are there any that you really thought were very strongly accurate and honest in portraying what you understood from your research and knowledge? i'm wondering about your reaction to the footlocker. and also these documentaries, i don't know any of you seen. >> i'll tell you that assure active duty guys here can yell out if they agree. "the hurt locker" was ridiculo ridiculous. unit, guys and all of a sudden he is an expert sniper. but what i found, judging on the guys i knew during the surge in baghdad, very small group of guys that i studied a lot, they did not show, they did not

necessarily value iraqi lives in the way that "the hurt locker" portrayed as hero valuing iraqi lives. i don't think they necessarily would have risked much. they would have risked anything for the unit, and if they thought that one or two iraqis could have had been blown up and a blast if they didn't do something that they might get blown up, no dice. the ones that i thought was most like the guys that i wrote about, and it turns out that one of the soldiers had been killed by three other soldiers and there was no reason for it really. you had a question. [inaudible]

>> to discuss your findings every book or have you speak to some of the units that either were coming back or deploying from the ford division. >> fort carson, i'm not allowed on fort carson. i have to get permission and two people follow me around with a tape recorder. >> so it wasn't well received? >> yes and no, but within the military you can't generalize. there's some people, it's like anywhere you're ever going to work, there are some people who are complete jerks and there are other people who are intelligent and thoughtful and open-minded. and i have a lot of friends at fort carson. they are just not the people who necessarily are in charge of dealing with the media. but they are very open-minded. in fact, the other day i had lunch with the brigade psychologist. and she's doing fantastic work. so good things are happening. [inaudible] >> very concerned about this issue.

to make sure that as many people as possible understand it, why it's different in this war and how it can be treated. he understands the impact on families and on brigade leaders. and chaplains are becoming more involved with the combat commanders so that they're getting the jiminy cricket icollege ingredient before some of this stuff is even thought about. i appreciate very much what you have done for this whole realm of understanding. >> ultimately you need guys, like there are rules on the book is a look, we need to use at home and at home. these guys had one year at home and in 15 months in a really bad place but and a lot of them didn't get to take vacations.

they were too short of bodies. and so beth laid -- best laid plans. this war was supposed to end eight years ago? i take all that with a grain of salt. >> get away a bit from the feature aspect of the individuals to the larger picture of the cost of ptsd and the continued treatment of it. i understand that the javelin, for example, who was put in prison for almost murdering the woman who is pregnant, all right, my brother is a judge their kids had situations where he sends people to prison who are ptsd ruined veterans. okay, they go to prison for whatever it is they have done. once imprisoned, they no longer

get veterans benefits. so he's had a person who was escorted to the va to meet with his physician, who was taken, escorted by military police off the va grounds because he was now the state prison systems responsibility, thank you very much. so these people are not getting continuing care for all their whole repertory of illness and injuries. and the cost is being dumped on the states in addition to that or the county. >> right, we end up paying for it. >> okay, so who pays for the woman who was injured, who was expecting the baby, who pays for the ongoing treatment, you know, what is the implication for all that and how is that changing? who's taking that up? in minnesota, for example, where i'm from there, setting up a separate court system to treat veterans so that -- okay, it

amazes me how this administration can't approve separate but equal court system, you know -- >> we can talk about the veterans. >> and in virginia we just pass a constitutional amendment exempting veterans from paying property tax. >> you know, the costs are going to be long. we're still paying for vietnam in a big way. one of the good things that has come out of it though is things got so bad at fort carson and at other places that the department of defense in 2006 and 2007 allowed an obscene amount of money to be spent on ptsd and traumatic brain injury research, which went for, went to, you

know, universities all over the country. and what we are going to get out of that, the potential, like the sites we get because all of a sudden there funding for this research, could be a really good thing. so i agree, there is something here that we created, but there are at least some good things. >> one small anecdote if i could add. i was transferring planes a few years ago. the person checking me and said how many bags do you have. i said to. she said i can count three. she was counting the person or i said okay, the person fits into she said put it in. i moved aside to put it into she said no here, right now. all right, the gentleman behind me said honey, i'm not hearing anything, i will carry that for you, sweetheart. so we started chatting. turns out he