 Ryan Smithson is here. He is one of those who was interviewed, and he's going to share a little bit about his story, Ghosts of War. This is when he served in Iraq, and also Rob Spoor, who was one of those who was interviewed, is here as well. He's going to talk a little bit about the importance of sharing stories through writing with a wonderful organization called Songwriting with Soldiers. Ryan Smithson is one of those who was interviewed for this project, and he felt strongly about doing something after the tragedy of 9-11. He joined the Army Reserve when he was out of high school, and at the age of 19 was deployed to Iraq. He shares his experiences in his book Ghosts of War, and these books will be available for sale, and Ryan will sign them after the program. So let's give Ryan a very warm welcome. Thank you Gail for putting this all together. This is just phenomenal. How many people you've touched and helped. Really awesome. Alright, so I'm going to talk a little bit about my service, my book, the War and the Army, and all that. But first I want to talk about this movie. Who knows what this movie is? The Sandlot. Who has not seen the movie The Sandlot? Alright, you got to see it. So this movie came out when I was a kid. And those of you who have not seen it, I'll give you a little bit of a background story. So this is the theme of kids, and they play baseball in a sandlot in their neighborhood. And the kid in the middle in the white shirt holding the ball, that's Scotty Smalls. And Scotty is new to the neighborhood. He doesn't really know anyone. He's kind of a dork. And he shows up to play with these guys, and he grabs the ball and he tries to throw it, and it goes about... So need to be closer? Alright, can you hear me in the back? Everyone's good? Alright. So Scotty shows up, he tries to throw the ball, and it goes about two feet in front of him, and Wayne's there. He's totally embarrassed. So he runs away, and all the other kids will laugh at him. Well the guy in the end here, Benny, in the half, he decides he's going to kind of take Scotty under his wing, and he bites him back out, and he's like, nah, I don't think I want to. Benny talks him into it, he comes back out, he shows him how to throw a ball, he shows him how to hit. And the other kids take a little while for them to warm up, but they need a nice guy to play, and Benny's like, come on, give him a shot. So they go through some antics, and then one day, oh, I have to mention this, behind the fence is this giant man-eating dog named Beast, and so every time they hit a ball over this fence, they can't get it back. So they're playing, and Scotty, they lose a ball, and Scotty says, well, I got one, nobody else has a ball. Scotty says, I got one, my old man's got one, and stepped it. It's in his trophy room, he doesn't tell me when it's in the trophy room, he just tells him, I got a ball, I'm gonna run and grab it, he grabs this ball, he brings it back out, he's playing with it, and Scotty doesn't know anything about baseball, he doesn't know what the significance of this ball was, but he starts playing with it, and Scotty gets his first homer, gets his first homer with the ball, and everybody's like, yeah, awesome, you made it, don't worry about it, we'll get another ball, and then he realizes, oh, no, I can't, I gotta get the ball back from my stepdad, no, don't worry about it, man, we'll find you, we'll figure it out. He says, no, that ball was special to sign by someone, they're like, what do you mean? He says, it was signed by Babe Ruth, and he thinks it's some girl that gave him a gift, she doesn't know anything, so in the rest of the stories, I'm trying to get this ball back, and they try, and they can't figure out how to do it, and then toward the end of the movie, right before the big climax, Benny has a dream, and in that dream, Babe Ruth visits him, and he says, listen kid, everybody gets one shot in life to do something great, and most people don't take it, most people are too scared, or they don't see it when it's right in front of them, and Benny decides he's just got to jump over the fence and get this ball, I won't ruin it for you, so I went out for baseball, I played Little League, ended up like that guy, it was not very good, they stuck me out in the right field because I sucked, and one time I actually did catch a fly ball, and while I was celebrating, two guys scored, baseball was not my thing, I went out for football, it's not actually me, I did football when I was in middle school, it was alright, but I didn't really love it, I'm kind of a smaller guy, and I wonder what my big chance was going to be, it wasn't baseball, it wasn't football, it's not track, I wonder what was going to be my big shot in life, it was I going to take, it was I going to be too scared, and so that was sort of what I'm thinking about as I'm growing up, movie influenced a lot of people that way I think, and I got into my senior, or excuse me, got into high school, and I went out for wrestling, and I was talking to my buddy Brian, who I was in a band with, we were in a little garage band, we jammed out, and it was the summer before 9th grade, and I was talking to him, I'm kind of just too small, I'm not really great at sports, and it's sort of hard for me to keep up, and he says, why don't you go out for wrestling, you're teamed up against people your own size, and I'm like alright, so I went with Brian to practice that first season, and something about it spoke to me, I don't know what it was, I just liked it, and the coach came out to me that first practice, and he said, who are you, what are you doing here, because he knew everyone in the wrestling, they all went to wrestling since they were kids, and he didn't know me, and I said, I'm Brian, my buddy brought me in here, and he goes, what do you think, and I said, I really like it, he said alright, stick around, and I did for all four years of high school, and I was never great, I never won sectionals, I never did anything special, but each year I got better, my first year I won one match on JP, by second year though I made it to varsity, and I won some more, third year and fourth year, and I ended up doing better than I had done that first year, and that's what mattered, and I don't fully know even now what it was about wrestling, that drew me to it, but I think what I liked about it is that it's just you, you can't blame it on the quarterback, you can't blame a loss on the pitcher, it's you and you alone, and sometimes you get taken down, and sometimes you get to take the other guy down, and sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win, and at the end of the day you gotta stand back up and put your toe on that line and go out for it again, and I think that personal accountability is what I liked about it, and it's what got me through a lot of those tougher times that were yet to come in the Army and elsewhere. So I was 16, my junior year, and I walked into my American history class and my teacher said something that I'll never forget, he said, you guys are living history right now. I never really thought of myself as living history, history was some boring thing I had to study in school and pass the test score and a bunch of old dead people that didn't really matter to me, but I realized on that day that history is alive, that we are a product of history, whether we know it or not, and I was in fact living history and these young people up here doing what they did today, this is history for them, they don't remember this, so it's really come full circle. So that was what prompted me to want to join, I wanted to do something, I didn't really know what yet, I was only 16, and in my senior year I decided I wanted to join the Army and I started talking to a couple of different branches, a couple of different recruiters and the reserves was a nice option because I wasn't totally sure if I wanted to do the military thing, I didn't come from a family where everybody served or anything like that. So the reserves gave me that balance and I went in as an engineer so I would be doing construction basically. And I went to basic training, that was eye opening, that's a drill service, and for me basic training was a total loss of freedom, they take everything you have, they shave your head, and you are not an individual anymore and it's really antithetical to the way we kind of think of life here in America that you're a special little star and you need to go follow your dreams and it's no shut up and get in line and if you don't you're going to get somebody killed because the stakes are just that high. So it has to be that way, everyone relies on each other and like a wrestling team or like a football team, I like that about it, that camaraderie and pushing yourself, the mental toughness, I felt pretty well prepared with wrestling. So I came home from my basic training, came home from my job training and this was 2004, so the war in Afghanistan had been going on for a couple of years, the war in Iraq had been going on for about a year and if you talk to people who were first there in Iraq, it was simple and easy, it went, we topped the Saddam, it was over, you could walk around the streets of Baghdad without body armor just talking to people. And then the insurgency thing started happening more and more and so by the time I got deployed this, I wasn't infantry, I wasn't cavalry, I was not an airborne ranger or anything like that. But it was an insurgency, it was guerrilla warfare so if you were out and about, I didn't know where I was going to be going or what I was going to be doing. And that sort of unknown quality of it is one of the, I think most terrifying things is you just don't know, you don't know what's going to happen day to day. And so before I left, my girlfriend Heather, who I had in high school and he was here tonight, with our kid, she had been there through basic training, she had been there through job training, she had been there when I was thinking about and listening, saying what the hell's wrong with you? Why would you think to do that? And so I didn't think it was right to leave her without a ring on her finger. The army doesn't care about your girlfriend, they don't care about your fiance unless they're your next of kin, they don't get that phone call if something happens to you. So we got hitched real quick, shotgun style when I found out I was being deployed. I ended up 2004, we had our reception at Bukit Apepo, not in Albany because we needed to place on short notice, I could hold like 30 people. So that was it. So we got married and then I left. I went over to, first I met my unit in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I did not know anyone from my unit, my reserve unit back home was in Kingston, but I wasn't deployed with them, I was deployed with the unit out of West Virginia, we met in North Carolina, we had people from all over the states, one guy was from Hawaii, we had a bunch of people from Texas, Alabama, North Dakota, you name it, we had people from all over, a couple hours away from here. So I didn't know anyone. I'd show up at Fort Bragg and it's training time and you get to know each other and you train and you figure out what you're going to do. And then we went over to Kuwait. We flew over there for three weeks, three, four weeks, just trained up. We had all our engineering equipment so the Navy brought that stuff up through the Persian Gulf, we picked it up in a little pork city in Kuwait. We got it all up and running and then we pushed north into Iraq. So that's my platoon sergeant, that's my buddy Scott behind me and then that's the dump truck that I drove. So I was licensed to drive in the Army, a five ton dump truck, bulldozer, scraper, loader and a grader. So that's what I operated. So basically all the stuff you see I'm like a construction site. That's what I was operating giant 20 ton dump trucks. We had tractor trailers, we had all sorts of stuff. And so in Kuwait one of the things we had to do was cross train on all these other things we might have to drive during the year. They let us license ourselves on whatever we want because it was just quick and easy. So we had this license printed out with all these vehicles. Somebody figured out, could have been me, what the license number was for motorcycles so we'd all license ourselves on motorcycles. We didn't have motorcycles. We figured might as well have the license for it. So you do things kind of quick and dirty in the Army sometimes. So anyway, that was my dump truck. I had driven it one time before that just to get familiar with it. It's like a stick shift and I had my platoon sergeant in my passenger seat. And then because we had so many people we had a bunch of guys in the back. We had made, we had like makeshift welded these like mounts for weapons so we could hang on to the side if we needed them. But they were just standing on duffel bags for three days into the center of Iraq. And Iraq is not like Kuwait, right? Kuwait is very pro-American. Iraq, we knew there were people there who were not pro-American and who were trying to kill us. And so you just don't know what to expect. You have no idea. The only thing I knew about the Middle East before joining the Army was people you know, burning flags and whatever else. So that's kind of what you expect. You don't know if that's going to happen. The village and its kids, lying in the streets, they're all keeping thumbs up. They're begging for food. A lot of them didn't have shoes on. And it was, for me, and I know for a lot of my unit it really became human for us very quickly. It was not about the politics. It wasn't even fully about the mission. It was always about the mission. But wherever we were, wherever we could do it was, we did what we could for those kids, because that's the future. Those kids are not, those are the ones who are going to decide whether the war means anything, not politicians, not the news media. And so we wanted to have a positive effect on these people. We're just going to be there doing construction, but if we can throw them water when they need it, if we can throw them MRAs and stuff. One of my buddies said, we can't share water in a desert culture. We can't do anything here. And one of our operating procedures, what he was talking about is we weren't allowed to throw water from our vehicles because kids were getting hit in the street and stuff, so that's bad PR for the army. But we did it anyway. So this is, we were, this is the Tigris River. So all the youngsters out there studying Mesopotamia and Babylon and all that good stuff. It's right here. And there was a bridge that went over it for the military. There's a civilian bridge next to that you can see on the left. And then there's this road that was going over. There was like a tariff in turn that we had to widen because some of the bigger trucks were getting caught there. They couldn't get around it. Bad stuff was happening. So we came out and leveled this land while the local sheep came out and was talking about the tenant. And he said, hey, we're bringing dirt there anyway from a borrow pit. And they got shoveled wheelbarrows and we have 20 ton dump trucks. We're like, yeah, sure. So we stayed out there for an extra week and we brought them a whole bunch of dirt and helped out that family. The women out of the village came out and brought a squad for the one day. So it was stuff like that, we're there doing road work for the army but anything we could do for the people was really what I think mattered. This is another mission. It's like the moon dust. It's not even like sand. It's not like a beach. And when it gets wet in their wet season, which was what we call winter, it just rains there. And it turns into like peanut butter is disgusting. So we would, on a lot of bases, you see stones, a lot of pictures of like bases overseas. You'll see stones everywhere. That's why it helps minimize some of that dust and for dust storms, and we put this outside of their posts because people were digging in the dirt, which is easier to dig in than rocks and hiding mines and all sorts of stuff. So there's a number of reasons we spread rocks everywhere. So we would take them from a borrow pit and bring them rocks. This is like just hot dirty dusty work that they don't make video games about this stuff. But it's a very important part of the military doing what it does. We were attacked on this mission. We didn't lose anyone, but a lot of civilians in Iraqi army soldiers, who were allies at that time were killed in there. But they were going after us. That's the infantry post. I think it was a hospital or something, and the infantry occupied it for the interim to try to keep peace in Samara. Samara was kind of a hotbed. A lot of people there This is Abu Ghraib prison. So we were leveling land in Abu Ghraib. That's myself on the left and my buddy Green on the right. The Abu Ghraib is right outside Baghdad. It's right in that fertile crescent part of Iraq. So part of being the fertile crescent is there is a lot of groundwater. You don't always know where it is, and so we're digging and doing what we do. The hard pack to the ground is very hard. It's like coming and until we went a little too deep trying to clear some of this land out and one of our dozers got stuck. So we had to get another dozer and hook up chains and pull it out and that dozer got stuck. And it just became like this sinkhole. It was just madness and it extended our mission forever. So we had to get a hydraulic excavator and hook up chains to pull one dozer out and the other dozer out. So that was fun. The other dozer was actually totally buried in Baghdad. This is also something we did a lot. So you'll see these. These are called Hasco Barriers. You'll see these a lot in pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan. They're just big sandbags. They're nothing too special. This was, I think we were making a fuel station or something at a base north by Mosul. That's a dust level. So in comparison, you see that little square on the left that's a tractor trailer. I thought about this in the book but that tractor trailer is going by. You don't halt a convoy for anything. You never want to stop. You want to just keep moving. Even when something blows up, you move if you can't. So this thing came across the road and I drove right through the middle and I had no idea what was going to happen. I'm like, oh my God. But I wasn't going to stop. So it was fun. But pretty wild. It runs in some weird stuff. This is a sandstorm. You see more than 50 meters ahead of you. So we would just stop and hope nobody tried to attack us and we'd just hang out until it cleared and then keep rolling. So this is our day-to-day. We're just moving around, doing stuff. There's a lot of beautiful scenes in Iraq. It's a very old country. There's a lot of history. In the winter when there is clouds, clouds otherwise, but when there is clouds it's very pretty and it's some very beautiful architecture. You've got a very super old country, and it starts in Iraq. And the stuff that you don't talk about when you come home. And the army really, whoops, too far. The army really trains you to shut things off, to ignore stuff. Because if you think with your heart when those bullets are flying you're going to get yourself killed you're going to get somebody else killed. So you have to think with your head. You have to rely on your train. And what they don't do is when you come home and it, for me, all those emotions and things that I was just sort of like stuffing down and ignoring because I had to for the mission. It didn't disappear. It's still there. I was just ignoring it. And they started to come up on their own. I was having night terrors and things. Some people go through a lot, a lot worse. I didn't have it so bad. But you don't know what to do I hadn't talked about it again. You're just kind of scared and you're ashamed of yourself. And so you don't talk about it. But the problem with that is those good things that we were doing. That also doesn't come out. So civilians don't know what it's like. They don't know what we're really doing over there. And that's a problem. You know, I was very bitter when I came home. I was mad that nobody knew. But it's up to us to make sure people know. That's why events like this are so important to have that dialogue, to talk for people to listen. And fortunately for me about a year after I got back I wrote an essay for an English class at Hudson Valley and it felt very therapeutic to get it out. I just wrote this essay. I didn't really expect to do anything with it. Looking back I think it was easier for me to write that essay and give it to a professor who I didn't know versus giving it to my wife or talking to my wife about something because the professor wasn't partial. If she said, yeah, good job B plus whatever, no harm no foul. But if my wife said I don't want to know this stuff that would have killed me. This thing I gave to the professor and she said, you need to keep doing this. You need to keep writing. You obviously have a story to tell when I told her that it felt therapeutic she said, you definitely need to keep doing it. And she asked me if I was seeking therapy and I said no. A little while after about a year after I actually did end up going to the VA for some counseling but it started with that sort of door opening and being able to I think what was therapeutic is being able to process it to own it a little bit to realize that I had learned the lessons that were important and that were worth sharing with people and that all came through that writing and so I kept writing and kept writing with her encouragement. I had a bunch of these stories and I went and I smashed them together and sent it off to try to get it published as a book and 50 agents said no but you're close and you say you can make it better. So she gave me some feedback so I was kind of bummed I was like man I really thought I had something here I went back to my professor showed her that letter and she said you are very close for an agent to take the time to do that it's huge. So I took that out of my series I went back I worked at a summer camp so I would wake up at like 5 o'clock in the morning and write a couple hours and go to work I did that every day for a summer and that doesn't matter because one said yes not that original one actually but another one said yes I want to make this happen so she went to the publishing houses this was in fall 2007 there were a lot of Iraq memoirs kind of in the works so it was a tough market I guess to compete with and she had an idea to go to Harper Collins she had worked with a young adult editor there I didn't write it for a young adult audience I just wrote it and they they loved it they jumped on it and said yeah we want to do this and so then I had to do a whole other bout of rewriting for about a year and making really drawing out that YA voice it was a YA perspective I was 16 and 9-11 I was only 19 when I was deployed so it was that it had that voice I just had to sort of figure out that's what this story was about and sort of tease that out in 2009 it's in English curriculum all over the country it's been turned into a play totally I had nothing to do with that other than write the book which I guess is probably a big part of that but it got turned into a play and so I've seen it three separate actors have played it now they're actually doing a full run in Chicago where the guy who adapted it for the stage is from and they're doing that in the spring and I guess when they do that run they invite like influential critics and stuff and if they give it a good review it has the potential to tour for like years and years I mean none of this the guy who adapted it was sitting next to someone on a plane and said I want to do a play a true story about a soldier in these wars for young people and that person had read my book and suggested it and so that's how it happened so pretty wild and when I look back and if I took it you know obviously the play in the book is a big deal and kind of once in a lifetime opportunity and I did that but if I didn't have that thing to heal from if I didn't have that reason to communicate and get through some of that stuff I wouldn't have written that book so going to Iraq was the big shot but obviously I wouldn't have been there if I didn't join the army if I didn't have the wrestling background if I didn't have that confidence and that mental toughness I don't think I would have done that and so it gets back to the wrestling room because the same lot is wrong you don't get one shot you get them all the time you make choices every day that affect your future and you don't always know if it's the right decision sometimes you can't know why because that's how it works but you stand back up and you put your toe on the line my buddy Brian never came back for that second wrestling practice he had wrestled for a few years and he was bored of it and said this sucks and he quit a couple years later he said the same thing about high school and he quit he got really hard into drugs and I saw him a couple years after high school and he was totally burnout it was hard to even hold a conversation with him and he was one of my best friends in middle school we were on a band together I easily could have gone that way and obviously at the time I didn't know that's where life was going and that's where his life was going but the book is about being broken down and building yourself back up and you don't do it yourself you're never alone on you you have to do it and so that's what the book is about and it's about war it's about all life but I think the reason for Collins saw the potential as a story for young people is because it is that message and to stand up and to share what you've been through because your other option is to hold it in forever and that doesn't do anyone any good so again thank you Gail for this opportunity and thank you all for listening I do have some books I don't know how many I have but I got a box and we'll see we can't get them to see it tonight we'll figure something out does anyone have any questions for Ryan? I was curious those big bags that seemed to be talking about what are those for? they have bullet catchers basically just a perimeter so you see them on the perimeter deep for some that was to get people behind anybody else? I noticed it looked like some of your monkeys were really thin skin and they were starting to develop maybe some pieces to the back that was part of the war there was a lot of emphasis on needing more equipment needing more supplies and being able to counteract the IEDs yes so in the beginning of 2003 we went into Iraq it was a bombing campaign we went in and bombed Baghdad and we toppled Saddam that was the mission George Bush flew back on an aircraft carrier land as the mission accomplished because it was but then it became nation building and then the insurgency happened and it got a little messier and so Congress so we were there in 04-05 and so during that tour we had when we first went into Iraq we actually stole a bunch of makeshift armor that we found in Kuwait and we put it all over our vehicles wherever we could probably wouldn't have done much good honestly but it was a piece of mind we put that all over where we could on our doors and stuff and then by the end of the tour we had the ones we drove a lot so the tractor trailers and dump trucks and the humvees most of them were pretty well off armor the right way but yeah we did a lot of that ourselves and Kuwait we just well did it's one benefit of being an engineer in the Army if you have access to a lot of stuff do what you need to do most of you don't have that at the mercy of Congress anybody else have a question oh Ryan we do have some books here and Ryan will be signing them but the whole purpose of this program was to share stories most importantly to share stories with young people because as you said they're the future you said that it was the children that touched you the most so that was the whole purpose of this and you know there are different ways that people can share their stories through writing or sometimes through artwork and there's another one another way that people can share their stories and that's through song and Rob Spore I have her little bio here Rob Rob Spore was one of those who was interviewed and he is the program assistant for a wonderful national organization called Songwriting with Soldiers whose purpose is to transform lives by using collaborative songwriting to service members with songwriters to expand creativity connections and strengths songwriting with soldiers uses songwriting as a catalyst for positive change so he's going to end our program today with a few words about this amazing organization and since we opened in song with our national anthem I thought I would play one of the songs sorry Rob not your song this is not child friendly let me pull up the website here yeah yep Staff Sergeant Rob Spore currently I am an AGR soldier in the New York Army National Guard I work for joint force headquarters and the Joint Operations Center I'm on the night shift I'm actually going to work tonight so I joined the Army National Guard in 2000 and I joined to go to school and just because a couple of my buddies had joined already and they were like you got nothing going on so you're going to join so I chose the infantry I had other choices but those two guys were in the infantry so I was with Delta Company versus the 105th out of Troy New York fast forward a couple of years 9-11 happened and then we got the call from the Army we did six months of train up at Fort Drum and then on Kuwait for a month and then we drove up to our fob in the SUNY Triangle right outside of LSA Anaconda on a little fob called Orion oh I was there all the time yeah 0-4 same time yeah we did a bunch of work there I told a bunch of Hasco's I want to meet this private Hasco that's probably rich so we did route clearance and with the help of the engineers clearing back the sides of the road it made our job a lot easier at times we got hit a lot because we were that hard target that came after them hitting soft targets and then we would try and rectify the situation to put it lightly so I came back then I took a job for an AGR position so I stayed in during my time overseas I planned on getting out and trying to start something else so 2007 comes along I meet my wife and she's a yoga instructor and helped me out immensely with meditation practicing yoga I went to the VA before and then tried to put me on drugs and stuff which didn't work for me so I met her and we owned a yoga studio here in Delmar Mary Judd who is the co-founder of the Songwriters Soldiers was one of my wife's clients and she said I run these retreats with songwriters that not as therapy but very therapeutic and they take four songwriters professional Grammy award-winning songwriters and take a group of about maybe 10 to 12 service members not only veterans but service members regardless of how long you were in if you deployed or not they take that group of people and they have a retreat Friday, Saturday and Sunday they write songs with songwriters and then they do a presentation at the end a nice concert everything's free to the veteran more service member I'm not going to do that that's like kumbaya stuff you got me doing yoga that's enough so she a couple years later teacher certification and my wife said you're going to come with me and help teach the yoga because my wife teaches the yoga so I'm like okay I'll do that so I go and I actually came up with this song it was so moving to me that I could just push play on recording and share my entire story not my entire story but a good chunk of it of what trauma was affecting me and the event and I could just say alright we'll just listen to this I don't have to talk to anybody I don't have to but some of our folks that have come to the retreats that's what they say just push play and it changed the way I looked at a lot of stuff and I really wanted to after the retreat I was like I have to be involved in this I have to help my fellow service members and help them share their stories because every one of these songs is a wonderful story and it's amazing to be a combat or civilian side I mean state side but to long story short my wife and I work for Mary as her assistance and we handle admin stuff I'm very part time with it my wife is more does a little more than I do because I work a lot of hours with the National Guard still I have five years left and I'll be retired but you want to play the song that's all I got any questions for me our website is songwritingwithsoldiers.org and you can get all the information there on the website just email and if you know anybody that wants to be a participant there's another retreat coming up probably next October in New York September October time frame for New York oh question so where are the retreats there's we usually call two in New York State there was only one here last actually there was two here last year one in May one in September and then there was just two one in Colorado one in Texas one in Virginia so it was all over the country there's retreat centers you can look up Boulder Crest which is founded by a former EOD commander and that's a retreat center that invites us to participate there and hold a retreat is that in New York? no that's in Virginia what's the one in New York? the one in New York we at the Cary Institute yeah it's about 20 minutes and it's the areas and sites for the retreats are just amazing it's like very serene and picturesque and the food's amazing and like I said there's no cost to the participant and they don't bring their family and just have a great meal I did have the pleasure of attending the retreat in Rensselaerville in September and one song that really spoke to me that's also age appropriate for the audience is called castify and I thought that I would enter that my summer is filled with a rocky stream of deficient bones is my country cold out of brand new this evening I want to thank the students and Boy Scouts for your dedication and for all those respects for the veterans and military members that you interviewed and it was my deepest hope that you would learn something from that just learn a story from someone who was about your age when they went to serve and the great sacrifice that they did and the great sacrifice that our men and women in uniform continue to do