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What I heard was it it's not easy to put on a uniform and take it off.

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The skin grows deep and the sloughing of it is very, very hard.

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It's not a role change and station of duty change that's rather easy, but a struggle to hold on to humanity.

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So what I want to talk a little bit about specifically is for me,

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one of the emotions that was most weighty but often not spoken of in terms of specific terms was guilt.

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It was the elephant in the room, and it was often bordered with shame and not articulated.

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And there are three principal forms that I heard, or at least helped me to map it out.

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And one was an accidental guilt.

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A second one is one that I think of in terms of of lucky guilt, but a kind of survivor guilt, a more generic form of survivor guilt.

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And a third was collateral damage guilt and collateral injury guilt.

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And I'll try to talk about them a little bit in terms of that in terms of stories,

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I should just also say one thing that I think is really critical in thinking about this.

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I think of the guilt as a kind of humanising force.

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It wasn't grandiose. And many of the cases that I heard, it wasn't misplaced.

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It was a strict terms. It wasn't mapping culpability so irrational in the sense that it wasn't tracking culpability,

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but it was a sense of personal accountability that these soldiers could not

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let go of things happened in their command that they needed to account for.

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And but I should say, at the same time, this is very critical to our different audiences.

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America really is fighting three wars. And if you talk to anyone, the DOD, they will say it's Afghanistan, Iraq, and it's suicide.

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The suicide rate in the states is is is amongst the forces is as high as it is amongst civilians.

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In the first time since we've been keeping records. Is that the case? And some months, the suicide fatalities outnumber combat fatalities.

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And there were last week incidents in Fort Hood amongst the newly deployed.

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But, you know, the deployments are long. They're longer for us than they are for you.

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They're typically 12 months, 9 to 12 months, multiple and often reserve in the National Guard.

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So it's a very, very difficult war.

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And though there's much still less stigma than there had been in referring it.

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And there are some that actually get promoted while they're getting treatment or referring is still difficult to come forward early and adequately.

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So let me talk a little bit about mindful of the time here about accident, guilt, as I call it.

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So this is a case that I remember very clearly. It's a man named.

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He was it is at the time, Major John Prior. I was captain at the time,

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Captain Pryor and he this was early days of Iraq and he was in charge of a unit that was a security detail by the Green Zone and the Army.

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But the Bradley Fighting Vehicle has a gun turret on top and one of his guys turned on the ignition and the current jumped right to the turret.

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The gun and the gun went off and blew off the face of one of their privates, Private Joseph Mike.

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The issue was that the vehicle had used a marine battery rather than an army battery.

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All the manuals said it was okay, but they later learned that it was a different amperage, same voltage.

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This battery is now outlawed and his case was fully reviewed for quite a long period.

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He was exonerated. But this is what he says to me.

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He says he's he reconstructs the scene very carefully.

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It was as if an ice cream scoop just scooped out Private Mike's face.

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He survived the initial blast, if you can believe it. We were in the medic tent.

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With him is one of the most traumatic things I've ever seen in my entire life.

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To literally see someone's face completely scooped out just the very bottom of his jaw working.

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He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He can scream. I mean, he had no eyes, no face.

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I can only imagine the terror, the fear. He obviously couldn't breathe because he had no nose or mouth to take air.

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And it was one of the few times that I really cried, just tears streaming down my face because I'm watching ten people work over this kid.

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It was an unbelievable thing to see. He then turned to feelings of responsibility.

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I'm the one. Who placed the vehicles. I'm the one who set the security.

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As with most accidents, he says, I'm not in jail right now.

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I'm not egregiously responsible.

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Any one of a dozen decisions made over the course of a two month period, and none of them really occurs to you not the time.

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So I dealt with and still deal with the guilt. He did use the word of having lost him his life.

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Essentially, there's probably not a day that goes by when I don't think of it, at least fleetingly now.

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And I think a little bit about this. I think of Bernard Williams and I think of ancient regret in the philosophical literature and the idea that

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you're causally implicated but not morally responsible in virtue of something that you intentionally did.

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But the soldiers I interviewed, Marines, I'm using that generically Marines, seamen, sailors, airmen and women.

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It doesn't capture the despair or the depths that they really felt.

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But for them, there is a sense of self indictment, and they wanted to make moral repair in the sense of this unit,

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and especially the man I was speaking to who commanded it, it was his guy.

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There's a sense of command, responsibility and care for your unit that really exceeds what ancient regret captures.

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And in his case, the mother of Mike would write weekly as if she were still talking to her boy.

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And the unit, including its its commander, would write back, telling them about the date,

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the week's events, and this mom would send cookies, biscuits every week in a kind of care package.

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It was very painful, but there was a sense that they had to make moral repair and help to normalise the sense.

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And that was a way to become morally clear to it in a way.

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Another phenomenon I think of is love to guilt.

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It's a kind. It's a more generic form of survivor guilt. We tend to forget that survivor's guilt is really a recently dubbed term.

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It's from the Holocaust, the European the genocide of European Jewry.

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And it's 1961 referenced in psychoanalytic literature, when those who survived felt they were the living dead.

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That's the term they used. And they had this unconscious belief that merely remaining alive was a betrayal of the dead.

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So this terrific sense of betrayal.

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And a psychoanalyst, I think, puts it very well, because it happens in families, too, when there's an uneven distribution of of of goods.

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You might say one child feels sort of an unconscious bookkeeping system, says Arnold Modell.

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It's not unfamiliar, of course, if you think of Homeric stories, and I'm thinking particularly about Achilles,

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Achilles himself gives excuse me, writing a called Achilles gives Patroclus his his armour.

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And then the Trojans fights. And Achilles has this horrific sense that he did switch places.

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In some sense, he gave up his ability or his willingness to fight.

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But not everyone does that.

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Not everyone sees a responsibility in those that don't still feel this horrific sense of a sense of of guilt, a kind of dumb luck, tragic luck.

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And I felt this. I did a small interview in Annapolis, the home of the Naval Academy, when Marines had just returned from the fall of Baghdad.

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And they had this tremendous sense of they were in a bucolic sailing community stateside when their buddies were over overseas,

81
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and there was a sense that they didn't deserve to be there.

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So the sense of more, you know, a kind of a rational, moral desert was coming in.

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Part of this, I think, is a way to understand that this is an empathic distress.

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We hear of unit cohesion as what pulls units together, and it minimises in some ways the sense of trauma and also protects vulnerability.

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That certainly was a lesson that was learned early and hard from Vietnam keeping units together,

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but that doesn't necessarily mitigate the sense of guilt.

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Now, in this case, for some of the unit have been dispersed, but still a sense of surviving when others don't.

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Many I interviewed at Walter Reed felt awful that they didn't have facial disfigurement.

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Women felt awful that they were as severely harmed as some of the men.

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And it was a sense that even if they had TBI, traumatic brain injury, it was invisible, that visible injury.

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Trees were much more significant in some sense.

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So I think sometimes when you think about guilt, one place to go and the place I sometimes go is Freud,

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that it's rooted in anxiety about doing wrong and the kind of fear of punishment for these soldiers.

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It was rooted in what Melanie Klein would call a sense of kind of empathic distress,

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a sense that you are in some way harming the very thing that you love.

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And so you're being you persecute yourself for that moment and hear what a very strong voice was, a guy named Major Michael Mooney.

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And I'll just read you a little bit. So he had a kind of triple whammy, you might say, a horrible set of triple traumas.

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Although was not fully traumatised by it as I was, you know, at least to hear.

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He was part of a lead battalion on March 23 that was asked to help the maintenance team of 507 maintenance.

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And this is Jessica Lynch's group, if you remember that story.

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And they had suffered horrific losses, 80 killed, 8080 casualties, and they pulled many of the dead out.

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And then two months later, the unit goes back first to peace and stability operations.

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And as he describes this to me, it's very physical.

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His feelings are extremely somatic.

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So he says, I remember driving into the city from the north, this time almost flinching, bracing as we're going down ambush alley.

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Because I remember the last time I was in it, we were still seeing the charred marks on the road where we lost amphibious tractors,

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catastrophic hills where every Marine in that Amtrak was killed in action.

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And then there was a battalion wide memorial.

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And he gets he gets orders to return to the Naval Academy to take up this position where I later was to see him to head up a company.

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And he says, and you could feel the rupture with the unit is very palpable.

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And he says, I didn't have the same experience or opportunity as the other Marines leaving the combat zone.

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I had orders to report to the Naval Academy. I had to get there quickly.

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I wasn't going to execute them. And then he talks about this surreal transition we take for granted in American airports.

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You see units coming through, but you don't quite realise what they're going through.

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And he describes it. I caught a plane, got shuttled to Kuwait City, was thrown on a VA flight several 7 hours after being in Iraq.

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I'm in Frankfurt, sitting in a first class lounge.

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It was surreal trying to actually look at the porcelain toilets because the last time I had taken a shower was about four months earlier,

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and then 10 hours after I was meeting my family and my wife to be at National excuse me,

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Reagan National and says to me, which also was very surreal,

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many of these people have engaged or have promises to marry, don't know their family, knew families very well.

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And then all of a sudden have this new family that's greeting them at the at the airport.

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It was an interesting dynamic, he says, being transitioned so quickly, one little boom.

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And then I say, how did it go for you? And he says, It was just fine, man.

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Just fine. And then seconds later, he sort of reveals the true weight.

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And he says, Just for me personally, I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't think about these times because of the accomplishments we

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achieved and the incredible loss of potential for the for the Marines and this term loss of potential was code.

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I heard it so often it was too hard to say dead, but loss of potential was the way to talk euphemistically about the voice.

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And then he says, I keep telling my new wife, now I say, You've got to prepare yourself.

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Because after sitting here in Annapolis, beautiful Annapolis for three years after wonderful air conditioning here,

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while my brothers and sisters have been out on their second or third tours,

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you need to come to grips with the fact that I'm going to be away for a while.

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And he is in Afghanistan right now. He was inside in March.

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And as I was listening to this, what came to mind and maybe to your minds was Siegfried Sassoon, who was Siegfried Sassoon in World War One.

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And you'll know this much better than I do, but it as retold in this first in memoirs, but also, of course, in the Pat Barker trilogy.

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He's at Craiglockhart outside Edinburgh.

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And Graves says, you know, you better stay there rather than really show your colours that you've talked over to Russell,

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that you may be a pacifist, but all he wants. To do.

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And he urges his his physician rivers is to go back to the front.

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And he writes these poems. I am banished from the men who fight.

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They smote my heart to pity, built my pride shoulder to shoulder, side by side.

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And then he hears his his his voice calling out in sickly.

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When are you going out to them again? Are they still not your brothers?

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Through our blood. That sense of having to be there no matter.

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No matter what. I actually think brotherhood is not really the way to speak about it.

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Often it was motherhood. It was caring. It was command responsibility.

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Understood in terms of some solidarity and caring ethic which made the guilt not irrational in the sense it wasn't their moral responsibility,

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but it was a heightened sense of responsibility, often understood in terms of empathic, empathic connection and somehow betraying in a Catholic role.

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The last kind of guilt and I'll wrap up with this was the hardest and most problematic.

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And that has to do with collateral killing the and especially if if children were involved.

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Many who spoke to me would say the children are the access to us.

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They're also what you're warned against getting too close with in counterinsurgency operations.

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But my Marines would take out their their wallet and show a picture of their children to the elder of the family to say,

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you know, I know, I know what it's like. And many of the Marines of Army guys would and women would play with children.

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It was it was it was a way of finding some normalcy.

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And one guy, this guy Hall, would in his case, he often operated with a, um, an Army colonel who was formerly in Mosul,

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Saltwater Doctors Without Borders, and was into humanitarian medicine and specifically children's medicine.

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And so they had identified a child who had a congenital heart hole in her heart.

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And Major Hall not only brought the doctor,

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but organised a charitable little trust for this child and got money back and others goods for the village,

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only to later discover when they returned to get her to hospital that the family was floating down

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a river because they had been collaborating essentially with Americans of the insurgents believed.

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So there is a sense of working with children, vulnerability to children,

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and often the betrayal that comes with thinking that you've let down the families.

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And in the case of a checkpoint incident,

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some of them Marine colonels would say it was hardest to deal with troops that had killed children in checkpoint incidents.

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They all the troops often had to be brought offline.

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And so in one case, Marine Colonel Bob Durkin, he commanded a battalion just outside Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom early days.

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And he said that if the injuries or deaths were of adult men they suspected were

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suicide bombers or women in large burqas who might be concealing explosives.

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This is how he put his Marines were generally flattered off and justify to themselves, rightly or wrongly, and they would argue counterfactual.

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He said. If I couldn't find out, it still could have been this or it could have been that.

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But he says, when children were involved, there was a dramatic psychological difference in the case of a badly hurt child.

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His Marines, he said, I'm quoting, would go out of their way to call in medevac aircraft to get the child out to the hospital,

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sometimes putting themselves and each other at risk. They couldn't shake what they had done or justify the killing to themselves.

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This is before the current rules of engagement where he was.

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His rules were rules of engagement required less protection for the troops and more aggressive use of firepower.

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But I also thought about this in terms of those the soldier, these Marines, often his guys were very young.

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They were boy warriors who regressed a bit in the image of a child.

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Or they were. I often teach uniform health services to clinicians who've come back into greatest difficulty with

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soldiers who have killed children and then who then go to their own homes and have children.

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The age of the children who died and the identification and projection is very clear in their minds.

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So, you know, hearts and minds sometimes it's for the soldiers as well and not just for the citizens.

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I want to end with. You know, a sense that this sense of subjective guilt isn't something Kant talks well about.

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For him, any kind of negative guilts are sort of morose and cheerless, and he wants to think of the soaring respect you feel for others.

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But Leach is the philosopher who sort of captures it for me.

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And he says Subjective guilt or bad conscience can become torture without end undoing any prospects for happiness.

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And he says this subjective guilt doesn't grow in the soil where you'd most expect it,

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such as in prisons where there actually are guilty parties who should feel remorse for wrongdoing.

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Rather, it's often, quote, a question of someone who caused harm, who causes a misfortune for which he's morally responsible.

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He's picking up on Spinoza here, who says The right of conscience.

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That's a very classical term that Seneca and Cicero write lots of bell.

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But that hurt of conscience has to do, says Spinoza, with an offence where something has gone unexpectedly wrong.

193
00:21:06,720 --> 00:21:14,160
And he says, it's not really a case of I ought not to have done that, but it's rather a case that has happened.

194
00:21:15,560 --> 00:21:19,100
So enduring the recriminations of a harsh superego.

195
00:21:19,140 --> 00:21:22,730
You know, this is partly what is going on.

196
00:21:23,080 --> 00:21:26,650
And and it's not. It's self-directed, furious.

197
00:21:27,560 --> 00:21:31,880
Seneca talks about rage. The other in this case, many of my soldiers felt self-directed fury.

198
00:21:32,150 --> 00:21:35,150
But it was their way of humanising what they were going through.

199
00:21:35,150 --> 00:21:39,440
And I think I'll sort of end on this note and my times about, you know, you can.

200
00:21:39,440 --> 00:21:48,230
Good. So when I start talking to the Vietnam vet and he in his case is more difficult.

201
00:21:48,740 --> 00:21:56,530
So he had a kind of gun happy sergeant who said, okay, you guys are on sentry duty.

202
00:21:56,540 --> 00:22:00,769
You know, you might get your Marines, you might get a little rusty with your rifle.

203
00:22:00,770 --> 00:22:05,720
So I think we should practice. And apparently this was not so common in the Vietnam days.

204
00:22:06,350 --> 00:22:11,600
He took them out to the riverside and there was a fishing village, a group of fishermen.

205
00:22:12,080 --> 00:22:21,560
But my particular Marine knew well, he saw that there were children and women in that fishing village, and it just looked like that they were fishing.

206
00:22:22,490 --> 00:22:29,540
And this sergeant had his unit fire at them.

207
00:22:29,660 --> 00:22:33,620
And my Marine said to me, I fired low.

208
00:22:33,980 --> 00:22:43,160
I deliberately missed. But for 40 years, I've lived with the thought that I didn't protest the war.

209
00:22:43,370 --> 00:22:46,760
I didn't publicly protest the order the others fired.

210
00:22:47,330 --> 00:22:52,880
So it was an omission and a difficult one. Had a different kind of case than the other three that I dealt with.

211
00:22:53,810 --> 00:22:56,800
But he said to me, You know, you write about guilt a bit.

212
00:22:56,990 --> 00:23:02,600
And I have to tell you that for me, especially as a Vietnam veteran, somewhat misunderstood a different era.

213
00:23:03,140 --> 00:23:07,580
He said feeling guilt over these years was a way that I could humanise.

214
00:23:08,720 --> 00:23:11,750
What what war did to me.

215
00:23:11,870 --> 00:23:20,690
It was a way that he could transition back into civilian mortality or address civilians, but also himself as a civilian.

216
00:23:20,720 --> 00:23:23,990
So I think that the guilt is somewhat redemptive and not less.

217
00:23:24,200 --> 00:23:28,370
You know, missed what soldiers go through is misunderstood.

218
00:23:28,370 --> 00:23:35,230
If it's all psychological injury without understanding the allure of psychological injury, that doesn't rise to the level of acute or not.

219
00:23:35,270 --> 00:23:44,749
Chronic trauma is moral injury, and it's moral and quaint is so hard for these soldiers to put their own troops at risk,

220
00:23:44,750 --> 00:23:50,870
to be denied the resources they need to develop rapport with villagers, to collaborate with villagers,

221
00:23:50,870 --> 00:23:54,530
but then to have to return a week later, you know,

222
00:23:55,010 --> 00:24:05,569
and not be able to give the villagers the resources or to move on and find that insurgents got to your collaborator before you could protect them.

223
00:24:05,570 --> 00:24:11,280
And to see, you know, the elder with whom you were working piled up on top of his children dead.

224
00:24:11,630 --> 00:24:16,220
These are betrayals that are remarkably hard to live with, and they need to be addressed.

225
00:24:16,360 --> 00:24:24,679
I mean, I often think, you know, we pay public respect, lip service to our our men and women in uniform, but we don't really know all the stories.

226
00:24:24,680 --> 00:24:29,570
And so part of what I want to hear from them is their moral the moral psyche, if you like.

227
00:24:30,080 --> 00:24:34,700
And, you know, it's not just the language and mask and uniform and decorum.

228
00:24:34,700 --> 00:24:37,460
It's really what goes on underneath.

229
00:24:38,630 --> 00:24:47,030
And I'll perhaps just add with my soldier, Will Quinn, Will Quinn, the interrogator said, you know, I've come back to Georgetown.

230
00:24:47,030 --> 00:24:51,379
So he's an older, older guy. And he says, You know what?

231
00:24:51,380 --> 00:24:56,120
I did, too, in order to build rapport, something I can't even begin to relive with my friends.

232
00:24:56,750 --> 00:25:05,700
But he said, this is how I think about it. I'm Catholic and I often go to Mass, but I often go to mass in the classroom.

233
00:25:05,780 --> 00:25:12,080
And I don't understand why entering a war zone is like going to mass level.

234
00:25:12,350 --> 00:25:19,040
You enter a different time and space and then I come out and I have to make the transition.

235
00:25:19,070 --> 00:25:27,320
So for him, he's talking about dissociation, but he in all his tours, he stood on the rim, on the edge, looking down with the scale.

236
00:25:27,350 --> 00:25:29,120
Humanity is really quite remarkable.

237
00:25:29,290 --> 00:25:38,960
I think we underestimate how hard it is to hold on to it and to stand on the rim, but to disassociate in a healthy enough way.

238
00:25:39,110 --> 00:25:42,850
But then hold on to something of it. Thank you very much, indeed.

239
00:25:50,270 --> 00:25:55,320
Discussing the idea of any chance of reducing the conflict with mainly the Iranians.

240
00:25:55,340 --> 00:25:56,780
The press is not wearing it anyway.

241
00:25:57,410 --> 00:26:03,380
They kept it fearful of interfering with the technology and far worse off than we were going in regards to their voting.

242
00:26:04,200 --> 00:26:09,860
Okay, we've got plenty of time for questions we've got here in about 45 minutes.

243
00:26:10,670 --> 00:26:17,480
And I'm going to ask the first one is a very serious question.

244
00:26:17,540 --> 00:26:22,580
Yeah, but I mean, it's not a historians question since the specific historical.

245
00:26:23,090 --> 00:26:26,990
Just that you're using analogies from the ancient world.

246
00:26:27,400 --> 00:26:34,510
Will you use Sassoon to make a point? Are we talking about the same sort of guilt over over time,

247
00:26:34,520 --> 00:26:40,040
or are we talking about different sorts of guilt expressed differently at the time and the Vietnam, you know, story?

248
00:26:40,220 --> 00:26:49,130
Well, they brought that into. Yeah. Is it your your your four guys might all have felt that this has to the order if it were today.

249
00:26:49,610 --> 00:26:54,800
Whereas perhaps in 1970 they felt differently because memory norms are moved on.

250
00:26:55,070 --> 00:26:58,610
So. So who says is good? Is there change over time?

251
00:26:59,150 --> 00:27:07,900
Well, certainly one of the points I want to make is that you find various kinds of guilt, survivor guilt early on, unnamed.

252
00:27:07,910 --> 00:27:11,809
But it's it's their Achilles is complicated, obviously.

253
00:27:11,810 --> 00:27:15,260
Very complicated. But it's certainly it's certainly there.

254
00:27:17,060 --> 00:27:24,800
I think counterinsurgency is very hard on soldiers in the following sorts of ways.

255
00:27:25,400 --> 00:27:31,310
Most of my guys, especially I call my guys because I, I spend a lot of time with them.

256
00:27:31,320 --> 00:27:34,459
I interview them over and over many cases.

257
00:27:34,460 --> 00:27:45,200
And I've come to know them as friends and especially the ones in artillery and infantry group enlisted 18, now 43 or something like that.

258
00:27:47,060 --> 00:27:50,300
They were trained to break and destroy.

259
00:27:50,390 --> 00:27:59,190
That's how they'll put it, you know, engage and fight and complete the job, which, you know, it's it's Clausewitz.

260
00:27:59,190 --> 00:28:06,139
See, it is attrition. And they some of them will say, you know, we never even heard we never read the manual.

261
00:28:06,140 --> 00:28:11,570
The manual was an out. It came out in 2005, you know, and but but by and large, also,

262
00:28:13,460 --> 00:28:19,790
they were asked to develop relationships, be armed social workers, as it's sometimes said,

263
00:28:20,360 --> 00:28:31,100
and the civilian affair workers, when that's not their training, they were often inadequately trained and also told to never leave a body behind.

264
00:28:31,190 --> 00:28:41,479
Never leave a fallen comrade behind. And so the sense of care and taking care, yet having the courage of restraint is very hard on them.

265
00:28:41,480 --> 00:28:46,700
And I do think this was a subject of, you know, I guess some of the discussion of last week,

266
00:28:46,700 --> 00:28:51,829
Wednesday at the when you brought the West Point person in that redoing the whole of the code,

267
00:28:51,830 --> 00:28:57,800
I do think that soldiers, the warriors great will never leave leave a so-called soldier behind is tough on them.

268
00:28:58,060 --> 00:29:01,370
That is their that is the logo and they are.

269
00:29:01,580 --> 00:29:06,920
And betrayal of trust at all different levels is especially hard in counterinsurgency

270
00:29:06,920 --> 00:29:13,490
fighting in the sense that they really are developing close relationships with locals.

271
00:29:14,420 --> 00:29:17,600
Command, in many cases early on didn't fully support it.

272
00:29:17,600 --> 00:29:24,679
They were under-resourced. The institutions that were backing them were not giving them right resources.

273
00:29:24,680 --> 00:29:31,909
So there may be comparables historically but certainly you know is is a war amongst the

274
00:29:31,910 --> 00:29:37,729
people is Roberts-Smith would write it is not what earlier warfare was like and be an in and

275
00:29:37,730 --> 00:29:44,450
amongst of civilian populations with relationships to them and willing willing them earning

276
00:29:44,450 --> 00:29:49,639
their interest rather than overtaking them is very different very different set of skills.

277
00:29:49,640 --> 00:29:54,680
And I think very, very hard on the psyche, moral psyche here.

278
00:29:55,010 --> 00:30:02,840
And Achilles has a different moral code from the war, although my honour comes in that I that's again a historical subject.

279
00:30:04,040 --> 00:30:07,490
Right. I've got. Yes, but peer facilitated and so.

280
00:30:09,190 --> 00:30:17,800
Thanks. That's the sort of question I wanted to ask is really about the people that the soldiers intentionally killed.

281
00:30:18,840 --> 00:30:25,390
And I wonder if you did mention any any suggestion of them feeling any guilt for those killings.

282
00:30:26,920 --> 00:30:31,480
And particularly in light of reflection over whether or not they ought to have been so and whether

283
00:30:31,540 --> 00:30:35,530
whether they satisfied is about and whether they should have been in Vietnam in the first place,

284
00:30:36,010 --> 00:30:40,630
whether they should have been in in Iraq in a different part of the narrative.

285
00:30:40,900 --> 00:30:44,889
But, yes, certainly my Vietnam veterans will say I was I was taught to separate.

286
00:30:44,890 --> 00:30:52,690
You said about look, I'll put it that way. But because from the conduct and and if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to go to Vietnam.

287
00:30:54,520 --> 00:30:58,240
And this is from, you know, PhDs in philosophy at Yale.

288
00:30:58,490 --> 00:31:07,420
And I really do believe very seriously and reading Gestalt that I've passed it along to some and in others,

289
00:31:07,420 --> 00:31:16,510
you know, it does make them think differently. Many will find it very difficult.

290
00:31:16,510 --> 00:31:25,720
But then there they come up with suffer seven ends for comrade rather than cause and to bring people home alive.

291
00:31:25,930 --> 00:31:29,700
And then that's really, again, hard to hold on to in a counterinsurgency.

292
00:31:31,060 --> 00:31:37,030
I've talked to many chaplains whose job it is with David Grossman, who works on this, Colonel David Grossman,

293
00:31:37,360 --> 00:31:44,080
to get over the repugnance and killing and just understand that it's not murder, that some do believe it is murder given the cause.

294
00:31:44,110 --> 00:31:48,550
So, yes, there's lots of individual struggles for some of them or on those grounds.

295
00:31:50,050 --> 00:31:55,880
Because I want to ask you about two books. One of them is in Borders, Lucifer.

296
00:31:56,230 --> 00:32:00,100
Yes. The roster, which for me anyway, as far as this is concerned,

297
00:32:00,880 --> 00:32:08,570
the way the situation can do the opposite of what you're saying is absolve you, make you behave more easily than you would.

298
00:32:08,570 --> 00:32:13,430
You would have to make choices on your own. If you run into any of this second book.

299
00:32:13,840 --> 00:32:22,440
35. Running courses for the Junior Officer's Reading Club, so know that one more club cup book in the UK.

300
00:32:23,560 --> 00:32:27,760
I'm reading it and it's a fantastic Oxford graduate to be.

301
00:32:28,090 --> 00:32:38,530
Yeah. He studied literature here to the fullest and ended up not seeing action, which is getting more and more frustrated.

302
00:32:39,070 --> 00:32:52,780
India is in Afghanistan in a very, very heavy environment and what comes out of it for me was the sense of excitement because he's young, 43.

303
00:32:53,290 --> 00:32:58,780
Some of your people a good deal older. But what I didn't get from that book was much of a sense of guilt.

304
00:32:59,080 --> 00:33:04,500
Mm hmm. And I'm wondering whether you run into some of the younger reactions.

305
00:33:05,470 --> 00:33:11,740
Well, certainly, yeah, the gamut. And I'm not trying to reduce in any sense responses.

306
00:33:12,070 --> 00:33:16,120
Just I was struck by how unquestioning the people were that I that I spoke to.

307
00:33:17,200 --> 00:33:22,419
I have a young sniper who I greatly influenced, Walter Reed, early days at Walter Reed,

308
00:33:22,420 --> 00:33:27,640
our major hospital, where we segregate in a way that you don't military care.

309
00:33:28,630 --> 00:33:35,290
He was in there for two years in a medical holding company meeting, getting ready, presumably to go back.

310
00:33:35,290 --> 00:33:39,130
But he had lost his leg and he had a titanium arm.

311
00:33:39,310 --> 00:33:42,040
And in traumatic brain injury, he was not there's no way he was going back.

312
00:33:42,310 --> 00:33:51,130
But he and he was telling me of his sniper in Afghanistan and totally overrun when he was caught.

313
00:33:51,820 --> 00:33:56,950
And he killed the guy that killed his best friend and that was about to kill him.

314
00:33:57,670 --> 00:34:06,010
And he read Jack with an excitement as I was interviewing and as my transcriber heard it, too, that we could barely sit on our seats.

315
00:34:06,010 --> 00:34:10,450
It was so wrapped up, adrenalized, even two years later.

316
00:34:11,830 --> 00:34:17,680
And he has a tattoo of the name of the guy that his best friend on his arm.

317
00:34:18,190 --> 00:34:23,169
And there was a sense of loss or talk about the revenge was so great.

318
00:34:23,170 --> 00:34:30,360
And also the adventure. Four year old I had pictures of myself in that, you know, given a gun, my uncle was a marine.

319
00:34:30,640 --> 00:34:35,530
I needed to be what I needed to be in artillery and infantry.

320
00:34:35,530 --> 00:34:40,209
And also, yeah, certainly adrenaline was ramped up feelings.

321
00:34:40,210 --> 00:34:42,940
If you read something like Sebastian Junger, his book, whatever it's called,

322
00:34:42,940 --> 00:34:49,380
or he's a Vanity Fair writer who embedded for a year or so ago with a unit.

323
00:34:49,900 --> 00:34:53,350
And I've heard of talk, you know, and he himself had that feeling.

324
00:34:53,350 --> 00:34:56,720
And there's nothing more exciting and candid.

325
00:34:57,550 --> 00:35:06,630
The folks that I talked to, my young students at Georgetown, who will be 22 year old lieutenants overseeing people that have been great work,

326
00:35:06,850 --> 00:35:17,259
you know, war wise in some sense, but they're eager, know that they have to keep the lid on on on individuals and so and worry very much.

327
00:35:17,260 --> 00:35:21,100
In my case they spoke about worrying about it another Haditha.

328
00:35:21,430 --> 00:35:32,560
And I've also heard someone like Larry Culver, who was in the side gunner for Hugh Thompson, who was the guy who stopped the further onslaught of Eli.

329
00:35:33,070 --> 00:35:38,860
And he and I interview both of them. That's 15 years ago or so.

330
00:35:39,130 --> 00:35:43,300
And they are going to Larry Colburn, who's just like I said,

331
00:35:43,900 --> 00:35:51,580
I'm not sure how I would have reacted if you Thompson, wasn't the guy sitting next to me who had to be stopped.

332
00:35:51,580 --> 00:35:55,780
The massacre. Very much command. You know, command.

333
00:35:55,780 --> 00:35:59,860
Climate is critical. We know that. Very, very critical.

334
00:36:00,580 --> 00:36:07,690
And also and, you know, and suppressed adventure about the war is also very dangerous.

335
00:36:09,270 --> 00:36:19,380
Someone who is interested in maintaining good for all of the conditions as long it seems to be much to be carried out.

336
00:36:21,570 --> 00:36:30,000
And so that probably that called it does not formulate the rules of engagement or the doctrine under which those rules are devised.

337
00:36:30,720 --> 00:36:36,150
That's done in conjunction with command or any of the coalition counterparts.

338
00:36:36,870 --> 00:36:49,050
My question is this Does in your view, the ground forces doctrine pay sufficient attention to the motive of the soldiers thinking up the base?

339
00:36:49,890 --> 00:36:53,370
And if not, would it be improved? It's a good question.

340
00:36:56,160 --> 00:37:03,430
I gather people are working on this issue right now, and I haven't been part of that task force in the States, at least the West Point individuals.

341
00:37:03,430 --> 00:37:07,950
So if I'm working closely with someone that is involved, Tony Pfaff is a colonel.

342
00:37:08,400 --> 00:37:18,230
And as I, I think. Some of it is to anticipate the issues, the conflicts that will come up,

343
00:37:18,680 --> 00:37:29,730
including loyalties and trust relationships to villagers versus to units in many cases.

344
00:37:29,750 --> 00:37:36,020
I felt talking to leaders that there were a sense,

345
00:37:36,200 --> 00:37:46,639
a sense of the lack of training to protect your own and to end to violate that and to not call in air air power when you could.

346
00:37:46,640 --> 00:37:49,300
An air strike was just something they weren't used to.

347
00:37:49,310 --> 00:37:58,070
And so some of it and again, I'm not that familiar, I haven't watched carefully some of the simulated videos and the like.

348
00:37:58,070 --> 00:38:06,500
But certainly in talking to individuals that have been there, it was still new news to them to not be able to immediately call an air power

349
00:38:09,710 --> 00:38:14,840
in difficult and difficult cases where their guys felt they were pinned down.

350
00:38:16,210 --> 00:38:20,060
So but when I was talking about this particular checkpoint incident,

351
00:38:20,270 --> 00:38:24,229
it was old rules of engagement wasn't the new ones that Stanley McChrystal had put into place.

352
00:38:24,230 --> 00:38:31,430
And there was much more concerned with mission and force protection than there was with the locals.

353
00:38:32,030 --> 00:38:36,379
And it shifted over time. And I think it still is hard.

354
00:38:36,380 --> 00:38:44,030
And, you know, those who are working very closely with the practitioners and the forces,

355
00:38:44,030 --> 00:38:49,910
I'd love to hear more from you, but my understanding is they have a long way to go in changing expectations.

356
00:38:54,280 --> 00:38:56,890
It's much since you took up. I really enjoyed it.

357
00:38:57,340 --> 00:39:05,680
You've spoken about guilt and shame and a little bit in response to your question about the gun proof attitude.

358
00:39:06,490 --> 00:39:10,300
There is one emotion which I don't think you mentioned, and that's anger.

359
00:39:11,330 --> 00:39:14,680
I mean, it must be that. Oh, it's very much.

360
00:39:14,680 --> 00:39:18,490
There it is. One of the chapters is about payback. And so it's anger.

361
00:39:18,710 --> 00:39:21,910
You know, of course, that's the classic. I'm kind of just.

362
00:39:21,910 --> 00:39:24,980
Yeah. Oh, please, I. I didn't have in mind why you didn't mention, you know,

363
00:39:25,010 --> 00:39:33,840
the people I've seen that I didn't have in mind so much anger at the enemy, but I didn't go directly to use themselves.

364
00:39:34,630 --> 00:39:41,010
The anger directed towards the enemy not sustained an enemy with, you know,

365
00:39:41,020 --> 00:39:48,590
the very villagers who may have come to trust but must have wondered in various forms were, can we really trust them?

366
00:39:49,060 --> 00:39:56,570
Anger the commanding officers, anger of the civilian politicians, because some of them, you know, invested since.

367
00:39:56,590 --> 00:40:00,670
And I was just wondering whether you could say that, yes.

368
00:40:01,270 --> 00:40:06,850
Anger is there at all moments. And. Yeah, and as you as you say anger directed to different objects.

369
00:40:10,380 --> 00:40:15,209
Anger sometimes, you know, in the form of revenge and classic revenge of the enemy,

370
00:40:15,210 --> 00:40:24,090
but also enormous anger at villagers whose loyalties are unclear, who are who have shifting identities between civilian and combatant,

371
00:40:24,510 --> 00:40:30,030
who use shields and and who are who don't have their guns tied in the same way

372
00:40:30,040 --> 00:40:36,899
these soldiers anger at commanders for compromising or for not supporting them,

373
00:40:36,900 --> 00:40:40,379
for asking them to build relationships and then not sending them enough money.

374
00:40:40,380 --> 00:40:47,130
In the case, that sense of betrayal. You know, anger, emotions are compounded, mixed and a sense of betrayal.

375
00:40:47,140 --> 00:40:51,570
This is shot through with anger. Shot through with anger.

376
00:40:52,440 --> 00:41:01,919
Major Jeff Hall, who had this enormous sense of betrayal by his command and also a sense of betrayal by commanders in chief and the people.

377
00:41:01,920 --> 00:41:08,720
You know, he said, give me a mission. If it's moving one brick at a time, I want that one, but don't change it all the time.

378
00:41:09,180 --> 00:41:12,360
And in his case, anger then plays out against yourself.

379
00:41:12,360 --> 00:41:16,620
Suicide is often anger, enormous, unresolved anger at yourself.

380
00:41:17,070 --> 00:41:27,900
And that is partly what's going on. You know, whoever the whipping boy or girl is in terms of family debacles and and family violence.

381
00:41:29,110 --> 00:41:35,180
So, yeah, thank you for the very first thing you did as always.

382
00:41:35,190 --> 00:41:39,659
And so I want to take you back to Mark to your response to Seth's question.

383
00:41:39,660 --> 00:41:42,900
Who asked about intentional killing here?

384
00:41:43,170 --> 00:41:49,810
Yeah. And comparing it particularly in the context of, you know, these ad valorem questions, which is a campaign to exercise of the exercise.

385
00:41:50,490 --> 00:41:55,770
So I was angry because your response to Seth was to say, well, here's the official policy response to say, well, you know,

386
00:41:55,770 --> 00:42:01,860
people reference the distinction between Abdulmanap and Bellow, this classic offering the best of all three rules of war.

387
00:42:02,790 --> 00:42:06,059
There was a really interesting response because at one level, at least this, you know,

388
00:42:06,060 --> 00:42:12,060
this doctrine of separation, which can happen memo is exactly one of these kind of rationalist,

389
00:42:12,330 --> 00:42:19,770
you know, intellectually constructed monologues that you are examples precisely bring out can diverge from these moral notions.

390
00:42:19,770 --> 00:42:29,700
Right. So, you know, revenge is intellectually we understand that it makes no sense to have a moral notion of revenge towards somebody in Iraq,

391
00:42:29,700 --> 00:42:34,220
for example, who have, you know, one knows intellectually had no responsibility for not living,

392
00:42:34,230 --> 00:42:41,910
but still has emotions and that it makes no sense to feel guilt for, you know, turning the here and this you know,

393
00:42:42,460 --> 00:42:47,070
you know, we know intellectually there's no sense but those emotions come anyway.

394
00:42:47,070 --> 00:42:51,160
And I guess that's you know, that's the whole reason why we find this so difficult, so troubling.

395
00:42:51,160 --> 00:43:04,500
It's hard to make sense of. So I guess, given the whole context of that, whether you did see any evidence that people were having and,

396
00:43:04,500 --> 00:43:08,129
you know, a moral emotional response in do, for example,

397
00:43:08,130 --> 00:43:13,640
did you see a difference in the responses that people gave you who had fought in Iraq,

398
00:43:13,950 --> 00:43:18,629
where campaign legitimacy was much less clear than those who fought in Afghanistan,

399
00:43:18,630 --> 00:43:23,910
for example, where at least in the early stages, it did seem like they did. You see those things speeding through if you did,

400
00:43:23,910 --> 00:43:30,810
and people think there is kind of broader appeal of issues was simply not part of these emotional moral experiences as soldiers.

401
00:43:31,260 --> 00:43:37,260
What do you think of that? Do you think that has any implications for the project that Jeff and I and still I think and

402
00:43:37,260 --> 00:43:41,909
various others have of trying to use the idea of human rights to really break down those barriers,

403
00:43:41,910 --> 00:43:46,140
which would have been good. Yes, certainly.

404
00:43:46,470 --> 00:43:51,299
Here's here's some of the morally sharp shot through emotions that folks talked about.

405
00:43:51,300 --> 00:44:00,959
One guy, Derrick Rose Parks, he was called because in the U.S. Army Route 50 and reservist who just kept going in Bosnia,

406
00:44:00,960 --> 00:44:05,460
I could believe it when I was called up reserve from Greenbelt,

407
00:44:05,460 --> 00:44:11,010
Maryland, outside of D.C. and my tech support of Woodrow Wilson when I was called up for,

408
00:44:12,030 --> 00:44:16,890
you know, his in training boot camp or, you know, sort of getting ready to mobilise.

409
00:44:17,910 --> 00:44:22,900
We all wish it were Afghanistan. Early days, but it was Iraq.

410
00:44:24,340 --> 00:44:28,610
And he have. And he was in an intelligence unit. WMD.

411
00:44:28,630 --> 00:44:32,110
Where are those? WMD is. I was suckered.

412
00:44:32,140 --> 00:44:36,820
He used that word. Suckered all the time, the truth. And then he says to be given.

413
00:44:37,150 --> 00:44:43,670
That's a hard pill to swallow by the top brass that Vietnam.

414
00:44:43,810 --> 00:44:46,690
I don't think it was shame I would say taint.

415
00:44:47,230 --> 00:44:56,410
So the cause tainted his ability to fight with just conduct that sort of how he felt that even though he's keeping them separate this is a you know,

416
00:44:56,410 --> 00:45:01,299
he was giving us a reason, I would say shame. And it was like it was like Michael Hurt in dispatches.

417
00:45:01,300 --> 00:45:05,930
I went. Journalist I went to cover Vietnam. Vietnam covered me sense of pollution.

418
00:45:07,150 --> 00:45:12,700
So, yes, some of them, I think it is harder for military to play the many.

419
00:45:12,700 --> 00:45:16,329
You don't know that he was called GI GI story.

420
00:45:16,330 --> 00:45:25,330
He wrote a script for Coen brothers IOW about not the code or not to not have a currency and Cohen productions companies.

421
00:45:25,330 --> 00:45:34,840
In another way. He went to visit various installations and he said, We've got to bring a story home that people can believe in.

422
00:45:34,840 --> 00:45:38,440
Otherwise we're going to have soldiers coming home who are severely traumatised.

423
00:45:38,890 --> 00:45:45,010
That's 44 or 41. So yes, I think it definitely is.

424
00:45:46,270 --> 00:45:52,630
And there's studies and I don't know the statistics of causes you can believe in willingness to fight,

425
00:45:53,740 --> 00:45:59,020
but I also think that there's rationalisation and it's not just rationalisation,

426
00:45:59,320 --> 00:46:09,160
it's another reason that people can fight is certainly to take care of each other and to feel that they're not in some sense abandoning a duty,

427
00:46:09,670 --> 00:46:18,730
patriotic duty or whatever, or ceding their place to another who will not do as well and will not act with the same kind of restraint.

428
00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:22,600
That's the common story I've heard. It was a question mark back.

429
00:46:23,200 --> 00:46:28,390
Yeah, yeah. I was wondering. Could you read to me another.

430
00:46:28,980 --> 00:46:31,290
That's representative on the question of anger.

431
00:46:31,620 --> 00:46:38,460
Do you think that there's going to, you know, predicting the future be a sort of us versus them versus those who did?

432
00:46:38,470 --> 00:46:44,140
And these are soldiers who have had four deployments and still feel that they're out there another time.

433
00:46:44,160 --> 00:46:47,840
We find it kind of amazing when it's, you know, some of the. Population.

434
00:46:47,850 --> 00:46:49,350
She's the only one in this complex.

435
00:46:49,680 --> 00:46:56,120
So do you figure in the future there's going to be a sort of gulf between the, you know, generation of veterans, Barack and Casey?

436
00:46:56,130 --> 00:47:00,209
Was this didn't. Or is that just such a small population set that you're not going to get that?

437
00:47:00,210 --> 00:47:03,240
I think another emotion I have addressed is resentment.

438
00:47:03,650 --> 00:47:07,980
And if you dig down very deep, there is enormous resentment.

439
00:47:08,310 --> 00:47:13,170
And the resentment comes in at, says a senior naval officer.

440
00:47:13,170 --> 00:47:17,580
To me, I go to Home Depot and they say, thank you very much for your service.

441
00:47:17,940 --> 00:47:21,390
You get a 10% discount. All right.

442
00:47:21,570 --> 00:47:29,639
You know, that's not you know, so I sometimes think about it in terms of there's lip service and public respect,

443
00:47:29,640 --> 00:47:38,490
that deep sense of private respect, you know, and I think in my classrooms, I really am trying to break down the borders.

444
00:47:38,490 --> 00:47:46,590
A lot of those absurd do feel angry and they also of feel they're a lot older and they feel misunderstood.

445
00:47:46,620 --> 00:47:51,600
And all they'll say, I'm not just if they're injured, I'm not just one more drunken driver.

446
00:47:54,210 --> 00:47:56,880
And they, you know, they want their story told in some way.

447
00:47:56,880 --> 00:48:07,070
So I do think yes, I think it's very difficult, a feeling of guilt on the part of civilians for not serving our country.

448
00:48:07,080 --> 00:48:10,800
You and your student. No, no. Mandatory national service of another sort.

449
00:48:11,370 --> 00:48:16,920
And so, yes, very, very unfair distribution of burdens some will say and feel.

450
00:48:17,490 --> 00:48:21,090
Well, it may be different than other generations. I'm not sure.

451
00:48:21,660 --> 00:48:25,620
I just say one other thing. The Vietnam veterans I talked to, we forget,

452
00:48:25,620 --> 00:48:32,559
but many of them who really were badly traumatised psychologically are returning or are in our institutions.

453
00:48:32,560 --> 00:48:38,100
The veterans retraumatized by for the general like it's a very hard very hard for them to witness these wars.

454
00:48:39,900 --> 00:48:43,950
Yeah. I got you. I want you to know where to go next.

455
00:48:44,190 --> 00:48:50,759
Thank you. Thank you. But when one considers the application of lethal force by individuals,

456
00:48:50,760 --> 00:48:59,969
there's clearly a distinction to be made by opposing a legitimate self-defence of oneself or another and someone else in your in your true profession,

457
00:48:59,970 --> 00:49:07,410
as whatever is acting under the extant rules of engagement at the time for offensive operations.

458
00:49:07,830 --> 00:49:15,090
And when you were interviewing those specifically from Iraq and Afghanistan,

459
00:49:15,390 --> 00:49:24,150
did you detect any differences of justification between those two issues or was it not really considered?

460
00:49:25,470 --> 00:49:30,630
Good question. And I don't think I that came up specifically.

461
00:49:31,350 --> 00:49:37,530
Yeah. The reason I ask the question is because that a policy which you used in an answer to your question here on

462
00:49:37,800 --> 00:49:45,990
courage and strength and clearly courageous restraint is what is the flavour of the month in Afghanistan,

463
00:49:46,260 --> 00:49:51,270
which places a far greater significance upon acting in self-defence.

464
00:49:51,450 --> 00:49:56,550
And defence. And I know that vice offensive rules of engagement.

465
00:49:59,560 --> 00:50:06,520
Yes. And I picking up on that term, that's the flavour of the month term as it was serving.

466
00:50:08,080 --> 00:50:13,819
I can't I don't I don't have enough interview material that specifically addresses that to be able to say that.

467
00:50:13,820 --> 00:50:20,620
That's very important. Thank you. I certainly know there's lots of issues, but you certainly know as well on exactly how to interpret that.

468
00:50:20,740 --> 00:50:29,120
You know, in terms of are these and that's been the political discussion of the moment, how commanders are interpreting the.

469
00:50:30,160 --> 00:50:38,860
And I haven't actually followed the debate as to just how Petraeus has been a role influencing

470
00:50:38,860 --> 00:50:43,860
lower level interpretations that might give him more room for bringing on firepower.

471
00:50:43,870 --> 00:50:49,300
I don't and I don't know what you know, how experience is in coalitions with the British.

472
00:50:51,370 --> 00:50:58,060
We haven't had the same level of debate part because I think in this country the argument would be that courageous restraint.

473
00:50:59,020 --> 00:50:59,230
You know,

474
00:50:59,260 --> 00:51:07,510
where you place your self in the arc of fire was seen to be part of what we were doing much earlier in the whole conduct of in relation to Iraq.

475
00:51:07,540 --> 00:51:12,400
I'm still not sure what happened, but certainly in terms of what the intention was in.

476
00:51:17,510 --> 00:51:20,750
Yeah. Gun. Black leather jacket. Yes. My name is. Sorry.

477
00:51:20,990 --> 00:51:24,460
Oh, you know how she said? Yeah. Uh, to.

478
00:51:24,490 --> 00:51:27,560
To talk about the war, as he called it.

479
00:51:28,040 --> 00:51:34,849
The psychological battles and the. The skyrocketing of suicide rates, too,

480
00:51:34,850 --> 00:51:42,169
to use the example mentioned by you in the Vietnam War of the sort of shooting practice on civilians and the fact

481
00:51:42,170 --> 00:51:49,520
that today there are channels through which it's sort of expected that incidents like those would be reported.

482
00:51:49,520 --> 00:51:52,999
And transparency generally is much larger the place.

483
00:51:53,000 --> 00:52:00,440
And it's a burden on the soldiers who feel sort of morally implicated if they don't use the channels available to them,

484
00:52:00,440 --> 00:52:02,420
whereas previously this wouldn't have existed.

485
00:52:03,320 --> 00:52:16,310
And and then upon return, you find evidence that all of this counselling that sort of address these problems is actually helpful.

486
00:52:17,960 --> 00:52:23,760
It seems that there's a correlation between the amount of counselling offered to soldiers and suicide rates.

487
00:52:23,780 --> 00:52:32,719
So it's that the characteristics of the war themselves that that motivates is more troublesome,

488
00:52:32,720 --> 00:52:37,170
or is it the way that those problems are dealt with of hunger?

489
00:52:37,520 --> 00:52:41,960
I don't know that there's a correlation between counselling and suicide.

490
00:52:42,470 --> 00:52:54,590
I'll sort of address the question slightly differently. My understanding is still seeking mental health is stigmatised by many.

491
00:52:54,620 --> 00:53:00,200
It's just not what, what, what, what real men do, if you like, real warriors.

492
00:53:00,270 --> 00:53:01,730
And in fact the DOD,

493
00:53:02,070 --> 00:53:10,970
I've been involved in defence centres of excellence and they have a site and probably no real warriors dot net about how people seek help.

494
00:53:11,210 --> 00:53:15,910
And I've been on radio programs where too much to my amazement, oh,

495
00:53:16,040 --> 00:53:23,150
someone will speak up and say that he was promoted to major and referred by his commander.

496
00:53:23,390 --> 00:53:30,710
You know, and that is that's a public affairs announcement that someone can say it on air and that someone feels comfortable about it.

497
00:53:32,360 --> 00:53:39,050
For many, it's a career stopper or it's it's an admission of moral failure, weak fibre.

498
00:53:40,280 --> 00:53:49,160
And it's there are other ways self-medicate by drugs and alcohol or by battering your wife or whatever.

499
00:53:50,330 --> 00:53:53,980
So it's still very, very hard to get help.

500
00:53:53,990 --> 00:54:03,460
The best I've seen in terms of being able to break down the barrier is forward deployment of psychological counselling units, of which there are many.

501
00:54:03,470 --> 00:54:06,710
There were many in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they they kind of.

502
00:54:06,930 --> 00:54:09,860
And one of my friends one of my friends does this, you know,

503
00:54:09,860 --> 00:54:17,450
and he's out there getting to know the troops and the way chaplains get to know troops who do similar sort of work and making himself available,

504
00:54:17,450 --> 00:54:24,499
known in a command unit known as the commander doing little seminars so that and then they do critical they for while

505
00:54:24,500 --> 00:54:30,290
they're doing critical debriefing so if something happens people know where to turn and they already know the guys,

506
00:54:30,800 --> 00:54:33,170
men and women that are hard to play. There aren't that many.

507
00:54:33,770 --> 00:54:42,980
And coming home, it is still hard and sort of a joke to fill out these for these these post-deployment forms about.

508
00:54:43,310 --> 00:54:50,510
Have you seen incidents close up how many times, you know, they'd rather be with their family,

509
00:54:50,510 --> 00:54:57,500
get a lot to get a beer rather than fill these things out. So and there's so I would say quite the you know, there's still enormous stigma.

510
00:54:57,740 --> 00:55:04,250
And the there are people on the road whose job it is to try to destigmatize.

511
00:55:04,610 --> 00:55:07,099
Your figures seem to be very, very different.

512
00:55:07,100 --> 00:55:15,620
And I don't know if it's the reporting mechanisms, self-reporting or, you know, National Health Service continues,

513
00:55:15,620 --> 00:55:21,409
whether you feel like we get a shot of army at the military and that's our National Health Service.

514
00:55:21,410 --> 00:55:22,460
And then there's the VA,

515
00:55:22,490 --> 00:55:29,930
which is a behemoth bureaucracy that you have to fight and kill yourself before it gets service of National Health Service isn't difficult.

516
00:55:29,990 --> 00:55:34,100
So I don't I don't know the ins and outs. This is the sort of thing I was in conversations like.

517
00:55:34,100 --> 00:55:39,140
So. Wesley But I know you have a different culture and I don't know how it feeds into it.

518
00:55:39,350 --> 00:55:44,180
My soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen want to be called heroes.

519
00:55:44,210 --> 00:55:52,670
They want to be called veterans, and they want to be thought of in a line of the same sort of like they want to be called ex-servicemen and women.

520
00:55:53,600 --> 00:55:53,840
Yeah.

521
00:55:53,870 --> 00:56:01,340
I mean, I think what Simon would say if he would have some wisdom would say, is that in some ways the US is exceptional in a great many respects.

522
00:56:01,350 --> 00:56:06,530
It does feel to be talking about this, not just that it's different, the UK is different, but the country experiences too.

523
00:56:06,620 --> 00:56:14,000
Well, yeah, yeah. And in much of this and you know what you would think in terms of some of this,

524
00:56:14,300 --> 00:56:17,750
but if you're right, the vocabulary is often different and the expectations are different.

525
00:56:18,500 --> 00:56:22,760
But paradoxically, of course, I mean, I'm sorry because I should be asking questions,

526
00:56:22,760 --> 00:56:30,260
but much big issues because I spent much of this long back of the summer talking to our service personnel precisely about some of these

527
00:56:30,260 --> 00:56:38,540
issues and about this transition phase and much of the issue be the issues that they're concerned with precisely to have what the US has,

528
00:56:39,530 --> 00:56:45,620
which you're essentially in some ways, you know, present while only getting 10% discounts.

529
00:56:45,810 --> 00:56:48,080
Oh yeah. Why, why, why?

530
00:56:48,830 --> 00:56:57,020
You know, they're very good at the of the unit support for the bereaved family that you've described in the case of the man who lost his face.

531
00:56:57,530 --> 00:57:01,550
But then, of course, the question that some of them now raise is actually were funny, very hard to withdraw.

532
00:57:01,670 --> 00:57:05,480
You know, we're being told to stop giving support because all of us must miserable.

533
00:57:05,810 --> 00:57:16,850
So, you know, the twists on these these I don't really understand the the why the suicide rate is very low and why the trauma rates.

534
00:57:16,850 --> 00:57:21,860
We have some. We're quite one in three, apparently. Simon has said, you know, you're you are using the same measures.

535
00:57:21,880 --> 00:57:28,060
I don't know if the self-reporting is. Yeah. Yes, but his name excuse me.

536
00:57:28,690 --> 00:57:31,540
My name is Napoleon and I'm reading history at St Anthony's.

537
00:57:31,540 --> 00:57:37,420
And I just got here nine days ago from Reuters in Iraq and I just wanted to comment on it.

538
00:57:37,450 --> 00:57:46,239
Thank you. Thanks very much. Enjoyed your comments. I was in Iraq initially for a year oh, five or six years as advisor to the sixth Iraqi Division.

539
00:57:46,240 --> 00:57:52,600
And then I went home to Atlanta for a year. And then for the last three years I've been there, civilian staff has been in a military organisation.

540
00:57:52,600 --> 00:57:58,870
I was a senior lecturer at the the U.S. military's counterinsurgency centre in Taji, Iraq.

541
00:57:59,350 --> 00:58:06,730
And if I could just make a quick comment, you know, just maybe for the throw out for for for everybody,

542
00:58:07,660 --> 00:58:14,260
I think there is a tendency to think about Iraq for not so good war, Afghanistan, the good war, as you mentioned.

543
00:58:14,650 --> 00:58:20,740
But I would say something that I noticed recurrently over time, especially with our young soldiers and maybe even the elders like me,

544
00:58:21,130 --> 00:58:26,650
is there's a tendency to think of whether it was World War Two of UN where everybody was united

545
00:58:26,650 --> 00:58:32,410
and we really were fighting animated was clearly almost universally seen as the bad guys.

546
00:58:32,410 --> 00:58:40,149
So one point of that, the stigma thing, obviously there is a problem but but the U.S. is doing so much to address it.

547
00:58:40,150 --> 00:58:43,870
You know, we didn't have TV in Iraq, by the way. All the military sit around, watch TV all the time.

548
00:58:45,070 --> 00:58:51,070
And, you know, we don't have advertisers. And I can watch British Forces television there and watch the advertisements, which was great.

549
00:58:51,610 --> 00:58:55,360
We didn't have advertisements on American TV and I think because of war.

550
00:58:55,900 --> 00:59:00,639
So they had what we would call public public interest broadcasts of different spots.

551
00:59:00,640 --> 00:59:04,480
And there were always I mean, I couldn't watch 2 hours of TV.

552
00:59:04,480 --> 00:59:11,680
I really do. I can't do that anyway. You couldn't have a TV on for 2 hours without seeing a major or a colonel or

553
00:59:11,680 --> 00:59:16,389
even a general talking about there is no stigma if you report your problems.

554
00:59:16,390 --> 00:59:21,910
And one of the fellows was a brigadier general that took his still on active duty as a general who had a nervous breakdown and thing.

555
00:59:22,270 --> 00:59:27,639
So I just wanted to throw that out to you to give a slightly different perspective on the suicides.

556
00:59:27,640 --> 00:59:31,840
I don't have any doubt of the fact that it's been disturbing me since I got there in oh five or six.

557
00:59:31,840 --> 00:59:36,150
And we're seeing people kill themselves routinely in Iraq and also in the states.

558
00:59:36,160 --> 00:59:42,970
Many military people, as you point out, traditionally the rate has been lower than the average, which I think is significant.

559
00:59:43,210 --> 00:59:46,840
We had just recently, you know, started hitting what Americans in general are doing.

560
00:59:47,350 --> 00:59:56,800
But in my it's my understanding that most of the suicides are not killing themselves over things they have seen or done in Iraq.

561
00:59:57,310 --> 00:59:59,750
It's over problems they've got at home.

562
00:59:59,750 --> 01:00:04,510
And because they are often in their third or fourth year away from their family over the last six or seven or eight,

563
01:00:05,020 --> 01:00:08,590
that they are unable to to address those problems.

564
01:00:08,860 --> 01:00:14,690
Well, I don't know the tail wagging the tail, as they say it.

565
01:00:15,040 --> 01:00:18,849
There's no doubt that there is a moral battlefield survey.

566
01:00:18,850 --> 01:00:25,360
And certainly one of the signs of stress that was coming as deployments increased was home relations,

567
01:00:25,360 --> 01:00:32,740
domestic relations, marital relations, and also treatment of civilians abroad in the in the combat area.

568
01:00:33,760 --> 01:00:42,190
There is no doubt that it that many of the soldiers are young and have difficult marriages to begin with.

569
01:00:42,400 --> 01:00:48,850
And always and always, infidelity is an issue and coming home is hard.

570
01:00:48,850 --> 01:00:57,129
The transition is tough. Even when you're transitioning and going off in a year's time, most folks or six months time will telling me, you know,

571
01:00:57,130 --> 01:01:04,450
you have three weeks at home and then you're really doing stateside what you would be doing elsewhere in terms of retraining.

572
01:01:04,600 --> 01:01:12,340
So, you know, I don't know. It's symptomatic and causal, but it's mixed and the strains and stresses compounded each other.

573
01:01:13,690 --> 01:01:18,800
Yeah, but if the guy's got to show high blood out,

574
01:01:18,880 --> 01:01:30,520
these are the some of the learnings and differences between the two or 3.4 year following Vietnam is for the military.

575
01:01:32,140 --> 01:01:36,640
The phrase always so, so many aspects of his with Don Quixote.

576
01:01:36,820 --> 01:01:44,020
Apart from this, of course, and even socialism costs in terms of organisation and just the whole structure be as well.

577
01:01:45,070 --> 01:01:53,560
Do you think that the current pattern of deployment of the current U.S. rate, if you will, of the military is sustainable.

578
01:01:54,010 --> 01:01:57,580
And if it's not. Are we going to see these? What happened after that.

579
01:01:58,600 --> 01:02:05,680
The conversations were so wild and effective and able to do this kind of overs long time overseas.

580
01:02:06,280 --> 01:02:09,100
Well, it's certainly overstretched over strain already.

581
01:02:10,060 --> 01:02:19,270
And I presume, you know, there's massive reconsiderations of this already, a lot of policy analysts in that regard.

582
01:02:19,270 --> 01:02:22,329
So I can't quite say what's what's what's going to happen.

583
01:02:22,330 --> 01:02:28,600
But there is the psychological injuries as well as moral injuries that I'm addressing,

584
01:02:28,600 --> 01:02:36,190
which remain amongst the qualia are something that we're an anticipated nor fighting wars,

585
01:02:36,190 --> 01:02:42,190
each of which is longer you know, than the major wars that we we've fought this century, this past the past century.

586
01:02:42,190 --> 01:02:45,429
So, yes, there will be enormous policy implications.

587
01:02:45,430 --> 01:02:49,420
But I don't know what they will what they will look like. Well, we have ruled the state of apology.

588
01:02:49,600 --> 01:02:53,200
I mean, a conscription I can't imagine it ever going through Congress.

589
01:02:54,070 --> 01:03:01,740
Simply can't imagine. That would happen. She will win 400,000 plus.

590
01:03:01,740 --> 01:03:08,940
Two great questions. I suppose the first was Mustang was climbing with suicide rates now at an all time high.

591
01:03:09,540 --> 01:03:12,900
We have an unprecedented level so far after conference of the month.

592
01:03:13,560 --> 01:03:21,060
Some months have suicide rates that are higher bands than amongst the general population.

593
01:03:21,060 --> 01:03:26,940
As my understanding varies a little bit and it's not all you know, many of them are stateside,

594
01:03:26,940 --> 01:03:33,450
you may know some more specifically, but in general, I mean, a friend of mine and many you might know the speech at West Music,

595
01:03:33,810 --> 01:03:42,470
who was a West Point colonel when I was there, was one of the earliest and highest ranking suicides in that was committed while in service in Iraq,

596
01:03:42,480 --> 01:03:48,900
which is a self-described middle class service compared to, say, Vietnam, to be in generation.

597
01:03:48,900 --> 01:03:58,170
We see higher rates of suicide today, which in my understanding is, yes, since they've been keeping records, why do you think that is?

598
01:03:58,530 --> 01:04:04,630
I can't imagine that wars become more or less dramatic in many instances, I'm sure veterans going.

599
01:04:05,130 --> 01:04:10,860
So incredibly traumatic things and also the home, the domestic situation.

600
01:04:10,860 --> 01:04:18,740
I can't imagine this child infidelity process longing. What does seem to have changed is sort of soldier society relations at that time.

601
01:04:18,780 --> 01:04:25,200
Change of citizen soldier where most of the adult male population this come together to tonight.

602
01:04:25,200 --> 01:04:32,910
Really unpack this 1%. And that's sort of my next question, which is to look at this issue of suicide as a public health issue.

603
01:04:33,180 --> 01:04:38,549
Is there something that we need to educate our society about how we construct the soldier,

604
01:04:38,550 --> 01:04:44,260
how we engage with the best terms of how politicians construct the discourse?

605
01:04:44,760 --> 01:04:47,850
Next, what you saying that they want to be seen as heroes?

606
01:04:47,920 --> 01:04:53,969
Well, there's a strong saying that the British soldiers had some animosity about the American

607
01:04:53,970 --> 01:04:57,629
soldiers and then they dissatisfied the plaintiff by giving them the 10% discount.

608
01:04:57,630 --> 01:05:01,560
Not only, well, I'll go backwards, I do think. Absolutely not.

609
01:05:01,830 --> 01:05:13,319
Military civilian relations have to be restructured and many, many barriers broken down and some sense of sharing.

610
01:05:13,320 --> 01:05:18,630
Absolutely. As well as just empathic understanding, which is part of what I'm trying to do.

611
01:05:19,230 --> 01:05:27,450
On the question of why suicide rate is so high, you know, all the studies suggest that the stress of long deployments,

612
01:05:27,450 --> 01:05:34,440
multiple deployments, some upward of seven, nine years of war,

613
01:05:34,890 --> 01:05:40,530
many reserves and guards not expecting it, hoping to get education or some other kinds of training,

614
01:05:40,530 --> 01:05:49,680
coming home, often finding that they that they're untrained for what is available, an incredibly awful economy.

615
01:05:49,720 --> 01:05:56,070
So reasonable grievances, I would say, as well as many other factors.

616
01:05:56,070 --> 01:06:03,570
And I do think that the mission, the lack of clarity and perhaps cause common cause issues,

617
01:06:03,570 --> 01:06:11,670
cause conflict issues, as well as the strain of counterinsurgency.

618
01:06:13,650 --> 01:06:18,570
You know, this is not this is not doing it in terms of studies,

619
01:06:18,570 --> 01:06:26,190
but certainly that some of the information suggests and some of the survey suggests some moves over the last question.

620
01:06:26,880 --> 01:06:33,720
Thank you again for part of this discussion focuses on very intimate exchanges like the examples of the check point.

621
01:06:34,380 --> 01:06:41,370
I was wondering if you had a chance to talk through any drone pilots where killing is conducted from a facility in Nevada?

622
01:06:42,090 --> 01:06:47,040
Jonathan Glover His book specifically talks about the moral difficulties of growing at a distance.

623
01:06:47,430 --> 01:06:51,540
And drone pilots have actually had one of the highest suicide rates of any unit.

624
01:06:52,230 --> 01:07:00,720
And if you see differences between those kinds of soldiers in that type of service versus most of the passenger fighters.

625
01:07:02,000 --> 01:07:07,050
Peter Singer and the other figures here at the Brookings has come to my class and talked,

626
01:07:07,470 --> 01:07:15,090
has done amazing work from child workers, but also wired for more is a government who suggests a few things.

627
01:07:15,090 --> 01:07:23,850
And there's been a lot of discussion of this in the American media. There's an army going and going to work in a trailer in Nevada,

628
01:07:23,850 --> 01:07:27,930
halfway around the world with a distance and a sense of trying to fight that by putting

629
01:07:28,170 --> 01:07:31,700
Air Force uniforms on individuals so they know they're going they're going to war.

630
01:07:31,710 --> 01:07:41,400
We're just going to a different kind of work. So some of and a sense of being themselves very well-protected,

631
01:07:41,400 --> 01:07:47,640
very vulnerable and making civilians extremely vulnerable, that that's not easy morally to to swallow.

632
01:07:48,600 --> 01:07:51,930
Secondly, they are very isolated from their unit.

633
01:07:52,990 --> 01:07:59,970
So there's that moral alienation. And thirdly, they do see very graphically what's going on through their monitors.

634
01:08:00,900 --> 01:08:04,410
I have not seen it myself. I've seen it reproduced on television.

635
01:08:04,410 --> 01:08:08,430
It's not quite the same thing, but it's hard. So there's going to be a lot.

636
01:08:08,460 --> 01:08:11,700
There is for different reasons. Certainly that stress.

637
01:08:11,780 --> 01:08:14,549
I would also say, you know, pilots will often tell me, you know,

638
01:08:14,550 --> 01:08:18,690
we don't carry the same baggage as those on the ground, but we carry different kind of baggage.

639
01:08:19,110 --> 01:08:24,629
And it is true that there are these FAA functional MRI studies that suggest, you know,

640
01:08:24,630 --> 01:08:32,970
just the up close killing of that's foreseen, but unintended kind of reads in your brain.

641
01:08:32,970 --> 01:08:40,530
The limbic system a little bit like intended killing is sort of potential killing and distant foreseen

642
01:08:40,530 --> 01:08:46,079
but unintended when you're flying high doesn't it to get comparable doesn't quite read the same way.

643
01:08:46,080 --> 01:08:49,080
It's not as it's not a close encounter in the same way.

644
01:08:49,170 --> 01:08:53,350
So I wouldn't be surprised if some of that plays out, but then, you know, it's layered on top of these other effects.

645
01:08:53,350 --> 01:08:58,250
So I was just talking about it. Mobile Nation, am I really carrying the burden?

646
01:08:58,390 --> 01:09:02,250
I, you know, I'm safe. My buddies are. This can't be easy.