>> karl, you speak in your knowledge about the transcendence that may or may not be spiritual, and i notice you bounced around a lot of spiritual philosophy in trying to describe it here but talk a little bit about that, how you

think to be prepared to go to combat you have to have some understanding of a higher power or a higher order of the world. >> well, first of all, as i was saying before, you have to be honest but which are actually being asked to do. you are being asked to do two things. one is take a human life, or the other is sacrifice her own life for the good of others. the christian religion is about a god that sacrifices his own life for the good of others. taking a life is also something that is, should be relegated to the gods. i don't care what your religion is, gods, higher powers, something humans shouldn't have to be involved with that we do ask that young people be involved with it. so willy-nilly, you're involved in a spiritual issue even though it's horrible. it may be the opposite side of the coin. our culture is wonderful.

we want religion to be pixie dust. we like christmas. we don't like good friday. it's just the way we're built. and if you look at a lot of world religions they have very dark sides to them. the earthquake and the aztecs had ritual torture. if you think about crucifixion, that's ritual torture, is it not? if you think about the demons of the tibetan buddhist, it's a dark dark side to the spiritual reality. and so the beginning is just that, that you begin to understand that i might be entering a dark side of something which is, in fact, roles that we generally would suspect god, now we're asking extraordinary young humans to do. the other thing i thought about is that whether or not it's a spiritual experience, it is certainly as intense as a spiritual experience.

and that is, is combat. advises that it may just be the dark side of the same coin, but i can tell you here that how similar it is. if you think about the mystics of any of the world religions, they have four things in common. one is there always aware of their own death. those of you who are children of the '60s remember carlos cast them out of saying don juan, death is always over your shoulder. and combat death is always over your shoulder. the next thing the mystics are always focused on is the moment. everybody knows that your mind is on the past, it is in real. if it's on the future it is in real. only right now israel, and they do years of psychophysical exercises to get into a place where they can actually still to minds and be in the moment. i guarantee you if you're in combat gear in the moment.

you're not thinking past or, i mean, you're right there. debt is over your shoulder. the other thing these mystics have in common is that they do try to subsume the egos for greater goods. and your any unit and one of the things that makes me so proud part of the military experts is that i have experienced situations where people literally will die for everybody else. that is really a rare thing, but that is what you're doing in combat. and the final thing is that all these mystics are parts of larger groups, churches if the christians, i mean, and you are part of a large group. so here we have these similarities between ordinary spiritual experiences and combat the things are striking and we just have to sort of accepted. i'm not going to say that combat is a spiritual experience. but i think it was for me but forcing

-- were some people, anyway if you go get st. john of the cross and have them come back down from the monastery and flip burgers at mcdonald's, he's going to have a problem. he's not going to fit in very well and that's what we're asking, you know, our young people to do. >> speaking of that, what did you say the first time you went to see wounded veterans at the hospital? >> yeah, i would first following the battle of falluja in november 2004. i went the following year 2005, and i've been down there not 30 times. i was down for the christmas party for the marines at walter reed bethesda this past december and 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 bethesda our series of winter. they have not been taken back home to a nearby hospital. pictures would pick their missing limbs. to have significant this

figuration. if they are burn injuries they're generally down that brooks. they're not there. and i was struck by them i was struck in talking to them, and i've always asked them what happened to them and they tell me what happened to them, how this occurred. and i'm always struck by them saying i want to get back to my you know, and my initial sense of that was that these guys are so caught up in what was said about the purposes of the war in iraq or afghanistan that they want to go over and carry the flag again. but it's far more basic than that. they want to be with her unit. they want to be with her friends. they want to be with her buddies. when they hear about a fund that is killed, i heard a young marine whom i've known a number of years who shot at falluja, multiple bullet wounds and his heart smote he said came about lunch, when he learned one of the guys in his platoon had been

killed on thanksgiving day in 2004, i happened to know this kid who was killed as well, small world department. he said i should've been there to. i do think that the instinct to reach out to help, the sense of being part of a unit with karl, did not experience in vietnam, his veteran circling and every day to day handshake, more people coming in and out of his unit, i think is fairly important but i was struck sometimes kind of tell stories about what happened to them. i feel like going out of the room and falling in the hallway. but that's not productive for them. but it's very moving. i've never heard anyone complain, never had a single person say it's not my fault, this war is stupid, why was i doing at? i can't believe at times at night they don't feel sorry for himself but they don't show. it's really a remarkable generation of young people.

>> what dr. vargas talk about what i think is a natural instinct of those people who were born to become lawyers. and that is they will naturally protect, that's what they do. they protect. and it's a natural instinct, and that's what he's talking about, natural instinct to do something for your friends, to help her friends. my father and my uncle and a whole bunch of cousins were world war ii veterans. i would ask them, were you there fighting for democracy? are you kidding me? all they wanted to do was get the job done, get home alive with all the friends they could. it never changes. so what the issue is this for a civility and we have to be extremely careful because what we have here is a precious gift from nature, which is that you young people who will sacrifice body, them, and life because they want to help and want to be part of the group you want to do all of that. it's a natural urge. they will do it but we're the

ones have to use it lightly and put them in the right place. so this idea of we're doing it for patriotism, they can say that, i don't believe that ultimately. i know for me and my father and uncles when push came to shove, when it was down to the real dark and dirty and combat we will think about anything else. it's a natural thing. and then so the adults have to say, well, let's use this gift wisely for our republic and let's not waste a. i think we've lost sight of th that. >> do you think there's a chance we're wasting it because we are getting into the less risky military endeavors on our part but from where we can be put in just as much death and destruction on any? >> i think it actually goes back to the issue about what are we doing in the world. i mean, didn't use the word empire, but are we sacrificing ourselves to protect our people

or our we sacrificing ourselves to put forward some political agenda or some geopolitical agenda? i think that's a very critical issue for any young person, and i think it's not just the question can the american people afford to be an empire, do we want to be an empire and do we want our kids over there dying for something that we're not sure is really protecting us? because the natural instinct is to protect, not to do some, you know, real politics. i think that's a fundamental question that this nation hasn't sold yet and we need. >> doctor mcintyre community line in your book concerning the wounded and when her character set a budget goes toward gets shot. summon the body, summon ahead, some in the heart. what did you mean by that? >> that was my experience in talking to people.

i was fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on what you think. i was the first class at west point not to go to the vietnam war. we all put in, the year before us they took only volunteers. two years ahead of me and 69 to take everybody. in 1970 that took only volunteers. and for the year 71 for to college or statements for airborne school, ranger school in vietnam. in march they returned volunteers for vietnam. so i was the first class not to go to vietnam. and i left the service 30 years later, after 30 years and 29 days, two months in two weeks 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, too. we froze to death and we had casualties. i would prefer not to talk about this what i had a friend killed by a tree limb.

had a kid killed by a tree limb. i lost troops run over. we had guys that started in waist deep snow and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. it wasn't as if there was no fighting for 30 years, it's just i wasn't sent. i wasn't sent. now, what, what then did i discover out of that experience and the extremes of my sons who did go, and my nephews who did go, and the people that it indeed did go? and what i got from interviews with those people played back against my career was this idea that everybody goes who is wounded. and i actually had a person come to me and said let me show you the page, let me show you the page and the paragraph where i decided to go get counseling. and it actually was that paragraph, that sentence right there. this female soldier said at that point i closed the book and i said my god, that's what drove

me. i'm shocked, i'm wounded. i just had no. something is wrong in my heart because i can't get it right. i can't get back to the centerline of my life. so i at least think that's what happens. karl has mentioned a good point about the people searching for utility. and i think you have addressed it and i was just one of the things that eventually we're going to find a cure for this is helping people find utility for their lives. i'll suggest he a way that all this can come together. all the frustration about what is it we want to do and all the unhappiness about a bright of visions of washington, d.c. and all the displeasure about gridlock in congress, i.c.e. agents to you it might be sold about a generation from now as people who have been over, paid the price, comeback, can't find that world changing job they want and suddenly discover rising to leadership position in our own communities and states and nations may be just what the

doctor ordered. so i'm very hopeful about the future that out of this darkness that people bring home there may be a great life for the nation in our future. >> thank you, colonel. this is excellent. thank you. that's a great line. because no one comes back the same. not one person i've ever known has come back the same, not one. we used to have this term they threw around as a quick anecdote early in the were called new normal. is that a to statement? tim o'brien's definition how to tell a true war story includes if it's believable, it's not true. new normal is not true your you are not going to be normal again. you're not going to be normal as in the case of the person working at wal-mart very hard,

trying to earn a living for their life. you as a warrior are going to think there's something wrong, as colonel mcintyre just said. what we would like to see is you refrain that to say to yourself, i have been through compromise, horrible choices that have caused me to think that i could have done better. now we're getting into the survivor guilt category. my favorite story about survivor guilt is freddie, the former chief of the vet center was -- he was severely wounded, kid next them lost three limbs and the kid next to describe one night and finall friday gets ith ask him why he's crying, and the kid says, i'm worried about josie. the kid next them by the way

lost three limbs. i mentioned that? okay. i'm worried about josie. i don't know if he can make it. what are you worried about josie for? why don't you worry about yourself? jones he lost all four limbs. so this guy with three limbs gone is weeping in the night over the god who gave all for. now, fred's conclusion was that, right conclusion to that, the only ones who don't feel survivor's guilt are the dead ones. he's a little rough in his language on this, but that's not far from the truth. so having said that, what i want to talk about is love and soul for just a second here. this iphone society concern to me. you know, when was the last time you don't have a conversation with someone who say yeah, yeah, i hear you.

i think we need to put our arms around each other. i think we in the military know that. people didn't used to hug early on. now they're hugging. even people who don't want to hug. there may be people of this table who don't hug but we all have hugged. i learned how to hug from janet thomas, who spent 18 summers in the woods with the first battalion armor in vermont, by herself as a nurse. and she was not as lieutenant mom and she became colonel mom, and she hugged people. nobody had the guts to tell her we shouldn't be doing this because it was sexualize and all the stuff. janet didn't care. she was going to hug somebody whether, somebody threw her out or not. very much non-sexualize. it was very deep and on a soul

level. one of the great inspirations that was revealed to me, can't take credit for come was we decided to do our deep breathing, digestion was when we go out to me troops and breaking down into platoon levels, talk to them, usually have a couple of beers that we try to run it with peers, real soldiers that have been there with them who have been are coming in with us to greet the soldiers coming back. me and made a chaplain or something, i vet center counselor with the platoon of the ideal he were a people. so the debate was even among the women do we send women tattooed debriefings, mostly men. and the answer was definitely probably not. guys won't open up around women. and guys don't open up around women. however we're having a discussion at an open desk discussion about this, and janet says, janet said i'll go.

and it just came to me and i said, we're going to bring the nurses. what a critical moment that was. because we brought if you will a great mother with us. we brought for nurses down there. these were not miss america beauty or something. these are 65 year-old nurses imitating light and love. and after the debriefing i ask is if you want to go on to something and guys would tell me things like no, sir. thanks a lot. colonel thomas, appreciate it. they wanted to talk to the women because women tend to fires hope at home for us. this is what we need 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, i don't

care if you ever ask me another question that i want to tell this story. we had a guy come one of the most heavily decorated vietnam veterans i know. if a fly can tell me maybe mike can tell me, what 49 v's been on a rack. 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 was afraid to open. and in an administration that was really rough. he settled me down over the pow-mia issue which i was about to go crazy on and joined a radical group and start doing some crazy things about in the early '70s, but the second thing he did, one day he said

johnny, i love you, you know. and i was, what? what did he -- this is the toughest, strongest soldier i have strongest soldier i ever met and he just went and said he loved me. so, story about that, goes along with the bowtie. those of you who know that i have met you, the first elected tell people is that i love you. i won't ask you if you think i'm kidding. you know i'm not getting. so we in the cards love each other. we just plain love each other. you may hate each other for what we do and what we are and the way we do things but we love each other. now, we've got to spread that out. the army and the guard and active duty, they can't take care of that. it's got to be the committee. it's got to be churches that have got to go got to hold a ritual for a guy who doesn't want to talk to anybody, burn

candles and get an article and a little islander newspaper up there and sent 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 will continue to think aboutt you. this will be an annual event honoring you. so i think we really need to get a bit of society in terms of getting love and getting down to the soul level of where things are. without the soul and love, doesn't that belong in the heart? what else, are you going to get job and feel good? no, you're not. you are not going to feel like you're for phil. you have got a hole in your soul, as warriors, and that needs to be filled with light and love. it's there. we have to encourage people to unearth it. mine it out and spread it out. >> back to the history lesson, i want to get to the ancient irish

poems, but back to the history lesson, how have our returning soldiers generally been treated by society? with welcoming open arms? shunned? told the shut up and sit down? >> 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 most people don't know who they are. they don't know what they've done. they don't quite know the place what know the place what he did and that don't quite understand the consequences of having served there, but there is an embrace of veterans. it's not a situation that karl and others have been in vietnam, when they came back. i think there's a genuine warmth, the most americans don't have any idea. they ask what we do to help. it's more than just an individual reaching out to help. this aside to recognize this is the cause of sort of war we're

waging today. we have to realize there is a common responsibility. what happened with these wars, we got started in two wars in 2001 and then in 2003. nobody anticipated how long they would take. when president bush's admission to publish on may 1, 2003, the mission hadn't been accomplished for the military but it was like a 10 years ago yesterday they pulled over the statue of saddam hussein in baghdad. the military did what it was supposed to be. nobody expected the nature of the war. nobody prepared for the number of deployments that we would ask people to serve. nobody thought about the nature of casualties that would come from this war. nobody thought about the care of the casualties that coming out of this war and were still scrambling. scram in terms of maintaining a force. scrambling in terms of equipment. we are scrambling in terms of the medical system within the military and we are certainly

scrambling within the va system in terms of handling all of the problems this generation of veterans. and society, we have to recognize we ask you to go to war, we should not ask you to scramble when you come home. >> i was just going to say, picking up on what jim was just talking about, i often have people saying, what's the army doing? what are the marines are doing about bringing these people home? and i think again there's a fundamental misunderstanding, military medicine, military psychotherapy, they are like trainers on the professional football team. they are not there to heal people. they 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, and to expect the military to do the healing is laying a big conflict

of interest right at their feet. if you going to kill somebody from post-traumatic stress, that's going to take a long time and they're probably not going, don't want us going back again. that's why they are there. so i always remember at quantico and talking to the marines down there about, they're having six programs trying, they don't know if it works because you don't know the results in 10 years or 15 years downstream, and this one colonel stood up, and he said, he said, he was just so frustrated, we are not psychologist, we are marines. you could just see the frustration. it just wasn't what he was built to do. so i think that anybody who thinks it's up to the military, a conservative better. first of all the stigma of asking for help has to be removed and i think mandatory

counseling to just remove, you've got to go see the shrink. army has a psychiatrist at battalion level. every battalion has a psychiatrist to comes and says i'm not feeling too good today, feeling a little flaky, as if the flu or something you're thinking about? they have a very different attitude what you do about it. i think we just had to make some societal changes about that. but fundamental issue about healing is up to the civilians. it's up to our end of it. >> so let me tell you where i think he was picking up that slack today because i think that point is exactly right about military medicine. point of military medicine, people back in the fight. and the military has stepped up to this challenge and as a result we are seeing a real strain on the military budget. military, the cost of military care is going through the roof and his because a lot of money from dod is being transferred in this direction. that's going to accelerate as we see of the costs cut down, range time.

yesterday, 17 fighter groups grounded as we see military health care costs go up. so was going to pick up that cost? the civilian kinard has not yet recognize that this is a community function, and if the military is constrained, who stepped 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 store here, the star i couldn't quite get to in centerline because my focus was these four groups and were they thinking about in their flash back to the combat and then their flash forward about the moment of arrival, this book takes them right to the moment they get off the airplane. on what really happened what really matters what i would like to explore any future is what happens when they go home? who picks up that slack. many times it's the spouse was totally unprepared for it. it's one thing to say i'm brave standing next to the hospital with my spouse and i will put up

with the inconvenience while we go through the business of fitting a prosthetic limb and learn to adapt, but now we're in what to for the next 39 years? that's a big challenge but it's a big challenge for the children to pick up that burden. we can't do what we used to do. the interaction, and i said husband and wife. i think there's even something more complex going on if it's your wife that comes home wounded and a husband who has to become the caregiver. >> what you just described is the healing nature of women. we're about to have an experiment unique in human history as with more and more women enter the front lines and then the question of, what role do they have as women traditionally that they're now in a front-line unit? i this going to extraordinary burden for them to care, 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. this is part i think may be a cultural change. everybody thought about sharing the burden of the last 20 years. who's going to do the housework? this is a nurturing and care giving back and forth within a family. we may need to rethink the responsibility and dedication. when you signed up and raise your hand and take the oath, it's not an oath, i'm getting married. it's still an oath and you still dedicate come you promise yourself to someone and something and the children that come from that. we may have to get some real hard thought about how do we create the family, and as an extension of the community in a way that provides that kind of care over the long term of a marriage. >> john, 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 them. i had a t-shirt that said help a soldier today, listen to them 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 out, but these issues of people really seeing each other. people do not feel seen.

it's a terrible thing to be felt that you are not seeing. i think a lot of us soldiers feel that they are not seen. the way they solved that, i think what i'd like to get into now is one of our favorite topics the last couple of nights together talking is why do people want to go back. this myth about 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, well to quote karl, 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. when you've been an environment where there's no control, like in the united states went

strange things are happening and you have no sovereignty over them, go back to a situation where you can control the situation, you can bring some order to your squadron, 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 a problem help figuring out what other going to do with training, people have been overseas. and you folks, and thank god there are a lot of women in the audience. new women for 10 it's going to. you folks are going to go out there and try to interest people and come together as units when there's not an immediate threat. when you don't have the luxury of the rush. instead, what we are 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's training drills is just a laugh. hurry up and wait. 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 is not going to happen on an iphone. >> i think that one of the issues they call accounting. you count when you're over there in combat, as your 19 year and you don't do your job, somebody can die. if you can't count any more than that, you come back to society -- it's not societies fall. it's just the way these. even the vice president a corporation and not show for a few days, nothing much happens. they probably wonder if you're off golfing. but if you're in combat it counts. so you come back here and you don't count, well, i want to go

backward i can't. that's not an adrenaline rush thing. that's a very different motivation. >> something that occurs to me that relates a little bit to this. i recall a few years ago seemed an interview, this was on a tape down at quantico, of a young lieutenant who was back from iraq, and he looked like he was 22 but actually he looked like he was 15 but is probably about 20 to. he had gone through infantry training, conover 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. he helped pick up the pieces, literally, of these two men. and he was haunted by the. and he said, every morning i wake up and i think i've got to forget this, i've got to get out

of my mind but i do not want to wake up every more and the rest of my life remember this but that's a merely followed by the recognitions that no, everyone for the rest of my life i have to remember this. they were my young men. i cared about them deeply. i had a responsibility to make sure they're not forgotten. if i forget them others will forget them so i've got to remember. that's a burden to carry for a long, long time. and i suspect he won't. >> can i just offer, let me offer what i hope will be a very short story, everyone hopes will be a very short story. for the cadets in the audience here. because i faced the problem there, i didn't go to get no more. what i had to do was a ride anywhere but else had been to the vietnam war. then i had established my responsibility just as you will do in a military were people have two or three tours and g. show up as a lieutenant in charge. it's not an easy thing to do and some new use determination

earlier today. i think it was you. and mission is the key to this. the mission is the key to stopping your authority, makers of good at your mission is this something we could do for the wounded coming back it would be to help give them a mission. tell you one quick story about being a faculty member of the national war college, and we had a commemoration of the battle of the marianas. very quickly in the battle of marianas as i recall it the american fleet was on the western side of want and the other marianas islands and the japanese fleet in order to attack the ease, japanese fleet approached from the west of the bricks of the japanese plan was to bomb the american fleet, the want to bomb any of the island, come back and strike the americans a second time. that becomes the plan. strike, land, come back. what actually happened was as the japanese struck the carriers, american dive bombers only part of them headed west against the japanese carry but others went east, cratered the

airfields were japanese immigrant stock directly going to land there were no runways. they were destroyed upon land. there was no second strike. so we were talking about this class and the veterans of the marianas from world war ii sitting in the back of the classroom talking, participating as we talk. one of them began to cry. he hadn't participated at all. he began to cry but and i turned on him, i couldn't of said, what was your participation? he said, i wrote in the backseat of a dive bomber. i only looked at the sky and we got to the bottom and they released the bomb and the pilot had been shot, and he said i was part of the group that bombed the island and i've thought until this moment that somebody screwed up because i lost good friends in that attack. and the other guys on my aircraft carrier went to attack the fleet. we went and dropped bombs 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 is not fair and i took it out of my wife. i've taken it out of my children. i've taken it out of my friends but 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 could carry out a this discussion today about helping soldiers when they come back and preparing soldiers when they go, and the thing you can take out of this and use for the rest of your career and the rest of your life, it's this. wherever you go, what have your assignment is, you personally, you are the main attack. as long as you will focus on that and focus your troops on that mission and take care of them on that mission, it's all going to work out. >> thanks, dave. i think we'll have time for a few questions and answers. so d when you come up, just stae

your name and if you want your question to be answered by a specific panelists, please let us know and you'll have to come up to the aisle. i think there's going to be one on either side. >> i'll start. carl, you had one passage in your book reminded me of what colonel coffin was talking about, the female influence on the soldiers that were coming back from combat and this was from an ancient irish folklore i think. >> yeah, this story, the mythic hero of the irish, the odyssey, and he is this fiery warrior and

dangers. he's coming back from battle and the king and queen are standing on the ramparts and they see him coming and i mean it's like he's got wild swans above the carriage began to be running before them, and he is whirling a fierce weapon of his, and he is boiling and steaming and they are terrified. they are terrified. the king doesn't know what to do. he slams shut the doors to the gates, and he rides the chariot around with his left hand, the hand he wiped himself with. that's a great insult. is riding around and they're terrified and they don't know what to do. and then the queen steps up through the doors and she bares

her breasts and says, you must contend with these today. and he just comes right back down to ground. and once that about it's about the feminine balancing out that wild warrior energy. and what they do is they throw him into a pot of water and they pulled him out of his home and another and they throw in another one and finally he just comes out and then he is 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 serves the king, which is the body politic. the culture. and he gets there and he is out of his wild demonic state by coming back to the feminine, and

that in our culture is carried by women obviously. that is what that meant is abo about. >> good afternoon, gentlemen. thank you for coming. my name is chris bentley. i just want to make a comment and then hear your reaction to the comment, and i have a question also. the common 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, yeah, that you all talked about, combat and blood, killing, all that. and for my own personal experience, that's not the hardest thing to do with. you can go, when you start feelingetting your heart rate gp 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.

g4 into go on tactics, what weapons to use on this mission or how to have a good logistic, support these guys. but is never is this strategy, this grand strategy working. and that's my main frustration, so i would like to hear your comments on that. but at the beginning of the panel you all suggested that you have 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. >> that's a tough one to handle. let's see -- >> i can start with that one. the first thing is it is a frustration that you will never get away from. you know, i mean, i was a lieutenant, right, and whenever

we were going into battle, we talked to the squad leaders. we're 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. your eternal, you know the grand strategy. i just think that's a difficult one. remind you what the other part of the question was. >> it was a lot about what the policy is going and how you can affected. the other part was the all-volunteer force, and if you could maybe get america to put some skin in the game by conscripting her sons and daughters spent i'm not asking for a return of the draft to solve this problem in terms of the draft of the military, but i can absently think there should be national service. i don't want everybody in the marine corps. i'm sure the army guys because you want special people who can do the job. that's no shame.

i've got my own kid that i would want to be in the marine corps. you know, i would be delighted to see in teaching people, building forest service trails, groping us at the airport to make sure airport street is okay. it would be a lot cheaper. there's all kind of things that can be done and the question of civil liberties, do you feel like when you pay taxes that 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've got to pony up. and when you pony up your taxes to pay for police service and roads, you are not being a slave. you are being part of the community. and ask you to devote your time to earn money and then give it to the government, you can say that slavery, you don't even feel that way. on have to do is go like that, that's community. it's not a civil liberties issue. and i think the same thing goes for asking people to serve their

time between the age of 18-20. you want to chip in or not? it's just chipping in. i don't think that's a civil liberties issue. >> i'm andrew clamber. i wanted to honor you men on the stage, and your brothers and sisters in the audience, for your 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 karl said, war healing is the business of civilians, not of the military. as my friend says, war healing is his peacemaking.

i'm really moved by, not just the intelligence, coming from you all here, but the humidity abroad to this conversation. this is important. it is important work, this idea of coming home. it's going to take a concerted effort, military and civilian. and just to bring the point home i wanted to address something, mr. coffin, you mentioned the negative 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 veterans have been lost to suicide than were killed in

combat. in the war. and not just a few poor, but like twice as many. when i first heard that, it got me. i got it. wow, we're not doing something, something is wrong, something is 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. i wanted to just put that out into the room because i think that's pretty moving and important. and maybe a question, maybe a comment. i'm not sure which is. if you want to pick it up, mr. mcintyre, but your friend who suggested the change from ptsd to post-traumatic stress syndrome, t. have any sense --

do you have any sense of that monica would have a better shot at government for the purple heart than ptsd does now? thank you. >> it would probably have less. i don't know how we're going to do with the question of how this plays towards purple heart because the purple heart, regulations are pretty clear, and physical one is a physical world and a cause is a cause. that's very clear. and as you can attest better than i, psychological issues are very hard to tell, very hard to accept what the problem is. it's very hard to address a treatment for the problem but 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. additionallyproblem. additionally, so where did that come up? doesn't 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 as offload flag draped caskets, without looking and to think about, do you think you by biblical and you've you've got a problem? you might be able to. this one is beyond me. so this is why, this is for lawmakers and for doctors. so this is why with in my book i really tried to draw a box i was operating within. the box am operating in is folks have been wounded and people who care for them and bring them home up to that moment that they arrived. what they're thinking as they flashed back to, and they flash for to what their lives are supposed to be about. and so that is the scor square f operating and. you ask a great question which maybe you should address better than the. i really hope we move towards this idea because i think it would release a lot of people. but i'm not sure how that would play and with awarding them or rewarding them for having suffered. >> i'll respond to the. i would like to d defer that an invite our vermont national

guard state surgeon to comment on that, doctor, if you would, marty. because this is a thoughtful, brilliant man with five or six tours under his belt, if this is not an issue to you, marty. do you have a comment, quickly? >> along the line of the questioner, along the lines of what our questioner highlighted is it's not new to this war either. that now there are more people dying of suicide than the actual are dying in combat. so this is 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 to migrate, you know, what earns award just on the side of blast injuries and confessions. there's been migration on that and it's a very, very hard line. i think one of the things that, i don't know that there ever

will be in answer to that question, you know, and i guess maybe sometimes the way i look at that is that puts the campaign -- everybody who believes suffers that. when i talk about, you know, the consequences of the war i always like to use the example, people ask how rough is it to go to combat? i say the very minimum, very minimal, imagine would work one day and not leaving for you. oh, my god, i would go crazy. that is the absolute minimum that every soldier goes through. let alone the separation from family and then all of those other things. off on the same lines, the point to ask them to do something that we in our society have told them 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? so we're not ready for that, and that's part of our culture.

many other cultures have really integrated death into the life experience, but we've actually kept it very separate. and that affects, creates a lot of additional angst that many of our soldiers go through. >> dr. wright come in your history of u.s. involvement in wars and how they treat their veterans, through at least the early part of the 20th century it was pretty much public policy that, going to war as 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 big is only with the g.i. bill approved in the summer of 1944 that we provide some sort of support, and the fact significant support obviously, for returning healthy veterans. before that the best we could do would be support for widows and orphans and maybe beginning with a civil war, systematically support for those who came back with some sort of medical wound. but it was only with world war ii that we started giving

support to anyone who served during the war. and that has been the pattern in the wars since then. >> since with several people lined up and a limited time, could i suggest we might take two questions at a time? lets you the questions and maybe the panel could sort of wrap the answers together. spent a good afternoon, jon. cadet edwards here. my question for the entire panel is, as the drawdown in afghanistan begins and there is no active units on the grounds overseas, do you think the issue of the mental wounds for service numbers and the family is going to get swept under the rug and kind of forgotten in the coming years similar to how we forgot about insurgency and operation tactics following japan and how we had to relearn of those things in iraq and afghanistan? >> thanks. >> lives and get a thank you very much for coming. my question is a follow-up.

with the constitutionality of civil liberties and having a draft address, what about the constitution of wars, war powers, cindy forces abroad? we don't have civilian support to they aren't really as active as they were in world war ii. and we see and how can we put a change in society where people become involved? >> great. and so kind of a composite question is just like you addressed, has america even forgot about the worst we're engaged in. and if we keep that information from them, are we taking them out of the constitutional process, electing a representative to decide whether we should go to war, and then sending our troops in harm's way. are we just come ever gotten to a point where we just don't even have that discussion? >> there hasn't been a constitutional decoration of war since world war ii, 1941.

and all of the wars since then, korea, congress authorized president truman to send in airpower and whatever troops are necessary to support them. vietnam, the gulf of tonkin resolution which gave lyndon johnson sort of a blank check, both iraq and afghanistan had 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 has never been a declaration of war but and i think that is a mistake. each of these wars has taken on different purposes after they began we find each of those would come we step the the goals. now it's more nation build in afghanistan. that certainly is not what we're talking about in october of 2001. we are 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 worst. the fact that it's not popular, part of me, nowhere is really

popular, it's just a necessary thing. but i'm a great, but there has to be public political support. and we have not exercised that. most of the time in the last election 7% of the americans said the war in afghanistan was a matter of great importance. it was not an issue in the election campaign. so the fact that the politicians are ignoring it, it starts with the fact that we have ignored it. >> colonel? >> the fact that in terms of forgetting it, we have an opportunity here. this is the first time and probably the only time the national guard, separate armies from each state, have gone. are our veterans going to be forgotten? it's up to us. but the downside is it's up to us, and the upside is it's up to us. these are our neighbors and church members and the guy selling french fries at a stand

down the road. let's remember, we were there. we were there in quantity and quality. let's not forget. in the non, we were individual to each one of us, we went to replace some guy. now we have whole you know, the bravo bowls with it. westminster. each of these talented people, real people living next door to you who were there. let's keep them up there in the light. >> i wish is going to answer the questions about what we can do about making sure people are involved. there's a few very simple things. first of all i think that if we have a vote, a clear vote of going to war, declaring war, each of those members of congress are going to have to go back to their constituencies and explain why they voted that way. the way they do know, well, the president made a mistake, right?

you don't want to take responsibly for that. know, vote. you stand up and be counted. and maybe ask her constituency before you make the vote whether you really do want to go to war. that's never one. number two is i don't think you should ever do it on borrowed money. if you go to work, you raise taxes. everybody gets involved. period, there will be war, tax, surcharge and every april 15 the entire nation will look at that war tax surcharge and wonder if they ought to pay at this time, or maybe we ought to stop them or what are we doing about it. right now it's like go shopping and borrow it from the chinese. and so i think that's a major, major change. and the other one is i think we need of some way that we get the elites back and called, the sons and daughters of the people who do make the decision. my favorite example, there was a plaque on the wall that said the names of hundreds of dead students who fought in world war

ii and korea. we lost one in vietnam. and i think the elite universities today hardly send anybody as a%. sure some go but it's very, very small. how are you going to get them back involved again? on me, i don't know. you may take you there being a fascist but i just about, if you're using government money and your kids are not contributing, we are not going to give any more money. .. >> this is