What I heard was it it's not easy to put on a uniform and take it off.
The skin grows deep and the sloughing of it is very, very hard.
It's not a role change and station of duty change that's rather easy, but a struggle to hold on to humanity.
So what I want to talk a little bit about specifically is for me,
one of the emotions that was most weighty but often not spoken of in terms of specific terms was guilt.
It was the elephant in the room, and it was often bordered with shame and not articulated.
And there are three principal forms that I heard, or at least helped me to map it out.
And one was an accidental guilt.
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.
And a third was collateral damage guilt and collateral injury guilt.
And I'll try to talk about them a little bit in terms of that in terms of stories,
I should just also say one thing that I think is really critical in thinking about this.
I think of the guilt as a kind of humanising force.
It wasn't grandiose. And many of the cases that I heard, it wasn't misplaced.
It was a strict terms. It wasn't mapping culpability so irrational in the sense that it wasn't tracking culpability,
but it was a sense of personal accountability that these soldiers could not
let go of things happened in their command that they needed to account for.
And but I should say, at the same time, this is very critical to our different audiences.
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.
The suicide rate in the states is is is amongst the forces is as high as it is amongst civilians.
In the first time since we've been keeping records. Is that the case? And some months, the suicide fatalities outnumber combat fatalities.
And there were last week incidents in Fort Hood amongst the newly deployed.
But, you know, the deployments are long. They're longer for us than they are for you.
They're typically 12 months, 9 to 12 months, multiple and often reserve in the National Guard.
So it's a very, very difficult war.
And though there's much still less stigma than there had been in referring it.
And there are some that actually get promoted while they're getting treatment or referring is still difficult to come forward early and adequately.
So let me talk a little bit about mindful of the time here about accident, guilt, as I call it.
So this is a case that I remember very clearly. It's a man named.
He was it is at the time, Major John Prior. I was captain at the time,
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.
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.
The gun and the gun went off and blew off the face of one of their privates, Private Joseph Mike.
The issue was that the vehicle had used a marine battery rather than an army battery.
All the manuals said it was okay, but they later learned that it was a different amperage, same voltage.
This battery is now outlawed and his case was fully reviewed for quite a long period.
He was exonerated. But this is what he says to me.
He says he's he reconstructs the scene very carefully.
It was as if an ice cream scoop just scooped out Private Mike's face.
He survived the initial blast, if you can believe it. We were in the medic tent.
With him is one of the most traumatic things I've ever seen in my entire life.
To literally see someone's face completely scooped out just the very bottom of his jaw working.
He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He can scream. I mean, he had no eyes, no face.
I can only imagine the terror, the fear. He obviously couldn't breathe because he had no nose or mouth to take air.
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.
It was an unbelievable thing to see. He then turned to feelings of responsibility.
I'm the one. Who placed the vehicles. I'm the one who set the security.
As with most accidents, he says, I'm not in jail right now.
I'm not egregiously responsible.
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.
So I dealt with and still deal with the guilt. He did use the word of having lost him his life.
Essentially, there's probably not a day that goes by when I don't think of it, at least fleetingly now.
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
you're causally implicated but not morally responsible in virtue of something that you intentionally did.
But the soldiers I interviewed, Marines, I'm using that generically Marines, seamen, sailors, airmen and women.
It doesn't capture the despair or the depths that they really felt.
But for them, there is a sense of self indictment, and they wanted to make moral repair in the sense of this unit,
and especially the man I was speaking to who commanded it, it was his guy.
There's a sense of command, responsibility and care for your unit that really exceeds what ancient regret captures.
And in his case, the mother of Mike would write weekly as if she were still talking to her boy.
And the unit, including its its commander, would write back, telling them about the date,
the week's events, and this mom would send cookies, biscuits every week in a kind of care package.
It was very painful, but there was a sense that they had to make moral repair and help to normalise the sense.
And that was a way to become morally clear to it in a way.
Another phenomenon I think of is love to guilt.
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.
It's from the Holocaust, the European the genocide of European Jewry.
And it's 1961 referenced in psychoanalytic literature, when those who survived felt they were the living dead.
That's the term they used. And they had this unconscious belief that merely remaining alive was a betrayal of the dead.
So this terrific sense of betrayal.
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.
You might say one child feels sort of an unconscious bookkeeping system, says Arnold Modell.
It's not unfamiliar, of course, if you think of Homeric stories, and I'm thinking particularly about Achilles,
Achilles himself gives excuse me, writing a called Achilles gives Patroclus his his armour.
And then the Trojans fights. And Achilles has this horrific sense that he did switch places.
In some sense, he gave up his ability or his willingness to fight.
But not everyone does that.
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.
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.
And they had this tremendous sense of they were in a bucolic sailing community stateside when their buddies were over overseas,
and there was a sense that they didn't deserve to be there.
So the sense of more, you know, a kind of a rational, moral desert was coming in.
Part of this, I think, is a way to understand that this is an empathic distress.
We hear of unit cohesion as what pulls units together, and it minimises in some ways the sense of trauma and also protects vulnerability.
That certainly was a lesson that was learned early and hard from Vietnam keeping units together,
but that doesn't necessarily mitigate the sense of guilt.
Now, in this case, for some of the unit have been dispersed, but still a sense of surviving when others don't.
Many I interviewed at Walter Reed felt awful that they didn't have facial disfigurement.
Women felt awful that they were as severely harmed as some of the men.
And it was a sense that even if they had TBI, traumatic brain injury, it was invisible, that visible injury.
Trees were much more significant in some sense.
So I think sometimes when you think about guilt, one place to go and the place I sometimes go is Freud,
that it's rooted in anxiety about doing wrong and the kind of fear of punishment for these soldiers.
It was rooted in what Melanie Klein would call a sense of kind of empathic distress,
a sense that you are in some way harming the very thing that you love.
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.
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.
Although was not fully traumatised by it as I was, you know, at least to hear.
He was part of a lead battalion on March 23 that was asked to help the maintenance team of 507 maintenance.
And this is Jessica Lynch's group, if you remember that story.
And they had suffered horrific losses, 80 killed, 8080 casualties, and they pulled many of the dead out.
And then two months later, the unit goes back first to peace and stability operations.
And as he describes this to me, it's very physical.
His feelings are extremely somatic.
So he says, I remember driving into the city from the north, this time almost flinching, bracing as we're going down ambush alley.
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,
catastrophic hills where every Marine in that Amtrak was killed in action.
And then there was a battalion wide memorial.
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.
And he says, and you could feel the rupture with the unit is very palpable.
And he says, I didn't have the same experience or opportunity as the other Marines leaving the combat zone.
I had orders to report to the Naval Academy. I had to get there quickly.
I wasn't going to execute them. And then he talks about this surreal transition we take for granted in American airports.
You see units coming through, but you don't quite realise what they're going through.
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.
I'm in Frankfurt, sitting in a first class lounge.
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,
and then 10 hours after I was meeting my family and my wife to be at National excuse me,
Reagan National and says to me, which also was very surreal,
many of these people have engaged or have promises to marry, don't know their family, knew families very well.
And then all of a sudden have this new family that's greeting them at the at the airport.
It was an interesting dynamic, he says, being transitioned so quickly, one little boom.
And then I say, how did it go for you? And he says, It was just fine, man.
Just fine. And then seconds later, he sort of reveals the true weight.
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
achieved and the incredible loss of potential for the for the Marines and this term loss of potential was code.
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.
And then he says, I keep telling my new wife, now I say, You've got to prepare yourself.
Because after sitting here in Annapolis, beautiful Annapolis for three years after wonderful air conditioning here,
while my brothers and sisters have been out on their second or third tours,
you need to come to grips with the fact that I'm going to be away for a while.
And he is in Afghanistan right now. He was inside in March.
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.
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.
He's at Craiglockhart outside Edinburgh.
And Graves says, you know, you better stay there rather than really show your colours that you've talked over to Russell,
that you may be a pacifist, but all he wants. To do.
And he urges his his physician rivers is to go back to the front.
And he writes these poems. I am banished from the men who fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride shoulder to shoulder, side by side.
And then he hears his his his voice calling out in sickly.
When are you going out to them again? Are they still not your brothers?
Through our blood. That sense of having to be there no matter.
No matter what. I actually think brotherhood is not really the way to speak about it.
Often it was motherhood. It was caring. It was command responsibility.
Understood in terms of some solidarity and caring ethic which made the guilt not irrational in the sense it wasn't their moral responsibility,
but it was a heightened sense of responsibility, often understood in terms of empathic, empathic connection and somehow betraying in a Catholic role.
The last kind of guilt and I'll wrap up with this was the hardest and most problematic.
And that has to do with collateral killing the and especially if if children were involved.
Many who spoke to me would say the children are the access to us.
They're also what you're warned against getting too close with in counterinsurgency operations.
But my Marines would take out their their wallet and show a picture of their children to the elder of the family to say,
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.
It was it was it was a way of finding some normalcy.
And one guy, this guy Hall, would in his case, he often operated with a, um, an Army colonel who was formerly in Mosul,
Saltwater Doctors Without Borders, and was into humanitarian medicine and specifically children's medicine.
And so they had identified a child who had a congenital heart hole in her heart.
And Major Hall not only brought the doctor,
but organised a charitable little trust for this child and got money back and others goods for the village,
only to later discover when they returned to get her to hospital that the family was floating down
a river because they had been collaborating essentially with Americans of the insurgents believed.
So there is a sense of working with children, vulnerability to children,
and often the betrayal that comes with thinking that you've let down the families.
And in the case of a checkpoint incident,
some of them Marine colonels would say it was hardest to deal with troops that had killed children in checkpoint incidents.
They all the troops often had to be brought offline.
And so in one case, Marine Colonel Bob Durkin, he commanded a battalion just outside Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom early days.
And he said that if the injuries or deaths were of adult men they suspected were
suicide bombers or women in large burqas who might be concealing explosives.
This is how he put his Marines were generally flattered off and justify to themselves, rightly or wrongly, and they would argue counterfactual.
He said. If I couldn't find out, it still could have been this or it could have been that.
But he says, when children were involved, there was a dramatic psychological difference in the case of a badly hurt child.
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,
sometimes putting themselves and each other at risk. They couldn't shake what they had done or justify the killing to themselves.
This is before the current rules of engagement where he was.
His rules were rules of engagement required less protection for the troops and more aggressive use of firepower.
But I also thought about this in terms of those the soldier, these Marines, often his guys were very young.
They were boy warriors who regressed a bit in the image of a child.
Or they were. I often teach uniform health services to clinicians who've come back into greatest difficulty with
soldiers who have killed children and then who then go to their own homes and have children.
The age of the children who died and the identification and projection is very clear in their minds.
So, you know, hearts and minds sometimes it's for the soldiers as well and not just for the citizens.
I want to end with. You know, a sense that this sense of subjective guilt isn't something Kant talks well about.
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.
But Leach is the philosopher who sort of captures it for me.
And he says Subjective guilt or bad conscience can become torture without end undoing any prospects for happiness.
And he says this subjective guilt doesn't grow in the soil where you'd most expect it,
such as in prisons where there actually are guilty parties who should feel remorse for wrongdoing.
Rather, it's often, quote, a question of someone who caused harm, who causes a misfortune for which he's morally responsible.
He's picking up on Spinoza here, who says The right of conscience.
That's a very classical term that Seneca and Cicero write lots of bell.
But that hurt of conscience has to do, says Spinoza, with an offence where something has gone unexpectedly wrong.
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.
So enduring the recriminations of a harsh superego.
You know, this is partly what is going on.
And and it's not. It's self-directed, furious.
Seneca talks about rage. The other in this case, many of my soldiers felt self-directed fury.
But it was their way of humanising what they were going through.
And I think I'll sort of end on this note and my times about, you know, you can.
Good. So when I start talking to the Vietnam vet and he in his case is more difficult.
So he had a kind of gun happy sergeant who said, okay, you guys are on sentry duty.
You know, you might get your Marines, you might get a little rusty with your rifle.
So I think we should practice. And apparently this was not so common in the Vietnam days.
He took them out to the riverside and there was a fishing village, a group of fishermen.
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.
And this sergeant had his unit fire at them.
And my Marine said to me, I fired low.
I deliberately missed. But for 40 years, I've lived with the thought that I didn't protest the war.
I didn't publicly protest the order the others fired.
So it was an omission and a difficult one. Had a different kind of case than the other three that I dealt with.
But he said to me, You know, you write about guilt a bit.
And I have to tell you that for me, especially as a Vietnam veteran, somewhat misunderstood a different era.
He said feeling guilt over these years was a way that I could humanise.
What what war did to me.
It was a way that he could transition back into civilian mortality or address civilians, but also himself as a civilian.
So I think that the guilt is somewhat redemptive and not less.
You know, missed what soldiers go through is misunderstood.
If it's all psychological injury without understanding the allure of psychological injury, that doesn't rise to the level of acute or not.
Chronic trauma is moral injury, and it's moral and quaint is so hard for these soldiers to put their own troops at risk,
to be denied the resources they need to develop rapport with villagers, to collaborate with villagers,
but then to have to return a week later, you know,
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.
And to see, you know, the elder with whom you were working piled up on top of his children dead.
These are betrayals that are remarkably hard to live with, and they need to be addressed.
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.
And so part of what I want to hear from them is their moral the moral psyche, if you like.
And, you know, it's not just the language and mask and uniform and decorum.
It's really what goes on underneath.
And I'll perhaps just add with my soldier, Will Quinn, Will Quinn, the interrogator said, you know, I've come back to Georgetown.
So he's an older, older guy. And he says, You know what?
I did, too, in order to build rapport, something I can't even begin to relive with my friends.
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.
And I don't understand why entering a war zone is like going to mass level.
You enter a different time and space and then I come out and I have to make the transition.
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.
Humanity is really quite remarkable.
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.
But then hold on to something of it. Thank you very much, indeed.
Discussing the idea of any chance of reducing the conflict with mainly the Iranians.
The press is not wearing it anyway.
They kept it fearful of interfering with the technology and far worse off than we were going in regards to their voting.
Okay, we've got plenty of time for questions we've got here in about 45 minutes.
And I'm going to ask the first one is a very serious question.
Yeah, but I mean, it's not a historians question since the specific historical.
Just that you're using analogies from the ancient world.
Will you use Sassoon to make a point? Are we talking about the same sort of guilt over over time,
or are we talking about different sorts of guilt expressed differently at the time and the Vietnam, you know, story?
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.
Whereas perhaps in 1970 they felt differently because memory norms are moved on.
So. So who says is good? Is there change over time?
Well, certainly one of the points I want to make is that you find various kinds of guilt, survivor guilt early on, unnamed.
But it's it's their Achilles is complicated, obviously.
Very complicated. But it's certainly it's certainly there.
I think counterinsurgency is very hard on soldiers in the following sorts of ways.
Most of my guys, especially I call my guys because I, I spend a lot of time with them.
I interview them over and over many cases.
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.
They were trained to break and destroy.
That's how they'll put it, you know, engage and fight and complete the job, which, you know, it's it's Clausewitz.
See, it is attrition. And they some of them will say, you know, we never even heard we never read the manual.
The manual was an out. It came out in 2005, you know, and but but by and large, also,
they were asked to develop relationships, be armed social workers, as it's sometimes said,
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.
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.
And I do think this was a subject of, you know, I guess some of the discussion of last week,
Wednesday at the when you brought the West Point person in that redoing the whole of the code,
I do think that soldiers, the warriors great will never leave leave a so-called soldier behind is tough on them.
That is their that is the logo and they are.
And betrayal of trust at all different levels is especially hard in counterinsurgency
fighting in the sense that they really are developing close relationships with locals.
Command, in many cases early on didn't fully support it.
They were under-resourced. The institutions that were backing them were not giving them right resources.
So there may be comparables historically but certainly you know is is a war amongst the
people is Roberts-Smith would write it is not what earlier warfare was like and be an in and
amongst of civilian populations with relationships to them and willing willing them earning
their interest rather than overtaking them is very different very different set of skills.
And I think very, very hard on the psyche, moral psyche here.
And Achilles has a different moral code from the war, although my honour comes in that I that's again a historical subject.
Right. I've got. Yes, but peer facilitated and so.
Thanks. That's the sort of question I wanted to ask is really about the people that the soldiers intentionally killed.
And I wonder if you did mention any any suggestion of them feeling any guilt for those killings.
And particularly in light of reflection over whether or not they ought to have been so and whether
whether they satisfied is about and whether they should have been in Vietnam in the first place,
whether they should have been in in Iraq in a different part of the narrative.
But, yes, certainly my Vietnam veterans will say I was I was taught to separate.
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.
And this is from, you know, PhDs in philosophy at Yale.
And I really do believe very seriously and reading Gestalt that I've passed it along to some and in others,
you know, it does make them think differently. Many will find it very difficult.
But then there they come up with suffer seven ends for comrade rather than cause and to bring people home alive.
And then that's really, again, hard to hold on to in a counterinsurgency.
I've talked to many chaplains whose job it is with David Grossman, who works on this, Colonel David Grossman,
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.
So, yes, there's lots of individual struggles for some of them or on those grounds.
Because I want to ask you about two books. One of them is in Borders, Lucifer.
Yes. The roster, which for me anyway, as far as this is concerned,
the way the situation can do the opposite of what you're saying is absolve you, make you behave more easily than you would.
You would have to make choices on your own. If you run into any of this second book.
35. Running courses for the Junior Officer's Reading Club, so know that one more club cup book in the UK.
I'm reading it and it's a fantastic Oxford graduate to be.
Yeah. He studied literature here to the fullest and ended up not seeing action, which is getting more and more frustrated.
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.
Some of your people a good deal older. But what I didn't get from that book was much of a sense of guilt.
Mm hmm. And I'm wondering whether you run into some of the younger reactions.
Well, certainly, yeah, the gamut. And I'm not trying to reduce in any sense responses.
Just I was struck by how unquestioning the people were that I that I spoke to.
I have a young sniper who I greatly influenced, Walter Reed, early days at Walter Reed,
our major hospital, where we segregate in a way that you don't military care.
He was in there for two years in a medical holding company meeting, getting ready, presumably to go back.
But he had lost his leg and he had a titanium arm.
And in traumatic brain injury, he was not there's no way he was going back.
But he and he was telling me of his sniper in Afghanistan and totally overrun when he was caught.
And he killed the guy that killed his best friend and that was about to kill him.
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.
It was so wrapped up, adrenalized, even two years later.
And he has a tattoo of the name of the guy that his best friend on his arm.
And there was a sense of loss or talk about the revenge was so great.
And also the adventure. Four year old I had pictures of myself in that, you know, given a gun, my uncle was a marine.
I needed to be what I needed to be in artillery and infantry.
And also, yeah, certainly adrenaline was ramped up feelings.
If you read something like Sebastian Junger, his book, whatever it's called,
or he's a Vanity Fair writer who embedded for a year or so ago with a unit.
And I've heard of talk, you know, and he himself had that feeling.
And there's nothing more exciting and candid.
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,
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.
In my case they spoke about worrying about it another Haditha.
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.
And he and I interview both of them. That's 15 years ago or so.
And they are going to Larry Colburn, who's just like I said,
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.
The massacre. Very much command. You know, command.
Climate is critical. We know that. Very, very critical.
And also and, you know, and suppressed adventure about the war is also very dangerous.
Someone who is interested in maintaining good for all of the conditions as long it seems to be much to be carried out.
And so that probably that called it does not formulate the rules of engagement or the doctrine under which those rules are devised.
That's done in conjunction with command or any of the coalition counterparts.
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?
And if not, would it be improved? It's a good question.
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.
So if I'm working closely with someone that is involved, Tony Pfaff is a colonel.
And as I, I think. Some of it is to anticipate the issues, the conflicts that will come up,
including loyalties and trust relationships to villagers versus to units in many cases.
I felt talking to leaders that there were a sense,
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.
An air strike was just something they weren't used to.
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.
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
in difficult and difficult cases where their guys felt they were pinned down.
So but when I was talking about this particular checkpoint incident,
it was old rules of engagement wasn't the new ones that Stanley McChrystal had put into place.
And there was much more concerned with mission and force protection than there was with the locals.
And it shifted over time. And I think it still is hard.
And, you know, those who are working very closely with the practitioners and the forces,
I'd love to hear more from you, but my understanding is they have a long way to go in changing expectations.
It's much since you took up. I really enjoyed it.
You've spoken about guilt and shame and a little bit in response to your question about the gun proof attitude.
There is one emotion which I don't think you mentioned, and that's anger.
I mean, it must be that. Oh, it's very much.
There it is. One of the chapters is about payback. And so it's anger.
You know, of course, that's the classic. I'm kind of just.
Yeah. Oh, please, I. I didn't have in mind why you didn't mention, you know,
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.
The anger directed towards the enemy not sustained an enemy with, you know,
the very villagers who may have come to trust but must have wondered in various forms were, can we really trust them?
Anger the commanding officers, anger of the civilian politicians, because some of them, you know, invested since.
And I was just wondering whether you could say that, yes.
Anger is there at all moments. And. Yeah, and as you as you say anger directed to different objects.
Anger sometimes, you know, in the form of revenge and classic revenge of the enemy,
but also enormous anger at villagers whose loyalties are unclear, who are who have shifting identities between civilian and combatant,
who use shields and and who are who don't have their guns tied in the same way
these soldiers anger at commanders for compromising or for not supporting them,
for asking them to build relationships and then not sending them enough money.
In the case, that sense of betrayal. You know, anger, emotions are compounded, mixed and a sense of betrayal.
This is shot through with anger. Shot through with anger.
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.
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.
And in his case, anger then plays out against yourself.
Suicide is often anger, enormous, unresolved anger at yourself.
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.
So, yeah, thank you for the very first thing you did as always.
And so I want to take you back to Mark to your response to Seth's question.
Who asked about intentional killing here?
Yeah. And comparing it particularly in the context of, you know, these ad valorem questions, which is a campaign to exercise of the exercise.
So I was angry because your response to Seth was to say, well, here's the official policy response to say, well, you know,
people reference the distinction between Abdulmanap and Bellow, this classic offering the best of all three rules of war.
There was a really interesting response because at one level, at least this, you know,
this doctrine of separation, which can happen memo is exactly one of these kind of rationalist,
you know, intellectually constructed monologues that you are examples precisely bring out can diverge from these moral notions.
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,
for example, who have, you know, one knows intellectually had no responsibility for not living,
but still has emotions and that it makes no sense to feel guilt for, you know, turning the here and this you know,
you know, we know intellectually there's no sense but those emotions come anyway.
And I guess that's you know, that's the whole reason why we find this so difficult, so troubling.
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,
you know, a moral emotional response in do, for example,
did you see a difference in the responses that people gave you who had fought in Iraq,
where campaign legitimacy was much less clear than those who fought in Afghanistan,
for example, where at least in the early stages, it did seem like they did. You see those things speeding through if you did,
and people think there is kind of broader appeal of issues was simply not part of these emotional moral experiences as soldiers.
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
various others have of trying to use the idea of human rights to really break down those barriers,
which would have been good. Yes, certainly.
Here's here's some of the morally sharp shot through emotions that folks talked about.
One guy, Derrick Rose Parks, he was called because in the U.S. Army Route 50 and reservist who just kept going in Bosnia,
I could believe it when I was called up reserve from Greenbelt,
Maryland, outside of D.C. and my tech support of Woodrow Wilson when I was called up for,
you know, his in training boot camp or, you know, sort of getting ready to mobilise.
We all wish it were Afghanistan. Early days, but it was Iraq.
And he have. And he was in an intelligence unit. WMD.
Where are those? WMD is. I was suckered.
He used that word. Suckered all the time, the truth. And then he says to be given.
That's a hard pill to swallow by the top brass that Vietnam.
I don't think it was shame I would say taint.
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,
he was giving us a reason, I would say shame. And it was like it was like Michael Hurt in dispatches.
I went. Journalist I went to cover Vietnam. Vietnam covered me sense of pollution.
So, yes, some of them, I think it is harder for military to play the many.
You don't know that he was called GI GI story.
He wrote a script for Coen brothers IOW about not the code or not to not have a currency and Cohen productions companies.
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.
Otherwise we're going to have soldiers coming home who are severely traumatised.
That's 44 or 41. So yes, I think it definitely is.
And there's studies and I don't know the statistics of causes you can believe in willingness to fight,
but I also think that there's rationalisation and it's not just rationalisation,
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,
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.
That's the common story I've heard. It was a question mark back.
Yeah, yeah. I was wondering. Could you read to me another.
That's representative on the question of anger.
Do you think that there's going to, you know, predicting the future be a sort of us versus them versus those who did?
And these are soldiers who have had four deployments and still feel that they're out there another time.
We find it kind of amazing when it's, you know, some of the. Population.
She's the only one in this complex.
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?
Was this didn't. Or is that just such a small population set that you're not going to get that?
I think another emotion I have addressed is resentment.
And if you dig down very deep, there is enormous resentment.
And the resentment comes in at, says a senior naval officer.
To me, I go to Home Depot and they say, thank you very much for your service.
You get a 10% discount. All right.
You know, that's not you know, so I sometimes think about it in terms of there's lip service and public respect,
that deep sense of private respect, you know, and I think in my classrooms, I really am trying to break down the borders.
A lot of those absurd do feel angry and they also of feel they're a lot older and they feel misunderstood.
And all they'll say, I'm not just if they're injured, I'm not just one more drunken driver.
And they, you know, they want their story told in some way.
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.
You and your student. No, no. Mandatory national service of another sort.
And so, yes, very, very unfair distribution of burdens some will say and feel.
Well, it may be different than other generations. I'm not sure.
I just say one other thing. The Vietnam veterans I talked to, we forget,
but many of them who really were badly traumatised psychologically are returning or are in our institutions.
The veterans retraumatized by for the general like it's a very hard very hard for them to witness these wars.
Yeah. I got you. I want you to know where to go next.
Thank you. Thank you. But when one considers the application of lethal force by individuals,
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,
as whatever is acting under the extant rules of engagement at the time for offensive operations.
And when you were interviewing those specifically from Iraq and Afghanistan,
did you detect any differences of justification between those two issues or was it not really considered?
Good question. And I don't think I that came up specifically.
Yeah. The reason I ask the question is because that a policy which you used in an answer to your question here on
courage and strength and clearly courageous restraint is what is the flavour of the month in Afghanistan,
which places a far greater significance upon acting in self-defence.
And defence. And I know that vice offensive rules of engagement.
Yes. And I picking up on that term, that's the flavour of the month term as it was serving.
I can't I don't I don't have enough interview material that specifically addresses that to be able to say that.
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.
You know, in terms of are these and that's been the political discussion of the moment, how commanders are interpreting the.
And I haven't actually followed the debate as to just how Petraeus has been a role influencing
lower level interpretations that might give him more room for bringing on firepower.
I don't and I don't know what you know, how experience is in coalitions with the British.
We haven't had the same level of debate part because I think in this country the argument would be that courageous restraint.
You know,
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.
I'm still not sure what happened, but certainly in terms of what the intention was in.
Yeah. Gun. Black leather jacket. Yes. My name is. Sorry.
Oh, you know how she said? Yeah. Uh, to.
To talk about the war, as he called it.
The psychological battles and the. The skyrocketing of suicide rates, too,
to use the example mentioned by you in the Vietnam War of the sort of shooting practice on civilians and the fact
that today there are channels through which it's sort of expected that incidents like those would be reported.
And transparency generally is much larger the place.
And it's a burden on the soldiers who feel sort of morally implicated if they don't use the channels available to them,
whereas previously this wouldn't have existed.
And and then upon return, you find evidence that all of this counselling that sort of address these problems is actually helpful.
It seems that there's a correlation between the amount of counselling offered to soldiers and suicide rates.
So it's that the characteristics of the war themselves that that motivates is more troublesome,
or is it the way that those problems are dealt with of hunger?
I don't know that there's a correlation between counselling and suicide.
I'll sort of address the question slightly differently. My understanding is still seeking mental health is stigmatised by many.
It's just not what, what, what, what real men do, if you like, real warriors.
And in fact the DOD,
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.
And I've been on radio programs where too much to my amazement, oh,
someone will speak up and say that he was promoted to major and referred by his commander.
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.
For many, it's a career stopper or it's it's an admission of moral failure, weak fibre.
And it's there are other ways self-medicate by drugs and alcohol or by battering your wife or whatever.
So it's still very, very hard to get help.
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.
There were many in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they they kind of.
And one of my friends one of my friends does this, you know,
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,
known in a command unit known as the commander doing little seminars so that and then they do critical they for while
they're doing critical debriefing so if something happens people know where to turn and they already know the guys,
men and women that are hard to play. There aren't that many.
And coming home, it is still hard and sort of a joke to fill out these for these these post-deployment forms about.
Have you seen incidents close up how many times, you know, they'd rather be with their family,
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.
And the there are people on the road whose job it is to try to destigmatize.
Your figures seem to be very, very different.
And I don't know if it's the reporting mechanisms, self-reporting or, you know, National Health Service continues,
whether you feel like we get a shot of army at the military and that's our National Health Service.
And then there's the VA,
which is a behemoth bureaucracy that you have to fight and kill yourself before it gets service of National Health Service isn't difficult.
So I don't I don't know the ins and outs. This is the sort of thing I was in conversations like.
So. Wesley But I know you have a different culture and I don't know how it feeds into it.
My soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen want to be called heroes.
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.
Yeah.
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.
It does feel to be talking about this, not just that it's different, the UK is different, but the country experiences too.
Well, yeah, yeah. And in much of this and you know what you would think in terms of some of this,
but if you're right, the vocabulary is often different and the expectations are different.
But paradoxically, of course, I mean, I'm sorry because I should be asking questions,
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
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,
which you're essentially in some ways, you know, present while only getting 10% discounts.
Oh yeah. Why, why, why?
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.
But then, of course, the question that some of them now raise is actually were funny, very hard to withdraw.
You know, we're being told to stop giving support because all of us must miserable.
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.
We have some. We're quite one in three, apparently. Simon has said, you know, you're you are using the same measures.
I don't know if the self-reporting is. Yeah. Yes, but his name excuse me.
My name is Napoleon and I'm reading history at St Anthony's.
And I just got here nine days ago from Reuters in Iraq and I just wanted to comment on it.
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.
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.
I was a senior lecturer at the the U.S. military's counterinsurgency centre in Taji, Iraq.
And if I could just make a quick comment, you know, just maybe for the throw out for for for everybody,
I think there is a tendency to think about Iraq for not so good war, Afghanistan, the good war, as you mentioned.
But I would say something that I noticed recurrently over time, especially with our young soldiers and maybe even the elders like me,
is there's a tendency to think of whether it was World War Two of UN where everybody was united
and we really were fighting animated was clearly almost universally seen as the bad guys.
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.
You know, we didn't have TV in Iraq, by the way. All the military sit around, watch TV all the time.
And, you know, we don't have advertisers. And I can watch British Forces television there and watch the advertisements, which was great.
We didn't have advertisements on American TV and I think because of war.
So they had what we would call public public interest broadcasts of different spots.
And there were always I mean, I couldn't watch 2 hours of TV.
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
even a general talking about there is no stigma if you report your problems.
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.
So I just wanted to throw that out to you to give a slightly different perspective on the suicides.
I don't have any doubt of the fact that it's been disturbing me since I got there in oh five or six.
And we're seeing people kill themselves routinely in Iraq and also in the states.
Many military people, as you point out, traditionally the rate has been lower than the average, which I think is significant.
We had just recently, you know, started hitting what Americans in general are doing.
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.
It's over problems they've got at home.
And because they are often in their third or fourth year away from their family over the last six or seven or eight,
that they are unable to to address those problems.
Well, I don't know the tail wagging the tail, as they say it.
There's no doubt that there is a moral battlefield survey.
And certainly one of the signs of stress that was coming as deployments increased was home relations,
domestic relations, marital relations, and also treatment of civilians abroad in the in the combat area.
There is no doubt that it that many of the soldiers are young and have difficult marriages to begin with.
And always and always, infidelity is an issue and coming home is hard.
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,
you have three weeks at home and then you're really doing stateside what you would be doing elsewhere in terms of retraining.
So, you know, I don't know. It's symptomatic and causal, but it's mixed and the strains and stresses compounded each other.
Yeah, but if the guy's got to show high blood out,
these are the some of the learnings and differences between the two or 3.4 year following Vietnam is for the military.
The phrase always so, so many aspects of his with Don Quixote.
Apart from this, of course, and even socialism costs in terms of organisation and just the whole structure be as well.
Do you think that the current pattern of deployment of the current U.S. rate, if you will, of the military is sustainable.
And if it's not. Are we going to see these? What happened after that.
The conversations were so wild and effective and able to do this kind of overs long time overseas.
Well, it's certainly overstretched over strain already.
And I presume, you know, there's massive reconsiderations of this already, a lot of policy analysts in that regard.
So I can't quite say what's what's what's going to happen.
But there is the psychological injuries as well as moral injuries that I'm addressing,
which remain amongst the qualia are something that we're an anticipated nor fighting wars,
each of which is longer you know, than the major wars that we we've fought this century, this past the past century.
So, yes, there will be enormous policy implications.
But I don't know what they will what they will look like. Well, we have ruled the state of apology.
I mean, a conscription I can't imagine it ever going through Congress.
Simply can't imagine. That would happen. She will win 400,000 plus.
Two great questions. I suppose the first was Mustang was climbing with suicide rates now at an all time high.
We have an unprecedented level so far after conference of the month.
Some months have suicide rates that are higher bands than amongst the general population.
As my understanding varies a little bit and it's not all you know, many of them are stateside,
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,
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,
which is a self-described middle class service compared to, say, Vietnam, to be in generation.
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?
I can't imagine that wars become more or less dramatic in many instances, I'm sure veterans going.
So incredibly traumatic things and also the home, the domestic situation.
I can't imagine this child infidelity process longing. What does seem to have changed is sort of soldier society relations at that time.
Change of citizen soldier where most of the adult male population this come together to tonight.
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.
Is there something that we need to educate our society about how we construct the soldier,
how we engage with the best terms of how politicians construct the discourse?
Next, what you saying that they want to be seen as heroes?
Well, there's a strong saying that the British soldiers had some animosity about the American
soldiers and then they dissatisfied the plaintiff by giving them the 10% discount.
Not only, well, I'll go backwards, I do think. Absolutely not.
Military civilian relations have to be restructured and many, many barriers broken down and some sense of sharing.
Absolutely. As well as just empathic understanding, which is part of what I'm trying to do.
On the question of why suicide rate is so high, you know, all the studies suggest that the stress of long deployments,
multiple deployments, some upward of seven, nine years of war,
many reserves and guards not expecting it, hoping to get education or some other kinds of training,
coming home, often finding that they that they're untrained for what is available, an incredibly awful economy.
So reasonable grievances, I would say, as well as many other factors.
And I do think that the mission, the lack of clarity and perhaps cause common cause issues,
cause conflict issues, as well as the strain of counterinsurgency.
You know, this is not this is not doing it in terms of studies,
but certainly that some of the information suggests and some of the survey suggests some moves over the last question.
Thank you again for part of this discussion focuses on very intimate exchanges like the examples of the check point.
I was wondering if you had a chance to talk through any drone pilots where killing is conducted from a facility in Nevada?
Jonathan Glover His book specifically talks about the moral difficulties of growing at a distance.
And drone pilots have actually had one of the highest suicide rates of any unit.
And if you see differences between those kinds of soldiers in that type of service versus most of the passenger fighters.
Peter Singer and the other figures here at the Brookings has come to my class and talked,
has done amazing work from child workers, but also wired for more is a government who suggests a few things.
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,
halfway around the world with a distance and a sense of trying to fight that by putting
Air Force uniforms on individuals so they know they're going they're going to war.
We're just going to a different kind of work. So some of and a sense of being themselves very well-protected,
very vulnerable and making civilians extremely vulnerable, that that's not easy morally to to swallow.
Secondly, they are very isolated from their unit.
So there's that moral alienation. And thirdly, they do see very graphically what's going on through their monitors.
I have not seen it myself. I've seen it reproduced on television.
It's not quite the same thing, but it's hard. So there's going to be a lot.
There is for different reasons. Certainly that stress.
I would also say, you know, pilots will often tell me, you know,
we don't carry the same baggage as those on the ground, but we carry different kind of baggage.
And it is true that there are these FAA functional MRI studies that suggest, you know,
just the up close killing of that's foreseen, but unintended kind of reads in your brain.
The limbic system a little bit like intended killing is sort of potential killing and distant foreseen
but unintended when you're flying high doesn't it to get comparable doesn't quite read the same way.
It's not as it's not a close encounter in the same way.
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.
So I was just talking about it. Mobile Nation, am I really carrying the burden?
I, you know, I'm safe. My buddies are. This can't be easy.