 It's great to be here today. To start, I'm just going to go through three quick stories about killing. The first is about Brian Chantosh. Some of you may know him. A Marine Lieutenant during the initial invasion of Iraq, he ordered his driver to charge an ambush that hit their convoy during a motor march towards Baghdad. He jumped into a trench lined with Iraqi soldiers and killed maybe two dozen of them. Firing his M16 until it jammed, then emptying first his pistol and then two AK-47s he grabbed off dead Iraqis. For his actions, he was awarded the Navy Cross. I met him in October 2004 outside Fallujah a month before he led India Company of the three-five Marines into the city, where he himself killed many more men. In his unit, backed by snipers, tanks, and air support, killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, he estimated. After many days of this, and here I'm reading from my story, he was taking more risks than a company commander should. Plunging headlong into firefights, pumped up, he says, by an overinflated sense of my self-worth and capabilities. It was, he admits, borderline reckless. I don't think I was at that point yet, but I was getting tired, battle-tired, not feeling a sense of danger. At a certain point, you just get so desensitized to it. Death, the killing. We talked at length about this, and I'm leaving a great deal out here, but generally he was good with what he'd done, proud of his service, proud of the men he fought with and for. At one point, though, he said, I'm going to hell because of all the people that I killed, or circumstances forced me to kill. I later asked if he was serious. Yeah, I've done some terrible things, he said, whether justified, whether legal, whether for a greater good, whether whatever. I've done some terrible things to other human beings, and yeah, if there's a hell, I'm going to hell for the things I've done, but I'm okay with that. The second story is about Chantosh's battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Millay, likewise very involved in the fight for Fallujah. It was very close, very personal, very competitive, he said. Either you're going to win and walk away, or he's going to win and walk away. It's the two of you in second place, his face down dead. Millay was 44 then. Fallujah was his first combat experience, but he'd lived, he'd studied war. After he got home, he had long talks with his father, who, quote, got a belly full at Okinawa. While a soldier barely old enough to vote might struggle to comprehend the emotional crosswinds and can swirl after taking a life, Millay described it with an appropriate mix of wisdom and profanity, respect and brutality. When I killed guys at close range, when it was over, there was a sense of euphoria. It wasn't, ha ha, I killed the guy, it was, I'm alive and he's dead. The next day is brighter. Food tastes better when you realize you might not be eating this at things gone differently. You think about the guy you killed a little, especially when it's up close, because you think, if I got killed, my family and friends are going to be notified. This guy, he's dead, nobody knows. And the dogs are going to eat him and he's going to get shit into the gutters of Fallujah and he had a mother. Some had pictures of wives and girlfriends and kids. But when you can say, hey, he was a few feet away with an AK-47 blazing away and he'd already killed Corporal Mike Anderson, a 3-5 Marine who died in Fallujah. You're okay with it at least for now. Still, he said he hadn't slept restfully through the night since he came home a decade ago. A third story. Before I'd met Chantash and Millay, I met a younger Marine, Ben Nelson in Ramadi where I spent time with whiskey company of the 2-5 Marines and Nelson and the guys he rode with, Lance Thompson, Mark Ryan, and company commander Patrick Rapicoe in particular. Nelson was the gunner. A month later, their Humvee was ran by a suicide car bomber. Nelson was badly injured. Everyone else was killed. From that moment forward, Nelson agonized over the fact that he hadn't shot the bomber, that he hadn't protected his brothers. He replayed the incident in his head repeatedly while trying to rehab his injuries, while dealing with severe PTSD and TBI, while going through a laundry list of prescriptions, as well as trying to start a family. Only recently, thanks to his wife and a particular VA therapist near Sacramento, does it feel like he got something of a handle on it, though still far from 100% it brings him comfort. But now he knows there's something else he has to confront, something that's been on the back burner while he wrestled with his guilt and sadness over the loss of Ryan, Rapicoe, and Thompson. In the initial invasion, his unit ran into and killed some Iraqi soldiers while heading north. The other Marines turned toward fire coming from another direction. While Nelson was told to keep watch on an area where the corpses lay, then a boy, maybe seven years old, ran out and picked up the AK beside one of the dead Iraqis. I was just sitting there thinking, okay, just run back, just go back, just go, and Nelson told me. Instead, he aimed at us and I shot him and I killed him. This was within the rules of engagement. He'd done what he was trained to do, neutralizing to use the antiseptic word, a threat to his fellow Marines. But no drill sergeant had ever run through a scenario like this. No one else saw the shooting, and he wasn't about to ask anyone what they thought. I knew what I did was right, but I still don't want to talk about it, he said. People talking about shooting adult who's got an RPG, aimed at a Humvee, everyone can understand that. You don't sit there and say, oh, I killed a seven-year-old. He understood why there hadn't been much talk about the aftermath of fighting during training. You can't at the same time have them thinking about what's going to come. Later, he said, that could make them hesitate. That could cost them their life or someone else's life. That could cost the war. But that doesn't mean you can't help them out after. Have someone talk to them about what they're going to feel, the rage that's going to be inside. I was so angry at everything, and I didn't know why. I do now, but I didn't then. I'm telling these stories for the same reason I wanted to report about the before, during, and after of killing in combat. Because after reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan and several other conflict zones, after reading a great deal about America's recent wars, I came to feel that killing was left out of the conversation far too often. There are many reasons for this, and there are exceptions too, some authored by people in this room. But in general, in this country, this basic aspect of war and its consequences, both for those who carried out and the communities in the places where it happens, has been overlooked, ignored, wished away. Killing in combat is part of a larger experience, a larger mission of course, but when the specific piece of it is kept out of the conversation, we get an incomplete picture of these battles. And it's not only a missing chapter in the story of these wars, which leaves many to carry the killing they did on their own in isolation. I was told by spokesmen at the Pentagon, the Army, and the Marines that the number of men who kill enemy or others is not tracked, that there's no generalized study of killing in combat. If it's true, and I'm not totally convinced it is, but if it's true, it's surprising, because I think it would be a real area of focus for several reasons tied to the theme of this conference. The first is performance, the capabilities of drones and cyber systems of war at times obscure the fact that at the end of the day men and women are going to be delivering the final blows, the kill shots if you will, regardless of the technology employed, especially as unconventional wars become more conventional. From a purely utilitarian perspective, I think the military would want to know how effectively combat troops carried out this part of their jobs and how well their killing was planned and directed. The second is the impact the killing has on the troops that do it, and the resulting consequences for them, the military, and the country in terms of care, battle readiness, and other knock-on effects. Training has evolved to make sure combat troops are prepared to take life when they arrive on the battlefield to make it feel, in essence, as if they've done it before. But there's much less attention paid to what happens afterwards. This blends into the larger discussion of post-combat care and guidance. Beyond that, it relates to the nature of the contract between the military, the country, and the men and women who serve. Some people kill and war and carry on just fine. They categorize it and make sense of it of what they didn't saw. Some, like Chantosh, managed to hold seemingly opposing sentiments in mind at the same time and keep moving forward. But others struggle with it. And I've heard veterans, mental health professionals, military, and civilian alike, even members of the special operations community, say we have no idea how guys will deal with the killing they've done as the years passed. For some, it can get harder, not easier. They move away from the context in which the killing made sense. Back into the space where taking life is the ultimate moral transgression. And where most others have no parallel experiences. The people they killed start seeming more human than they were on the battlefield, like fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, rather than just enemy to use one of the more polite name given in times of war. Individuals beginning to confront their own mortality may start thinking about what they'll have to atone for when they're judged. And they have to weigh what they did and what they were asked to do against how the campaign turned out in the end. Something that's already happening with regards to Afghanistan and Iraq, along lines earlier noted by Lieutenant General McMaster. Third point I'd mention here is that killing is a way that America projects itself, and it's therefore integral to later military and diplomatic efforts to consolidate gains among other objectives. It influences how local communities see us and our allies too, particularly government and security forces trained or installed by the U.S., which are crucial to future stability or lack thereof. Killing is a language of a sort, one way the U.S. has been conversing, in a sense, with other cultures and communities. How and when and why troops killed or didn't kill. Incidents where troops saved lives or incidents where individuals uncontained by their leaders, community atrocities, all of it is absorbed and remembered. This goes for non-military too. And our allies and the killing they've done, that reflects on us as well. Ask any Afghan about Dostam and Syaf and see what the first thing they tell you is. It doesn't matter how long ago it was. They remember and it still matters. This goes the other way too, of course. ISIS is saying something with how and when they kill. What's happening in Central African Republic, DRC, Nigeria, Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinian territories. What's happened in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Yemen and Mindanao. In some ways, in many ways, things are being said through killing. These are messages written in blood. The trick is that the three elements I mentioned and others involved don't naturally flow together. And as you know, the agencies and departments responsible for them don't either. Some considerations about the well-being of individual troops or diplomacy can also run counter to what a fighting force needs to do to carry the day. Ben Nelson wanted to shoot the driver of that car bomb, but he was told to hold his fire. His commander, Pat Rapicoe, who was responsible for seeing the big picture, was thinking about how killing civilians undermine efforts to win over communities. Nelson understands that. He still admires Rapicoe immensely and doesn't blame him at all. But there were consequences. What was right then? Were the rules of engagement too tight? Were they too loose at other times? Are these situations inevitable when war is declared? What are the ramifications of killing for wars and war fighters? And where does responsibility for the killing ultimately rest? I'd love to hear your answers and hear what you think of the kill switch if you read it. It's a Kindle single, but if you just download the app, you can read it on any device. You may feel differently than I do, but I came out of this knowing that if we're not talking about killing, we can't begin to answer these questions. And the country and its institutions to their detriment will fail to see how important taking life is to what happens afterwards. Thank you.