so this large base. and and is this weird thing where you are in a combat zone, but there are large, secure, and they are like little miniature cities. workout facilities and the chou all. you know, there would be some who never left them who were referred to as bobbitt's. and this story is set on. some marine had recorded the song said to the chin of photo california, and the course was welcome to the hotel camphor loser. you're in a combat zone, garbage restaurant on. that sort of gives you the feel for them. they are actually engaged. all right. this morning 275 pounds of

lyceum on a checkpoint. a group of insurgents and then went to the child of a launch. i got fish and lima beans. i try to a healthy. all nine of us are smiling and laughing. still jittery. a big plate of ravioli and pop types. before digging in, the persian gulf, the they have pumped cuts everywhere? >> another better, too. >> weird. he looks up and down the table. i cannot believe we finally had a mission. it's about time we kill someone. even i chuckle little. we had been in iraq two months when the artillery units actually doing artillery, except

so far we have only shot elimination missions. they usually don't want to risk collateral damage. not us, not until today. today the old and battery fires and we know we hit our target. religion until the so. pretty quiet. how many insurgents to you think we killed? platoon size elements. what? platoon size? hq i don't have platoons. why do you think we need the old and battery. we didn't? each gun only fired two rounds. they just wanted us all to have gone time on an actual target. even one round would be enough to take out a platoon in the open desert. it was fun. he shakes his head slowly. platoon sized element he says again. that is what it was. two rounds per gun was what we need to take it out.

i didn't mean a whole battery, are gone. how many did our gun, just our gun kill? , i suppose to know? platoon sizes like 40. figure 6 pounds, devise six, i don't know, and just over six people per gun. yap. we killed exactly six and have people. sanchez takes out a notebook as those doing the math and a stretching out his numbers. / nine marines on the gun and you personally have killed zero. seven something people to date. just like a torso and head columbia torso and head. that's not funny. we definitely got more. we are the best shots in the battery. just firing on the quarter deflections they give us. i mean, we are better shots. put our round down a rabbit hole at 18 miles. but even if we are on target, we are on target.

okay. we are on target. the other guys, their rounds could have it first. i could see that. shrapnel, the force of a jerking lenses when that. look to my even if the rounds hit first does not mean everyone is that necessarily. maybe some insured to of insurgent has shrapnel in the chest. he sticks his tongue out the clutch is is just dramatically. then around comes down and blows his stocking had off. he was dying already, but the cause of death would be blown the hell up, not shrapnel to the chest. i guess. i don't feel like a killed anybody. i think our know if i had. no, you would not know until you have seen the bodies. the table clients for a second. it is better this way. doesn't it feel weird to you? after our first real mission to just be eating lunch. he takes a big bite of his sows barry stake in grants, you have

to eat with a mouthful of food. it feels good. we just killed some bad guys. i cannot. it is good. i don't think i killed anybody. technically i am the one that pull the lynyrd. i fired the thing. you just loaded. like i could pull a lanyard. yeah, but you didn't. drop it. it is a crew-served weapons. it takes a crew. >> if we used a howitzer to kill someone back in the states to wonder what kind of crime there were charges with. murder. what, are you in india's? yak, murder, sure. but for each of us? and what degree? we loaded. by loaded an m-16 and handed it to him by would not say i have killed anyone. it is a crew-served weapon. crew-served weapons. takes a group. and i loaded the we get the hamel from the afb. shouldn't they be responsible, to?

yap. one of the a happy? one of the factory workers to make them more the taxpayers to pay for it. you know why not? because of retarded. the lieutenant gave the order. you believe that? you think officers would take it? how long you been in the military? he bounces fest on the table. listen to me jack we are gone six starts responsible for that gun. we just kill some bad guys. that's a good day's work. i still don't feel like a killed anybody, sergeant. it is quiet for a second. he shakes his head and starts laughing. yeah, well, all of us except you, he says. [applause] >> i am happy to be here tonight. asked me to do something with them in the york, and i was not able to.

i was happy when he asked about this gate. and i think we agree that if the short story thing does not work out a gun start a career based on that. come back to town. >> there are reporting this. >> that was such an error. no, my god. >> are their record in this? >> well over a year ago. veterans' issues. and so, you know, one of the first, maybe even the first person i spoke to. the kind of nervously asked me if i would read his book. i said of course. i was blown away by it. over the last decade i read a lot of the work that has come out of the wars. i always said -- you know, there were some great books.

a number of others, but i kept saying that it was going to take a decade or so for one of those books that really grabs you, grant me, at least, and really kind of took the war and took it apart and reassembled it in a piece of literature and a piece of art. and, of course, was right. and it was -- fills book was the first part that really, all the pieces were working for me at once. and i didn't come and tell we were handed out this afternoon and didn't really hit me as to why. i think there's something in this collection that is very stereoscopic in terms of how we see the war. those were just artillery guys. we see ground spirited getting his picture of the war, the different perspectives, is systemic look at it. and i wonder if a collection

store being put together, i was befuddled the process of pulling the collection together. those stories, how did you come up with the story in this collection. very important. >> i start out by writing really bad poetry. >> had started the first story a few months when i got back from iraq. the first or is about in rain. they're reading courses. something that happened. i guess that was -- its about him coming home. the weirdness of that reentry

into american life. i was working on a novel, precisely for that reason that, you know, you come back for more especially now because there is less than 1 percent served. i am from new york. you go back to new york. i am one of the few veterans of people need. and they would ask, so, how is iraq going? and you feel like you can actually explain, sort of pontificate to them what iraq is even know, you know, everybody on the seas that this little small piece of it, and everyone interprets their experience differently. so i wanted to half stories that would tell mob just kind of the

stories of the grounds or the artillery year or whenever, but the experiences of support staff, what it was like to be a chaplain to mortuary affairs specialist. have those people dealt with both what happened overseas and then what happened when they came back. it felt like with the collection i could hit the same themes. kill people up close. the act of killing is pretty central to the military. but his relationship could not be more different than the artillerymen in that piece that just read. or some of the other characters in the book. i was able to talk about the same thing from different angles, which was useful for me just from -- so i sort of slowly worked until i had what felt like a cohesive piece of work even though none of those stories, there are no characters

that crossover. >> especially in this story, guys are breaking down and killed. the artillery guy, always hit every but there seems, people are trying to make sense of what happened. these guys are using numbers and other stories, how these veterans or their friends are attempting to make sense of this thing. >> in no, we sometimes think of wars as this other experience. you know, you sort of a journey to the heart of darkness and give into the abyss. this inexpressible knowledge that you can never tell. but it is also, military is a job. and you go into the job with all the stories about the military you have been told.

and then you come back home and tell the stories about the military that people believe about you. and so there is a great bit in the book what it's like to go to war. and he says, as the 20 year-old combat veteran what it feels like to kill someone. and his possible angry answer if he is being honest, you might say not of shocking thing, doesn't feel like if shocking thing. if you have the same guys 20 years later, 40 years later, his answer might be different depending upon the people who have been around him into the is and what is ben through. and -- so it is this slow way that the characters need to navigate. you know, some of them are dealing with things in theater. one of the stories is about to marines, one who kills a teenage combatants and then asked his

friend to tell everyone else in the unit that he is the one who did it. we got actually kill. taine's combatant does not want to think about it. >> come back into the american society and deal with the kind of protections that people put on the man the way in which they can present themselves as veterans and know what a lot of americans don't pay that much attention to. >> in terms of presenting what is fiction allow you to do and what do you think fiction allows the cohort, what does it allow them or what do they react to think positively or against? >> well, fiction invites the

reader to think about that experience from the inside which was really, really important to me. is important to me to bring in and have narrators who would not necessarily agree with each other so you can start making valued of judgments about the sort of claims that they're making. it also lets you pressurize things. questions about not just what i have been through but people that i had known have been through. i could not have explored those things throughout memoir. i like it more. can't talk shed about memoir. but, you know, for me personally and think i find it hard because there are stories you want to tell yourself about what you've been through.

but if you put it into fiction, take those ideas you have about the world and put them into a story and make the characters real. invariably those characters in the process of making and real just destroy all the notions that you have about what you were originally writing. and i guess that is one of the things that is really valuable for me. if you do it well caught, memoir essays, you can do the same thing when you are getting your own experience, but i find it hard. >> to you want to read a little bit more? >> so, this is the opening story it is a vow a mortuary service marine. for a long time was angry. that did not want to talk about

iraq, but would not tell anyone i have been. people knew, if they pressed i would tell them lies. there was this corpse, i would say, lying in the sun. been there for days, swollen with gases. the eyes were socked its commander had to clean it off the streets. now look at my audience and massage them up, see if it wanted me to keep going. you would be surprised how many do. that's what i did a my sake. collected moraines. u.s. forces mostly, but sometimes iraqis, even insurgence. there are two ways to tell the story. funny or sad. guys like it funny with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you to the end. grows like it's sad with a thousand yards tear out to the distance as you gaze upon the wars of or they cannot quite see. ..

the big jagged tear through the stomach and fluid in organs flew out from the bottom of a wet paper bag. it's running down his mustache. if i'm telling the story said i'm going to stop there. if i'm telling it funny though there's one more crucial bit which corporal g attorney told the story for me for the first

time back in 2004 before either of us had collected remains or knew what we were talking about. i don't know where gee heard the story. the colonel screamed g had said and then a weird high-pitched noise deep in his throat like a wheezing dog. this was to show us precisely how they scream when covered in human fluids. if you get the noise right you get a laugh. what i liked about the story was even if it happened more or less it was still total bull ship. after deployment there wasn't anybody not even corporal gee who talk about their mutilated some of the mortuary affairs marines felt the spirits of the dead hung about the bodies. it creeps them out. you could feel it they would say especially when he looked at the faces. but i got to be more than that. midway through the deployment guy started swearing they could feel spirits everywhere not just around the bodies and not just

marine dead, sunni dead, shia dead come occurred dead even the dead of all an iraqi history and the mongols and the invasion. i never felt that he said. leave a body in the sun the outer layer of skin detaches from the lower and you feel it slide around in your hands. leave the body in water, everything swells in the skin feels waxy infix that recognizably human. except for me and corporal gee everybody mortuary affairs talked about goes. we never said any different. [applause] >> throughout every story a lot of these are told in the first person that you seem to be occasionally celebrating the marshal and even the masculine and also interrogating it.

you are kind of working every story above levels. did you plan on that or did these stories for instance mortuary affairs and you are a public affairs officer. you talk to some of these guys. did you come home and when you started that story, and did you know how you are going to work back? did you know how they have -- you were going to use them? >> i never had any idea. i knew there were things that interested me. i had heard that story that i just told but i also, the way the mortuary affairs guys talked about the job and there's a good memoir about the mortuary affairs marine called shade of black which was very different and i usually have a couple of different pieces than a new kind

of comment that's the opening of the story and then there is four or five more significant scenes that happened along the pro-am. and i knew that those things talk to each other. at least they stayed in my mind and he seems to fit together. some of them are not stories about work. one of them is a story about going out to a club, right? but it seemed to resonate and i would write the story and i would send it to friends until i sort of had a good feel for why it does different things talk to each other and what they meant. yeah. >> you also seem to be indicting storytellers too and sort of the nature of war stories, how they are told, why they are told, kind of who gets to tell them.

>> there's a lot of a lot of. >> du on the stories now or who owns the story's? >> do i own the story's? corporal gee. the i. there is a lot of room for story time. it doesn't have to be this. you know, the story my drunken night in what happened. you tell the story in the first time you see where you get the laughs and the next time the story gets to aipac recitation of what happened. ..

>> spent the guys are getting wasted.

[laughter] it confuses me for a minute and thinking about this talk and looking forward to it it, is there any solid ground to tell war stories? and if not, why? it is a process to go back to what i mentioned earlier we don't figure anything out especially on our own. >> with the vietnam vet he spent 35 years writing it?

>> agreed but. >> also writes about men at war. >> so sometimes the notion you cannot communicate which is ultimately harmful because you need other people to help what you have been through and the example that i use it does not have to be bored but a bad relationship. oh my girlfriend is the psychopath in thin it's like you sound like the asshole. [laughter] maybe you are the dick. may be more deeply or emotionally invested with the war is you would be it is hard to figure that out on your own.

so it is extremely important in the narrative is the way that they work or can work he manipulates them because he does not open himself up to that type of questions. >> they are all fairly sophisticated story tellers. between fact and fiction should we open it up to the crowd? >> we take insults also. >> one of the things i was thinking about is my father was in every major battle of

the pacific but i did not hear about -- about it to until he was in his 80s and dying but maybe we can try to understand some parts of it at least? >> people talk about the road work to generation may be memoirs and self published as they were dying and then realized they did want to talk about it. and a sam hines road and a say in the '60s going to college john the gi bill there and put a picture housing for all the veterans and they walk around working with planes you would wear

one thing and they would have the beef with each other and then they go to afghanistan they are alone. they cannot discuss it with each other. also with a world war ii is some of the most insane or career fed war stories that i have heard i think it is weird if you have this experience it is ugly. the industrial scale killing. it is odd with the things that stay in your mind is the rabil fucked up type of thing to beat called a hero for what you have done

faugh. the services is a complicated. and then of course, the vietnam's generation had a different reception so that colors the way the veterans talk about what they have been through. i have heard that from a lot of people and then realized they really did want to tell the story. >>&0x [inaudible] your father trying to discourage you had to give

you some books when tom cruise is a movie came out for now the fourth of july but did that affect you the you did not think it would be you? >> my father was not a reader so there is no literature of the war and to the best advice is a cliche but it is true don't go out to try and be a hero of those who want to be heroes

die and also those on the chow line so he knew in the best circumstances i am not sure i answered your question. >> caddy's cents red those books. >> yes i read that when i got out of the marine corps in my 20s i think it came out while the war was happening. but his work is great but i want to ask if you try to

compare if this book is falling in line to tell those kinds of stories and a professor in college toxic a fantastic poet when he learned i was joining the marines corps had me read and hemingway and all these folks to fill my head with the a little bit of wisdom. some of the stories i was

reading and reading what of the stories in here as i was reading the book that was reading things to inform me about technical matters to get the details right but also stuff to get the emotional things right sometimes that was more ra or the diary of a country priest like the brilliant the egyptian novel >> earlier talking about individuals that were tiny mine was especially tiny and when i first started writing

after having been in the marine corps i read dozens and dozens of the books i read the rand reports but i did not know what was happening outside of very small area of operations so you were an officer. >> but i did the exact same thing i was reading construction reports and a lot of memoirs and i talked to a lot of marines who might know something about the subject. i had to do a lot of research to try to get it is right as possibleyíc. >> the things they said that war is the enemy and also on

the forefront submerging with this technology with the quest for world dominance? >> well, i don't know. i think have you answer that question depends on what were you talk about for the iraq war thomas certainly s huge majority of the cost is borne by the iraqi people. bright? which is, there is a lot of things you could say about that but it is very strange to me and continues to be strange with that disconnect

as a citizenry when you join the military you entrust yourself to politics that you are fighting for reason that your lives and efforts are well spent to the greatest degree possible and for that regard it is strange to come back from iraq where there is a lot of brutal things happening to feel like a country or to get out of the military to go back to new york you don't have to think about it if you don't want to put friends are in afghanistan the contributions are hugely important but a very small percentage that service but with the technology of

warfare to have drone strikes and special operations a fraction of a fraction and whenever we employ violent force which sometimes we should come up we as citizens should keep a watchful eye on how our government and to do so with as much foresight as possible and seriousness and intent as possible. >> anyone else? >> thanks for coming out. iraq and afghanistan were the first fought by the volunteer army how did that change the nature of service

if any? >> it changes in a lot of ways we are much more disconnected the divide between civilian and military is pretty wide. and remember -- veterans remember that it q lee. we come back to a positive reception but there is that degree of apathy but also extremely professional military. so when you read about the things that went on late in

world war ii for example, course you think about, it is a highly professional military it is all volunteer so that changes the common cause it changes the dynamic of the unit greatly. >>. >> is there is a growing poli5

from the perspective of the foreign service officer there is discussion that story about the things that went on it is in a bizarre space we invaded by iraq with very little planning for the aftermath with the notion that we would be a good as liberators rate -- to transition over the state department basically predicted it would not happen as general shinseki had a more robust presence and pushed aside aggressively and the consequences of that with

the early policy decisions played out over the years. so certainly there is details with that at the policy level we want people to think about what it meant to be one of those marines or us state department guy to build the society up and what that was like and how that was affected by the past but on a day-to-day basis. >> for use thinking of trading when you were deployed or were you taking

notes when you were deployed ? >> i took a lot of notes a was right thing but not about war mostly very, very bad short stories and i've learned anthony powell had quit writing during world war ii i felt like that excuse me for all the things i had written them were awful. but i did come back with notes and a lot of memories but the source material that i had with the nature of my job by which travel lot and it's been time with units so that certainly affected what it was like because is you

talk with industry guys to get a different picture of the '04 even just from people. ahead to friends named madge both of the save area, the same calvary and the same translator but one was 2006 the other was two years later and could not have been more different. but it gave me a subject that felt vitally important to me. i had to do a lot of work as i was routine the collection. -- riding the collection but i was scared to get the wrong.

>> en telling things that might upset people. >> wars make raiders sent for you they began to fade not on the front pages anymore but in terms of an understanding of the men and women who servedw$n and what should we continue to know? >> i don't know. [laughter] but that somebody would take away one thing they're other

veterans there is mower literature coming out about the words on ashley war but what i want people to do instead there is a beltway with the feelings about the of war and what that feels like on a human level is extremely important and not falling into a false myth about the war. >> thanks everyone. [applause]

thanks for coming out if anyone wants the book signed we have copies just outside the door you can get it personalized and pay after i still trust most

[inaudible conversations] >> i think we are ready to start please turn off yourself phones we will beyond c-span today so this will be recorded i am a staff writer for the "l.a. times" talking about the realities of war with three

distinguished writers who have attacked a subjects from different angles america has been at war 13 years and the statistics are 22 veteran's day killing themselves and of the 2 million united states veterans that have banned to iraq for afghanistan are afflicted with posttraumatic says one dash stress disorder but last year did a series on veterans for the "l.a. times" and i followed iraq's veterans and their families in getting to know these families i am eager what my panel has to say today i will introduce the guest and ask specific questions been general questions and open up to the audience.

david is a journalist and author since 2007 has been documented the effects of war on the human psyche his most recent book thank you for your service. has received numerous awards his previous book the good soldiers has won multiple awards and named the top than book of the year by "the new york times" and editor and writer for the "washington post"fm reporting from africa and asia and central america and europe and covered wars afghanistan and kosovo a pulitzer prize and macarthur foundatifoundati on genius grant is among his honors in 2012. to his right is david moore's former marine infantry officer and cover the war's in iraq for slates

in virginia quarterly review the first dispatch is titled the big notes from the jarhead underground his work has appeared in "the new yorker" and in this surfer's journal in january 2015 he will release his book with ptsd. , with her novel the pulitzer the most creative writing textbooks and her children's book said giant gm said which translated into 20.

>> the new guardian and other publications her memoir losing tim which is about her son will come out april 2014. please welcome our guests. [applause] mr. finkel during the search trying to cope with life back home toe us the story of sgt schuman. >> thank you for coming today. at an issue bin they had been the quick thing about the number doing some

reporters on this just to be clear it is not 22 iraqi and afghanistan veterans it is all veterans when you examine that liggett the 22 on a particular day suicides are happening but most have gone on from service to do many other things a great number are over 60 is just worth pointing out it is direct line from the war experience to a suicide although i say it is not but not necessarily is the other part is when we look at the 2011 numbers which are the most recent with the number

of young people but adam schuman i am happy to say is not one of them that might have been while i was reporting my first book for a good soldiers when i was asking around one day who was a great soldier someone said this guy adam schuman. time went by and i got dizzy i walked into his room and the soldier was waiting by himself he was gaunt and was sitting by myself but i am leaving and what happened has has happened so often

after three deployments 1,000 days the great soldier could not do it anymore walk to the helicopter out all day with the policies of the war's been he would fight every measure as a great soldier not feeling any sense of accomplishment orl÷i success anatomy -- amanda in his mid 20s cloaked in shame. you can imagine the norway's the line moves forward and when adam schuman gets to the front he is stopped. he says the next one is

yours so he is there by himself waiting for the next helicopter it has the big red cross on the side and then he gets it the helicopter for the injured and the dead and that is who he has become. he is done if he goes home. my intent with the first book is to right journalistically about going into a war at a particular moment that something has happened this new show up and stay. with that question in 2007 when it reached that lost momentum of the tragic moment from a young man who

goes into a war and adam schuman was one of the answers. and had a rough deployment and adam schuman and others were not doing very well with depression and things they were not expecting. so that tragic moment but here all of the people that did well to recover from the experiences of what they did, a sock, did not do or did not see. thank you for your service and it begins with him and then he drops the baby and the book goes on from there

and tell whole cluster of the people trying to get better. >> every seamlessly now but how did you go about with the plan of attack for the reporting of it? they are around the country that you don't know which ones that is useful habit to you devise a plan to use your time most efficiently? >> the kid a million americans were imported directly 25% or 500,000 returning with psychological wounds to contend with us.

the again the tepper journalism that i do with that battalion for eight months i stayed with it bad things happen and just to build up from there the first one wasn't getting during the war the second one is recovering families and the trust came from the first book because i knew everyone but to know we were going through it needs to be written about of a bite to come and hang out with you

by the way you don't get to see the book until the is published because i am writing about you and you cannot be your own editor it requires a leap of faith on your part did you just go hang out and filled with familieshyñ and think what a my missing? shouldn't i be over there? you do the best you can. >> david morris your book tell us how your interest began and how it evolved? >> i came from a military family serving in vietnam so we don't know how to answer the question like vietnam's

but that was the first the ptsd comes from the vietnam not recognized until 1980 and grew out of that war experience trying to figure out where the interest started in that was the first question i ever ask my father is what happened in vietnam he was washing the car at the time i remember the stream of water going into the sidewalk. but i went to college in ptsd was on the minds of active duty but if you are familiar with the literature to see the taxi driver you

get us sense that ptsd isn't the film so you grow up with an awareness of that if you have a sense of history and i pick that up from my dad and his friends i grew up in san diego and arguably the biggest military city in america. i did active duty time then of war and a lot of goodies that a trained with were over there. it was impossible for me to restore the war so i ended up calling working as a reporter at that point. people make jokes all the

time you have that ptsd thing going? it is the fourth most diagnosed psychiatric disorder in the world associated with soldiers but if you spend any time on base for marines who have returned it is part of the conversation and i run into people all the time. it is a rare in southern california with the largest population i look dash is part of the environment debt

this point. >> challenging the understanding of the ptsd it was systematically over diagnosis cater explained the gist of this controversy? when i hear that criticism is hard to wrap your head around it we all want to thank them for their service so it is ironic people are thinking we for my service and people would thank me for it called the osama have said everyone assumes that we all have ptsd and have

that old veteran experience and they assume if you are blown up points or blood weaken baghdad the were broken. then there is a tendency to little soldiers as having been through it as if there was always a negative damaging experience to show and are okay. the war stays with all veterans their whole life but to assume everyone has been damaged is going too far. i think we have to apologize to the experience and then a disconnected and devotional goal is so great and they feel such a burden to give something back to veterans

and ptsd is a gift to extend sympathy with the form of a psychiatric disorder that can somehow make up for the fact we sent you to war and you were screwed up the and you had to sacrifice a lot of your life for the steep fare wars. is a coping mechanism that i have heard reid save when someone thinks you for your service their needs are met, not mine because they feel uncomfortable, a guilty so they say thank you for your service and ptsd is related to that.

>> did impede the more honest conversation. >> people think me and i am not debt combat veteran i served peacetime marine corps and it does make them feel uncomfortable but it is weird because it is easy to complain but i don't know what i want people to say except maybe nothing and let's have a conversation instead. if you are interested i will talk and tell your ears are blue but let's talk about the treaty how the middle east was the creation of a the map get into a don't just tell me through your bullet points what it was to you.

if they're willing to have been honest conversation palfrey doubt i was having it was quasi villages how much imus it i will talk about it all did that people get freaked out. talking about rape or sexual abuse so i guess rather than taking me for my service then to take five minutes and just ask where were you what year and learn how the unit's work. but think of a different way to approach the topic.

>> her son was a rancher and dag capt. of the army and shot and killed himself in 2004. her memoir is out this year. you write to that he was despondent and reshape -- enraged#.b)z-)

and went back to do the same job as a contractor. then of course the contractor claimed that he worked for was bought by another and bought by another and a lot of happened that happens in the contracting business as well as in publishing. but, he went to ethiopia. he married in namibia and had a step-son and young daughter in the winter if he'll be a for another operation. then he was given the option by his company of going to washington are going to iraq. he went to iraq with fabulous,

ecstatic enthusiasm. at that point he admired bush. he believed that wmd would be found. he believed the war was necessary, bought it all and he was there for only seven months but when he came home i feel that this one like that he had to stand on which was his belief in the military values, had been ripped from him. he was appalled at for example the disbanding of the baathist army and he had, if you look at it on paper, all of the symptoms of ptsd. he couldn't sleep. he was always aroused. he was sometimes distant, sometimes frightened, sometimes irrationally angry and so forth.

what happened in his case and this is complicated but i will try to sanctify it. his wife after his suicide sued for benefits for her and the children. what the trial came down to us did he or did he not have ptsd. at which point it seemed to me this is not an answer to anything. this does not satisfy any need that any of us have to understand what happened to tam but that is what a courtroom does, and it's very difficult to prove posthumous ptsd so there were a psychiatrist to look at the story and gave opposite answers to the question. and for six years my daughter-in-law pursued this through the courts with reviews and appeals and reviews and ultimately was denied benefits for her and the children because they couldn't properly say that he had ptsd.

that experience was valuable to me in the way u are describing i think david because i understood that there are kinds of trouble and there are recognizable symptoms if you like of the trouble that happens in the minds of young men who go through an experience like this. but labeling it is not really very helpful. jonathan shea who wrote two wonderful books about his work with vietnam veterans achilles in vietnam and odysseus in america, has come up with to his work with veterans has come up with the phrase moral injury. and that seems to me absolutely to describe what happened to my son. attache describes it if you volunteer with great enthusiasm for the army and find yourself

in a situation that you cannot then get out of because once you say yes you can't say partially know, and then you find that your superior officers are giving you orders that are in my son's words, stupid, greedy, wrong, what happens is a moral injury. it is an injury to that idealism with which he had and that phrase is -- my diamond fact glad i had written this book losing tim before i came across the phrase moral injury because i think i might have believed that was the answer that i was seeking what happened to my son. >> in your book you say when i'm writing about my son i have verbal planes at levels and

tools to give me the illusion of control. as a writer you are trained to perceive and study your emotions. i'm curious could you elaborate on that passage and tell us what the experience of losing a son under the circumstances, how am i be different for u.s. a writer as opposed to someone maybe with less of a habit of introspection or verbal facility? >> while the difference it made for me is that writing is what i do to make sense of any kind of chaos. it's instinctive and immediate and i do remember -- i don't remember much about the plane trip back from namibia where i buried my son but i do remember that i sat writing a furious letter to the nra, which then eventually was altered into the

first essay that i wrote about him, which was published by the same people and it happens that christopher was on the staff at the st. pete times at that point. but when i look back at it, it seems to me that the writing helps me in three different ways. one was that at first i just flashed out everything, the grave come, the anger and the loss in my journal. and then at some point i began to realize that i had been enormously helped by books that other people i've written about suicide, about depression, about soldiering and it began to seem to me that what i was doing in my journal was telling the story of my grief but i wasn't telling the story of my son, whereas my experience day by day was brief memory, brief memory, brief

memory and there arose a new desire to tell his story which i know it's not his story of his story. it's mine. he would not have told the story in the same way and he would not have come to the conclusions that i came to. but it was a way for me to try to understand through his life what had happened to him. you never come to an understanding. there comes a place that you can go no further as carson says that was the impulse toward the book. those two things, to tell his story in a way that keeps him them, they keep them alive and in a way that might help other people. curiously, and david morris and i were just talking about this. curiously i find that now having written a memoir as close to the facts as i understand them as i possibly can, i am freed of the

facts and now i am writing a play in changing characters and purposes in place and i feel quite free to use the emotions that are still in me in this very different way. >> thank u. >> thank you jenna. along with the country lionizing veterans we have a pa system with serious shortcomings. the va backlog is already a joke on comedy central. it's well-known that the battle for benefits goes on year after year. i am curious how you three would respond to the seeming contradiction between the fact that we lionize our best anti-access david morris writes, the shortcomings in the va

system seemed to show as a society we don't feel much responsibility for what happens to them when they return. >> i think if you go -- i wish next time we held a vote to declare war -- not the va hospital. i still go to the va hospital sometimes which has the largest concentration of iraq he afghan vets just to kind of soap in the history because you can go there and see world war ii vets world war i vets and vietnam vets and the whole thing. but it is, you know the va most people don't know is the second largest department in the u.s. government. it's huge. we spend a lot of money on veterans. not enough and i don't think -- i think it's overly centralized and i think it suffers from not fully understanding and not

being completely serious in the ways that it should be serious about dealing with people on a personal level. the biggest va in 2003 in 2004 in 2005 begin the new rollout of what they called gold standard treatments which are basically one-size-fits-all mass produced therapies, prolonged exposures. prolonged exposure and cbt which is more by talking therapy. and one of these prolonged exposures for example as a dropout rate of almost 60% am prolonged exposure which is the va's number one, they spent the most money on this therapy involves you describing your worst experiences not one time and not five times and not 10 times but ideally 100 times in a row. virtual reality exposure therapy is a big-ticket item. usc was involved in a production

of that technology which i think is completely foolish. i append their exposure therapy and it doesn't work. they have doubled down and spent money on these therapies that are questionable. they have very serious side effects a cause they needed to rollout and create a mass-produced therapy in which tens of thousands of veterans and to be seen to be doing this in a way. there's far less attention when i first went to the va all i wanted to do was talk to somebody that may be at a masters in psychology and is something about psychology. that never happened. i was put on a seven or eight month list. good exposure therapy, hated it, and made my symptoms worsen at the end of it i said what can i do to see, just want to see what else is out there. why do you put me back on the seventh month list. there are some very serious and smart people who work at the va

some of the smartest most dedicated and innovative experienced counselors that treat ptsd come from the va. no one spends more in the entire world on ptsd treatment research and training and the united states veterans administration. they are the lead agency in the world for ptsd research and treatment. i just don't think, it's not decentralized enough. i don't think we have enough qualified counselors are just basic counselors to talk to veterans and to do with them on the human level instead of getting this mass-produced, it's like they are producing what they think about weapons systems. let's make make one that we can do 100,000 times in a row that will work for everybody. it's a really tough -- trying to solve the va's problems is like fighting a war all the time. you have to have a campaign plan and you have to have very smart people in it and you have to

have a serious review process. i don't know why eric shinseki is still in charge of the va considering his poor track record that i don't know why they continue to use these therapies. it's odd because ptsd grew out of the anti-vietnam war that was heavily associated with the left with all of the people who xopposed the vietnam war. the marine veteran played by tom cruise in born on the fourth of july. the va has become this orthodox. they have become a zen masters at ptsd and so they eventually dictate their research agenda. they dictate the public agenda and in my mind they have become a little bit fixed in their ways on how ptsd can be looked at in how it's going to be treated as a public subject is largely dominated by the va.

international organizations and the u.n. communicates and looks to the va in large measure for leadership in ptsd research. we found ptsd research around the world in the netherlands and in london and in south africa and australia. we pay for their ptsd research because we have money. >> anyone else care to comment about the golf? >> i would like to say the obvious thing which there is no va for the contractors although many of the contractors are like my son, recent veterans who go into the war sounds for the same reasons they went into the war to begin with. rumsfeld's idea was that in the privatization they would pay them very well and then they could cut them loose. so there was no briefing. there is no debriefing. there is no contact with the wives for the symptoms that they might look for.

they are very well paid and being very well-paid when they are working among soldiers. there is a natural tension. they are better paid than soldiers by far but they are cut loose. that's all. >> if i can just widen it beyond the va. on one hand unlike other wars at least now there is some attempt at putting a system in place to offer mental health assistance to people who needed. that's the other part. the thing that my reporting brought me to for this book was just you know the good intentions are one thing but on the other side of it, it's an ad hoc haphazard system.

three quick examples from the book. one guy, three soldiers all who reached the point, all did well, came home and for various reasons finally worked up the courage to say they need help which is a whole nother story that they did and it's a small window. they needed help so the first guy, he goes into a va run ptsd program in topeka kansas and he gets seven weeks. the next guy when it's his he wants to go to the va program for seven weeks which is a long waiting list at this point. the caseworker looks around and she finally finds the four-week program for him in colorado. this is a tried care run program. so okay, one guy gets seven weeks to work it out in one guy

gets four weeks to work it out. then along comes the guy was talking about earlier adam schuman. his moment arrives where it's clear he needs help. the seven-week program is full with a waiting list. before the program is full with a waiting list family finds this little thing in northern california that's not va and it's not tried care. it's entirely donor supported. the guy who runs that says e he can come here but the deal is four months minimum and he stays as long as it takes to tear it apart and figure it out. seven weeks, four weeks, at least four months and it's where you go isn't dependent on your particular peculiar needs for recovery. it comes down to where there is nobody and i try awfully hard and i think i succeeded at keeping my own opinions out of these books.

they're not my stories. they are the stories of the soldiers and families but i think it's pretty fair to say that if i had a kid, who served them and came home and needed help and i learned that there were these three options available i would expect the very best for him. it seems like the least we could do but again everything is in the oven on the other hand. on the other hand a four-month program is not a broadscale workable model. they're just too many folks who need help right now to have a program like that. so what do you do? >> apart from the time they spend in these programs which specific therapies seem to be the most effective among people that you followed to? >> well so they relied a lot on cbt and let's return to the event just what david was talking about and own it and just replay it so it doesn't

seem so dramatic that when it comes up it's sort of smooth out and you can control the moment. what happened at the four-month program is that guy at the time and you may agree with this or you may not agree but at least have the time to do it, to take these folks and kind of take them well past their germanic moment, back toward his much they can remember as what happened before that moment or the accumulation of these moments. go back to the beginning. go back to your childhood. not as excusing what they may have done and not that everything depends on the patterns of your life but his thinking seems to be if you can understand by learning about yourself enough to know who you were in a moment before the germanic event then you will

have an easier time understanding how you behaved in the first controlled moments after the dramatic event and you might be more, maybe not forgiveness but at least understa. >> so that seemed in now is that perfect? no. but for what's available out there seemed like a pretty good shot. >> one quick note, interviewed a couple dozen ptsd survivors male, female war veterans rape survivors in one of the most powerful therapies as yoga as an alternative therapy because it helps change the hypervigilance associated with ptsd where you are always aroused and ready for an attacker. soldier veterans suffer from that a lot. he'll got helps helps people be on an even keel with their body and lower the stress hormones, to a more stable centered state. the va is spending money on this

and researching it at various va centers for a lot of eastern philosophy took part in mantra repetition city which is repeating a mantra which i didn't personally find effective at most of at most other at most of the at most other people to appear a lot of these alternative therapies which have nothing to do with sigmund freud were bf skinner or wearing it the classical cytological theories, they are kind of weird. the little strange to take a bunch of marine and say we are going to put your leg behind her head pretty doesn't go over particularly well at first but like california where yoga is particularly common. i have friends that teach in twentynine palms california and those are extraordinarily effective and we need to invest more in those. it seems kind of strange they are harder to sell on the floor of congress but yoga superpowerful. i know one victim for several hours that it saved her life.

and she went through exposure therapy and it did nothing for her. i think you have to expand your definition of what therapy is basically. >> it just occurred to me with a little lightbulb over my head as david finkel was talking that for me no doubt the book i've written about tim is exactly the process you described, that i serwer this childhood and try to understand how the patterns of his life could have let him where they did. >> of storytelling and there's a soul thought and i don't know whoever said it first said it far better. i'm just going to jumble it but life basically is so absurd and chaotic anyway the only chance you have of making sense of it and living an optimistic life is to storified things. take all these things and turn them into stories. whether you are running -- writing a book or trying to understand her life. there are certain motives we

have to get to gain control of it. i saw some value with some guys, not everybody but some value in but cpt was doing. the bigger problem i saw was just oh my god the over reliance on medication. there was one guy in my book and i hope this number is right. i think he was taking something like 40 pills a day. they weren't all separate. it was a thing where you are depressed, take this one. you are still depressed? take this one in addition to that one. anxious? this is not news. but the overmedication was stunning and a lot of the reason for the overmedication is because of band or representation of people especially in areas where soldiers tend to come from.

there is not an abundance of psychologists and social workers and therapists and qualified counselors able to help so guys show show up in a sale right here, take this pill, take this pill, take a spill. i'm generalizing obviously but it's a significant model. >> i think we have about 10 minutes left and i opened i would -- i promised i would open it up to audience questions. >> you never explained why to ptsd men. >> post-traumatic stress disorder. as i understand ptsd as many different things but it is first and foremost a category, psychiatric disorder category involving intrusive syndrome, intrusive symptoms like flashbacks and hypervigilance were you are too switched on and expecting an attack in a moment

and that can alternate with emotional numbing where you feel numbed out in the film nothing and there are about 18 different symptoms but those are the three basic symptoms areas. intrusive symptoms which can include nightmares and flashbacks, hypervigilance and just being totally angry and waiting for an attacker and just being him doubt so that's how i understand it. you have to understand that it's a long story but ptsd was invented basically in 1980 but it has a history that extends all the way back within human history. john shea the gentleman who wrote the forward for her book finds some of the symptoms and ptsd. it is in some ways kind have been immortal condition but it does tend to be inflected by the culture. flashbacks great civil war veterans did not have flashbacks. they tended to report being haunted by ghosts though it was more of a supernatural

reflection prior to film and television. flashbacks as we call them kind of grew out of the film culture and the lsd culture of the 1970s because that is where ptsd came from. it came out of the antiwar movement on the left. >> i'm just wondering what you thought about the fact that it seems like we have gotten away from the point where we think about the human cost of going to war and they don't take that into consideration. the wars obviously were kind of unavoidable come the two world wars and i remember growing up a lady whose husband came home from vietnam and i just remember it struck me when i started reading about the iraq veterans and every member of the thousand yard -- where he would sit in his chair and just stare at it struck me that it was like how did we forget this was happening to people when they came back for more and not be prepared?

>> when we talk about human cost, it is one of those phrases that falls very easily into an account of the war without really thinking about what it is. one of the things that i think about is 22 veterans a day means 22 mothers today. >> so here is a way to think about it and forgive me if i am being obvious. these have not been popular wars and it's not like a lot of americans have a particular stake in these wars. it's an all-volunteer force. it's a professional force now and you know the stats. less than 1% of american families have had somebody directly in these wars. so it means you go to neighborhood and knock on 99 doors, not here, not here.

it's not like factories were being shut down to build mraps so guys wouldn't get blown up so much. these weren't popular wars by professional force in a faraway country. you don't have to care and this is not a suggestion in any way from description. it's just to state the obvious. it's not how you forget about human cost? it's not just that. nobody's thinking about the wa wars. a lot of people aren't thinking about the wars very much at all so the human cost gets to be one of the casualties of that. >> i remember as a girl in phoenix arizona seeing gold stars in windows in the neighborhood and there were quite a few of them. one of the things that i did on memorial day after tim died was to make a big gold star and put it in a window.

but you know that was a kind of sentimental thing to do. >> sir. >> the other appalling appalling statistics i've hurt from these wars as the number of traumatic brain injuries. i'm sure there's some overlap between that and post dramatic stress disorder. i would like to comment on how many tbi's there are and give us a quick little in the time allotted background on that if you will. >> i don't feel actually qualified. he tbi you are correct in the sense that if you imagine two circles of symptoms the two circles overlap to a large degree in terms of the symptoms of ptsd and tbi. i think to be honest i think we are just now in the opening phases of a campaign of understanding what tbi really means because the brain is --

has more connections than our stars in the known universe that we don't fully understand what happens when someone experiences it. i lived through two ied attacks. i don't know, didn't lose consciousness. they weren't profound injuries so it's hard to say what the long-term impacts impact of those are. interestingly the researchers that i have spoken to look at the nfl as being a very useful and very analogous database. they look at locally and look at junior seau. he experienced concussion after concussion after concussion. one of the units i was in one of the sister units had people that generally have a four or ied rule. if you had three concussions, three register concussions they would send you home. so there is a think a general awareness of it. i don't think the neurology,

think we are just getting into the basics of our understanding of it. it's almost like you know the space program in the 60s. we are just sorting out the fundamentals of what is at stake there. interestingly one thing i would say is someone is seriously wonder there's this weird effect. if you you were going to do and you lose consciousness the likelihood of you getting ptsd drops by 50% so there something that happens in six hours after an attack that changes the way the memory is stored. neuroscientists have a pretty good handle on that. so i'm kind of a paradoxical way if you suffer a fairly profound hermetic brain injury and lose consciousness psychologically you are in a slightly better position if that makes any sense. i'm not sure how to describe it. i'm not saying good for you, you have a tbi but it shows.

we don't know why that is exactly but it shows how complicated and delicate a machine to mind is. i don't hope you can add to that david. >> there are some overlap. you are right. of course there are more tbi cases and traumatic brain injury and a lot of it has to do with the fact that so many other people in wars who would be dead are not dead in these wars to these are low class. they tend to come up. you got your brain rattled in the lose consciousness for a bit and then you are rearranged. you have got some things that are chargeable to deal with. it's funny on the whole hierarch if these things i see guys with ptsd sort of wishing for tbi because at least there could be a brain scan to show look,

here's proof. there actually is something physically wrong with me and guys with tbi so wish that they were missing a leg so they could say say oh look their sex was something wrong with me. i can believe this and all of that kind of gets back to the whole stigma of psychological wounds. even if there something organic underneath it the inability for these rough and tough guys especially to first of all believe something may happen to them and then go forward from there. >> yes, sir. >> a lot of the things you talk about in a shamanic event i'm curious in the majority of cases there is a traumatic event that it can be traced back to or it just develops and there's nothing you can attribute it to? >> that could be an accumulation of things. the shade term of moral injury. people are starting to pay more and more attention at that and that's not pretend this all makes us us on the military side

of the equation. there is trauma in the civilian world as well. you guys might disagree but to me the commonality here is when something happens in your life whether it's a single event or an accumulation of things but it's not just trauma. something happens that just rattles you down to your bones. you either succumb to it or you get busy trying to recover and whether it's tbi or ptsd or a civilian in the military is one of you guys were saying life comes with. trauma necessarily comes with attempts at recovery. that's what we do and to get back to an earlier point of the whole idea of what has to be careful here because of the whole notion of perpetuating the

stereotype of a soldier and so on. the fact is they are our broken soldiers from these wars. it doesn't mean they are going to be forever broken. probably most of them -- back but that doesn't mean you dismiss this moment as you know other words were tougher trade we have always had a version of this. people have figured out themselves, we don't have to act as reactive before. we can advance an act with more compassion and understanding than we have in the past. >> it became one of the legal issues and the benefits trial for my son whether we could point to a particular incident that had caused trauma. and we couldn't. there were three possibilities of times that he had been in trauma that one of the symptoms was that he wouldn't talk about it. and i think that is a frequent

symptom and certainly something we learned about the second world war, that vast numbers of people came home from the second world war worth vastly changed and wouldn't talk about it. that's part of a soldier mista mistake, a man of few words. and clearly what helps is getting them to talk about it. in many cases. >> hi. you mentioned, was mentioned on the panel bush and cheney and i think even rumsfeld. what i wanted to know is what the panelists are doing to prevent the united states from going into another war particularly ukraine where we contributed to overthrow the government. syria which is heating up again and all the other places that we are meddling in. what are we doing to prevent this so we don't have more discussions about ptsd and tbi and all these things under a

democratic president by the way. >> so i wonder what you're doing. >> to answer your question i guess for me and i'm not specifically a politically, don't see my role as political activism but there is a political inextricable lyrical element to ptsd and the sense and i think this is where it's good to recognize that there are broken soldiers out there because the soldiers that are suffering are symbolic of all of the suffering that went on and all of the suffering that the war has conflicted. and i was one of the original things about the original architects that helped set ptsd down and get recognized by psychiatry. we don't want, we don't entirely want this to be a curable condition because we must remember the pain of a war. we must remember the losses of war so as far as how we interpret the work i'm doing now

and trying to use ptsd come a think ptsd is many things that in addition to it being a psychiatric disorder as recognized as also symbolic in a poetic thing. it's a symbol that you could talk to someone and you can see there is a symbol of a soldier who paid for his country that we are forced to pay for his or her treatment and to deal with their story, to deal with the testimony. people are more interested now in ptsd than they are in the wars that we just left because people are seeing their spouses and children come back with it so it's an issue that people are wrestling with. i think that is -- i can't think of many things i would do a better job at keeping us out of fighting another stupid war. i don't know if i fully satisfied your question. >> my answer would be that writers write and the way that we try to be activists, those of

us who do consider consider ourselves activists hactivist and unlike the journalists i do because of my experience but you know, your question is a valid one and the answer so pitifully small. i don't make $25 here and sign a petition they are but what i am really doing is writing the story that i went through. >> we are out of time but i think we have time for one quick question. >> one of my subspecialties at cal state is teaching university level mathematics to learning disabled students. i had a first ptsd this semester. strategy. we don't have a medical diagnosis. all it is ptsd. the circuits are broken. tragically impaired. no adequate diagnosis and we don't have -- we have ph.d. so

we don't have medical doctors. the tragedy continues. >> please thank the panel for coming. [applause] we will all be around after