 Hi. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming. It's such an honor to be here at the US Institute of Peace. I was here for the groundbreaking some years ago, and to be back here now and again and see what this institute has become is really moving to me. My name's Susan Hackley, and this panel, War Changes Everyone, the Hidden Costs of War at Home and Abroad, came about because of a project I've been really dedicating a lot of my free time over the past three years, too. And it came about because I feel that we don't have good conversations about war in the US and that by bringing peace builders and veterans and active service members together, we could then be part of a joint conversation the next time there is a lead up to war. We've been at war in the US for 15 years, and what I'm going to be talking about, and then my fellow panelists are going to speak as well, I'm going to be talking about the impact of war in the US. We've been at war for 15 years, and that war is largely invisible to most of us. But it's very visible to a lot of people who have soldiers in the war. And of course, it's horrifically visible to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. And I don't begin to speak for the suffering and the disruption and the horrible consequences of war there. I'm just going to be speaking about my own experience. So we each are going to speak for about 15 minutes. This feels weird. I have with me my friend, Robert DuBois. He's on the advisory board of my project. And I'll introduce him more fully later. And then this wonderful new friend, Kitam Al-Kaqani, who works here at the US IP and is Iraqi. And we'll hear from her as well about her experiences. So we'll talk, and then we'll have time for Q&A. And so I'd like to start by telling my own story. First of all, who here is either active duty service member or a veteran? Who? Welcome. But who here has a family member who has been in the service and is a veteran? Everybody else, I think. Yeah, so this is something we all share. So my job is at the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School. I'm the managing director of a wonderful inter-university program that deals with helping people negotiate more effectively, solve problems, build relationships, and bring about peace. I've also served on the Alliance for Peace Building Board. I was chairman of the board a number of years ago, some very, very connected to this community and love this community very much. I also co-founded an internet company, and that was a really interesting set of experiences that taught me to want to innovate more. And I've worked as a writer and photographer for many years in Alaska. So that's sort of who I am. Nearly every time I come to Washington, I visit the Vietnam War Memorial. My college boyfriend, William Earl Foster, Jr. died in Vietnam in 1968. And I always want to go and pay homage to him. His death was a personal trauma to me. Another veteran just entered the room, Chris Holshek. So we have at least three. But it was also a trauma for this country, right? Anybody who is old enough to remember that it really tore the US apart, everyone was affected by it. Everyone either knew a young man who was getting drafted or knew a family that was affected by that. And it was a huge trauma for this country. I didn't ever think we'd go through that particular kind of trauma again. But years later, my son, Zach, decided to join the Marine Corps. And I was upset because he was putting off college. And I thought, why don't you join the Peace Corps? Or why don't you wait till after college and join the service? But he wanted to join. It was a year 2000. And if you can remember, that was a very peaceful time here in the US. I did not for a minute imagine that he would be going to war. It just never crossed my mind. So lo and behold, in 2003, he was among the first Marine infantry over the border from Kuwait and into Iraq. And as I went through that buildup to the war in Iraq, as a mother of a soldier of a Marine, it's very painful. You don't really feel like you can speak out against the war as candidly as you would, because your child is going into that war. But it was painful for me as a peace builder as well, because I felt like our whole community was marginalized and not listened to. I saw very, very few voices in the media of our community speaking out against the war. So I resolved whether my son came home safely or not that I would try to do something personally so that the next time our country is hurrying to get into a war, felt hurrying to me, that I would help to make our community be more a part of that discussion. So my son did come home safely. He's now an Alaska state trooper and a pilot and he's very happy, so that was a happy ending for me. But the way I decided to go about this was to create a project. I call it A Child's Guide to War. And it's a whole campaign which is going to focus on listening to American children, talk about what it's like. We've been at war their whole lives. Two million of them have a parent who's been at war. And in eight years, a 10-year-old can vote or join the military. So it's a way of getting into that discussion with adults, because many of us have children or they're children we know and love. And what should we be doing to prepare them? But my overall goal is to help bridge a civilian military divide. I feel that many Americans, many peace builders are pretty ignorant of the military. I hear all these things. I heard somebody yesterday say, well, only poor people join the military. It's just not true. And there are all these examples of not knowing each other. So I'm as a mother of a marine and a peace builder, I'm trying to bridge that divide. So I'm going to show you a six minute film. Where is Durva? There she is. I'll show you this. Thank you. A six minute film. This is part of a larger project. I've done a lot of filming in Indiana. And these are children in a room in Indiana asking other children what it's like to have your mother or dad go to war. When you first saw your parents after they came home? I was just really happy that he was home finally. And when I saw him, I just started jumping up and down. Excited that she was back. And I just wanted to hug her and start everything all over before she left again. What did you miss most about your parents when they were gone? I missed her voice and her hugs and her kisses. I just missed him cheering for me and stuff and stands. The way that she used to do everything for us, like help us with our homework and help us do the chores. I did the dishes and I helped clean the house. That was my first time I started doing laundry. Are there things that will just trigger you and you'll immediately think about your parents? I will go into her room and see that her bed is made up and her room is clean. And just remember that she's not there anymore. Like if you wrote her a letter and we wrote back and we didn't hear from her for a while, it kind of made me worried, because I didn't know what was happening to him. You sometimes worry about them, like if they're still over there, or if they're somewhere else and you don't know it. How did you focus on like sports and school? Some days I was thinking about my dad more than others, but my best friend Isabel, she talked to me sometimes at ESA. I think she made me feel better. I just put the thoughts on like the side for a second and just try to get everything done first. And then I can worry about it later. Does it bother you or does it comfort you when like your friend or something says, oh, my parent can substitute for your parent while he or she is away? My friend's dad, he was always there asking me if you wanted to throw the football, if you wanted to work out in your skills or anything. So that comforted me a lot. There's no explanation for why they're not talking to you or like answering your calls or anything. Like, how do you guys deal with that? I just usually think that he's probably doing something important and he has his mind, other things that he needs to get done. I just really respect everyone who joins the Army because going out to fight like that, it'd just be very hard because there's so much violence everywhere. I think we all live in our own little bubble. Like we don't want to believe that people are getting hurt and you know, there are people dying every day. I think it's actually really hard for a lot of people to witness stuff like that. He warned me that there is some stuff that he probably couldn't tell me because I'd be like freaked out about it. There's just people before him who were driving in a Humvee and there was like a mine and it kind of exploded. But it didn't hurt anybody, but he was still worried that it was going to happen to him. I feel like being in war would be like a really traumatic experience. So like it would change your life. Like afterwards you wouldn't be the same. You would just be like scared and stressed out all the time. Some people at my school asked if he's ever killed anybody or like hurt anybody. And that just makes me mad because it's kind of a personal question to ask. And it's never respectful to him or the family because my dad's really not like a killer. So I wouldn't think of him like that. Have they ever hurt somebody or did on purpose? It kind of hurts when they ask that because I don't really know what's going on over there. And I can't really tell if she's okay or if she's like badly injured. Will you ever consider going off tour? Like to join the military? Just in your respect for the country and my dad? So I can like walk his footsteps? For me, it's really scary and I wouldn't really want to risk it. And I think that my dad is really brave because a lot of people wouldn't want to sign up for doing something like to going to war. And he did. I have my own plans for my future. I don't want to mess that up. My mom's a way of life and that's been a time alive with us and I want to do that to my kids. I was really glad to learn about how like kids whose parents are in the war, how they like think and how they can deal with stuff. It's good to know like what's happening. It affects other people's lives. And it'll help other people who are not here understand better because they really need to know. So thank you. I'd love to just hear a couple of very quick reactions. What did you feel or? Thank you and one of the things I've learned from this is children of Holocaust victims, children of soldiers, children of tragedy, suffer secondary PTSD and you're right, it's just invisible. What else? Yes, James? Oh, yeah. And I think every soldier gets asked that, right? When you come back? Yes. Yes. Last question then we'll move on. Nevermind. Yes. And just a final thought is in doing this work, I've talked to children of Vietnam veterans of World War II veterans and there's this code of silence very often among people who return from war, who can't, who won't, who don't want to talk about it and the family members who are afraid to ask and so I think in a lot of ways it can be healthy to have those conversations. And now I'm going to have the great pleasure of introducing Rob Dubois, former Navy SEAL who's worked in 36 countries. He's now an advisor who was labeled a smart power authority while working with coalition leaders in Baghdad. He advises Congress on the importance of foreign assistance for U.S. national security. He's the author of a wonderful book, you should all get, Powerful Peace, a Navy SEAL's lessons on peace from a lifetime of war. He's the founder of Impact Actual Consulting and he's currently featured in the National Geographic Channel six week series which is ongoing now, Migrations, a Human Heard Attempts to Cross the Serengeti Unfoot. Welcome Rob. Thank you very much. I'm gonna try and give you an amplified volume but at the right distance so I'm not choking on it and you're not choking on my voice. I'm going to talk about the tactical, operational and strategic, if you will, distances of this issue. The tactical, the immediate is my family and the next is the interaction with my family and the society or other military kids in society, other families in society. And ultimately, without stomping too much on the condoms area, talk about the families of our enemies. They have families too. With a quick aside on that note, we're talking, I just heard the talking point of generations of war and all. So I said I'll come back to that but the distant enemy and his family is something we don't consider. I mean, they're faceless enemies. They have horns, they have laser beams coming out of their eyeballs and they're not human. We have to dehumanize in order to fight somebody and kill them. That's the general policy, not for seals. Seals don't need that because seals are trained to a level of doing the job when it needs to get done. And we recognize the dirty work as being part of a critical global process because sometimes you have to do a surgery on a cancer. The body of humanity is like an organism and it can get sick and it can have ISIL pop up in it. And you have to sometimes kill a guy because that guy's gonna saw the head off of a woman in the streets of Baghdad as happened to a fellow. His mom was sawn in front of the whole neighborhood when a very bad man was released because somebody paid $5,000 to the local guard to get him out. The Iraqi captain let this very bad man go. He went back, got his posse. They went to the man, the snitch's house, grabbed up the snitch and his brother and took, I think, altogether, there were seven men that were captured and the woman, his mom, they started with her, forced the whole village to come out and watch what happens to the mothers of snitches and they decapitated in front of the families of the village. And then they took the man away and tortured them until they all died except for one. And I emphasize that in my book too. It is possible to torture somebody until he dies. It's not an execution, it's a torturing until you're dead. They get the one guy who was cleaning the life and dragged him back and threw him in the street and he said, go tell everybody what you saw. This is what we're dealing with. This is war. This is not theoretical stuff. This is not some nonsense about, well, we should just try to reason with everybody. I'm the biggest advocate of reason, the biggest advocate of peace. I'm a UCIP alum, basically. I'm here all the time in the past few years. I've referenced individuals from UCIP in my book about empowering women and the power of a stabilized society, like we're talking about here. I'm called up to Congress to talk about foreign assistance. How does it help us stop terrorism? And there's always the debates. The theoreticians love to talk about, well, poverty doesn't cause terrorism because Muhammad Atta wasn't poor. I want to grab people like that and I get another one like that and conk them together like coconuts and say, listen, this is not that simple. Muhammad Atta wasn't poor, so what? And many, many people are coming from poor societies that are fragmented and where communication is limited to what you hear from the next guy and outside of both Baghdad and Kabul bases, I've known of insurgents talking to the local forces and a local population, good innocent people. Green forces or white forces, however you want to identify them, compared to the blue and the red forces that are out there duking it out, but they'll talk to these guys and say, you know why your daughter has dysentery and you only get three hours of power a day but before the invaders came, you had five hours of power days because they're stealing your power. Look up on the base. They're playing basketball at 2 a.m. and drinking lattes from the green bean coffee machine which is true. We are drinking lattes at 2 a.m. because we worked 12 hours before that and just got off work and some of the guys are playing basketball under floodlights but it's generated at a huge cost by American gas or gas that's shipped in from Europe at four or five times the cost of gas in America, more than it's worth. So you see layer after layer of waste here and the worst part about all that waste is we're exhausting ourselves to make sure we have high quality gas coming and we have to have morale high enough to manage the war and keep maintaining whatever pressure we need against the guys who are gonna saw the heads off of women but the reality is you can take those simple facts, twist them around and say they're stealing your power and that's why your daughter's dying right now in the heat because she can't get air conditioning in your house. So it's complex. There's nothing easy about this but I promise to come back to the nearer. I was with my family formed in 1993 and by 2008, 15 years later we calculated on my anniversary that I've been gone for eight years. When my grandpa kicked the bucket about eight years ago I was talking to him and grandma on the last days and I learned that they had been apart for one night and 50 years. They couldn't comprehend my life and I couldn't comprehend their life. I have three children. The impact on the kids of being in a military family is complex. That's what this is all about. That's this whole discussion, the movie is all about that, it's complex. Kids are so proud or try to be so proud of their parents who are serving. I say try to be because if you picture the vulnerable little organism that is a kid with the vulnerable little psychology of a kid that kid can do the best possible job three or four or five or eight years old of rationalizing what he's supposed to understand about why daddy or mommy is serving overseas but that kid cannot ever grasp it because that kid is not 18 or 28 or 58. That kid is eight. And all that kid knows is mommy needs to take care of me. So you have underlying issues of abandonment that exist. In the case of my family where daddy was abandoning them calling it what it is. You know, I'm not condemning myself. I'm simply identifying what the experience is for the child as abandonment. It's real, let's call it what it is. Let's have a no-crap conversation today and every day for the rest of my life, God willing. It feels like that and that lays on anxieties and securities and so forth. Especially when the child shames him or herself for having those negative feelings about daddy or mommy. How complex is that? I shouldn't be mad about this. I shouldn't be resentful about this. Kids from military families are oftentimes of a higher caliber of a sense of citizenship. There's these great memes you'll see online about kids playing basketball on a military base and when colors is resounded, when the music goes over the base to bring the flag down, the kids drop the ball. They stand at attention. They respect the flag. And you're not gonna see that on almost any, any other campus in America. That's a positive aspect of it. But like I mentioned, there are psychological currents that are complex and they all have this interplay. There's secondary tertiary effects inside the child's mind. And so when a person who's five or eight feels conflicted, what do they do? It's called acting out, simple stuff. I'm not a kid psychologist but I have kids and I have military kids. And acting out is a thing kids do to try and get attention. In my caveman understanding of things like ADHD or attention deficit, I've always wondered what, how much is it possible that the syndrome of attention deficit has been influenced in America by the division of attention from the parental units to the children who are in need and they seek to get attention because they have a deficit of attention that they need. I'm not saying mom has to stay home and can't get a job. I'm saying that's, again, a no crap conversation about what we really are, who we really are today. Neither judging it, saying go to bed. Simple observation because when we understand what the objective facts are, we can start to make adjustments, little adjustments that make big downstream effects. So when kids act out, they get in trouble unless the system that they're working with, the institution of the school or the church organization or whatever they're doing, whoever's working with them when those people understand the complexity of the child from the military family, then they can say, you know, maybe Johnny was slamming erasers across the room. Let's look at the why's behind that. And I'm not into coddling. That shouldn't surprise anybody. I am into understanding people, human beings, because every human being, eight years old or 98 years old deserves respect in my opinion. We have a lot more respect on the planet. We have a lot less war, a lot less need for seals. So when that kid is, I'm gonna talk about solutions but I'm talking about the issues first. The solutions include addressing that issue of the kids acting out because the kid feels bad, that the kid isn't getting the love and attention he feels like he needs. The mom or dad staying home is maxed out doing two jobs that it's a single parent family in every sense of the word when mom or dad has gone except that when mom or dad has gone in a separation, a normal American standard separation of the family of the two parents. The kids have all the issues of, you know, sense of neglect or abandonment that happens. Again, calling it what it is. It hurts for a kid to be part of a divided family. I was one and I'm speaking from experience. But that does not, that all too unfortunately, all too common experience in America does not include watching the TV and seeing a former CEO get burned alive in a car, dragged from said car, dragged through the streets and then hung from a bridge in Fallujah upside down. It was like splayed all one way and his body's charred beyond recognition. That's what military kids see on TV and unlike the kids who are from regular old fashioned divorce families, their dad might be the next one. My wife couldn't comprehend watching the news after that because I was in Fallujah when it happened. She didn't know and neither did any other seal wife in the world what seal that was because all the news had was four men were killed and one was a seal. After that, she couldn't watch the news and she couldn't not watch the news. It was like this. Every night, she and Kelly, her girlfriend, Rick and I were both away and they were just both, you know, I mean, how do you grieve in advance? That's what it feels like. You gotta grieve in advance or kind of get staged, you know, get pre-positioned for the grieving process and a hurt. So there's two things I wanna touch on from the video. Dad killed someone, did dad kill someone? Have you killed someone? And I would like to, I would like to sensitively address everybody who's not in the military, social with the military on that issue because I don't, unlike many people, I don't call everybody an idiot. You don't understand this, you're an idiot. I don't believe that. I believe that if you don't understand it, you don't understand it. It hasn't been conveyed to you in an understandable way yet. And so I want to convey all things that I say in an understandable way and say, you know, we're not characters in a movie, although I am on TV right now. Migrations is spelled with a Y, my like personal, cause we're a human herd, migrating across the Serengeti, trying not to get killed. And it's amazing, Monday nights. National Geographic. But, still on their site too. Anyway, enough plugging. We're not characters in a movie. We're not Chuck Norris doing his thing. You know, he started in the military, but most actors haven't. We are human beings, and I love this reference when I first was going to my team in Hawaii. I saw an interview on the paper, the local paper, a young woman interviewed the commanding officer and the command master chief. The top enlisted and the top officer, commissioned people at the SEAL team, both old war dogs. And they, she said at the end, you know, you both remind me of somebody, I don't want to tell you this cause you might get mad at me, but sir, you remind me of my uncle to the commander. And my uncle wouldn't hurt a fly. And the master chief, forgive me for this, but you remind me of my grandpa. My grandpa's a sweetie. And the master chief said, well it's like this, we're human beings first. We go to PTA meetings, we take out the trash, we have to mow the lawn. We're human beings first. Sometimes something has to be done and somebody's got to go do it. When that happens, we reach across the wall to the switch, flick it on, and we're in that mode and we go do the things that have to be done. And they're dirty and hard and nobody else can do them, but they must be done. So nobody else gets his mom's head sewn off in front of the neighborhood. And when we get done with our dirty work, we flick the switch and we go to a PTA meeting. And all I want to do is sensitize the community. That's what this project is all about. Sensitize the community about the humanness about the military kids. And I'd like to see, as my final comment about solutions, I'd like to see, I'd like to see deliberate programs in schools. To take, you know, we have ethnic recognition, we have other group recognition through the year. There's the month for this, the month for that. Why not be, you know, Veterans Day? It's a military month. Why not do programs at schools? But don't be careful about bringing out a highlight in the kids who are military. Give them a voice, let them be heard, have dialogues, you know what it's like. So that way the non-military kids and the military kids can all have a conversation and say, yeah, here's my experience. Just like those kids, but this is a real whole thing. And then everybody understands everybody and nobody has horns or laser beams coming out of their eyes. It's all human beings with shared experiences. Except for the kids that are afraid of their dad hanging from a bridge in Fallujah at that time and the kids who just had their dad hung from a bridge in Fallujah at that time. It's complex because it's sensitive and you have to think about everybody's needs. It has to be said, the conversation has to happen. Or we're not gonna move forward with the kids and the dialogue between the motor and the civilian. But it must be said with great care. Thank you. And one thing I learned in making this film was these children, their teachers did not know their parents were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. And that seemed crazy to me, that the parents hadn't said that. And with the reserves and so many soldiers who aren't part of a base, then they're largely invisible. So any quick thoughts or comments on what Rob had to say before we move on? Yes. Yes, that was like always a large individual thing. I would like to like, how do you also conceive? It's huge, critical. I spoke with every person of influence I could get from our congressman to commanders of military units in the U.S. and abroad for the U.S. and other foreign governments. I talked, I was a liaison officer to the Brits and the Iraqis in Basra and Baghdad and various places. I used to sit with one guy who was the liaison officer of this general Abbas to, he was the liaison officer from the Iraqi forces to General Petraeus when we were in Baghdad. And he and I would have drink juice and talk and he said, you know, it's all about respect. If our guys don't feel respected by the Americans and they don't in a very common, very commonly, then you will not get our best. Will not be a good relationship. It won't even be a good, you know, pragmatic team effort because the Iraqis are always being looked at like something other than what they are. Equal, you know, men of honor, men of strength, men of military capacity. And by no means am I indicting all American soldiers. I will be very clear on this. Not all American soldiers look down on Iraqi soldiers and I'll be very clear that some American soldiers do look down on Iraqi soldiers and let's be honest, I gotta say. Let's just be honest once and for all. That's how these conversations move forward. And that's what we have to do. We have to say, you, dude, stop this. General, the guy who's in charge of SENTCOM now, I think, or no, he's might be the chief of staff. Can you remember his name all of a sudden? General, huge guy. Sorry? Not Votel. Not Votel, no. Austin. General Austin posted a thing in the dining facility. He said this in my book, Powerful Peace. I talked about dignity and respect. These are huge things for me. And on this poster was dignity and respect in giant letters. Not my army talking about racial discrimination, ethnic discrimination, religious discrimination, you know, international discrimination. And it was a bold statement from the general about how we will, you know, act with dignity and respect toward other people, all people so that we can move the ball forward in this war and actually stop the bad guys, not create new bad guys among ourselves. Everybody's gonna become bad guys against other guys. And in that same dining facility, I walked up to the dining, to the serving line and the fellow behind the counter, I think it was Pakistani. He was serving this one big American dude, big white American dude who was waiting for three orders right now, styrofoam. He gave him different orders that we wanted, you know, corned beef on this one or whatever on this one. He was acting like this and looking at the guy like he's a dog and the young man's just trying to serve it up. And he got more and more offensive, the American got more and more offensive and just kind of being like, can I say a dick in here? Too late. And finally the guys like stressing and I'm behind him, I'm like, you know, chill out, don't give him too much stress. The guys finally this big dumb American grabbed these two boxes and walked on down and the guy's still trying to fill the third one and he hustled down to catch up to him and he says, here you go sir, here you go sir. And he opened it up and said, and I quote, I said, barbecue pork, small child who's never been spanked. And I was so disgusted. And I thought about my time right after 9-11, I was clearing certain beaches for the invasion of Afghanistan. I was doing missions that were in certain countries where people might have been Pakistani, theoretically, rhetorically speaking. And these guys saved my ass, they kept me alive. They watched and covered me while I did my mission and these men would give their lives for me. It's not about who's from what nationality, who has what passport, it's about dignity and respect across all colors, shape, size, language issues. And that's what we, I mean, the posters can't make that happen. The same base, a different general, General Offal was in charge who was the J2s in charge of all Iraqi intelligence. I sat in meetings with him every week or two and he would say every week or two, your men are disrespecting my officers. So you have E3s and E4s disrespecting O3s and O4s, young officers, young smart officers, they'd call them rag heads and things like that in front of them thinking they don't speak English. These guys just got back from training in universities in America. And speaking English quite fluently, thank you very much. They're being called rag heads in their own country in their own headquarters by these junior enlisted people who have no place behaving that way toward any officer, any person. It's frustrating to me. You probably couldn't tell. All right, thank you so much. And I'm very happy now to introduce Kitam Al-Kay Kane is a program officer with rule of law, justice and security here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She's part of the team who put together a wonderful book that I commend to all of you, speaking their peace, personal stories from the front lines of war and peace. Born in Iraq, attended university in Iraq, many years in Iraq, many years in a war environment, as she described to me this morning. In 2003, Kitam became a coordinator for the coalition forces in Baghdad, providing humanitarian assistance for Iraqi detainees. Following her promotion to cell chief of the detention section at the Iraqi Assistance Center, she joined USIP as a program specialist. In 2011, she transitioned into the role of justice and security dialogue, field officer in Iraq, within the rule of law program. And this program works to build relationships between police and civil society. So in post-conflict countries, we're so happy to have you here. Thank you, everyone. It's such great honor to be among lovely audience like you. We're gonna, I'm gonna touch up on the war hitting coasts and it's always a question that we all raise. Does the war end or stop? It's easily, it's always easily and strongly welcome to accept war, the stop point of the war, but could it be tolerated? Like it's always easier to welcome and accept ending of war, but is it easier to be tolerated? That's the question. And if it's not easy to tolerate war, does it really end or the war, it's just stop? The war, I think for someone like me who lived his entire life through wars, I guess I was talking to Susan this morning. I guess I get to enjoy, in my entire life, I got to enjoy about four and a half years of peace. A year and a half was transitioning from the Iraqi, Iranian war to the Iraqi Kuwaiti war. So it wasn't real peace. It was another preparation for another war, but at least it was somehow pretended peace in Iraq. And the other three years of peace that I lived is when I moved to DC back in 2013. War is beyond the spending dollars. It's beyond destroying facilities. It's beyond confronting the enemy at certain lines or at the borders. It's about death. It's about injuries. It's about destruction among the community, destruction of the society, destruction of the psychology, destruction of the psychology of the new born generation. And it's lots of unintended consequences that can go on for decades. The physical damage of war, such as what's happening for properties or even institutions across the world, it could be easily forgotten by time. But again, and I would echo my colleague Robert here, it's so tough to forget the humiliation of human dignity and faith. And that's where really the hidden cost of war will keep on going for at least two generations, if not more. Living, and when I think of enjoying like quite some years of peace, and specifically I would highlight my years living in US, is it real peace? Whenever I turn on the TV and I see active shooting or I just follow the news and I see ISIL threats, global threats, is it real peace that I'm living? Or am I living another period of fear from living another conflict and undefined type of conflict yet? I will touch upon few major factors that from my personal experience and from my professional experience, I could highlight as the hidden cost. For war, one major hidden cost is losing trust. Once trust is lost, here come the monster of fear. So that would turn your life upside down. As a consequence of conflict, especially on children and young people, it can easily, they can easily, once they lost their trust, then they can easily lose their confidence in the society and their environment, even in their family, as well as their future. They often and then as an impact of losing trust and losing confidence in yourself, in your family, in your future, those young kids and young generation, they could be either anxious or they could be fearful, a weak generation or they could be so aggressive generations. And that's where the high risk is really kind of like, it's a thin threat between being like escape or a threat type of a personality or a very aggressive, because both can turn into a massive bombs in their society. So once trust disappeared, people more all normally get down and many of the unexpected behaviors became accepted and became a daily norm and became the type of life that the new generation is living. Once losing the trust made or kind of like the status of losing the trust could lead to another major factor which is changing the fabric of the society. When people get scared and especially families with kids, when they get scared, the first thing they would think about is changing their environment, seeking for another less fearful, more secure environment, more trusted environment. And then they decide to go to a new and non-destinations and that is the start point of breaking their social binding. So they have to deal with strange and new form perceptions among the new community that they're joining. And then the start is living with a strange community either by perception or by environment. So living the strange aspect of the new life is a huge time point in people's life and that could be highlighted and labeled as another major factor of the hidden cost of the war. So you might lose what makes you part of the community starting with losing your original identity. For example, through managing the Justice and Security Program with the USIP, I get to deal with IDPs. They're Iraqis, but they moved, they're an internal displaced persons who moved from province or from city to another or from village to another village within the same province. And I'll give you an example of how people, like how the changing of the societal fabric started. I met I think 10 kids while I was doing my tour across Iraq. They were IDPs and I started conversation with them away from the formal dialogue session and we were out in the garden and we start talking and I asked them, so are you going to school? And they were like, yes, we're going to the IDPs school. So the first thing, they labeled themselves as an IDPs. So they labeled themselves as a stranger in this community. And then there was a moment of silent because this really hurt me. I mean, it's so tough to see kid like eight years old who use new identity for himself, labeling himself as an IDP. And then there was another kid who jumped in to say like, well, we go to this school because the other school people start calling as ISIL and we don't want to be called as an ISIL. We are an IDPs. So he started defending his new identity as his preferred identity than being called as an enemy from his own country. But none of them mentioned or labeled himself as an Iraqi. None of them. And that's where the fabric of the community start to really get changed. And it's so horrifying and it's high risk that we really need to pay attention to early on. It's internal displaced persons, sure. And even in defensive war, like for example, the war against Al-Qaeda that took place in Iraq, where the Iraqi government led joint military operations with the U.S. military back in 2009. That war even generated, it has a consequences and generated a new neglected and rejected generation. For example, by the neglected and rejected generation, I'm referring to the sons of, the sons who were born by a forced marriage to Iraqi women by one of the Al-Qaeda fighters that in certain places in Iraq women were forced to marry Al-Qaeda fighters and they got kids. And those kids up to the speaking moments are stateless generation. The government is not willing to touch that issue because they don't know how to handle it. It has lots of community sensitivity and it has lots of implications on the system. So the easiest way to deal with the problem is just get into a denial status and avoid dealing with that issue. The same thing applies for IDPs, in newborn IDPs or among IDPs. And again, the Iraqi government unable to verify that those are real, pure Iraqi citizens because it happened during the time that ISIL invaded some of the Iraqi territories and people fleeing from those territories, they lost their national identification and they just cannot register their kids. So the hidden consequences, these are hidden consequences and hidden cause for the war is the creation of a new rejected generation within the same community or within the same country. That's beside the cost of sexual abuse for women and we can go long and long in the list. But what I realized that children language is so different nowadays. We used to hear from kids words like toys, games, schools, friends, all these words being replaced by abducted, killed, bombed enemy. And instead of kids normal phrase of saying, let's play together, let's make friendship together, they keep saying, just stay away from me. I don't know you, you're a stranger. I wanna be by my own. So that's what really change, these are factors, scary factors that changing the fabric of the society and we have to really pay attention to those factors and we don't have to keep underestimating those factors because this generation, all they learned is these words kidnapping, killing, war, that's the education they got from war and some women became so protective for their kids and they have to drop them out of school because basically either they are so afraid that they're gonna go and they're not gonna come back because of random shooting, a car bomb or they could be kidnapped. Second, they cannot afford secure transportation that can take them back and forth to the school and they get to enjoy the safety of their kids on daily basis so they decided to drop them off school even in countries that have a free education system. With that means all they learned is tactics of war. All they learned is terminologies have to do with genocide, has to do with killing people, has to do with being enemy to the community. We don't have to really underestimate those factors because those factors could turn this generation into ISIL and into other unnamed future groups. I wanted to touch upon a very broad level of hidden cause factor which is community resistant to foreigners. The legacy of war illustrated in community fears from dealing with countries who engaged in war against them at certain time and that by itself is a major obstacle even for the governments of post-war and post-conflict countries to really rebuild their international policy and rebuild their relation with international communities just because of the resistance from their own community. For example, it's very difficult for American investors now to really invest in Iraq and be investing their money or work directly in Iraq because of the community fears. Even if the community, they don't hate the Americans but there are war proxies around, there are political agendas around that can fuel this fear and turn it into like real violent reaction from the community. Couple of recommendations I would like to make. We really need a better diplomacy that promote a mutual understanding and respect for the right of self-determination. It's time to really think about preventative programs and initiatives that can bridge the peace builders with the military divisions. It's time to really start at least to bridge peace builders and military at the planning stage of ending the war. I think one last recommendation is to really consider studying, teaching and learning the hidden cost of war not just keep avoiding learning about it and just think of war as it's like military tactics and we're gonna hit that regime or that extremist groups and we don't think beyond those military tactics. So once we start teaching hidden cost for war we will start really be creative in designing preventative strategies in a collaborative way. And one last thing, if you wanna hear more testimonies about the war hidden cost you can just read this book, Speaking Their Peace. It has about seven countries, people from seven countries, women, youth, civil society and different segment of the communities who really spoke about the hidden cost of the war. Thank you for your attention, thank you. And in the book it also has interviews with soldiers so it's really all sides of the war. Thank you so much, Kitam. So some thoughts and reactions, we've said three very different ways of looking at this issue. Yes? Yes. Yes. Yes, and then you. You talk a little bit about the identity, especially with the IDPs identity but can you explain a little bit more about the conflicting parties identity what they fight for, what kind of in Iraq context? Can you explain about that? I'm sorry, can you just, let me rephrase your question. Are you asking about the conflict now in Iraq? No, the conflicting parties identity. So there's, I'm a little bit confused about, no I know about IDPs identity about children things but that's always important when there's a conflict, there's a conflicting parties identity are very important. So what were the identity and what they fight for? So it's still fight going on, right? You were my winner or no? Yes. Well, Iraq has multi-political parties now are playing a role in the political development and climate and normally IDPs or people under direct impact of military operations or the conflict they will, the best choice for them is to go and live with communities either they share with them ethnic identity or religion identity or at least political, the least political identity. But even moving to those communities, you're still being categorized as a stranger and you don't really, there is not much of a binding between you and them even if there is a strong ethnic binding, a strong religious or political bindings but the environment, the geographic bindings is completely different and I would say a huge country like Iraq, it's not about just about your ethnic or religious or political identity, it's about the geographic identity as well. That's the first step that create the strange feeling between you and the rest of the community that you ever thought you belong to them. So those are major facts and major categories of identity in Iraq where people try to navigate their survival around but it's beyond that. It's about integration of communities, it's about acceptance of each other, it's about also acquisition and how much the host community perception can accept you even if you are part of their religion or their ethnic ethnicity or you share their political affiliation, how much they can really look at you neutrally and objectively without judging you coming from that geographic place. For example, now even if we're talking about Shi'a coming from Mousal, which was the first city under the control of ISIL, even Shi'a, when they went to Shi'a community, they were seen as ISIL followers and the evidence for that is kids start calling them ISIL in the school where kids bring those terminology from. They're bringing those terminology from home, from their families. So it's a transfer perception that could change the perception of the new generation and keep categorizing and really forming the new generations. I don't know if that's answer your question enough or you want to expand. Well, let's move on. Go ahead, sir. Thank you for your presentations. My name's Eli. I'm curious about the comment about dehumanization that you, I think Robert mentioned early on. My father worked in the Pentagon for most of his life and he also confirmed to me that the training was set up to dehumanize the others so that they could be killed and I've heard this confirmed by other soldiers and other talks. So if that's the reality, why are we surprised that dehumanization happens in the field and that dignity of other people is not respected? And sort of a nuance on that is how can an institution or people claim to be defending human dignity while at the same time being willing to kill certain humans? There might be another reason or something else that's happening but it doesn't seem to be consistent with the activity of human dignity. I'm so glad you opened that box. I am too, thank you. So, he's gonna answer and then we'll get to you, sir. My, I am a peace-loving seal, not a pacifist or a easter egg. I'm not a non-violence advocate. And I'm gonna, this is going somewhere. King in America under the US rule of law was able to non-violently sway society and Gandhi under the UK rule of law was able to non-violently sway society, seismic shifts in society by both men. And people can misunderstand that to mean that we can do that anywhere. But if you do that in downtown Kabul under the Taliban and have a peaceful sit-down protest, you're gonna have exactly as many heads laying on the side of the road as we're sitting down in the road before that. Because it's not conducive in certain circumstances. So, the reason I say the, I love peace. I wish we had peace all over the planet and there's certain needs like the guy who wants to cut off a mom's head where we must take action. And oftentimes, sometimes in the right circumstances that action is violence. If I use this analogy, I'll pose it to everyone because many people in USIP are pacifist. And I respect that. My grandfather was a pacifist. I respect philosophies, approaches to living. We all have one. There's seven billion plus different philosophies on the planet. Mine is as flawed as anyone else's. But in the situation of people who flatly tell me I would never raise my hand even Gandhi said I wish my son would defend me with a fist or a gun if somebody's trying to hurt me badly. Those who flatly, theoretically refuse to use violence in any situation, I pose the idea that there's a 300 pound man right now raping a three year old child viciously right now and he's resisted any, you know, moving him around you may wanna use. And there's a gun right there. Would you stop that brutal attack including possibly the killing of the child by that man in that search for the situation? And if the answer is yes, if each person searches his or her heart and says yes, even though I'm a pacifist, then we have the beginning of the answer to the question of how can you talk about human dignity like it matters and be willing to use violence. I will kill anyone who walks in that door. I'm not armed to be clear, theoretically. I would kill anyone who walks in that door with a vest on and a plunger in his hand, intent on blowing himself right there. Not cause he's gonna whack me, cause he's gonna whack her. And he's gonna whack her. Part of her body, part of my body will shield her when he detonates right there. But you guys are taking it full on the face. You're dead. They're gonna have their ears blown out right there and fragmentation will be all over them. Or I can put a bolt in his head right now and he drops. Sometimes it has to happen. And I have massive respect. I wrote chapters about dignity and respect and powerful peace because I love dignity and respect and I've seen the immeasurable power of simply treating people with respect. People with opposing views as well as mine, as well as who share my view. So it comes down to that about the dignity and respect and back to the dehumanization really quickly. The dehumanization is a global and historical, unchanging necessity of warfare. Because sometimes, you know, war's diplomacy by other means, sometimes you must have an army go forward because there's another army called Hitler's army. And it's gonna erase all the people who are Jews, Gays and Russians in the continent. And you put a big force against them. And so the dehumanization process is just an unfortunate necessity and my GI friends will understand because you can't take a normal good human being and tell them to go kill people. It doesn't work. Just like you can't take a normal human being and tell them to run into a nest of guys with guns. You have to condition those behaviors by the tens of thousands to make it happen. It's impossible otherwise. But it doesn't mean we have to dehumanize every person we encounter who looks different from us like this Pakistani server who is an ally and not an enemy behind that line from the big white American. I just add something and then get to you, sir. As a mother, it was horrifying when I realized, and I should have known a long time before that, that my son as a Marine was being trained to kill. Honestly, when he joined the Marines, I didn't think about that. And so I, but I didn't know that. That's awesome. That's awesome. You're doing exercises, right? Exactly, and they started telling me. And then I've heard this story about, and I don't know the statistic, but in World War I, very few soldiers shot to kill. And if anybody can back this up, Chris, because it was so hard to shoot and aim at another person. So the training then, I think, became shooting, practicing at targets that looked like human beings. So they got used to shooting at something that looked like a human being. So this is, as Rob said, part of the training, the horrible training of learning to kill. Yes. I feel like I'm a mommy as part of that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate this discussion. My name is Ken Donty. I've worked as a therapist and trauma in PTSD and secondary PTSD, the kind of the coins in the trade. And when I think of people who go off to war, even if it's a just war, even if it's World War II, even if it's absolutely clear, they often come back with nightmares and things that they can't integrate. They're haunted, the family suffer, comes out in divorces, shootings, other fashions. And these are not necessarily bad people. They're people who've been traumatized. In thinking of the training process you were mentioning, there's certain costs. I mean, there's a cost to going to war. Moral wounding is the word they use now for complex PTSD. Initially, there were two types of PTSD. One is like a truck blows up. It's the shock of it. But the other is that there was a child and you thought the child had a grenade and you weren't sure but your buddies were there and if you did shoot, something awful was gonna happen. If you didn't shoot, something awful was gonna happen. It was a devil's dilemma but you had to make a choice. Or you had to make the shot. And even though it sits right rationally and it sits right cognitively and you've been trained in a certain way, late at night, those ghosts come back. I often think of PTSD as ghosts. I mean, I think of the Vietnam War. You're haunted by stuff, even though your superiors told you it was right, even though you were prepared for it and it was part of the ethos, you're still haunted by it. It's part of the cost of going to war, the fact that people will suffer moral wounds, even if they are good people. Is that just part of the cost of this? We're talking about the- I want to thank you. That is exactly what I'm trying to get at. Even those of us who don't go to war, who send their soldiers to war, who elect the leaders to send their soldiers, we should be bearing some of that moral burden. I feel that. It shouldn't be just born by the soldiers. I have to remind people, I know, the soldiers don't choose where to go to fight. We do. The American electorate. And now there's a lot of loose talk about war and this just seems more imperative than ever that we all kind of own our wars and feel some of the pain. Of course somebody comes back from war and feels anguish. Even if he or she made the right decisions, it's an ugly, awful, horrible business that should be a last resort, right? Chris, do you want to add anything? And including head games. So I want to get that comment back there. Yes. Good, we have five minutes left. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, so it's multi-generational. I've learned and there are a lot of great psychologists working on that at Purdue, at Duke. There's a lot of good literature on that. And I think what I've learned is the great grandchild of a Holocaust victim is continuing to feel that mix of anger and shame and humiliation and fear and all those complex things. And so one thing I want to say about the project I'm working on, which is called achildskidetowore.com. You can look up the website. Is I'm trying to start this in the US, but then I'm talking to people about hopefully taking it up in other countries. There's somebody in Israel said, we need this. There's this kind of ongoing identity hatred war going on in our part of the world in Rwanda, in a number of countries. So I think if we listen to our children, think about the impact on our children, think about what do we want to be teaching them? What are the civics lessons? And I have to say, this conversation has been so meaningful to me to actually sit in a respectful environment and talk about the incredible difficult issue of killing. That doesn't happen at these meetings. And to be here with a soldier and an Iraqi and the mother of a soldier and all of you, I think good for us that we're doing this. And I think we can do it in other conflict zones. Is anybody else want? Oh, yes. The front of powerful peace, I didn't bring any books to sell, but I can't strongly recommend it. Because the chapter, the opening chapter, or before the chapters begin, I wrote a letter, a one page letter called, an open letter to veterans and recruits. And I said, you will be scarred in your body, mind, heart, and soul to become a soldier. Or you have become scarred in body, mind, heart, and soul. This is not even a chapter. I wrote that and I said, this needs to get out there. People need to hear this. The vets need to pass it to a vet, pass it to a vet. Because they come back thinking about rag heads from wars. That's not OK. That's not healthy. That's not good for our country, for any other country, for the people in our country. And so along those lines, I also opened up with this shocking revelation. The first words in powerful peace are when I was growing up in the Navy back in the mid-80s, female service members stripped nude on our base club stages and competed to be the hottest stripper. This is Army, Navy, and Air Force women to be the hottest all-nude stripper among a bunch of screaming male soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Think forward 10, 15 years to Tailhook and the great right sizing of dignity and respect across the genders, which by no means is complete. Any more than race relations are fixed in America. There is absolutely progress on both those issues. And so that issue is massive. And it's still, it's a residual. It's like, if you will, there's a memory or a flavor or a residual scent of degradation of females within the US military. It exists in calling it what it is. And there's a hard response to it from authorities saying, we have to stop doing this. And the complexity, again, of getting down to the war zones itself. And when men are in combat environment, the women are in combat environment, where I've been in these bases, these rapes, sexual assaults, attempted rapes have happened. I'm not saying are happening. Of course, they're still, they always will. But it was, there's a massive rash of it when it was kind of uncontrolled because everybody's focusing on the war, part of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan during the OOs up to 0809 and 10. So it's, like everything else, it's complex. It's complex. But it is absolutely a residual aspect of our culture of degradation of females. Yeah. I want to give Kitama a reject to say anything as we sort of wrap up about our conversation here. I would just re-emphasize, like in certain countries war or the history, how history touch upon war is illustration of war as it's a game of win and a game of, always a defensive game. We, I think it's real time to revisit how we are illustrating war in our history books. And I would re-emphasize, like illustrating war as is and whether it is offensive or defensive war regardless. But let's not just talk about war as if it's a game to win, but let's touch upon what's beyond war and let's be frank about what we are teaching the different generations about our country achievements regardless where we and how we did those achievements. But it's time to be honest about illustrating war as a war and illustrating the importance of lesson learned of those wars and that's the message we want to communicate to the different generation. We don't want different generations to think of war as the first tactic to convince people or to convene people about their ideology or their policy or their development vision. Let's not push them towards that type of thinking. I've seen war not just in Iraq, in Libya, in many countries. They think of war as a game on their smartphones and they think that war on the battlefield, it's just like using a gun toy. And okay, yes, I might kill someone and he might come back alive again and we can continue this game, it's not that. Once you kill someone, you're not gonna be here anymore and you have to live with it for the entire life that you're gonna live. Once you're gonna live war, you have to really communicate whatever you experience, whether you are a soldier who stood up to defend his country, to defend the honor of the women in his country or to defend the honor and the survival of a human overseas, but just tell them about the entire story of war. Tell them about your kids, how they suffered. Tell them about the taxpayer, what they paid and how they lived and tell them about the fears that they lived through and tell them and bring back the stories of the kids and the society you try to defend and you try to protect, bring it back to your own community and tell them like, look, we have to stop calling like all Afghans and all Iraqis and all Libyans as our enemies, they're not. Part of them, they were our enemies, but not all of them. It's time to shift the game. Once we shift the game, when we're gonna shift the game is when we decide to tell the truth, is when we decide to be honest with ourselves, is when we decide to learn from our own lessons and from our own experience and teach the lesson that we learned and pass it to others honestly because I don't think you want your kids. I was impressed, one of the kids, he said, I have my own future plans and I don't wanna miss it and the other one said that I don't wanna have my kids to live what I live. This is my decision, is that I lived in a war but I don't want my kids to live the exact same feeling every single day that you're gonna die in a harsh way. That's the type of message. It's time to communicate and it's time to teach, to own a new generation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.