with you. >> from the 2013 writers symposium, our panel discussion continues with dave mcintyre, james rice, and retired colonel john kauffman. this is about two hours. >> first of all, president schneider, doctor warren, i would like to thank you for coming here. i think that this is going to be a very worthwhile afternoon.

does anyone have a cell phone? please turn it off. were please please get the ringer volume also does not interrupt the proceedings. willie mays with national league rookie of the year. like many of his generation, willie mays was another american of some repute. including those like edward kennedy of massachusetts. with several records behind him, it was a time when virtually all man who could serve in the armed forces of united states did so. those who did not were more pity than envy.

folks that sign up voluntarily got a better deal. most veterans were proud of their service. a great many regarded it as an important and formula to part of their growing up. things changed in 1973 with the coming of the all volunteer military. it also brought a close what has been a major rite of passage. what the celebrities shared with the rest of us. after 1973, men reaching the age of 18 years old were no longer pushed towards military service or bite cultural norms. the volunteer force set up a major shift in the demographics of america. three quarters, it 80% if you count age 85, of american men over the age of 80 our veterans. by contrast, less than one third

our veterans. veterans are a diminishing minority. the most for the most part, what young people know about military service they have heard from their fathers, their grandfathers, seen in the movies, or picked up secondhand. currently only about 13% of americans are veterans. the military still ranks high in public opinion. but this could change. wartime success brings back contempt for military values, much like it did in vietnam. news coverage of the military usually focuses on scandals, lawsuits. waste, mistakes. most of the entertainment industry traditionally depicts the military as corrupt or ill-informed. when people do have personal life experiences to debate their judgment, images delivered by the news and the entertainment industry dominate.

or as we might say this year, lack of images produced by the oteri in the entertainment industry. those who have served in the military can lend their voice. on this panel we have several of these voices. all men who have served in the military. i'm going to introduce them. doctor james rice, he is the son of a world war ii veteran and he joined the marines at age 17. primarily with the first marine brigade and he earned a phd from the university of wisconsin, madison, and he became a history professor at dartmouth college from 1998 until 2009. since 2005, he began a series of u.s. military procedures where

he met other military war in the service in iraq and afghanistan. in over 2000 visits since then, he has helped servicemen and women to continue education. and he has assumed responsibility to support and educational counseling program for veterans. helping them fulfill their dreams. president james wright worked with chuck hagel on language for the g.i. bill. it was passed by president bush in 2008. he has the support of veterans in these institutions.

he also writes books. "those who have borne the battle." it was released in april 2012. he provides a historical account of those who have fought american wars. and he shares some of his own experiences and insights. please welcome doctor james wright, doctor david mcintyre, colonel mcintyre is a distinguishing general at the analysis institute in washington dc. and at the partisan terrorism research center as was the director of homeland security and defense programs at the national graduate school. he serves on the editorial board

of homeland security education and writes a regular column for inside homeland security. doctor dave mcintyre was appointed by the president bush and the national security board in 2008. he previously served on the national board of directors for public and private partnership with the fbi. as academic advisor to the university systems of emergency management. he was featured at the study of homeland security. he has taught homeland security at the george washington university, the lbj school of university of texas, and texas a&m. he also directed the integrated center for homeland security for four years. he has numerous press credentials and interviews with every major network in the united states. including last night, we filmed

a cell phone radio interview in texas. part of this he served a 30 year career in the united states army, alternating between airborne and security units per he retired as the dean of the faculty at west point and academics in 2001. he was my dean when i was a student there. doctor mcintyre's book is "centerline", which depicts the story of the u.s. air force medevac c-130 transport. and the lives of its crew. the medical personnel who supports the transportation of wounded veterans, bringing them home and it is a really good story.

please welcome doctor dave mcintyre. [applause] karl marlantes is directly to my left. he grew up in seaside, oregon. he is back in the great northwest now. he was a high school football player and student body president at seaside high school, class of 1963, where his father was principal. he won a national merit scholarship and attended university. he is a member of jonathan edwards college. he played for the rugby team. his position was wing forward. he attended the university college at oxford. after his military service and

he returned to oxford and earned a master's degree. making a living in international business as a consultant in england and france. he is the author of "what it's like to go to war." karl marlantes was declared one of the most profound individuals for the topic that you wrote upon. based upon his combat experience in the vietnam war. he is a marine corps first and second lieutenant. his decoration included the navy cross. after his combat tour, he served in the rain corps and wrote about service and post service in his latest book.

"what it's like to go to war" he was recently interviewed with bill more years the promotion of this book in 2012. please welcome karl marlantes. [applause] last but not least, at the far end of the panel is colonel jon coffin from the national guard. he is retired. his army career consisted of him serving as its signal platoon leader in moving across south vietnam from 1960 through 1970. he joined the vermont national guard in 1973. during his career in the guard he served in a wide range of positions to the honor of commanding vermont singularly elite three of the 170 seconds and the tree battalion in early

1990. based on his longtime service, he is a staff psychologist for fire service and police officers. you have the name of the organization in burlington? >> the howard center in burlington. colonel jon coffin was debriefed returning soldiers at the platoon unit as well as breathed -- brief the soldiers were getting ready to go to iraq and afghanistan. in addition to the better part of the last two years, he was constantly deployed to one of 12

locations around the country, providing 106 debriefings to the soldiers during their weeklong process. six months ago, colonel jon coffin or tarred with 49 years of army service, at which time he was awarded a medal for distinguished service. welcome, colonel. [applause] this year's theme for the colby military writers' symposium is "coming home: the hopes, fears, and challenges of veterans returning from war." it talks about the hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions of returning veterans. also the dwindling number of returning veterans. but not the current veterans, but those dwindling population. following world war ii and the way that we mobilized our war and fight our wars and honor those who serve great you say

that this has changed drastically. because of unclear and changing military objectives, do you think it is harder for civilians to stand behind the situation? because our forces have become less representative of american societies as a whole, to citizens joined in the sacrifices and the support system seemed capable of handling it. how do we deal with this? how do we fix this? >> that is a question of today. it is a question really our time. those of us who care about veterans. we need to fix it and we need to address that. world war ii was a clear war with objectives defined and accepted by the entire population. there was mobilization and everyone shared in the sacrifice of world war ii. about 12% of the population served in uniform and not war. the war since then, korea, vietnam, certainly the wars in iraq and afghanistan have been

less clearly defined. we have been reluctant with sacrifices from americans. increasing upon an all volunteer force. they are not represented always. how do we fix this? we have to get our political system to recognize when we take our troops into war, they're going to be casualties. our political system needs to recognize that the casualties deserve full care for the casualties, as long as it takes for these issues to deal back with doctor including emotional issues that they bring back with them. wars are very dangerous things. the democracy cannot wage war in this way you think the relative lack of press coverage in the current war or current military operations in afghanistan, but

that is an issue? >> it is an issue. there is nothing dramatic to cover most of the time. there could be some kid from iowa losing his leg in an ied. there is no engagement with the enemy, there's nothing to say that we had a victory today. most of us do not know that the war is being fought by jones at a place that we don't know. it is still being fought by young men and women and they are dealing with multiple deployments and we have to understand better what it is that they are enjoying. >> let's see that visible opposition today, you permission is made more clear than it was in vietnam.

>> the first and obvious answer is there is no war draft. there was not a whole lot of protesting with this in place. this results in a draft. students and, my goodness, they are going to get me. i do not like this war. it is very important, as i said, that the entire nation realizes that it has chosen to go to war. somehow we get the idea in this country, we are faced with an indifference now. almost and apathy. we are not at war. we build factories and build on this. we grow up in a military and we develop the weapons. we talk about how veterans sometimes feel isolated when they come back. i think that what is happening

as a result of the all volunteer military is that the country itself, they consciously don't really feel like it's involved. we borrow the money from the chinese to fight the war. so there is not even any mutual sacrifice anymore. the more important thing, something that we need to take on is if you have the attitude that you are not really engaged in this as a civilian, at the end of this long chain of factories and financing and taxes, you have a 19 year old who pulls the trigger. that 19-year-old is just at the end of a long chain that we are all part of it somehow we have the idea that that 19 year old is the one that led to war and pull the trigger and he did the suffering. and we have some compassion for

that. well, there is going to be isolation. how is the guy going to feel when he comes back? in the old days, everyone suffered. all the way back to the revolutionary war, women had to go farm. they had to suffer when the men were gone. so i think that that goes right back to the doctor's point, which we have to re-examine the all volunteer military. >> we touched on some of the family's background. could you describe we get some of these ideas in what we will use as biographical sketches?

>> the example are from people i know including aircrews and those people that i knew specifically for my youngest son. he is an air force pilot. the family the chief of emergency worrying in kuwait, a flight nurse and the family members and my wife was a military child and then married a guy in the military and then sent two sons off to war and became a military mother. my daughter-in-law, my sister, it is just really when you talk about four groups, pilots and

air crews, family members, these were people part of the experience. including the question we are addressing, let me just take 30 seconds for the homeland security strategy. that is mostly what i do. let me talk about this for just about 30 seconds. it is not the sole issue, please don't get me wrong, but it is an important issue to understand. there is a mental divide in this mission over what the future of the nation should be. at the top, whether it is republican or democrat for the bush administration, there has been a feeling among the political elite and the political science week.

among the decision-making elite that the united states must be engaged globally. it is the way that we defend ourselves overseas or with influence overseas the problem is that the american public is not going to pay for that. we have it on borrowed money to hire soldiers go and do that. there is a fundamental and strategic disconnect. it leads to this in the country, doing things without open access as the public. i don't know whether you noticed that or not, but there has not been an american casualty in the news for several years. by the way, no longer reported in the news. we have to refund on in the article to find out what country they are from.

the military has made the decision to do that. it is leading from behind a curtain. it is not just leaving from other people. if what we are doing and where we are engaged is obscured from the american public, we don't feel the price of american engagement. if there is a fundamental problem, i suggest that this army and audience, the question is what you want to do? you want to have a global footprint, we need to have a global print. if you're not going to pay for that, then we have to accept the fact that other people do what they want to on their own time. and you cannot have both things. that is a strategic impossibility.

>> speaking to a lot of things and before they came home, you tell me what you told them. and i would like to get the view of whether that was the right thing before fighting in combat. >> thank you. i have three well read and well written. those i hope that can assist everyone in this room to let our government provide everything from vocational health to psychological health for our soldiers. i would like to join them in this humble capacity. i just got out of the 49 years. all i know is what i have heard. i have read a thought and really what i know is what is in the

hearts and minds of our soldiers. jonathan farnum is over here. i was on the phone with him last night reflecting on a pile of newspapers that he had in his office for the first couple of months in the war. many men and women in this room and from other places in vermont are here. ten or 12 years ago there weren't that many in the guard.

the thing that rang loudly in our hearts was nothing happened to us. no one general farnum and ii sar these guys. we don't know what we are doing. we do not what is going on but we must talk to them from our hearts and souls. we have to tell them that we are behind them no matter what they find themselves into over there.

the general and i have been around a long time. we have the opportunity to be able to talk to people, someone who may not rent them out as far as they really felt. i had this experience please after critical incidents. and we had the bright idea that we would try to convert the critical incident model and taken on the road. the moment they came back as we

are meeting them at the bottom of the stairs on the tarmac. as many of you know, people come home to vermont many times, they go and cool offer for five days, they get angry for something other than what was over there. we would hold the briefings with these people. this cost a lot of money. i am not sure that we have a hold of the money. we were on the road constantly and what we told them before we left was if you get on this plane, if we are still alive, we will be here after you are gone, every way possible. learning how to pray for your redemption when you get home, no matter what you face. general farnum, true to his promise, i think -- i don't think i have missed many visits. i hope to tell you a little bit

later about how we did the debriefing. it is a very simple process. all i can say is there are some noble psychology professors over the last couple of days who have asked, what you think works best. we don't know. the guard never did anything like this before and probably never will again. we have done everything that we can and we have tried everything that we can that is not experimental. if people didn't want to talk to us, we talked to them anyway. people going on car rides, at once, the them in the middle of the night. he is a medical surgeon that is over here right now. he has carried out through. did we do any good?

i am praying that we did. we continue to plan to do so. >> thank you. you wrote in your book what it is like to go to war. a couple of lessons that you thought you may have wished you were told before you got to vietnam. >> yes, i think that again, it is our culture. we like to shuffle things under the rug. but we really ought to stir things right in the face. there are several things i wish that i understood before i went in before i came back. one of them is today our kids are out to do something that we have told them all their lives that they shouldn't do, which is kill someone. the judeo-christian culture, one of the major tenant of that culture, yet suddenly that is

what we are asking. i was at the air force academy and i was talking to a woman who is in charge of the curriculum. and we didn't really talk about killing people, she said. you know, we don't like to talk about that. and i wish that i had done a little bit more thinking before i went. maybe even before i joined the marine corps. many were very young. those kinds of kids don't seem to think about anything like that. you're going to have to take it upon ourselves as adults to make them aware of it. and how are you going to deal with that or handle that when you come back in a it is not like you have an answer, but at least you have a framework you are not going crazy, that you are not evil, that you are not some kind of an animal. all of these doubts, all of this

has been really handy and one of the more important ones is how you do kill someone, and that is described in the book. it is a fancy term for turning someone into an animal. say no, you can't dehumanize people, that's terrible. well, the fact of the matter is that you will dehumanize them. that is what you're asking the 19-year-old to do. to be sophisticated enough to kill an animal and we called them all kinds of names. we seem to be so great at that. then we immediately get out of it. well, it is going to be very hard to get out of it if he doesn't understand what the mechanism is.

you still think they are animals. we were killing animals as far as psychology was concerned. you get into this, you get out of this as fast as you he can. including the leadership that was older. the leadership is a lot older than some leaders. they would have a better chance of seeing what is going on. i got myself involved where i went into a fight where i was angry. i didn't have this in terms of framework figured out. so that is a big thing. the second thing that is really important is education about what happens to your brain after you come back. we all know that in combat, most combat occurs in the infantry. that is because the brain has not adapted. the brain actually start to switch the circuitry.

it is not psychological, it is physiological. you hear a sound and you wonder what it is. the process is going through your cerebral cortex. by the time you have done on that, what happens is you rewire the circuitry under extreme until adrenaline. there is no more thought, you hear the sound and you shoot it. well, that is ptsd. i bumped my head in the kitchen one day. here are my kids and my wife are you what is going on? and there is crockery and things all over and my hands are bloody. we had never heard of the tse. they were frightened. my wife talked about how with a little bit of education, oh, he has poster max stress. he is not angry at us, he just

got surprised, and he wasn't thinking. we better get him some help and medicine and my wife, i am so grateful to her. my daughter had put the chain on the door and i opened the door like that. i hit the door a couple of times. and my wife said, you can take your meds today, did you? [laughter] that is because we are educated now. we understand what the mechanism is. this is part of what has gone to war and this is what we come back with. if you don't know about it and the families don't know about it, there a lot of families that have no education whatsoever on it. the husband is going with me. she doesn't know if it's her

fault or not. education about what happens when you come back, what happens your brain to your brain when you were over there and come back, giving you an idea that is actually kind of normal. this is a normal reaction. and this is what you are really engaged in. this is not about football. this is about killing people. here's what you have to think about. >> you are the historian. has always been like this? what is this a phenomenon of the early 21st century? >> i think it has always been like this. homer had some good insights into all of this. i agree so much with carl. in my book, i say that there are two things that we teach our children. from the time that they are able to be taught anything. one is not to put themselves at risk, and the second one is not to harm others.

and we say, you have to be willing to put yourself into tremendous risk. you have to be able to do things quickly. after a couple of years, we say, go home, forget about all these things. i think many forget the behavior. despite all of the stories, they do control the behavior. but they never forget. one simply cannot forget this. >> is there anything to add their? >> no, except that i really like the point that you have made about how this is a natural response. i talked to an air force psychiatrist psychiatrist and she suggested that she is working with the team to change the term from ptsd to poster might stress syndrome. suggesting that this is not

something that you are broken and you have a disorder, a broken leg and you have to park this at the handicap facility, but instead, it's a natural response that the body has an extreme situation. and your body will heal itself if you give a hand. i had the same suggestion from some of the nurses i work with. one of them is doing her phd work right now. what she calls the secondary casualty. what she is researching is the medical personnel who becomes a psychological casualties based on what they see and what they do. the suggestion here is that they can become casualties if you talk through it properly and prepare them for it properly. she really liked the framework in dealing with homeland security. where you have preparedness and response. you can mitigate and prepare and protect and you can rapidly

respond and recover. in the long-term, you can really try to give long-term responses to care. and she is taking that framework and trying to apply it. next step is to understand that what we are talking about with soldiers, she's talking about medical people. it also applies to police and fire individuals. if you have spent 30 years cutting car seats over bands, eventually this will get to you. but it doesn't have to get to you in a way that breaks your brain and causes you to become an alcoholic and abuse your family if you prepare for it. then if we respond properly to it after it takes place. i am hopeful. military medicines have made huge strides as a result of bringing people home wounded. i hope mental health is in the

same way. >> so colonel coffman, you work with fire portions were some numbers of years. do they have any training programs to prepare this first responders for the violence they are going to encounter? >> we have learned from the last 10 years. our people will be exposed to the most devastating explosion of their vision, ideals, and fantasies of what god and country, chain of command, and legitimacy of task will be. the question is what will they do and how will they handle that internally? what we are working with people now to do is sell to our

soldiers the idea of you need to know who you are. i would like to see every soldier get 10 sessions of psychotherapy before they go over. and if they don't do that before they go, as many of you know, we expect you to get to a veteran center and talk to someone about what we call readjustment counseling. i like that word. that is not a scary word. you can get the readjustment counseling. when i talk about psychoanalytic therapy here. just because you have been exposed to the total of all your ideals, it does not mean that you need to go around as a

broken vietnam vets for the rest of your life. you have to get yourself together, knowing who you are, and each one of you in the audience is different. you are in an asthmatic situation and you have to save your platoon, it each one of you is going to come to a different place on that and arrive at a different conclusion in a different way. but it has to be when you can live with, even if both situations are going to end up in death and destruction. it has to be a way that you can live with the best. even as an individual, you have to come away with your internal truth intact. we believe that that can be done. we are just starting to wake up to that in a couple ways to do it, i want to speak about this, first of all.

>> is the idea of rituals. i am a white protestant boy from them. we do not have any rituals. we may go to church on sunday, but somebody talk to me about rituals early in my career. and i had a hero who had a leg blown off. he went to a veteran center and started talking to someone. he was also an alcoholic. he was sent to recovery. he found a deep spiritual self within himself. a higher power. he got sober. he got a job as an alcohol and drug counselor. worked for 35 years. wore a bowtie every day. and the smile on his face.

he believed that people can redeem themselves. i look in the morning every morning and i say, you can do this. because bucklin did it. and you will find your own rituals. it may not be going out, dancing around, some of you have told me you have done that and god bless you. whatever it takes. get in touch with who you are. never mind what the mentality, you have something than to offer the rest of us. we are talking to you about what we have heard. god bless you, use it behind you. >> bespeak in such transcendence

that may or may not be spiritual. i noticed you have bounced around spiritual philosophy in trying to describe things. let's talk a little bit about in preparation to go to combat, you have to have an understanding of a higher order of the world trade. >> first of all, as i was saying before, to be honest about what you have to do, when it comes to taking a human life is sacrificing your own life for the good of others. the christian religion is about god that sacrifices his own life for the good of others. taking a life is also something that should be relegated to the gods. i don't care what your religion is. it is something that humans shouldn't have to be involved with.

but the u.s. that young people be involved with. willy-nilly, you are involved in a spiritual issue. even though it is horrible, it could be the opposite side of the coin. we want religion to be sort of like pixie dust. we like christmas. we don't like good friday. it is just the way we are built. if you look at a lot of world religions, they have a lot of dark side. if you actually think about it, it is torture. if you think about the demons in buddhism, there is a dark, dark side to a spiritual reality. the beginning is just that, that you begin to understand that i might be entering the dark side of something that we generally suspect young humans to do.

the other thing that i have thought about is that whether or not it is a spiritual experience , i suspect it may be the dark side of the same coin, i can tell you here how similar it is. if you think about any of the world religions, they had four things in common. some are always aware of their own death. in combat, that is always over the shoulder. we are always focused upon the moment.

there may be years of psychophysical exercises to get into a place that actually allows their minds to be in the moment. i guarantee you that during the moment, you are not taking fast. you are right there. the other thing that these things have in common is that they do try to include their egos for greater good. one of the things that makes me so proud to be a part of the military experiences that i have experienced situations where people will die for everyone else. that is really a rare thing. but that is what you are doing in combat. all of these things are part of larger groups. i mean, you are part of a larger group. and here we have the

similarities between ordinary spiritual experiences and combat, which i think are striking and we have to accept it. i'm not going to a that this is a spiritual experience. but i think it was for me. but for some people, anyway, if you have them come back down and put burgers at mcdonald's, you're going to have a problem. he is not going to fit in very well. and that is what we are asking our young people to do. >> speaking of that, doctor, would you think about wounded veterans at the hospital? >> i went the following year 2005 and i was down for the christmas party for the marines in this past december i will go down again in a couple of weeks.

i was stunned by what i saw. obviously the people who are hospitalized in places like walter reed and bethesda are seriously wounded. they are missing limbs. they have a significant consideration, and if they are burn injuries, i was struck by them. i was struck in talking to them as well. i have always asked what happened to them and they tell me what happened to them. i have always been struck by this. i wanted to get back to my unit. my initial sense was that these guys were caught up in what president bush or president cheney or president rumsfeld was saying. they want to go over and carry the flag again. if they want to be with their unit and their friends. they want to be with their

buddies. i know young marine who have known for a number of years who had multiple bullet wounds. when he learned that one of the guys in his platoon had been killed, it was very hard for him. i happen to know this kid had been there. he said i should have been there to help. but i do think that the instinct to reach out, these guys, everyday there would be a handshake to meet more people coming in and out. we think it is terribly important. i was struck when they would tell stories about what happened and that is not productive always for them. but it's very moving. i've never heard anyone complain. i've never had anyone say, it is

not my fault, this was stupid, why was i doing it, i can't believe that they don't feel sorry for themselves. there is a remarkable generation of young people. >> with the doctor is talking about is a natural instinct of those people who were born to become warriors. they will naturally protect. that is what they do. they protect. it is a natural instinct, and that is what we talk about. a natural instinct to do something to help your friends. my father and my uncle is in cozzens were fighting for democracy. all they wanted to do was get the job done and get home alive. it never changes. what the issue is for us civilians, we have to be careful. what we have is a precious gift

from nature, which is you have the people who will sacrifice body and limb and life. because they want to help and be part of the group and they want to do all of that. it is a natural urge and they will do it. that we are the ones who have to use it wisely and put them in the right place. the idea that we are doing it for patriotism, yes, they can say that. when push came to shove, when it was down to the dark and dirty, we were thinking about anything like that. it is a natural thing. the adults have to say, let's use this gift. that way it is not wasted. i think that we have lost sight of that. >> do think there is a chance that we are wasting it because we are getting into these less risky military endeavors from where we can be inflicting just as much difference on the enemy?

>> it actually goes back to the issue about what are we doing in the world? are we sacrificing ourselves protect our people, or are we sacrificing ourselves to put forward a political agenda or a geopolitical agenda. i think that is a very critical issue for any young person. i think that it is not just a question of the american people, or do we want to be an empire and we do we want our kids over there dying for something that we are not sure is really protecting us? the natural instinct is to protect and not to do some real politics. i think that is a fundamental western that this nation has not followed yet. >> doctor mcintyre, you have a line in your book concerning the wounded. one of your characters says that

everyone who goes or get shot. some in the body, some in the head, some in the heart. what do you mean by that? >> this is an experience, the first in 40 years. i was dependent -- the first class at west point not to go to the vietnam war. the year before us, and took only volunteers. two years ahead and made it to everyone. from 1970 they took only volunteers. in march they returned this at vietnam. they established the atomization. i left the service 30 years later after 30 years and 29 days before 9/11. so i fell right in the hole, in

the middle. it's not that we didn't do anything for 30 years. we worked 20 hours a day. we had casualties. we have guys that started with waist deep snow and not carbon monoxide poisoning. it was a dangerous world. i wasn't then. now, what then did i discover out of that experience, including my son said that though? what i got from the interviews is that those people -- it was this idea that everyone who goes is wounded. i actually had a person who came to me and said, let me show you

the page and the paragraph. it was actually right there. the female soldier said at that point i closed the book and said, i goodness, i have been shot, i'm wounded, just didn't know it. i wasn't shot in the body and i'm not crazy, but something is wrong in my heart because i can't get it right. i can't get back to the center line. a very good point was mentioned about people searching for utility. eventually we are going to find a cure for this. helping people find utilities for their lives. on the frustration about what we want to do, all of the unhappiness in washington dc. all of the displeasure about gridlocked in congress. i suggest it might be thought about a generation from now

people who have been over there, paid the price, and they can't find the world changing job that they wanted only to discover that rising to a leadership position in our own communities and states and nations may be just what the doctor ordered. i'm very hopeful about the future and out of darkness, there may be a great way for the nation and future. >> thank you, colonel. thank you both very much. no one comes back the same. not one person i've ever known has come back the same. not one of them. we used to have this term that they threw around as a quick antidote early in the war called a new normal. is that a true statement? you know, in the definition of how to tell this, if it's

believable, it's not true. the new normal is not always true. you're not going to be normal again. you won't be normal necessarily in the case of the person working at wal-mart very hard trying to earn a living for their life. you're going to think that there is something wrong, as the colonel said. but we would like to see you say to yourself that i have been through compromise. i have been through horrible choices that have caused me to think that i could've done better. survivor's guilt is very real.

no individual that was severely wounded. the kid next to him is crying when i and he finally gets up the courage to talk about the crime. and the kid says, the kid by the way is an individual that i know. i am worried. he said, i am worried about josie. i said why? and he said he lost all four limbs. well, this guy had three limbs gone. he is weeping in the night over the guy who gave all four limbs. ..

>> i learned how to hunt from janet thomas, general day's -- some of you may remember -- daughter who spent 18 summers in the woods with the first battalion armor in vermont, the 86th, by he's as nurse. and -- by herself as a nurse. she was known as lieutenant mom. she became colonel mom. and she hugged people. nobody had the guts to tell her

she wasn't supposed to be doing this stuff. janet didn't care. she was going to hug somebody whether anybody threw her out or not, and it was very much nonsexualized. it was very deep and on a soul level. one of the great inspirations that was revealed to me, i can't take any credit for it, was that when we decided to do our debriefings, the suggestion was when we go out to meet troops and take them down to the platoon levels and talk to 'em, usually have a couple of peers, because we try to run it with peers, you know, real soldiers that have been with 'em who have been in, are coming down with us to greet soldiers coming back. me and maybe a chaplain or something or a vet center counselor with a platoon of, ideally, 40 people if that's what's left. so the debate was, even among the women, do we send women down to debrief these mostly men? and the answer was definitely, probably not.

guys won't open around women. and guys don't open up around women. however, we're having this discussion. we had an open desk discussion about this, and i looked over at janet, and janet said i'll go, and it just came to me. i said we're going to bring the nurses. it brings tears to my eyes to think what a critical moment that was. because we brought, if you will, the great mother with us down there. we brought four nurses down there. and these were not, you know, miss america beauties or something. these are 65-year-old nurses emanating light and love. and after the debriefings, i'd ask guys if they wanted to go to lunch or something, and guys would tell me something, no, sir, thanks a lot, i'll hang with colonel thomas. appreciate it. i -- they wanted to talk to the women. because women tend the fires of hope and home for us and hearth.

and this is what we needed to do, and by the grace of god, we thought to do it. and what i think we need to do now is, if you will, stephen, i don't care if you ever ask me another question. i want to tell this story. we had one of the most heavily deck crated vietnam -- decorated vietnam veterans i know. if a flier can tell me this, what 49vs means on a rack. he flew as a covert fighter in vietnam and a very dangerous and formidable man. and a man with the biggest heart i've ever known. he became the chief of staff of the national guard somehow, because he had a mouth on him that he wasn't afraid to open. and an administration that was really rough. and he went flying one day. well, first of all, he settled me down over the p.o. w./m.i.a.

issue which i was about to go crazy on and join a radical group in the early '70s. but the second thing is he went by me one day in the hallway and said, johnny, i love you, you know. and i was, like, what? what did -- this is the biggest, toughest, strongest soldier i ever met. and he just went by me and said i love you. so the story i get to tell you about that goes along with the bow tie. some of you, those of you that i've met you, the first thing i like to tell people is i love you. and do you -- i won't ask if you think i'm kidding. you know i'm not kidding. so we in the guard love each other. we just plain love each other. we may hate each other for what we do and what we are and the way we did things, but we love each other. now, we've got to spread that out.

the army and the guard and the active duty, they can't take care of that. it's got to be the community. and karl and i were talking about in the other day. it's got to be churches have got to go, they've got to hold a ritual for a guy who doesn't want to talk to anybody and burn candles and get an article in the little islander newspaper up there and send it to the guy in the mail and tell him because he wouldn't come that we held this in your honor, in your community. and we're thinking about you, and we're going to continue to think about this. and this could be an annual event honoring you. so i think we really need to get with it as a society in terms of love and getting down to the soul level of where things are. because without the soul and love, doesn't that belong in the heart? what else have we got really? what are you going to do, get a better job and feel good? no, you're not. you're not going to put money in your ira and at the age of 49 feel like you're fulfilled. you got a hole in your soul as warriors, and it needs to be filled with light and love.

and it's there, and we have to encourage people to unearth it. mine it out and spread it out. >> so back to the history lesson, and i'll get to you in a second, karl, because i want the get to the ancient irish poem. but back to the history lesson, how have our returning soldiers generally been treated by society? with welcoming, open arms or shunned or told to shut up and sit down? >> i mean, today, this generation, i think that they've been treated warmly. i think that there really is a genuine affection and sense of support for the returning veterans. but it's also the case that most be people don't know who they are, they don't know what they've done, they don't quite know that place is where they did it, and they don't really understand the consequences of having served there. but there is an embrace of veterans. it's not the situation that karl and others who have been in vietnam encountered when they came back. i think there is a genuine warmth. but most americans don't have any idea.

they ask what can we do to help, and it's more than just an individual reaching out to help. it's a society recognizing this is the cost of the sort of war we're waging today. and we have to realize that there is a common responsibility to look out for these veterans. what happened with these wars, we got started in two wars in 2001 and in 2003. nobody anticipated how long they would take. when president bush said mission accomplished on may 1 is, 2003, the mission had been accomplished for the military. it was, what, ten years ago today or yesterday that they pulled over the statue of saddam hussein in baghdad. the military did what it was sent in to do. nobody knew what to do next. nobody expected the nature of the war, nope prepared for the number -- nobody prepared for the number of deployments, nobody thought about the nature of the casualties, nobody thought about the care for the sorts of casualties that are coming out of this war, and

we're still scrambling. we're scrambling in terms of maintaining a force, in terms of equipment that's not ready for, we're scrambling in temples of the medical -- in terms of the medical system and in terms of the va system in handling all of the problems of this generation of veterans. and as a society we have to recognize we asked you to go to war, we should not ask you to scramble when you come home. >> i was just going to say just picking up from what jim was just talking about, i often hear people say, well, what's the army doing? what are the marines doing about, you know, bringing these people home? and i think, again, there's a fundamental misunderstanding. military medicine as well as military psychotherapy, they are like the trainers on the professional football team. they're not there to heal people. you have a fundamental conflict of interest. their job is to get them back into the fight. that's the job of military medicine.

it's up to the civilians to do the healing. it's a very big difference. to expect the military to do the healing is laying a big conflict of interest right at their feet. i mean, you know, if you're going to heal somebody from posttraumatic stress, that's going to take a long time, and they're probably not going to, you know, want to be going back again. and they want 'em back into service. and that's not wrong. that's why they're there. so i always remember i was at quantico and talking to the marines down there -- they have six programs that they're trying to, they don't know what works because you don't know the results until 10 years or 15 years downstream. and this one colonel stood up, and he said, he said, but he says -- he was just so frustrated. we're not psychologists, we're marines. you could just see the frustration. it was just, it wasn't what he was built to do. so i think that, you know,

anybody who thinks that it's up to the military, they can certainly do better. first of all, the stigma of just asking for help has to get removed. and i think, you know, mandatory counseling would just remove it. you've got to go see the shrink. the israeli army has a psychiatrist at the battalion level. kid says i'm not feeling too good today, is it the flu or something you're thinking about? go to the doctor, go to the psychiatrist. they have a very different attitude than we do about it, and i think we have to headache some societal changes about that -- make some societal changes. but the fundamental issue is up to the civilians, it's up to our end of it. >> so let me tell you what i think who's picking up that slack today, because i think that point's exactly right about military medicine. the point of military medicine is to get people back in the fight. and the military has stepped up to this challenge. and as a result, we're seeing a real strain on the military budget. military, the cost of military care is going through the roof. and it's because a lot of money

from dod is being transferred in this direction. and that's really going to accelerate as we see other costs cut down; range time. yesterday 17 fighter groups grounded as we see military health care costs go up. so who's going to pick up that cost? if civilian community has not yet recognized that this is a community function and if the military is constrained in the amount of money they can put against it, who steps forward to help the wounded of body, mind and heart to recover? the answer right now is the stress goes on the family. and the quiet story here, the story i couldn't quite get to in centerline because my focus was these four groups and what they're thinking about and their flashback to the combat and then their flash forward about the moment of arrival, and this book takes them right up to the moment they get off the airplane. but what really happens that really matters, what i'd like to explore in the future, what

happens when they go home? you know, who picks up that slack? and many times it's a spouse who's totally unprepared for it. it's one thing to say i'm brave standing next to -- in the hospital with my spouse and i'll put up with the inconvenience, you know, while we go through the business of fitting a prosthetic limb and learn to adapt, but now we're going to do it the next 39 years? that's a big challenge. it's a big challenge for the children to pick up that burden. we can't do what we used to do. the interaction of the -- and i've said husband and wife. i think there's even something more complex going on if it's a wife that comes home wounded and a husband who has to become the caregiver. what you just described as the healing nature of women, we're about to, we're about to have an experiment unique in human history as we have more and more women enter the front lines. and then the question of what role do they have as women traditionally but they're now in a front line unit? i think there's going to be extraordinary burden for them to

carry. and the burden at home for a husband with a wounded wife. and so we haven't begun to figure out how those stresses resolve themselves. too many times that's left to the family. and i'm not sure -- to work out. and i'm not sure the military can do this or that you can have three classes and prepare the wife. this is part of a, i think, maybe a cultural change. that we have -- when everybody's talking about sharing the burden for the last 20 years, who's going to do the house work, but this business of nurturing and caregiving back and forth within a family, we may need to rethink the responsibility and dedication. when you sign up and, you know, sort of raise your hand and take the oath, oh, it's not an oath, i'm getting married. well, it's still on -- an oath. and you're still dedicated and promised yourself to someone and something. and we may have to give some real, hard thought about tow 40 recreate -- how to recreate the family and, as an extension, the

community in a way that provides that kind of care over the long term of a marriage. >> jon, you're one of the first ones to get to see these men and women when they do come back from combat. what do we do to get them to readjust? >> talk to 'em. general friend gave me a t-shirt that said help a soldier today. listen to 'em. first, however. every case is different. what can we do? i think that we need to bring our units closer together in some way. we need to address together these psychological, spiritual issues. who wants to talk about these in

the unit? we've got to learn to go out and shoot, move and communicate. but these issues of people really seeing each other, people do not feel seen. it's a terrible thing to be felt that you're not seen. i think a lot of soldiers feel that they're not seen. the way they solve that, i think what i'd like to get into now is one of our favorite topics of the last couple nights together talking is why do people want to go back. they just want to go back because it's a rush. well, a number of us have questioned that. i think that they want to go back because, to quote karl, he uses the word because there's meaning back there. a woman cadet this morning talked about the issue of

control. you have some control over your environment. i've been in an environment where there's no control like in the united states when stranger things -- strange things are happening that you feel you have no sovereignty over. you go back where you can control the situation. you can bring some order to your squad, platoon, company. i think that we need to take that element of control and keep it local. we need to give people jobs in the military and examine our training. we really have got a problem now figuring out what are we going to do with training people who have been overseas. and you folks -- and thank god there are a lot of women in the audience, new women lieutenants coming up -- you folks are going to have to go out there and try

to interest people in coming together as units when there's not an immediate be threat. when you don't have the luxury of the rush. instead what we're all seeking is the meaning and the feeling of belonging. and we've got to put that together somehow. because that's really -- without that, running through training drills is just, you know, hurry up and wait. and it's just a joke. so let's go do that. let's go bring ourselves closer together. but it's going to mean we've got to behave differently, and it's not going to happen on iphone. thank you. >> i think that one of the issues is counting. i call it counting. you count when you're over there in combat. if you're a 19-year-old and you don't do your job, somebody can die. you can't count any more than that. you come back to this society, it's not the society's fault, it's just the way it is. you basically can be the vice president of a corporation and

not show up for a few days, nothing much happens. they probably wonder if you're off at a golf game. but you're in combat, you count. so then you come back here and you don't count, uh-oh, well, i want to go back where i count. that's not an adrenaline rush thing, that's a very different motivation. >> steve, something that occurs to me that relates a little bit to this, i recall a few years ago seeing an interview -- this was on just a tape at quantico of a young lieutenant who was back from iraq, and he looked like he was 22. actually with, he looked like he was 15, but he was probably about 22. and he had gone through infantry training and gone over as a platoon leader in iraq. and within the first week that he was there, he had a couple of men in his platoon killed by an ied, and he was there, and he watched that. he helped pick up the pieces,

literally, of these two men. and he was haunted by that. and he said every morning i wake up, and i think i've got to forget this. i've got to get it out of my mind. i don't want to wake up every morning for the rest of my life remembering this, and then that's immediately followed by the recognition, he said, no, every morning for the rest of my life i have to remember this. they were my young men. i cared about them deeply. i have a responsibility to make certain that they're not forgotten. if i forget them, others will forget them. so i have to remember -- and that's a burden to carry for a long, long time. and i suspect he will. >> dave? >> can i just offer, let me offer what i hope will be a short story, everyone hopes will be a short story. [laughter] for the cadets in the audience here. because i faced the problem here, i didn't go to the vietnam war. what i had to do was arrive as a lieutenant in a unit where everybody else had been to the vietnam war. and then i had to establish my

responsibility just as you will do in a military where people have two or three tours, and you show up as a lieutenant in charge. it's not an easy thing to do. and somebody here used the term "mission" earlier today, i think it was you, and mission is the key to this. and mission is the key to establishing your authority. make yourself good at your mission. if there's something we can do for the wounded coming back, it would be to help give them a mission. i want to tell you just one quick story about being a faculty member at the national war college, and we had a commemoration of the battle of min -- [inaudible] as i recall it, the american fleet was on the western side of guam and the other islands, and the japanese fleet in order to attack to the east, japanese fleet approached from the west of them. so the japanese plan to bomb the american fleet, go on to guam and the other islands, land, rearm, refit, refuel, come back and strike the americans a second time, that becomes the plan. strike, land, come back.

what actually happened was that as the japanese sought the carriers, only part of them headed west against the japanese carriers, others went east. when the japanese aircraft went to land, there were no runways. they were destroyed. so we were talking about this class, and we had veterans of the marianas from world war ii sitting in the back of the classroom talking, participating. and as we talked, one of them began to cry. he hadn't participated at all in the conversation. he began to cry, and i turned to him and said what was your participation if he said i rode in the backseat of a dive bomber, you know? i only looked at the sky, and we got to the bottom of the bomb, and they released the bomb, and the pilot had been shot, we died if the pilot hadn't been shot, we climbed away. he said i was part of the group that bombed the island, and i have thought until this moment

that somebody screwed up. because i lost good friends in that attack. the other guys on my aircraft carrier went to attack the fleet and went and dropped the bomb on a stupid runway. and my friends were killed. and since that battle i have been angry at the world. i have been mad because i thought somebody screwed up and because life's not fair, and i took it out on my wife, i've taken it out on my children, on my friends. i've been carrying a grudge for 45 years, 50 years. and now i discover in the back of this classroom we were the main attack. so if there's a thing i would say you need to carry out of this discussion today about helping soldiers when you come back and preparing soldiers when they go, and the thing you can take out of this to use for the rest of your career and the rest of your life, it's this: wherever you go, whatever your assignment is, you, personally, you are the main attack. and as long as you'll focus on that and focus your troops on that mission and take care of them on that in addition, this

is -- on that mission, this is all going to work out. >> thanks, dave. i think we're going to have time for a few questions and answers, so -- [inaudible] they'll be bringing up a microphone. and when you come up, just state your name, and if you want your question to be answered by a specific panelist, please let us know, and you'll have to come out to the aisle. i think les going to be one on either side. i think there's going to be one on either side. i'll start it. you had one passage in your book, karl, that reminded me about the female influence on the soldiers that were coming back from combat, and this was from an ancient irish folklore, i think. >> yeah. oh, yeah, the story of kahula.

that's the mythic hero of the tain, and the tain is the irish odyssey, the iliad of irish mythology. and kahula is this fine warrior and dangerous, and he is, he's coming back from battle. and the king and the queen of -- [inaudible] which was at the center of irish culture are standing on the ramparts, and they see kahula come. and, i mean, it's like he's got wild swans above the cager, he's got deer running before him, and he's whirling a fierce weapon of his, and he's just boiling and steaming, and they they are terrified. they are terrified. and the king doesn't know what to do, and he slams shut the doors to the gates, and kahula rides that chariot around showing his left hand which that's the hand he wipes himself with, so it's a great insult.

and he's saying i can trach you with my left -- take you with my left hand. and he's riding around, and they're terrified, they don't know what to do. and the queen steps outside the doors, and she bares her breast and says you must contend with these today. and he just comes right back down to ground. and what that's about is it's about the feminine, the capital f feminine balancing out that wild warrior energy. and what they do with kahula is that they throw him into a pot of water, and he boils it out, and they throw him in another one, and he boils it out, and they throw him in another one, and finally he just comes out steaming. and then he's back to normal. and he goes into the castle, and he sits down at the foot of the king. that's where the warrior is. the warrior sevens the king -- serves the king which is the body politic. the culture.

and he gets there, and he gets out of this wild, demonic state by coming back to the feminine. and that, of course, in our culture is carried by women, obviously, and that's what that myth's about. >> thank you. nice story. >> good afternoon, gentlemen. thanks for coming. my name's chris bentley. i just want to make a comment and then hear your reaction to that comment, and then i have a question also. so the comment, being an enlisted guy in the marines, i've been on several tours to both iraq and afghanistan. and i've seen some of the things, you know, that you all talked about; combat, blood, killing, all that. and from my own personal experience, that's not the hardest thing to deal with. you can go when you start feeling your heart rate get up or you get mad, you can walk away, and you feel that coming on. the most frustration comes from

the lack of a conduit for enlisted guys to the policymakers and the strategy makers. and also my consultant isn't listed on what weapons do we use on this mission, how do we have a good logistics train to support these guys, but it's never is this strategy, is this grand strategy working? and that's my main frustration. so i'd like to hear your comments on that. but at the beginning of the panel, you all suggested that you had a problem with the all-volunteer force or hinted that you want to bring back the draft. so how does that play into civil liberties, and why not just force our policymakers to actually go to war constitutionally? thank you. >> ooh, that's a tough one to handle. let's see. >> i can start with that one. i mean, the first thing is that

it is a frustration that your never going to get -- that you're never going to get away from, you know? i mean, i was a lieutenant, right in and i always, whenever we were going into battle, i mean, we talked to the squad leaders, we were all just basically trying to figure things out amongst ourselves, and nobody knew the grand strategy. i mean, i don't know at what level you do know the grand strategy. you know, you're a colonel, do you know the grand strategy? i mean, i just think that that's a difficult one. remind me what the other part of the question was. >> well, it was a lot about where the policy was going and how you could affect that. the other part was the all of volunteer force and if you could, you know, maybe get america to put some skin in the game by conscripting her sons and daughters. >> yeah. i think that i'm not asking for the return of the draft to solve this problem in terms of a draft of the military, but i think

absolutely there should be national service. i don't want everybody in the marine corps, and i'm sure the army guys don't want everybody in the army. you want special people that can do the job, and that's no shame. i mean, identify got with, you know, my -- i've got my own kids that i wouldn't want to be in the marine corps. i'd be delighted to see them teaching people how to read, building forest service trails, groping us at the airport to make sure the airport security's okay. that'd be a lot cheaper. there's all kinds of things that can with done. and the question about civil liberties, do you feel like when you pay taxes you're a slave to the government? this is a republic of the people by the people for the people. of the people means you have got to pony up. and when you pony up your taxes, pay for police service and roads, you're noting being a sl. you're being part of the community. and to ask you to devote your time to earn money and then give it to the government, you in

your head can say, oh, that's slavery. you can go ahead and feel that way. all you have to do is go like that. that's community. it's not a civil liberties issue. the same thing goes for asking people the serve their time between the ages of 15 and 20. just chipping in, i don't think it's a civil liberties issue. >> hi, andrew clamor. i wanted to honor you men on the stage and your brothers and sisters in the audience for your militaries service. so -- military service. so personally and sincerely, thank you for your service. i'm also really grateful to be able to be here and that you've offered this to the public. as mr. marlantes said, war healing is the business of civilians, not of the military.

as my friend ed tick says, war healing is peacemaking. i'm really moved by not just the intelligence that -- coming from you all here, but the humanity you've brought to this conversation. this is important. it is important work, this idea of coming home. and it's going to take a concerted effort, military and civilian. and just to bring that point home, i wanted to address something, mr. coffin, you mentioned. the negative the stereotype of the crazy or alcoholic vietnam vet, i'm not sure that i actually have that stereotype in my head. because those guys have all killed themselves.

the fact is that more vietnam vets have been lost to suicide than were killed in combat in the war. and not just a few more, but twice as many. that, when i first heard that, it got, it got me. i got it, wow, this is -- we're not doing something. something's wrong, something's way wrong, and that's not a military thing. that's an issue for our country and our world. that's an issue for humanity. to look at. so i wanted to just put that out into the room, because i think that is pretty moving and important. and maybe i -- maybe a question, maybe a comment, i'm not sure it

is. if you want to pick it up, mr. mcintyre, but your friend who suggested the change from ptsd to posttraumatic stress sin dome, do you have a sense that a moniker would have a better shot at bite element to the -- entitlement to the purple heart than ptsz does now? thank you. >> it would probably have less. i don't know how we're going the deal with the question of how this plays toward the purple heart, because the purple heart's pretty -- the regulations are pretty clear, and, you know, a physical wound is a physical wound, and a cause is a cause. and that's very clear. and as you can attest better than i, psychological issues and problems, it's very hard to tell when a problem starts, to know exactly what the problem is, it's very hard to address a treatment for the problem, it's very hard to tell when the problem is solved. so that makes it very hard to assign, you know, an award for the fact that you've suffered that problem.

additionally, so where does that come up? i mean, does it have to be combat related? not necessarily. if you are, if you treat remains at dover air force base and if what you've done for four years in time of duty is offload flight caskets without opening them up, you know, do you think you might be able the claim you've got a problem? you might be able to. this one's beyond me. and so this is why, you know, this is for lawmakers and for doctors. and so this is why within my book i really tried to draw a box i was operating within. the box i'm operating in is folks who have been wounded and the people who care for them and bring them home up to the moment that they arrive, what their thinking as they flash back to combat and flash forward to what their lives are about. so that's the square i'm operating in. you ask a great question maybe you should address better than me. i really hope we move toward the syndrome idea because i think it

would release a lot of people, but i'm not sure how that would play in with awarding them or rewarding them having suffered the problem. >> it's always -- i'd like to defer that and invite our vermont national guard state surgeon to comment on that, dr. marty lucetti, if you would, marty. [laughter] because this is a thoughtful, brilliant man with five or six tours under his belt, and this is not a new issue to you, marty. have you got a comment quickly? >> yeah. no, just along the lines of what our questioner highlighted is it's not new to this war either. now there are more people dying of suicide than there actually are dying of combat. so this is one to have the signature wounds of the -- one of the signature wounds of the conflict. i think when you look at this issue, i think the issue of award, we've tried, we've tried to determine what earns a war just on the size of blast

injuries and con concussions -- concussions. there's been migration on that, and the it's a very, very hard line. i think one of the things that -- i don't know that there ever will be an answer to that question. that's what the campaign award gives you. everybody's at least offered that. when i talk about the consequences of the war, i always like to use the example people ask, you know, how rough is it to go to combat, and i say well at the the very my mum, you're exposed -- imagine going to work one day and not leaving for a year. people go, oh, my god, i'd go crazy. i said that is the absolute minimum that every soldier goes and endures, let alone the separation from family and all those other things. the point that we asked them to do something that we in our society have told them we don't ever do, we say, hey, look,

don't ever kill somebody. we're a society that has sheltered death. how many of you in this room have ever seen somebody die? and so we're not ready for that, and that's part of the -- many other cultures have really integrated death into the life experience, but we've actually kept it very separate, and that effect creates a lot of the additional angst that many of our soldiers go lu. >> and doctor, in your history in the u.s. involvement of wars and how they treat their veterans, for at least the early part of the 20th century it was pretty much public policy that, you know, going to war is just a part of being a citizen. i wish there was something special we could do for you, but that's the price you pay. >> that's right. it was of only with the g.i. bill that was approved in the summer of 9944 that we provided some support and, in fact, significant support for returning healthy veterans. before that it would be support

for widows and o fans and maybe -- orphans and maybe the civil war, support for those that came back with some sort of medical wounds. that has been the pattern in the war since then. >> since we've got several people lined up and a limited time, could i suggest we might take two questions at a time? >> sure. >> and let's hear the question, and maybe the panel could wrap the answers together. >> okay. >> good afternoon, gentlemen -- [inaudible] my question for the entire panel is, um, as the drawdown in afghanistan begins and there is no active units on the ground overseas, do you think the issue of the mental wounds either for service members and their families is going to get swept under the rug and kind of forgotten in the coming years similar to how we forgot about insurgency and occupation

tactics following japan and how we had a read on those thicks in iraq and -- those things in iraq and afghanistan? >> my question is sort of a follow-up to mr. edwards' question. with the constitutionality of civil liberties and actually having addressed, what about the constitutionality of wars, war powers, sending forces abroad and we don't have civilian support? i don't really fully understand what that war means to them. they're not as active as they were in world war ii. can we see and how can we put a change in society for people to become involved? >> great. and so kind of a composite question is just like you addressed in the atlantic, as america even forgot about the wars that we're engaged in? and if we keep that information from them, are we taking them through the constitutional process, you know, electing the representatives that decide whether or not we should go to war and then sending our troops in the harm's way, or are we

just -- >> yeah, it's -- >> have we gotten to the point where we don't even have that discussion? >> there hasn't been a constitutional declaration of war since world war ii. all of the wars since korea the congress authorized president truman to send in some air power and troops necessary to support them. vietnam, the gulf of tonkin resolution gave lyndon johnson sort of a blank check, and both iraq and afghanistan, congressional actions, that said it's okay to take action to defend the united states. it was ambiguous, but it was a blank check, and there has never been a declaration of war. and i think that that is a mistake. each of these wars have taken on different purposes after they began. we've gone in each of those wars, we've stepped up the goals, now it's more nation building in afghanistan. that certainly was not what we were talking about in october of 2001. we were talking about punishing the taliban government and chasing down al-qaeda in the mountains of afghanistan.

obviously, it's become more than that. we do need to buy into our wars. the fact that it's not popular, you know, there's a part of me that would just assume that no war's popular. it's a necessary thing. but there has to be public political support. and we have not, we have not exercised that support. most of the time in the last election 7% of the americans thought that afghanistan was a matter of great importance. it was not an issue in the campaign. so the fact that the politicians are ignoring it, it starts with the fact that we've ignored it. >> colonel in. >> just very briefly, in terms of forgetting it, we've got an opportunity here. this is the first time and probably the only time the national guard's separate armies from each state. some people look at it as have gone. are our veterans going to be forgotten? it's up to us.

but the downside is that it's up to us, and the upside is that it's up to us. these are our neighbors and church members and the guys selling french fries at the stand down the road. we were there. we were there in quantity and quality. let us, let's not forget. this isn't -- in vietnam we went as fillers, as individuals. each one of us went over will to replace some guy. now we have got the slow -- [inaudible] -- westminster. each of these towns had people be, real people living next door to you who were there. let's keep them up there in the light. >> yeah, i was just going to answer the question about what we can do about making sure people are involved. there's a few be very simple things. first of all, i think that if we have a vote, a clear vote of

going to war, declaring war, then even of those -- each of those members of congress are going to have to go back to their constituency and explain why they voted that way. the way they do now it's, okay, the president made the mistake. no, stand up and can be counted. and maybe ask your constituents before you make the vote. number two is i don't think you should ever do it on borrowed money. if you go to war, you raise taxes. everybody gets involved. period. it will be a war tax surcharge, and every april 15th the entire nation's going the look at that war tax you are charge and wonder if they ought to pay it this time or maybe we ought to stop. right now it's like go shopping and borrow it from the chinese, you know? and so i think that that's a major, major change. and the other one, i think we need some way that wet go the elites back involved, the sons and daughters of the people who

do make decisions. when i was at yale, there was a plaque on the wall big as the whole back of the stage with names of hundreds of dead yalelys who fought in world war ii and korea. and we lost one this vietnam. and i think universities today hardly send to anybody as a percentage. it's very, very small. how are you going to get them back involved? i mean, i don't know, you can accuse me of being a fascist, but i just say, well, if you're using government money and your kids aren't contributing, we're not going to give you any money, you know? come on, you guys, we're all in the same boat. >> okay. >> good afternoon -- this is a question for the board. earlier we addressed how veterans are coming home and feeling isolated, and in the current job market how do you think the current policies are and initiatives of the government also companies who are making -- integrating veterans into jobs? i constantly hear about veterans

not being able to get jobs and becoming more depressed and iced because you can't get jobs. >> thank you. >> good afternoon, gentlemen. this is mostly a question, but to start off, dr. mar marlantesu talk about the turning of soldiers into animals. [inaudible] society is generally accepted, and that despite -- [inaudible] taught at a young age. and and also about having spiritual strength, pride of battle. i'm just curious, personally, since i'm also seeking to be a chaplain as a career. but since i'm going to be around people who are, how am i going to deal with that? and even with that, dr. mcintyre, you mentioned the strategic impossibility of a -- [inaudible] now, of the future leaders not

personally since i still have a lo of time to go, but people that are going to be going into officer in less than a month, how are they going to handle not being able to at least project this global footprint that you've mentioned? and to dr. coffin, payoff this idea of psychospeesuation and your talk with moral integ te can sort of military integrity and questionable leadership, are we going to be able to easily identify this? and, because i'm pretty sure that an rtc level at least from what i've seen so far, this isn't something that we're taught. and what are we going to do as of now in order to combat it? in thanks. i think we'd better break those two up. dr. wright, you know, with your work with veteranning' groups, what's in the works, you know, to help employment activities for returning veteranses? is will any special treatment?

are they feeling even more isolated because they're now trying to rejoin the economy when unemployment's high, maybe when they don't have the education? >> yeah, i think, steve, that's a critical point. unemployment is higher for returning iraq and afghanistan veterans than it is for the population as a whole. and a part of it is to do with the fact that the economy has changed dramatically, most of these enlisted men and vim have a high school education, they do not have any college, and that part of the population is very great difficulty getting jobs. my counseling effort in the hospital, the one that i helped to set up down at walter reed and my own work has been to encourage them to continue with their education. i think it's crucial. a different world than their fathers' world. there were still plenty of manufacturing jobs. certainly after world war 2, that was the case.

>> your work on the new g.i. bill and we read your article on vermont colleges opening up opportunities for returning veterans, should this help that situation? >> >> oh, it should, absolutely. i think what i keep telling these guys that i see in the hospitals, you can do it. you can go to college. it's not what they were thinking about at age 17, i'm not sure if i'm going to go to the army or go to mit. they've been on the track of military for a while. they may not have taken s. of a.t. exams or anything, but i keep theming them, you can do it. and i think the it's crucial to encourage them. they need individual counseling and support. >> is psychospeechuation a fundamental imperative for a soldier going to war, that you have to dehumanize your enemy in order to be able to pull the trigger on him? >> i think so.

you make a false species out of the human being. i mean, that's my opinion that it's too hard to pull the trigger on a human being. you hear these situations all the time. they were on camouflage and a 14 or 15-year-old kid herding goats came upon the position, and the goats were right towards where they were hiding, and this guy was on watch that night. now heath got a person in front of him -- he's got a person in front of him. they all got in trouble. because if he'd have killed that kid, the mission would have been paramount, but he congress do it because it was just a kid, it wasn't a hajjy or a towelhead, and i think that's the way it's done. it's just, i mean, i thinkst the imper tough that we understand that. i think if you're able to kill

people, i think you're a psychopath or a sociopath. i wanted to address the young man who says he wants to become a chaplain. i always felt it difficult when i was sort of a young man and say how in the world can these chaplains come and talk to me about god when one of the ten commandments is thou shall not kill. and i'm remined of a story that's happened to me and almost everybody in this room, but this is the way it happened to me. we had a really important football game against north -- [inaudible] and there was none of this nonsense about we pray be, oh, nobody gets hurt and we do our best. he world come in there and say, god, let us beat the other team because we want to go to state. [laughter] but i'm sitting there, and it's

the game against north catholic. whoever won this game was going to go to state and probably win the state championship. and he's talking about beat withing north catholic, and i'm sitting there going does knot catling have a priest? that's when it hit me. god doesn't care which side we're on. and as a chaplin, you have to understand god just thinks we're stupid, right? fighting each other like this. but what god is about is about individual souls. it's about what happens to the individual foul in the crucible of that fiery conflict of the cash of the world of office. people have no choice over where they're born. somebody grows up in a logging town in oregon, a rice-growing farm in vietnam, and we face each other on a hill. but what is it about?

it's about how i deal with that as a personal individual towel. it's not about as far as i hi -- that's a political question. helping him through the crucible, that's what i would say. >> jon, did you want to say something? >> yeah, quickly. i believe every potential soldier, past soldier knows what to do. the only thing i would -- knows what to do. you know what to do. you know what to do. you just get stuck doing the hierarchy in some way. you have to make a decision to lie your way out of the situation where to save your butt or your commander's butt, i would just echo permission to change that story about the british kid. he said he just couldn't do it. i would like to change it to he just wouldn't do it. and the reason he wouldn't is he knew better.

deep in his heart and is soul he knew that i'm not going to do this like in the odd si. the only guy who came back alive stood up proud of who he was and the decisions he made, and he didn't come baa one man, in the a pom. not what a come. where did we lose the idea that we know what to do, we will do the right thing. we can see it; we just have to act on it. it's not a matter of courage, it's a matter of necessity. necessity because you'll remember it the rest of your life, the calls you've made. and be i know you'll make the right ones. >> we've got 15 seconds. i wrote a chaplain in as a major chapter because every nurse i interviewed said i could not do my job without a the chaplains. and to that's why i wrote them in recognizing just because

you're a guy whose job is to listen to other people doesn't mean you don't have problems as well. >> last round of questions. thank>> thank you, gentlemen, fr coming. my name is dan gem tricep play, my grandfather was denied is citizenship and con violented to fight in north korea. he was left kind of alone to teal with his mental problems. fortunately, he had a supportive family. but when the board is talking about about how society has changed, what i want to ask you is do you think that we should focus more on pushing our young men or our is citizens to combat, or should we be more concerns about dealing with they come back with. >> aye noticed over the past few

years a lit of an anomaly forming especially within the youth. >> our country, and i think colonel coffin touches on it lightly. earlier when te refers to the i phone generation. what i'm looking at mere is a very dwrodz misperception of war. and et seems to stem from media and tv shows and especially from video games. can i'm seeing children -- and i'm seeing children and adolescents and even young adults more and more seem to have just this complete disconnect between the reality of war and what has been brought to them in the fantasy world. and i'm wondering in the long one over the next decade or maybe two decades, whatever, what kind of effect is in this going have on the military in and if this is a negative effect behind it, is there any way to fix et?

>> you know, met me take the first one. we've got to do both those things. we have to the take care of the soldiers cocome back and go overseas. this is not a choice. we don't live in a world where start of decided to go back to afghanistan. the fest fireman killed on fetch was killed by a civilian who jumped from from a billing because they were roasting to death. we didn't make this up this came to our shores and would have come again and again and again. and the reason we went to afghanistan is because our government approached the tall pan and said you have allows the people who attacked us to build examples in your country and train and move equipment and have command and control. and if you'll run them out, we won't have to come and get them. now, we can debate on whether it was dope an on intelligence fashion. we're all sitting here for the

last two hours. wonder what happened on the north korean border. one artilleryman makes a mistake and pulls a lap yard and crops a to be role in downtown, we have got a problem. we are back at war. if you the you're going to do it by air power, i've got news for you about korea. i would say you've got a great question. we've got to prior tie was whoo going to do. and what we've not cone as a nation is figure out what effect do we want, what'll cause it and how much are we going to pay for. until help we've got a problem. et better include some young men and women willing to pick up a lung and shay home so they can fly the next day which is what my son's doing in afghanistan. or shawl them home or take care of them when today get home,

which is what the families do. the srgd the srld with -- gnash one way is to let down your defenses. >> thank you. on the second half of that, iphone, xbox generation, video games make us all killers. >> well, i don't think it manges us killers. i have two sons and three daughters, and my two boys would stay up all night playing those games. be they're not killers. you're not born to watch your 2-year-olds beat up on each other. when you hit johnny, that hurt johnny, huh? you know? empathy is learned. and video games and xboxs and stuff like that are anti-empathy machines. and i think that that's the danger. and it's up to parents to say,

okay, you blew up in this thing, but, you know, be that was a real person, maybe that would not be good. but the fact is, you get a -- i think the other thing even more dangerous than xboxs is the reaction of participants to those things. if parent and little johnny is sitting on the floor and there's a supervision show and p somebody is brutally murdered and their parents go up and get their beer, they're going, oh, mom and dad weren't affected by that. again, it comes back to the possibility of adults constantly monitoring that when somebody, you know, is blown up on television and you've got a kid this big who doesn't really understand, you say, you know, this is pretend. and this is horrible, we don't like this happening in real life. ..