 Hi, I'm Mike Yaffe. I am the vice president and chief civic engagement and scholarship officer here at USIP My name is Patrick Spiro, and I'm the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon This new series at USIP, which is called First and War, First and Peace, is really a program that is set up to engage and to learn from military veterans. These are the people that are at the tip of the sphere They're the ones who actually are seeing the conflicts first in and they many many of them really say that we need to find ways through nonviolent course, nonviolent actions in which we can resolve these conflicts. As an inaugural program it seemed most appropriate that we begin with the ultimate veteran, George Washington. And George Washington was of course the veteran of the Revolutionary War who having experienced war had come to this conceptualization of saying that how do we prepare the country for peace? What is it that we need to do in order to make sure that we don't end up in further war? One of Washington's most important addresses one that is not well known today came in 1783 as Washington himself was retiring from the Army and many of the soldiers who had fought to secure American independence were going to return to their homes. And they were anxious. They were unsure what the future was going to hold for them. What they were going to what being a citizen was going to mean. This transition from being a soldier to a citizen was really on the top of everybody's mind. And so Washington in November of 1783 delivered an address, farewell to the troops, and in it he emphasized the importance for soldiers to continue to fight for the Republic, to preserve the country that they had secured as citizens engaged in their communities advocating for a greater union and the policies that were going to preserve the country for posterity. First we hope to do something annually on Veterans Day, and particularly to honor veterans. We also hope to do activities around Memorial Day and more importantly we also want to be able to reach out to the various veteran councils and groups and organizations throughout the country as we start to engage them on the notion of what is happening in conflict and what could be done to bring peace.