 Hi, everybody. Thank each of you for coming out today. My apologies for those of you that didn't get books. Our mission as an organization, this is actually an organization, is twofold. One is to inspire other veterans through these stories to tell their own stories, with the conviction and the belief that telling the story and sharing the story of the impact of war on you and your service time is a crucial step in the healing journey home, because war leaves you impacted for the rest of your life. And I think you will hear stories from these veterans today about that. Our other mission is to educate civilians about the veteran experience, particularly folks just like you, student groups, and veteran service providers is another group. Most Americans don't have contact with veterans. Fewer than 1% of our population are in uniform. America is set up a society where we're really very effectively able to isolate ourselves from our veterans, the impact of their experiences on them, and our wars. People tend to get their knowledge or their beliefs about war from either video games or movies. If you talk with a veteran, I'll quickly tell you that's not our experiences. I think you'll hear that today. So we are an organization. The books I gave out to you today are literally the very last boxes of our first printing of over 5,000 copies, which we've distributed in the last year. We've done another printing. I told Kendall I will ship a couple more boxes to his office. If any of you did not get a book today, you'd like one, check with Kendall in maybe 10 days or the next two weeks. Hopefully he'll have books to give them to you. People who read the book, guys, I'll just tell you. A lot of people do shed tears when they read some of these stories. This is not light reading. This is not the stories of gallantry and heroism that Americans tend to prefer to hear. This is the stories right from the veteran's mouths. They're stories. The stories, as I say, that they need to tell us, not the stories that we want to hear. And if you talk with veterans, they'll say over and over and I tried to talk and people did not want to hear the story I needed to tell them. Today they're going to tell you the stories they need to tell you and I really appreciate you guys being here to listen. This is Jeremy Grisham and Jeff Radcliffe, Joe Porter, Brandon Metales, a great diversity of experiences. We have another veteran, Mike Farnham, who is en route. So the rather beleaguered looking man who's going to come in shortly is going to be Mike and he will also speak. They're going to read a short excerpt from the story, their story in the book, a couple of paragraphs that they have chosen, and they may choose to just speak some thoughts that they have. Hopefully they will kind of tell you their branch of service and their deployment times here. But Joe, we were going to start with you. So Joe Porter, everybody. All right, guys, you in. So I just give you a quick background. I'm from Maine and basically the only two ways to get out of Maine is to join the military or you get really good grades, you know, go to college. And I did not get a good grade. So I joined the military and I went into the infantry and I had the option to join the honor guard, which is stationed in DC, which is a pretty nice place to be stationed. You know, it's a pretty prestigious unit, hard work. And I signed up in 2000, so I'm barely millennial. I still remember like dial up and getting disconnected, you know, and your friends call you. So yeah, I joined right before 9-11 happened and this is my story being there in DC at the day that the Pentagon got hit. So there's a lot of details I won't go into that I recommend you read in the book firsthand, but I'm just going to kind of give you a firsthand account, like the days of us, of our job there, just to lead up to where I'm going to start here. After the Pentagon got hit, there really wasn't enough military in DC at the time to, because we went to like full on alert and we needed people pulling security everywhere. So basically we just didn't sleep for a long time, you know, we're just pulling security at our base at McNair, which is in Southeast DC, and then in Mayer, which is in Virginia, it's right outside of Arlington, Virginia. If you ever go there, all the gray site is a pretty remarkable place to go. If you're in the history there, it's pretty interesting. So yeah, we were pretty exhausted, but one of the other duties we were tasked with is helping recovery operation at the Pentagon, like going in after everything was, you know, fires had died out and do recovery. So I'm going to start here. So one of the things is, I see pieces of plane everywhere and there's a lot of conspiracy to series theories that there wasn't a plane, that it was just an explosion, something that was set up, somehow we bombed our own people. When I hear those lies, I get angry sometimes. I saw the actual remains of people in the plane and I spent a lot of time digging through the rubble. I saw a lot of bad stuff. When our shifts over, we stumble out of the Pentagon and they spray us off. We take off our hazmat suits and we're exhausted physically and mentally. The first couple of days they give us water and sandwiches. They have cots for us to rest on, but in the days after 9-11, there was a big rush of support. We noticed more and more businesses started setting up camp right outside the area, giving us free stuff. It was a competition. Donald started giving away free hamburgers and then the next day Burger King showed up giving away free whoppers. The day after that there was a steak chain that gave us sirloin and potatoes in between shifts. Free massages to anybody who wanted them, but I never really took them up on the offers. When we get out of their hazmat suits, we're all sweat and gross, but people come and rush to give us things. Hey, do you want a sandwich? They ask, a bottle of cold water, energy drink. We didn't have a lot of time to relax, even though there was all this stuff offered to us. We were basically there to work and then when we weren't there, we were sent back to our base. It was pretty incredible seeing all this happen. Being stationed in DC, we sometimes felt like, with so many colleges around, whenever we went out, and I felt like people looked down at us and stuff. I remember going to college parties and sometimes people were like, well, at least we got into college and stuff like that. So it was fun, definitely a fun place to stay, but we weren't expecting 9-11 to happen, obviously, and the job ahead of us. One of the stories that just came to me recently of there were all kinds of senators coming around shaking hands and stuff like that. People I didn't recognize because I wasn't into politics of that age, but I remember one day we were standing there just standing around and waiting and all these bright lights are shining down on us and I see a group of huge guys coming towards us and all my friends just turned away and I'm just standing there and I see and one of them reaches out and I'm like, oh, this is Jesse Jackson. I shake his hands, his hand's huge, and he said, thank you for your service and walked away, so that was pretty cool. I don't see a lot of famous people living in Maine, so unless there's a Stephen King movie filming or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, all right, thank you. So Joe mentioned, so Joe, as he said, was doing recovery at the Pentagon in literally the hours after 9-11 and that was a little over 18 years ago and I know I'm in a room with some folks possibly who are not born at that time. I can tell you, if you talk with anyone who might have a little gray hair like myself, you remember precisely where you were when you learned about that. That was an earth-shaking event in this country and it's one thing I've been interested in is how history gets lost and then passed on and for folks that lived it, it's a very different experience for folks that weren't old enough to experience it at the time. We're gonna have Jeremy Grisham come up here next. Please forgive me because I have experience speaking in public, but this is the first time reading an excerpt of my recollection of my own history and it's weird. I'm sorry, oh sorry, can you hear me okay? Little closer, sorry. So my name is Jeremy Grisham in the book. I'm listed as Emmanuel Wright. I asked to use a pseudonym because there are details in my story, frankly, that I'm ashamed of and it's hard facing the truth. So with that said, I had initially planned to read one excerpt and then I decided to read something else because frankly I lacked the courage of what I see as being held accountable in front of so many people. And with that said, I was a Navy hospital corpsman. I joined in 1993. I was a high school dad and so with that I was like, I need a future. I need to be able to raise my children. And so I joined the Navy and I spent most of my career working with CB units and I'm just gonna use, it's like a slang, POG Marine Corps units, persons other than grunts and in naval hospitals. And in 2002, I was transferred to Second Battalion Fifth Marines out of Camp Pendleton, California. And that's where, that's the unit I deployed with to Iraq in 2003 during the invasion. This is what I'm going to read is happened just outside of a town called N Numanaya. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but it's off the Tigris River. And we were pushing, pushing up us before we were in Baghdad, and we're just pushing up in a big convoy and just kind of doing what we wanted to do. And I was in the last, in the last track. The track is like this fibrous assault vehicle sort of thing. It's like a tank except for a turret. It has like a 50 caliber machine gun and then like a grenade launcher, you know? And so we're in this, we called it a mobile ambulance. And it was me, my doc, and three other corpsmen. We're the last vehicle in the convoy and I'm looking at the back little window, port hole, hatch or whatever. And I see this truck, it's, I don't know, maybe two or three football fields back. And it's getting a little bit closer. It's this white truck. It's kind of like every truck you see in Iraq, it seems. And all of a sudden it swears off the side of a road. And I'm gonna start reading though. Sorry, I'm gonna start going off from the weeds. A father is driving a pickup truck full of people. He gets too close to the convoy and the Marine shoots. I'm not sure which Marine. He was a really good shot though. The Marine is following orders by shooting and the Marine is shooting because he will do anything to protect his brother Marines. It really was like an order, you know, no warning shots. And so if people got too close and they threatened our security and so it was just part of what they did. It was a good shot. The shot goes directly through the driver's throat. It kills him instantly. The truck fears off the road and crashes several feet into the field below. And it was really strange because when I'm watching this truck, it just, it's almost like it floats. It just kind of floats down into this field of reed or whatever the crop was. And it just stops. We stop and then I go to treat the occupants. The body of the driver is laying out on the ground. His body is laying in mud and the blood from him is intermixing with the mud. The passenger in the cab, the passenger, his face is cut up from the shattered windshield. And I start sewing him up. The people who had been in the bed of the truck, you know, farm hands and that sort of thing. And we had taken them up to the top onto the road where we had them sit down in the circle. There's a young boy. After I finished sewing this man's face, I go up to see how to check on the other people and there's this young boy among them. One of the Iraqis speaks English and he says, you know, like, what's going on? He asked, how's the driver? And I didn't know how to speak English at that point and I just, I just shook my head. And the young boy is sitting right next to him. And as soon as he understands that, as soon as he understands what happens, his face contorts into a grimace and he wept. The Iraqi that spoke English told me that the driver was, his father, forgive me, the driver was his father. And that morning he had his sister, the family, the mother, father, brother and sister. The sister, the daughter was begging the father not to leave. And they, I mean, it's a war, but they still have to, you know, feed their family. So he was like, the daughter says, you asked them not to leave repeatedly and he said, oh, we're gonna go anyway. And they went and he died there in the mud. And what's not in the book is how people, my people celebrated the shock, the accuracy, the lethal accuracy of that Marines. Intent, another corpsman sticking his finger in the dead man's throat. And the fact that we didn't have the resources to clean up our mess and we left them there without a means to communication or transportation or a way to communicate with the family. And we left them there on the side of the road so that they could carry him home. And as our convoy started on again, that's exactly what they did. They picked them up and they went the direction opposite of where they're heading initially. I just wanna say that, I just wanna say that Iraqi people are some of the most beautiful people I've ever known. And I agree completely that veterans, veterans perspectives are important because these are perspectives of our community. It's my hope that we don't forget that the issue is bigger than veterans and there's people whose families have been broken, people displaced from their homes and people, too many people who are dead and we don't even know how many they are because it's just unimaginable because of this war. I think that's all I need to say, thank you. So we've done, I don't know, 15 or 20 events. This is the first event Jeremy has come to and I think you can kind of understand the enormous courage it takes to come and share a story with folks. You realize very privileged to get to be with Jeremy. He's really an extraordinary, I can tell you because I've gotten to know him and he's just an extraordinary individual because he's had to work through deep pain and grief and people of character can turn that into wisdom but the pain and the grief never go away. We thank you for coming. Jeff, you wanna come on up? Jeff Radcliffe. My name is Jeff Radcliffe. I grew up here in Washington up in Linwood. I joined the Navy when I was 17. I was a corpsman like Jeremy, basically a corpsman. We're like a dock. We do medical stuff for the Navy and the Marine Corps so you can work on ships, work in hospitals or be a green side corpsman and go with the Marine Corps or CVs and stuff like that and get deployed over to the Middle East or wherever there's a war zone going on. So I'm gonna read a little bit. If you got a book and you wanna follow along I'm gonna start on page 160 and I'll just get right into it. We're running non-stop convoy to Marja. 16 gun trucks accompanying loads of lumber and sandbags and Hesco barriers. Hesco barriers are eight foot tall, chain link cages, link lined with canvas. The Marines assemble the Hescos, each one flush against the other and fill them with earth and rock. They're building the defensive perimeter for a Marine fire base in Marja. Most of the world's opium flows out of Marja. It's the heroin center of the universe. Marines are going to flush the Taliban from the area and convince the farmers to plant mung beans, red radishes, alfalfa, watermelon and corn. They want the farmers to plant these instead of opium poppies. We've been awake for four days straight, grabbing 30 minutes of sleep when and where we can. We drive two hours from Camp Leatherneck to Marja, unload Hesco barriers, lumber and Marines and turn around. We drive by kids and farmers and donkeys. We drive by brightly painted Afghan trucks and the silent rusting hulks of shattered Russian tanks. We drive by the irrigation canals that line the roads and in and around Marja, smelling the foul green water. A film of scum floats on the surface. For four days we don't stop for anything other than gas. It's 4 a.m., it's pitch black except for the Milky Way blazing overhead. Our six wheeled MRAP truck creeps along at 15 miles an hour. Nobody's wearing their seatbelts, nobody's wearing their helmets. I'm asleep like most everybody else, but if I were awake, I'd hear our turret gunner shouting. He's hollering at the top of his lungs at Lance Corporal Ely. Ely's supposed to be driving the MRAP, but Ely's falling asleep at the wheel. Our turret gunner up top watches us slowly angle off the road towards the deep, fetid canal. Ely's a tall, skinny black kid whose white teeth are always showing. He has perpetual smile. He's the funniest guy in the truck. He's constantly cracking jokes and making us laugh. Ely, Ely, wake the fuck up, man. Ely, wake the fuck up. But Ely has been lulled by the quiet night and the monotony of the road and the fatigue of round-the-clock operations. He doesn't wake up. The front tire of the MRAP leaves the road and heads toward the dark water of the canal. The second tire leaves the road and down the steep bank. When the MRAP is on the cusp of rolling over, the gunner jumps down in the cabin. I wake up and realize I'm floating in warm water. My ears are filled with liquid and the world mediated with aqueous sounds of sloshing and creaking. I have no idea what's going on. I don't know shit. The only thing I know is I'm underwater. I figure out the MRAP's upside down and I stand up. Me and the two guys in the back are up to our armpits in warm, slimy water that smells like human shit and dead animals. You'd think it'd be a shock to wake up underwater, but no. Oh, I gotta get out, you think, blatantly. Commence MRAP emergency egress procedure. That's all. You just deal with it like it's normal. A lot of things become normal. The first time you get shot at, you get real excited. Your heart hammers, no way I'm getting out of the truck, you think, no fucking way. But you get shot at again and again and again. After the fourth or fifth time someone shoots at you, well, I gotta pee. I'm getting out of the truck, so tell that guy not to shoot me. It's really interesting going on a deployment, being 19, 20, 21 years old, and just the things you go through that are totally not normal, and they just become nothing to you, traumatic experiences or seeing horrible things or being a part of horrible things, and it's just, it becomes so normal that you don't even think about it, and then later on in life, whenever I sit down and read the book or talk to other veterans and tell stories and just sit around and bullshit around a fire, drinking beers, I don't even feel like I'm talking about myself, and it's just a whole, it's a whole different life, a whole nother world away, and it's just interesting to see how that affects you as you continue to age and grow up and deal with this stuff after the fact, so, thanks. I don't know if Jeff's told you, but he did three deployments to Afghanistan, three deployments. First two, my memory serves are nine days apart, and then as a corpsman, anyway, his story titled appropriately enough, tell that guy not to shoot me in there here. Let's see, Brandon, until Mike rolls in, we're gonna have you come up here, brother. Brandon Metalis. Well, I thank you. So, as Jeb said, my name is Brandon Metalis. I enlisted in the Marine Corps a couple months after 9-11. I was playing college soccer at the time, and just felt, I was actually recovering from a concussion, and so the whole week that it happened was kind of a blur, and by Friday after the towers fell on Tuesday, things kind of started to fall in place in my mind, and I was kind of beginning to understand the gravity of the situation, and with that understanding, I also felt a calling to do something bigger, to be a part of something bigger than just myself, and up until that point, I was 100% focused on soccer. I missed my high school graduation to go to a soccer tournament. My mom still gives me a hard time about that, but so yeah, soccer was my whole life, and then the military became a huge part of my life while being in the Marine Corps. So I deployed interesting circumstances, but I ended up deploying in 2004, and we landed in Iraq on September 11th of 2004, and after about a week, I was handpicked out of my unit to fly down to Kuwait and run an airport down there, so I spent most of my deployment in Kuwait running an airport, and my airport just happened to be where every military member came in and out of that airport, so whether they're coming into country to start their deployment or leaving country to go home at the end of their deployment, they came through us, and that included both living military members and military members who were killed in combat. So I ended up carrying 226 Marines and sailors who were killed in combat, their flag-draped caskets or their body bags on stretchers, sometimes having to go back in the morgue and help the Army guys do their thing as mortuary affairs people. So that's just providing a little bit of a context to what I did in the military, and now I will read you a short excerpt from the end of my chapter and then the end of my where-there-at-now section before I kinda just talk a little bit, all right? My mom was long asleep up in Seattle, 200 miles away when I called her. It was after one in the morning. The phone rang and rang, and then she answered, said, hello, what's going on, Brandon? There was no hiding the trembling in my voice. I told her that I was struggling, bad. I told her that I wasn't sure that I was gonna make it through the night. She said that she was getting her keys and coat and that she was coming to get me. She was driving to Portland to take me to the VA right then in the middle of the night. She'd be at my apartment before dawn. She was on her way, but the sound of her voice brought me back to somewhere I could hold on. Talking to her took me off the metaphorical ledge, at least for that moment. I told her then that I would be okay for the rest of the night. And she convinced me to go talk to somebody for the first time, and I did. I woke up the next morning and drove straight to Seattle and met her at the VA emergency room and had my first psych appointment. That was my path. That was my crossroads. She saved my life that night. If that was the one thing she was put on this earth to do, I'm still here because of it. At the time, I didn't believe that I would see my 25th birthday, and I turned 37 this year in August. Thank you. So now the last few paragraphs of my where they're at now submission. Telling my story and talking about these things is not an easy task. I have found it increasingly difficult to separate the emotion from the process of telling the story. Unloading everything that first time with Jeb face to face, it was powerful. It was meaningful, but it was also difficult. It brought a lot of things to the surface that I had unconsciously, that I had consciously and unconsciously suppressed for a long time. Vulnerability is scary, but it's also liberating. I gave a keynote speech to a large audience at a high school one year. It was terrifying, but you can see that when it's over, you're okay. The world is still spinning. The sun is still rising in the East and setting in the West and you still have a purpose. You don't have to be afraid of your past. Everyone has their own unique story and I don't understand how mine can affect others in a meaningful way. I know it does, but I still can't fully grasp why. These memories of things that I've done and seen and experienced, they almost ended me. Multiple times. Part of me does not understand how those same things also have the power to save a life or to positively affect change in another human being who doesn't know me. But the fact is, if indeed my story does have the power to save a life or change a life or the better, and if I can help just one person by talking about my struggles, my experiences, my demons, and my ascending path to success and happiness and joy, then it's all worth it. The pain of telling the stories and the pain of remembering the sights and sounds and smells and moments, it's all worth it. So it's really interesting. The paper that I was reading from in here, I made a note in it last year here at Highline when we were given a talk. And I made that note because it just popped in my head and a couple of weeks before I wrote it, I had met a woman at a festival type thing and got to talking about my story a little bit and then she just flat out asked me and it says right here, talk about being asked if I was a racist. Welcome to the heavy part of the talk. You thought the other stuff was heavy. I'd never been asked that before, before that moment and I'd never really put a whole lot of thought into it because you go through your training, you are taught in that training and indoctrinated in that training that these are the good guys and these are the bad guys, these who you want to protect and these are the enemy. So my answer to her question only took about three seconds but there was probably 10 years worth of mental processing going on in that three seconds and my answer was flat out yes, I was. I had to be, right? Unfortunately I had to be and so when you hear talks about the words being spoken about, that seems like a different life, doesn't even sound or feel like I'm talking about my story or reading about my experiences, I feel the exact same thing. I tell people all the time that it's like I watched this movie multiple times and it's ingrained in my head but it wasn't a movie, it was real life experience and I was 100% for a number of years prejudice towards a certain type of people and I just want to express to you how archaic that way of living life is. Those times are done, you cannot, you cannot judge people by their religious beliefs, by their skin color, by their sexual orientation, by their gender identity because at the end of the day we're all part of the same tribe and we're all trying to make it through this life as best as we can and we have to keep doing that and we're not gonna be able to do that alone. So if you get nothing else from your journey in life today, I hope it's just, I hope you take some time to reflect on how you treat people, right? How you treat the stranger on the street and how you treat your best friend. Are they different, are you different to those people? And if you are, ask yourself why. What about that person on the street that you know nothing about makes you treat them poorly compared to your best friend or your favorite family member that you know everything about? That's what's gonna help change this world. Approaching your daily life and every interaction that you have with people as if it's the last time you're gonna see your best friend. Show them love, show them respect, show them courtesy, offer to help, reach out a hand. You never know if you're gonna be the person like my mother was that saves that person's life that day because I guarantee you every single day on this campus you cross paths with somebody who is at the end of their rope who's on that ledge that I was on, that most of us veterans have at least flirted with in our heads if not actually stood there. And your ability to save that person's life could be as simple as a smile, could be as simple as a bottle of water, could be as simple as are you doing all right? It's not that difficult, but it is a choice. I had to make a choice. I had to leave my old way of thinking and looking at people far behind in my past. And while I may not be proud of that, who I was at that time, during that time of my life, I'm damn sure proud of the path that I have consciously taken to flip that script. It's a choice. It's a difficult one at times because everybody's raised differently. I was born in 1982 to a first generation Greek American father. And a wonderful mother who put up with that Greek American father, right? But certain words were okay to use in the household. Certain ways of talking about certain people were okay to use in the household. That was just how I grew up, right? But that's not how you have to continue growing up. Thank you. Brandon had referenced the where they're at now section. His story is the last story in the book and then after that is where they're at now. So it's an update. There are 18 stories in this book and these are updates of each of the individuals you've read about, kind of where they're at now. It also includes a photo of their service time. And one thing you might notice seeing Brandon now and looking at his photo back then is what a very young man he was. In fact, they all were at that time, you look at photos and realize we send very young people to war and they come home not young people at all. Philip Caputo who wrote a phenomenal book called Rumor of War about his time in 1965 in Vietnam said when I came home I was older than my father or at least I felt that way, psyche clay here. Brandon also had the courage to talk about suicide and veterans, some of you may know the number 22 that's out there, the number of veterans suicides a day and I kind of feel that's really one of the highest callings of the book is to inspire other folks, other veterans to tell their story and that's a way to try to make themselves feel whole and working through almost universal guilt for simply being alive when you know other people who are not, that's almost a universal attribute aspect of being a veteran. Brandon was on a podcast called This Is War and related his experience. A young man, a young veteran listened to that and was inspired to type up his own story. Did you read his story? Ryan Miles I think so. Interestingly he titled the young man who wrote his story up and he titled it don't thank me for my service. That was the title he put on his thousands of words. Don't thank me for my service which my experience with certainly veterans of the 9-11 generation is they find that a very awkward encounter to have people want to thank them and that might be something you would like to ask them. We're gonna open it up to Q&A guys. You're cool with that. Is that mic working there? Nope? Nope. What I know we've got these mics here I was also thinking I could walk around for people that are maybe too shy to walk on up and see if anybody would like to ask Jeremy, Jeff, Joe or Brandon. Some question you've got or some comment? Yeah. I'm gonna carry this one up to you. Hi my name is Noah Polowski. I grew up a dependent of a dad who served 26 years and first of all he didn't like to be thanked for his service either. It's kind of just what you go out and do it's not something that's a little extra. So I kind of grew up in the mode that more kind of like your mother than anything else. It was different seeing him leave and seeing him come back being nine years old and then being 11 years old and having a different person walk through the door. And what I wanted to ask about was it didn't really get hard for our family until after he retired. He had 26 years experience but he didn't have a bachelor's degree or a high school diploma. So it was more difficult dealing with your experience and then coming back and feeling like you're worthless to society. So I was wondering if any of you struggled with finding a career after you left the service and how you got through that personally. I'm 38 now and I'm just now basically starting my career as a graphic designer. So I definitely struggled trying to find my way. I was always into art but for some reason doing it as a career didn't strike me until later in my life and I realized what I really loved to do. And when you come out of the army depending on your MOS or your job I don't know what your dad did but if you're 11 Bravo like me it's infantry. You basically have like security job or the police and if you're not into either of those things then you're starting from square one. So yeah it's definitely a struggle for a lot of people. I got out of the Navy when I was 23 and doing medical stuff in the Navy. I got out of the Navy without even like a CPR card with no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I worked a lot of just pardon my language bullshit jobs for minimum wage. Doing security guard work mowing people's lawn. And you don't want to go to school and get an education because you're way older than everyone else you're going to school with and you're just in a weird place. I ended up living in my car for almost a year down in the desert in Arizona. And I'm turning 30 this year and I'm finally just starting to get going on a real career last year. Making some good money and have insurance finally and a little bit of money saved. Yeah it's tough when you get out trying to figure out what you want to do and how to get there for sure. I just want to say one of the toughest jobs in the military is that of a family member. And so I just want to raise my hand to you and your family for your resilience and everything that you've been through. One other thing he talked about was the person who goes to war is not the same one who comes back from war and almost a universal experience for wives and families. Any of you guys want to comment on that? Part of what he said. Coming back people always tell you you're different or your parents or your friends that you used to hang out with in high school. And it's hard to believe and it's hard to listen to and me personally at least. I got angry at people trying to tell me I was different or I changed. But I don't know maybe that's just being young and stupid but growing up a little bit. I definitely came back a different person and it's hard to admit that to yourself when you come back and there's a lot of guilt and shame associated with it but looking back, I'm not proud of the person that I came back as and the way I treated other people or the way I acted out in public. But you definitely 100% come back different and it takes a long time to accept that and become a normal person and try to fit back in again. Yeah, I mean one of the things my story touches on is like mental health and kind of dealing with that and kind of how underprepared the VA is with dealing with mental health and if there's one thing I would say from my story if you got read it, what you would get out of it is definitely try to, if you're struggling with anything try to get some help right away because it definitely turned my life around when I finally saw a therapist and kind of realized some of my learning disabilities and issues that I struggled with for so long and also stuff from the military and other things in my life and unfortunately veterans don't have much help at the VA. Like there'll be some groups you can visit but as far as like one-on-one help having a therapist they'll, this is very, very limited and it's like you would think that would be the number one thing like priority people would put you know when they talk about veterans you know politicians and everything especially with 22 suicides a day instead of talking about privatizing the VA and all this other stuff it's like can we just get mental health resources and start from there and yeah it would do people like your dad wonders cause like it's almost like a retiring athlete like athlete who's just like spent his whole life like working towards being an athlete and like it's just like that in the military when you get out you're thinking everything is with thinking about your brothers people around you, your job is all military and then you're thrown into the civilian world which you only like get a glimpse of every now and then and you're just kind of like feel like you're abandoned and if you don't have a great support network or even if you do it's a big struggle so yeah definitely if you know any veterans out there and another thing is a lot of veterans sometimes close off from their families and it's not always on purpose you know it's like so if you know anybody like that you know sometimes reaching out is hard but try to do it. I'll bring the mic up for you. Thank you for asking a question. I was just wondering if for someone that is thinking possibly about going into the military after high school is that something that you like I don't know if you'd like I don't know if recommend is the right word but like think would be a possible good choice for them especially career wise and if so what advice would you give them? Like going into just like going into like National Guard or the military or army or going into that career choice after high school. It's funny we were actually kind of just had an off the cuff conversation before any of you all arrived. I think there are amazing benefits and there are so amazing bullet points in the plus column and there's some definitely some negative column bullet points as well. My recommendation and this is just for me is to speak with veterans right speak about you know and try and get a diverse group of veterans you know whether it's a female from the army a male from Marine Corps this person that was an infantry this person that was logistics because recruiters and pardon me if there's any recruiters or family of recruiters in here. Recruiters are salesmen right they have quotas they have goals to meet and that comes down from much higher up so they tend to mind didn't I had a personal like friendship with mine prior to but they fluff stuff up and they try and make it sound like everything is brilliant and it's just like in this movie and it's this that or the other and they'll play to the cues that you're giving them. I want to do this okay let me tell you about how awesome that is. So I think it's a brilliant path for a lot of people you know based on whatever they're upbringing or family situation or lack thereof right it definitely has been an avenue for people to get out of the struggle and start a path towards you know happiness, success, joy whatever and it's also been the opposite for people so I think getting their first hand experience is so much more valuable than just going into a recruiting office and saying what can you offer me oh a $10,000 signing bonus sweet and that's spread out over two paychecks a month for the next six years so you get $43 extra a month and that $10,000 and you gotta pay taxes on it so there's a lot of fluff but I think veterans like us and other people you may know are in your network I think they'll give you the honest feedback and the honest account of what it's going to be like cause it's vastly different than the recruiting videos. Would you guys each be willing to talk about I think we're gonna get a diversity of answers on that one so. Yeah I would say you're reading these stories and a lot of them are very hard to read but I would after everything I'd definitely recommend it if you're thinking about it like if you're in that mindset where you are really interested in it and you definitely put research into it not just relying on recruiters to get all the information and learn what kind of benefits you get and really the benefits as a young person I didn't even think about the healthcare benefits that I do have and the college I was paid for looking back I definitely think it was worth it and obviously all the friends I met and stuff so if there's a job, if you're looking if it's available in the military if it's something that you think you could do also if you finish college and join the military sometimes you get a higher rank so sometimes that's the better way to do it and then they pay for your college so just look at the options available so I'll see. You asked us if we would recommend it my personal answer I tell everyone I know who has kids that are thinking about it or they're thinking about it I tell them not to. There's a reason that recruiters and the military target high schoolers and 19, 20, 21 year olds because we've all been that age we all thought we had the world figured out and we knew how things work and we were just we had life figured out and as you get older you start to realize that maybe you didn't know everything maybe you got used maybe you got manipulated and personally for me I have no pride in the fact that I was in the military it's nothing but shame and disgust with things that I was a part of things that I've personally done and things that were done with a group I was associated with but again everybody comes out of it with a different experience the only advice I guess I would give is try to get some civilian world real life experience before you make that decision there are good benefits to being in the military but just like everything else there's gotta be a balance if there's some really good things there's probably some really terrible things too I think I have two minds of joining the military I think I have two, three children one on the way, one's 25, one's 21, one's four and I thought with my daughters I thought well maybe it would be good for them to join the military and they would learn some good skills and strengthened up and that sort of thing they didn't need the military to learn their strengths and resilience and now I'm thinking about my son who's four and I'm thinking I would tell him no because I think that there are so many other ways to serve our country and our community but it's a deeply personal choice and if you do join I think that you'll do fantastic but I think that if you're looking to serve the community there's like a jillion different ways to do that and I think they're just as important as the military option would be. Thank you guys, we still have, we have a little more time anybody else have a question like to ask? Any other guys? Yes, yeah, let me give you the mic. Has your experience heavily influenced your political views since serving and I'm not necessarily looking for you to declare your political views or more just kind of that process and how you were influenced by your service? Yes, yes and no, I mean serving in the helping profession I've always been fairly liberally minded but my experience in the military is definitely kind of involved in my perspectives as far as what it means to, what social justice really means and what human rights means and that sort of thing and so yes it has, yes and no, strengthening my perspectives on the military. Yeah, absolutely, it's affected my political views. Kind of to touch on what Brandon was talking about earlier, you get so indoctrinated and surrounded by this culture of maybe not like hatred but these people are the enemy, these people are bad, kill, kill, kill and being that age in that environment formed some pretty strong, biased, personal and political opinions that were after growing up a little bit, not the healthiest to have. I've always been fairly conservative, I still am but I don't support either one of these wars, I don't support any other wars. I get it, there's a need for self-defense and defending democracy and all of that but I can't think of any more rights that I have now. I feel like I have less rights now than I did before I went to war or before my friends went to war and didn't come back. So it's affected my political views a lot, yeah. I mean, it definitely got me into politics after I got out, when my 20s wasn't really thinking too much about who I was voting for or anything. I'll just say that to me, I just recently the past couple of years I just got sick of politicians using veterans as a political tool and decided to finally just start speaking out on my own as a veteran and just kind of, yeah, making my voice heard on my own. For me, big part of my distaste for certain aspects of our political system happened when we were deployed and it was a presidential election year in 2004 and we were unable to get our absentee ballots in time to vote. So having been sent to the Middle East, being in the Middle East during an election cycle and not having the means to vote quite frankly really pissed a lot of us off and so for me, I guess if anything has evolved within my view of politics, it's more my approach to voting. I do not affiliate with any party. I look at the ballot, I research both sides of the ballot or the multiple candidates on the ballot and I make the best decision for myself and how I view this whole experience of life while also understanding that especially in Washington state, sometimes my views or my vote has absolutely no meaning just because of the political breakdown of the state or the party affiliation breakdown of the state. So sometimes I'm conservative, sometimes I'm more liberal and more often than not, honestly, my party of choice is just be a good person because at the end of the day, the stuff at the highest level doesn't really, I don't have any control over that much like I didn't have control over my ability to vote in 2004 and so just take it as it comes for me. Anybody else, great, thank you. I was wondering if you, with it being a volunteer army, do you think it would be more beneficial to institute the draft where people would, do you think it would end the wars quicker because more people would be more in tune to what's going on and care or do you think having the volunteer army is because the people who want to be there are there? I was gonna say, everybody I know in the military is glad that it's a volunteer army or Navy or whatever, because yeah, it's hard enough getting people from that civilian into becoming a soldier. I can't imagine drafting people and who have no desire to do it. And as much as some people can benefits from structure, that's not necessarily how they'll learn discipline and camaraderie and all that. I used to be a huge supporter of mandatory military service after high school, but the whole purpose and intent of our military is to defend our freedom. And if you're gonna force people to go to war and die and kill, that destroys the whole point of freedom, that people have the right and the freedom to choose. So I think it's a good thing that it's volunteer. Yeah, I think it should stay volunteer. I'm against forced servitude, but if we did something like that, it would be really interesting to see if we made it mandatory to serve the country in other ways for like a year or two. Yeah, so not just the military. I think people kind of like focus on military is the only way to serve, but there's so many different ways. And if we were to do something like that, then it would be cool to see how creative we could be with service.