 It's now my great pleasure to welcome back for the third time, Mr. Carl Marlontis. It was kind enough to come to my elective class last yesterday for an excellent conversation and we anticipate an excellent conversation again today. For those of you who may not have known of or read Carl's work, let me give you just a little background on it. Carl is a graduate of Yale. He had a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he chose to leave that and to volunteer to become a Marine officer at some of the very worst fighting in Vietnam. And he then subsequently left the Marine Corps after that tour and was a successful businessman for the rest of his career. But he started sometime, what, 20 years or so after the events of the war, realized he was behaving bizarrely and was having clearly reactions to stress and he needed to seek therapy and did so and writes about that rather eloquently. But then that's a story which is unfortunately fairly common. What makes Carl something of a national treasure in my opinion is that he is a very rare combination of things. He's a veteran who experienced some of the worst of hard ground combat and he also was a superbly educated man who decades after the events of the war drew on both of those sources to write two quite remarkable books. Both became New York Times bestsellers and if you haven't read them, I can't think of any better reading for military officers to read than these two books. The first one Matterhorn is a novel about Vietnam, again bestseller on the New York Times list. Even more remarkable in my opinion however is the second book, a book called What It Is Like to Go to War. The world is of course awash in war memoirs and it's not clear that most of them add any fundamental knowledge to the world being just sort of narratives of events that happen to those individuals. What makes Carl's work remarkable is the deeply reflective character of the book. It's organized not as a linear account but as a thematic account of what war did to him in terms of things like guilt and lying and the positive experience of killing and combat, things that rarely get articulated. And so I think that Carl brings a quite unique contribution. No other book is like it that I'm aware of. The closest thing would be J. Glenn Gray's book The Warrior is written right after World War II but Gray was in a very different kind of mission. He was an intelligence officer. He wasn't in the midst of hard combat. He had his PhD in philosophy the same day he got his draft notice to Vietnam. So it's like Carl in the sense of being a deeply erudite guy who also could reflect on war in a way but not with the kind of hard combat experience that Carl draws on. So it's really a great pleasure at this point. I consider you a friend and it's great to see you back. The first time I saw Carl he was being interviewed on the Bill Moyer show on television. That's an excellent interview. You can just Google it and find it if you like. Also his last interview here is up on our YouTube channel that I mentioned before. But when we first talked about his coming he said he actually preferred that format to giving a talk. So to that end I've prepared some questions. So if you looked at the last interview you realized we did this last time as well. These questions are somewhat different although since the themes are perennial some of them are somewhat similar to the last question but we need to cover them. So without further ado I'll ask these for a few minutes and then we will open it up to a question of the conversation. One important theme throughout your book what it is like to go to war is that it's very difficult to have an honest conversation with returning veterans about the experience of war and its effects on them. You point that part of this is the enormous inhibition on the part of civilians who haven't been there or done that fear that they don't know how to ask the question or that maybe they don't want to know it fear that they're going to offend you or upset you. But you also suggest that vets themselves are fearful about being open and honest about these experiences with civilians and their families and many who know people from the World War II generation almost universally report that those individuals virtually never or never talked about their wartime experiences. So can you say something about how you analyze the root of all these inhibitions that we've got about having this conversation and more importantly what are the negative consequences of the fact that we don't have it? Well first of all I think that in a sort of a lighter level it starts with the very culture that we live in you're not supposed to whine right? That's bad. You're not supposed to brag. That's bad. Well I mean combat is about 99.5% things that you would like to whine about or brag about you know. So that pretty much cuts out you know everything else. And I mean I can remember my father a World War II veteran he would be talking about oh that was the time we got into this basement in France and got drunk on Calvados would never mention that they were fighting in the hedgerows in Normandy I mean he just that was the only thing he could actually that society itself has as these rules about what you're supposed to keep mum about and you don't whine and you don't brag. That's the that's the underlying issue. The other one though is the more personal stuff which is that if you're a veteran you have and a combat veteran you have a very likely done some things that you are not proud of you have done some things that you feel like maybe you had to do but that if you talked about it to somebody who's never been there that they're going to think you're a monster. Well you know you're not too encouraged to say things to people that will have them believe that you're a monster even worse is that maybe you'll start to believe it yourself and you don't want to go there either. So I think that one of the big inhibitions on the veteran talking is just simply this fear of being judged by people who really don't know what the situation was and what the pressures were and that you'll be judged harshly and badly so what's the you know there's no return so don't take the risk. The other one is which I often caution you know veterans coming back young veterans in particular is that there is this sort of disdain for the civilian side and you don't know what I've seen you know you don't know what I've gone through and I'm sort of going like well you know that's no reason to not talk to you know 99 and a half percent of the population here it would be sort of the equivalent of if the women stopped talking to the men because the men don't know what childbirth is like I mean you know it's just I mean some people go through some really hard stuff that doesn't mean that you know well I'm better than you or we can't talk about it so that's from the veteran side I think from the civilian side there is just first of all fear I think you go postal on me I mean you know we've all seen I mean this whole post-traumatic stress thing is becoming a I don't know what the word is a sort of it's the equivalent of attention deficit disorder I mean you know it exists but you know 70% of the boys in grade school can't have ADD you know but because well the kid was daydreaming or the kid you know got into a fight in the playground give him some ritalin well you can start to do the same thing with post-traumatic stress it exists I mean I have it but it doesn't explain everything and so people have gotten this thing going well we don't want to set them off the other one is is a sort of a reticence about what do I know I don't know what to talk about I mean I'd like to know but I'm kind of afraid that I'd say something stupid or I'd bring up sad memories for him or you know so it would pretty much ruin any conversation so again there's a there's this risk I don't want to ruin the conversation but what the real risk is is that you're going to ruin the chance to actually communicate deeply and have a relationship with this veteran you're gonna have to move from veterans being the people you clap for at the airports to being some individual who has gone through some certain events that have been typical of the human race for a hundred thousand years and you're gonna have to open up a little bit and be vulnerable that he may just say I don't want to talk about it fine then you have to come back a couple days later and you don't have to start with tell me about combat would you kill anybody you ain't the cliche but I mean I've had people ask me that you start with something like what did you guys eat for breakfast before you went out on a patrol you can start with some very simple stuff like where were you when you found the bottles of calvados oh then you find out well then why were you there in other words you can start with something that leads in and it it lowers the chance of a rebuff which is get out of my face I don't want to talk about it for all the reasons that I've just talked about the veteran and it also lowers the risk of to you of looking stupid I mean why would anybody know what you ate for breakfast before it went from patrol unless you were there so it's a perfectly legitimate question and then then you start there and go go that way and I think that the key is that you don't look and someone and see a veteran you look at someone and see that individual person who happened to have been in combat it's a very big psychological shift I know this is slightly cheating in terms of the ground rules but I do have a follow-up question if you don't like it is good to have but you know you say some quite eloquent and for non combat vets perhaps surprising and counter intuitive things about some of the more pleasant experiences of combat and in terms of the group experience in terms of even the pleasures of killing under certain circumstances yeah do you think a non combat so it has the moral imagination the moral bandwidth to take that on oh absolutely I think that you can certainly imagine things like intense brotherhood I mean all you have to do is if you've been raised in a family with brothers or sisters you got a pretty good idea of what that's why that word is used and you can certainly just extrapolate from there that it's it's gonna be just you know intense and you know if someone says well if this guy was in trouble and he was in Timbuktu I would be on an airplane and I'd go there and try and figure out how to get him out of jail that is true I mean that's something that that's why I feel about some of these guys that I served with in Vietnam luckily none of them got in that kind of trouble but but but I think I think that people can can certainly use empathy on the other hand I think that there are certain experiences in life that you just you just will never fully grasp that's no reason not to talk to somebody I mean I think that that's the issue it's like again go back to the childbirth thing I have I can empathize I know what pain is you know I but I don't I can't empathize with all the you know millions of years of motherhood and the archetypes and the feeling of something coming out of your body I mean I can sort of try and think of that but I'll never get there I'll never get there but that's no reason for me to not talk or even feel like I'm inferior in some way it's just like that's just a different experience James Fallows recently published an excellent piece in the Atlantic Monthly called the tragedy of the American military I think most of these folks have read it one of the points he makes is that while Americans say that they highly respect the military they're also largely almost entirely ignorant of it what it actually does and especially of the toll the last nearly 15 years of conflict have taken on a force drawn from only 1% of the population and probably half of 1% actually engaged in combat further more that said it has been redeployed many times I mean many people in this room have been deployed four or five times in ways that were never imagined when the draft was ended and and the expectation wasn't in major conflict we would mobilize the force and re-energize the selective service system so this war has been fought by a your war was fought by a draft de-force you went for one tour you came home you got out most people did that one consequence of that was the military that went to Vietnam was deeply connected to the country for good and for ill I mean in terms of generating the anti-war movement because every almost every family had right children in the in the conflict all of us to remember our ping-pong ball number from the selective service system who are out of that period so what do you think are the positive and negative effects of on the one had a very professional all-volunteer military but one that's so disconnected between most Americans and the American culture we have a lot of time this is one of the soapboxes I like to get up on I grew up in a little logging town in Oregon and it was in the 50s even though I was in college in the 60s and you like to think if you're so old I was part of the 60s and you actually what was my formative period was the 50s when I was a child and everybody knew somebody or was or lived in a family with somebody who had been in the service it was called the service today we call it the military and I think it's a profound shift in language that needs to be thought about we had the expectation that now there's the draft and yeah and nobody wanted to get drafted but no one wants to pay their income tax either it was just part of being a citizen it was just that you know you knew that maybe you'd be the one that get called and okay I'll go do it but it was like I'll pay the taxes we have to you know the government needs to function and so you know we have to pay taxes I don't I wouldn't do it if there wasn't somebody you know scare the hell out of me I go to jail you know I mean I'd rather keep the money and I think that but the draft changes your view of your citizenship it's like I that's hanging over my head and I may be the one that gets called and I think that from the professional side I mean who would you rather have a volunteer or a draftee that's reluctant to even do anything well I mean clearly the volunteer is the way you want to go and you'd like to retain them not have someone there for two or three years and then have them disappear you know I mean so there's a lot of advantages to the military the service of having an all-volunteer military but I think it's dangerous for a republic I really think it's dangerous I'm reminded of the story of the battle of Connie which is when Hannibal handed the Romans their rear end it was a horrific battle just opposite of Rome across the mountains where the Carthaginians got exhausted killing Romans because they had to do it in shifts it was such a horrible loss here's some interesting points about that the first one is that 25 percent of the Roman Senate lost their lives in that battle that's a big change 75 percent of the Roman Senate lost an immediate family member you better believe Rome was involved at a very high level and with with the draft having gone away the elites are dropping out and they're not involved like they used to be 1956 class of Princeton over 50 percent went on immediate active duty service in 2006 or four it was like three or four this is not healthy if you're gonna have the elites not rowing their ore you're gonna start to build a lot of resentment about the from the ones who are rowing it going back to the battle of Connie the survivors were vilified because the Roman citizens were people thought well they must be cowards they didn't die there everybody else died my kid died so you must be a coward and they instead of letting them come back into the Roman towns or Rome itself they had them outside isolated from the community in camps and that was the beginning of isolation of the military in Rome I believe where they didn't just be weren't just citizen soldiers where they came home but they're sort up and then when it was the time to go back and fight again they went back and fought here these guys are in encampments outside of town well this looks pretty familiar today to us the other thing that began to happen is because they weren't feeling very supported by the Republic this man named who was from a family called Scipio were enormously wealthy I mean they would put you know Bill Gates to shame in terms of the difference between their level of wealth and everybody else's he began to take care of them and their loyalty began to shift from the Republic to Scipio and he used this cadre of veterans loyal to him to go into Carthage and defeat Carthage and you know so them salt in the ground and it was really was the end of Carthage but 172 years later which in historical perspective isn't much you have a Roman army invading Rome totally loyal to one man Julius Caesar and it can happen and it can happen because I think we now have to recognize we're on a path that is the very beginning of the wrong path I think we need the reason we got rid of the draft it was so unfair you know I mean kids that didn't go to college basically fought that war up until about 1970 or something when they finally got rid of the two s deferment that's unfair that is not a healthy way to keep a Republic going so they said we're gonna get rid of it but when they got rid of it these things started happening and the other thing is that the unfairness actually hasn't shifted if you take the top three desiles in terms of income and you can do this sort of basically just by zip code where these people come from and you look at their military Homer records and you compare it to the bottom three desiles and we're not talking about ghetto kids here we're talking about kids whose parents work in Walmart all right and up here we're talking about kids whose parents are you know partners in law firms at the very end but the top three of on being World War two as you would expect the lower three desiles were killed at a rate of one point two times the top three they're the ones that don't know how to type and so they don't get the job in the rear that's the way it works still unfair in Vietnam it was at one point four times because of the inequities of the draft today it's at one almost one point seven times that's a very bad trend and and and it's a bad trend that was not solved by getting rid of the draft it's because it's not the all volunteer military and I know some of you are gonna get mad at me when I say this it's the all recruited military volunteers are when 9-11 hits and people run down to the sign up that's a volunteer when Pearl Harbor gets bombed that's a volunteer we're we're recruiting people it's a place where you can have a good career it's a place where you know you learn skills there's nothing wrong with this but I think we have to disabuse ourselves that it's it's the same thing as as volunteering it is not you know I mentioned that when I since you are about same age I remember vividly when the draft was ended and there was all this talk that well the selective service system is still there and we will definitely activate it if we need any kind of big mobilization we're just gonna have this smaller permanent force but we never think of going to any extended period of warfare without re re-energizing the selective service system and to this day of course every 18 year old has to register with them and has to prove that to get student loans and so on can you foresee any scenario in which political leadership would ever suggest actually doing that yeah no I I think that first of all the the way they solve it is by multiple tours isn't there a clause at the end of the contract that says well you know you can leave when we think you it's okay I think that that has that was sort of a hidden in there but I think that that the real issue is that if you have a draft suddenly you're gonna have political blowback and what politicians are gonna want to take the risk of that I mean if they and so I think that they're unlikely to try and and bring it back because right now you've got people who volunteer are recruited and basically it's like well you know you didn't have to do it and so the political blowback is nothing like what it was during Vietnam and clearly there are people in this country who think that we're in the you know the wrong place in the wrong time in terms of Afghanistan and Iraq and there would be way more heat if their kids were getting drafted just just no doubt in my mind so I think that that's important I think the way to solve the inequity of it is I think we should just have national service I think we should let I mean I've got a couple of kids I wouldn't want them in the Marine Corps I mean they're you know I mean you know just they're just not not the kind to do it but boy they could go teach kids how to read in the inner city I mean they can certainly build fire trails out in the forest there's a lot of work to do out there I mean I much rather be groped at the airport by some 18 year old than the people that grope me right now you know so but and then out of that out of that Corps out of that two years of service let the kids volunteer to do theirs to do their form of service in the military the Republic has a whole wide range of people with a wide range of skills and if we can allocate them properly we are better off and the unfairness issue would go would go away and you still wouldn't lose the the military's concern which is I don't want a reluctant recruit one last time follow-up it's on another side of it it's about the the founders are very concerned about excessive use of military force very concerned not mean in fact they didn't provide to have an army at all in peace time but you know in the modern period with the large standing army since the since the Cold War the Congress has basically abdicated its responsibilities about war powers almost entirely right in the bill up to the Iraq war the press was pretty supine about all of this the mood of the country was frightened and therefore not inclined to ask a lot of critical thinking so what you describe is you got a basically an American foreign legion to be used at the discretion of the executive branch under conditions where most people don't have a political dog in the fight that's right I agree with that completely that it's I mean I call it the Praetorian Guard but it can be misused way easier than it used to be and I think that what what citizens of the Republic and we all are citizens of the Republic whether we wear uniforms or not need to do is to start to think about is this have we started down a bad path there's no fear of a military coup right now I don't know anybody you know in the military personally that would act like to take over the job of the president you know we're not you know we're not all that stupid but anyway the the thing is though it can happen because that's exactly what everybody said in in Germany you know it can happen here is what they said in in Chile it can't happen here it can happen because we're humans all over the world just the same okay switching subjects your description of the experience of killing in combat was unlike anything I think I've ever read and its nuance and and it articulates some things that I think are rarely articulated and are probably somewhat surprising to those of us who haven't done it and in particular you give voice to for lack of a bit or the unique pleasures of killing under some circumstances could could you say something about that yeah I mean this is where I'm glad I wrote it down because it's already out so I can feel better about saying it now I wouldn't be so hesitant because I have the same hesitancies that I've talked about but the first thing that I want to say about the killing is that we are the top animal on the food chain and we're not on the top of the food chain because we're nice so the first thing we have to recognize is that we aren't we are a savage species we're the only species that really kills each other to the extent that we do certain chimpanzees do it seems to be a primate thing but if you go if you see most animals they'll get into a fight for dominance or something and then the other one will just leave and that's it's done we will go for the kill so we have to own that that's that's the first thing and the second thing that we have to own is the same way that we have to own our sexuality 19th century repression of sexuality led to enormous weird stuff now we still have a lot of enormous weird stuff I mean you know going on I mean I've got the internet I can look at it anytime I want but where that stuff comes from is repressing a natural urge a natural part of our being you can't repress it you have to learn how to ride the horse you can't say the horse doesn't exist but are you gonna be able to ride it or are you gonna have a gallop away from you and end up doing some really stupid things it's the same with aggression I think that we have to own that we do have aggression and some have more than others some are naturally more aggressive than others it's just the way that we're also built and I thought you know if I don't speak honestly about some of these feelings then what I'm doing is I'm repressing something that's very natural to me I played football and rugby I love knocking people over I just love it and my wife is sort of horrified by that she's why would you want to do that for fun I said because it's fun I love to knock people over I just like it and when I was in the war I have to own that I remember once killing a guy and I hid him right between the eyes and I went God I got him right between the eyes and what did I feel I felt competent I felt exultant he didn't get me I got him and not only that but I got him between the eyes and then you know in 30 years later I thinking boy that's that's kind of a weird way of looking at it and then a few years left you know that was an appropriate response at the time at the moment for a 22 year old kid who was trained to fire the rifle right and when you're in war that's that's the way it needs to work the other one that I talk about in the in the book is is a recon team got in trouble and I had been hit a couple times so they moved me to the backseat of a 01 Charlie to be a forward air controller naval gunfire spotter and they were being pursued by an NBA unit and they were holding them off and they had two wounded with them and so they weren't going fast and we were the only ones around it was a very cloudy day so we started flying around and I I could shoot in with my m16 out of the window and that was and we sort of slowed them down so we could get the team up to a place where we could extract them and then we had two phantoms show up from the name with a snap and nake that's you know napalm bombs and I think it's 250 pound bombs maybe 500 but I think but anyway a lethal comment they showed up and it was like here's where we want you to hit them and they hit them first with the with the bombs and blew away jungle and then they came in with napalm and they killed I mean you know scores of them and I could see them burnt and crawling around on the ground and writhing in pain and what was my reaction I caught on the radio and to the recon team and I said we've got crispy critters all over the place here we're going to get you out I felt enormous joy because I had done them in you know well now I look back on it I go like whoa whoa what was I doing well the thing is is that we have to start to understand something about war and the admiral you know said it's a dirty ugly business we managed to do that kind of stuff because we've managed to make the enemy into an animal I use the word pseudo speciate him but we've done it for eons we fought gooks today we fight hajis and towel heads then before that we fought crouts and nips what are we doing well we're we're sort of making them into an animal because we've been taught all our lives thou shalt not kill this is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage which is what this country has basically and and how do you get a 19 year old or an 18 year old to go against that much inhibition about killing well you let him pseudo speciate the enemy because you can kill an animal but my sort of mantra about that is you fight an animal you kill an animal but you bury a fellow human being it's the way you have to get it done because as soon as that person is dead it is no longer stopping you from fulfilling your mission and then that's the time to say that was a human being who fought courageously who has you know a mother and brothers and sisters and now we're gonna bury this person and you bring your humanity back you know you tell one other killing story that I we've talked about last time you heard but I think we should talk about that one too because this is the one that comes back to haunt you and the one you know appears on your windshield on i-5 in the middle of the night and that was the killing of this Vietnamese soldier who is in a in a firing position that you came face to face with before you kill him could you talk a little about that episode and how it differs from the yeah the crispy critter right I can we were an assault and again I love the animals thing you know as soon as the plan hits it's the ground in reality everything starts changing that's why every individual rifleman has to know what the plan is so he can figure out how to get it accomplished the assault had broken down it was still going full blast I mean we were no no way had crumbled but it's just that the lieutenant no longer really has control because everybody's busy fighting and I was with my radio man and two other guys and we were up against the hill it was pretty steep and all of a sudden I saw two chai calms down and and those are the hand grenades with the potato mash or shaped hand grenades and they're whirling told me it blew up and knocked me out and I came to pretty quickly and one of the guys was wounded and so we threw our grenades back whether we knew there were two NVA in a hole right above us someplace and so we toss them back two more chai calms came down and we you know we had to run uphill because you wanted to get underneath it so it would go down behind you and then we we threw our grenades and then the lieutenants brain starts to go in as I'm gonna be out of grenades here pretty soon so this is not a good tactic and so I told the guys that was with me my radio operator and this other guy was still functioning I said you throw the grenades but wait for me to get around to the backside and then when they stand up to throw the grenades back I'll get them with my m16 and so I got up around the hill and got into position that was no further away from me than the front row here so I was really close to this guy grenades came sailing over bang bang they're off they went and in the hole one of the NVA soldiers was slumped over and was dead and this other one rose up to throw his grenades and we locked eyes that is the big difference because suddenly it wasn't a gook it was a 1918-year-old kid that was staring me right in the eyes and I was staring at him right in the eyes over the top of my m16 and I remember whispering out loud I couldn't speak Vietnamese I remember he had his grenade in his hand I remember he was just saying don't throw it I won't shoot don't throw it I won't shoot I didn't want to kill him because it wasn't it was a person all of a sudden unlike the crispy critters who I couldn't see I was up you know 500 feet well he just snarled at me and he really hated me I mean there was this ugly snarl and he threw the grenade I pulled the trigger and again you know talk about weird things what happens I bucked my shot I mean those of you who are marksmen know that when you anticipate the recoil you'll you'll go forward like that's called bucking your shot so the barrel goes down and I hit the lip of the foxhole instead of hitting him directly and so it the bullet hit the top and then it went into him and talking about and I went God you bucked your shot I mean that's what's going on in your head all right and then I was busy I had all kinds of things to do we're in the middle of a full blown assault and we took the hill and you know I had to consolidate and all that stuff that you do and years later I think it was about 1990 I was driving down I5 which is the interstate on the west coast and it was 2 o'clock in the morning and I've got country music on and the no kids are with me so I'm all in control I'm going on a mission I'm going from Portland to Seattle I mean you know everything is great with the world my little bubble of green light heading down the highway and all of a sudden in the windshield I see these eyes of this kid that I locked eyes with now I'm sophisticated enough to know that okay there's no ghost here but something has to be done about this because you have repressed this fact that you actually killed a human being and you have never dealt with it I don't feel guilty about killing him but I feel something because it's a great tragedy that that we both found ourselves in a situation where one of us was going to die and I happen to be the one that won and I have to deal with it because I actually killed a human being and everybody that gets killed in war is a human being and we have to try to remember that and like I said goes back to my mantra you kill an animal but you bury a human being we never bury our enemy we'd throw him off the side of the hill and let him rot that was a bad thing to do so anyway the 1990s when when finally this repression of this act that I had done came out to haunt me and believe me I had had all kinds of trouble but by that time I mean I mean I bumped my head on the cupboard in the kitchen and it took me by surprise obviously and I took it out with my fists and my kids are looking at me with wide eyes and my wife is horrified and there's cans all over the kitchen and food sprayed everywhere and splintered cabinets my hands are bleeding I didn't know what why it had happened I couldn't I was like shocked at myself I mean there would be a noise and I'd be stark naked out on the street and I suddenly realize I'm out in the middle of the street with no clothes on because I thought that you know there wasn't something out there it had to be dealt with screaming at my kids all that sort of stuff and I think a great part of that is that I had repressed the combat action and not thought about it not worked through with it and there's a wonderful expression a guy named Joe Bobo who's a he says he's a zen monk he says the task is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors ghosts haunt you that unintegrated repressed image of a of a Vietnamese boy that I killed was a ghost it haunted me and because I was unaware that it was there and what I had to do was get it out in front of me and I did that by writing that book so suddenly the ghost is now in front of me I still killed him the history is still there but it's now out here where I can see it I can examine it the ghost has become an ancestor and there's a lot of ways you can turn ghosts to ancestors I do it by writing some people can do it by telling their family what happened some people can draw it some people write poetry music there's a lot of ways that we can turn ghosts to ancestors but we just have to understand the process and this is what we're doing there's one episode in your book where you just describe a firefight that you're now done you've killed some Vietnamese and you discover that your your marines are cutting off ears and sticking them into elastic bands around their helmets right I think your description of that event why it happened and how you dealt with it is really important and I'd like you to tell the story about what you did and then more importantly why little context there were officers marine and army officers who actually encouraged people to cut ears to prove body count and I talk a lot about body count that's a very immoral objective we don't go to war to kill people we go to war to achieve some political end hopefully something that's very important like protecting our sovereignty or our people and people get killed in the process of doing that that's a very different thing than we're going there to kill people real different and body count was the only objective that anybody ever talked about in Vietnam it was a very confused war for that very reason I mean my dad always talked about well first you know we get the beaches at Normandy and then we cross the Sen and then pretty soon we were at the Rhine he could measure whether they were winning or not you never had that in Vietnam and we have that problem in what Moore's today to what is what is winning actually going to look like so body count substituted for okay so now now I've got my kids and they're 18 all right they're 19 this was the equivalent to them of a Letterman sweater I mean people have to understand that when you see carnage day after day and your own friends are blowing up and they're you don't know which part goes to which you know which body and you have to throw it in a poncho so it can go back to mom and dad some place cutting an ear off of a dead body is really pretty trivial in the eyes of some 18 or 19 year old who's proud because he killed this guy killed my friend and now I'm the I'm the I got my antlers on the garage door here that's the sort of the attitude but the thing is is that you have to be responsible for being the adult and I realized that this is no way to go I didn't get mad at him I wasn't mad at him because I understood the carnage and what they were up to and I just took these two two kids who had I saw it with the ears and their helmets and I said I know that you know they they're dead bodies down below us that's why they taken the ears off killed your friend and I know that you just you know took these these ears off to prove that you you were you were the victor I understand what you're doing but I said it's not right you can't do this it can lead to a lot worse things you have to do something about this and I'm going to make you bury these bodies and this wasn't a trivial assignment because we were still getting shot at I mean it wasn't a full-on firefight but there was a sniper out there that was taking shots at us all the time and so they had to go down and bury these bodies worrying about getting shot by this sniper and I did go down with them and when they started digging the hole they both started crying 18 year old kids just started crying because they were burying a human being and and that was a big lesson for me I learned that that humanity is always there but if you don't remind people of their humanity it can go awry and then you end up with me lie where they were killing vermin that was the word they used vermin because they had pseudo-speciated everything that was vietnamese and they never learned how to pull it back and no one helped them pull it back I think it was a complete failure of leadership okay last question for me so begin to prepare your own thoughts and questions you said a little about this already but how did you become more that you were suffering some pretty serious after effects to your war experience and how did what kind of help did you seek and why and what was helpful well the first irony of it is that all these symptoms are coming I had no idea that they were related to my war experience I thought I was going crazy so they're my wife and I couldn't figure out why I was going crazy I used to think gee I was pretty mellow guy it was sort of a type type b kind of a guy you know things didn't bother me too much and suddenly I'm you know someone honks the horn behind me I mean this was one incident someone came up I was in an intersection in Santa Barbara and I was trying to figure out which way to go and some guy came up I mean blasted the horn because he was impatient I remember coming awake basically on the hood of his car trying to kick his windshield in with my kid in the intersection Sophie who was three years old at the time going what's daddy doing kicking this guy's windshield I mean because post-traumatic stress you don't think you reacted the the input normally goes from the ear or the eye or whatever through the cerebral cortex and then you make a decision about what to do about it with post-traumatic stress because you've learned in combat I mean most combat casualties occur early in a tour because the brain hasn't adapted and then what happens is that the brain starts to route those messages straight to the amygdala fight flight freeze so somebody honks the horn behind me there's no thinking I'm on top of that hood trying to kill him and then I come awake because now I'm starting to think it kicks in and and and there were the instances I talked about the you know this the cupboard shouting at the kids just all that stuff and you know one day my wife says to me she says well you know I see in the paper that there's going to be a bunch of psychologists from the county at the local grade school and they're going to have a workshop on job stress I think you've got a lot of job stress and I thought well maybe it is job stress I mean I had a fairly stressful job um so she said maybe you should go to that and I said okay I'll go to that she's usually right about that kind of stuff and uh I go down there and there's about 70 or 80 people there and there's a bunch of psychologists sitting at the cafeteria tables people you know coming coming to line they had numbers and number 14 and you go up and see whoever it was and I go up to this guy and I sit down at the table and he says well tell me what's going on and so I start telling him about to what I these things I've just related to you he looks at me and he says have you ever been in a war I broke down sobbing I mean snot coming out of my nose heaving I couldn't stop have you ever been in a war it just everything came out and I'm in front of all these people in the school cafeteria completely out of control with tears and snot and heaving and everything and after about 10 minutes where I don't know it seemed like an eternity I finally sort of get it together and he's writing on a card and he says you have something called post-traumatic stress disorder have you ever heard of it no this is like 1997 or something like that okay 67 cents 30 years after the war 28 years after my complex experience and he says I want you to go down the street now not tomorrow not next week I'm calling this guy on the phone he works for the VA outreach patient center or something like that on on Santa Barbara street his name is Larry Decker I'm calling him on the phone and you're promising me that you're going to walk down there now and see him okay okay and uh I walked into that thing and Larry Decker was there and he said one minute we'll talk about this and that's what started me even understanding that that I had problems from the war I knew I had problems but I couldn't connect him well he started me talking about it he said well tell me about your experience so I told him about my experience in about 20 minutes and then he said all right that's a good start he says next week we'll we'll do it again the next week it took me the whole session I went through it then I started again and uh it lasted for several months and then he said now you're ready to go to a group and then we did it again and it was just a form of therapy where I kept talking about it and I talked about it with other veterans talked about it with him I turned ghosts into ancestors and and I also got medicine I take uh was it buprian hydrochloride it's uh well butron uh and I take a little tiny bit of riddle in with it I talk about attention deficit but anyway because I have this thing about if there's a noise whatever I was doing I'd forgotten about it because I'm over here now you know and a little bit of riddle and helps me go like oh yeah there's that noise but really I have to get this project done you know and so it's a combination of talk therapy writing and medicine well there are many more things I'd like to ask you about but I think we should give the students an opportunity to ask what they'd like so uh over to you guys whatever what are you yet yes please