i personally learned a lot by reading tim o'brien's and getting a greater sense of how tim o'brien and his other books as well and if i die in a combat zone taught me a lot about what is coming home experience was like. so there is this, in many cases actual psychotherapy that you read about the most powerful impacting psychotherapy that the va uses to treat ptsd across-the-board often focuses on this idea of narrative of discovering your therapist helping you find your story and a way to conceptualize yourself as a person in the world. literature is basically a training session and good books explain and help us understand how stories can be told. a lot of people if you grew up on television and film which is less emotionally rich in a lot of cases you don't get that emotional, you don't develop that emotional iq and get a sense of how a story can be told and how it veterans story can be told. for example it's useful to look at, after the trojan war he wanders for years. he's literally homeless which in some ways this is a metaphor for the homecoming experience and the idea of travel

a century later, the vietnam veteran and gifted novelist, tim o'brien wrote, war is hell. that is not the half of it. was also mistreated and tear adventure, courage, discovery, holiness pity, despair loa ve. war is fun, war makes you a man, war makes you dead. people don't think about love with veterans. those of us who know veterans and work with them, there is a love that is almost impossible to replicate in life. the words of a survivor of the pacific theater in world war ii, i felt a tear rolled down my cheek as i said goodbye to my last friend. i was delighted to be home, but i expense powerful ways of a motion as the last three years of my life rolled off like the night. the men of the union faced very similar emotions, as all men and women were returning from war, but they had special difficulties. there was no g.i. bill. the g.i. bill was 80 years away. eugene sledge got his doctorate in biology on the g.i. bill. union soldiers had no g.i. bill. there was no v.a.. no system of treating veterans. no rehabilitation program. the pension system was embryonic and only

and then tim o'brien who i guess, is sort of the gold standard. the national book award but the things they carried, which is just -- which has just turned into a phenomenon, you know high school my son read it in high school, college students read it in those community read things. that should be on the top of your list, "the things they carried." gus hasford wrote two really good novels that you may have heard of, the phantom blooper was one, the other was the short-timers which became the movie "full metal jacket." he was also a marine. and article marine, carl marlantes wrote matterhorn that came out in 2010 and it is a brilliant novel. and going all the way back to graham greene's the quiet american from 1955. so we have a long, a long history, and that brings us to today's panel made up of all of us here served in the vietnam war, all of these men have written exceptional books about the vietnam war. i'd like to introduce them to you, and then we'll get started. well, beyond what you have you have in your introduction. danny lliteras like i

and i think a lot about the things they carry in the greater sense of how tim o'brien in his other works as well is like a combat zone that talk about what his homecoming experience was like. so there was -- in many cases there was actual psychotherapy that you read about. the most powerful impacting psychotherapy that the va has and that are used to treat ptsd across the board often focus on this idea of the narrative of discovering in the way to conceptualize yourself as a person in the world. it's a way to explain and help us understand how the stories can be told because a lot of people if you grew up on television and film which is rich in a lot of cases you don't develop that or get a sense of how the stories are told. after the trojan war he wanders for ten years and is literally homeless which in some ways is a before for the homecoming experience in america and the idea of travel as a medicine and display ofthis way of changing itself and so to see how people can find themselves through wandering and how that played out in that way can be extraordinarily powerful and it's measur