 All right Admiral hell gave you a little sense of Carl's biography this morning Just question. How many of you have read either Matterhorn or what it is like to go to war Carl's two books? Okay, that's a pretty good representation I first saw Carl on the Bill Moyer show and that's an excellent interview Carl told me last night that it was up for an Emmy. I think that Specific episode was up for an Emmy because it was such a good interview Carl is really a quite remarkable guy. He has a graduate of Yale He as Admiral how said he had a Rhodes scholarship, which he voluntarily left to command a Marine Infantry platoon in the worst of Vietnam Went on to have a business career and then decades later starts doing some quite bizarre things that he recounts quite honestly and graphically in his book and Realized he's got some problems with what war has done to him and so he got the help he needed but also Being the superbly educated man that he is he began to turn this into these remarkable books And I don't know really any war memoir That's written by someone who experienced the worst of combat and it has the deep educational resources to really think deeply about What war did to him? That Carl has so if you haven't read the books I Highly recommend that you do it And I don't think you'll ever forget him though. There are books like no other The closest thing I can think of is like it in a way is Jay Glenn Gray's book about World War two called the Warriors This guy got his PhD in philosophy and his draft notice on the same day and went off to World War two and wrote An excellent book about World War two, but he was an Intel guy. He wasn't in hard combat. It's a much more distant kind of reflection So since I first saw Carl on Moyers This is now Carl's fourth trip to visit us and he's always preferred this format so Some of the questions are somewhat similar if any of you have watched this on YouTube But I worked pretty hard to come up with some novel things and got some a couple of insights from colleagues to try to modify them So we'll go through a few questions and then we'll still have plenty of time for you to ask them your own questions And if you've got the books, you'll be happy to autograph them if you bring them up after after the end of the session So what important theme throughout your book what it is like to go to war is the great difficulty of having an honest Conversation between veterans and civilians about the experience of war and its effects You write about this a lot in your book but for this audience would you tell them? What do you think are the sources of this these inhibitions on both sides? Yes Fear on both sides is one of the other of the biggest ones which is that the returning Veteran is afraid that they'll be judged because the things that you do in war often end up being horrible and You're worried that somebody who actually hasn't seen the context in which These deeds are performed and then you start to relate them to them. They're just going to judge you I mean nobody wants to be thought of as a horrible person and so you think well if there's a chance of that Maybe I'll just keep quiet On the other side the civilian side people are afraid. Well, I don't want to disturb him or I don't want to I don't want her to get upset as a culture we're pretty bad dealing with emotions and If you're gonna have an honest dialogue with with a returning veteran you had better be prepared to have some emotions coming out because Anywhere from from anger to sorrow to pride all the above in about a 30-second interval and Often people say well, you know, I'll talk to somebody He'll say I don't want to talk about it. So you're rejected. Well, there's another issue is rejection You have to just have the courage to go back and talk again There's a deeper issue Which is that there's an automatic? Us them that is a result in my opinion of an unconscious attitude on the part of the country it comes in large part because we no longer draft people and so we were beginning to see a bigger Split between the military a professional group When I was a kid, I mean everybody's dad and uncle had been in World War two and Every mother in town knew that a destroyer was you know smaller than an aircraft carrier and things we did Are I just took for granted when I wrote Matterhorn the first people who were reviewing they said well No one knows what a m16 is you better explain it, you know, I go, huh, how can that be possible? It is possible. I had this woman come up to me and in a reading and She was a little bit sort of nervous, you know, and I thought well I'm what's going just finally she comes up to the place where she wants the book sign and I Say well, you know what's going on and she says well, you know I was a college student during the Vietnam War and I just just hated it I mean it was just a terrible thing and I went to all the protests. I could I just Didn't like it and and then I read Matterhorn and I didn't know you guys slept outside Do we have an issue? Yeah, and where are this where this comes from? I use this analogy And and I've used it before so forgive me if you've already heard it, but it's a good one. So I'll use it again There's this rifle and The rifle is paid for by taxes and everybody in the country that pays taxes Contributes to that rifle and it's designed by scientists who are taught by second grade school teachers They're arithmetic who are fed by farmers and it's built in factories and you see where I'm going with us You have this enormous chain of connected events that builds this weapon But at the end of that whole chain some 19 year old Marine pulls the trigger He did the killing The minute that you have an unconscious and it's unconscious. I'm not saying people are bad But but it is an unconscious attitude that we didn't do the killing He did the killing so the minute that the veteran and the civilian have to start talking There's already a an unconscious division between the two of them if people realized that We were all involved in this war and this returning veteran was at the other end of the of the rifle But we were at war. It's automatic. It's already a different dialogue instead of you're coming back after you've done the killing I Got one other point and this I think is really important and on a part of veterans There's this sort of you don't know what I know It's a sort of a cocky to state and I have to watch it myself You civilians you're just ignorant. You don't have a clue or a little bit of anger You don't really know how much I suffered or awesome and that's a sort of a barrier too And I see you know a lot of cocky kids coming back from wars and that's hard to break down too So it's got to be watched. Do you think it's worse with an all-volunteer force than it was with a drafty Well, that last phenomenon you're describing, you know, I don't think so I mean, I think that that cockiness is is is something that comes out of surviving Combat, I mean that's just that is going through a fire and coming out the other end And I think that it doesn't have anything to do with whether you got drafted or whether you volunteered I just I just think it's a it's human nature And you just need to watch it because it really wasn't up to you that you went to combat I mean yeah, you volunteered for the military, but you could have been you know stationed in Germany I mean the orders gods are where they are. So You just have to kind of have a little more humility about it Related to that first question Anthropologists distinguish between guilt and shame Shame refers to a deep sense of a loss of self-respect or almost I can't show my face Sense that others will think ill of you in some fundamental almost existential way, you know, whereas guilt is you know Feeling badly about some specific thing that you did that requires Expiation or forgiveness or something like that How much of what you experienced as you I started running into your issues after the war was guilt and how much of it was shame There's a nuanced question, isn't it? you know I Here's what what comes in my mind Guilt it is when is a feeling that you have because I think you haven't owned it I think that that's something that we we do in place of owning it I mean I I had this feeling of You know, I may have done something wrong when I when I ordered a kid to Set an ambush and I got mad at him because he was slow and He wasn't getting there on time and so I was shouting out the radio and he broke covered in his squad I hit by two RPGs and he died and so there was this vague feeling of guilt remorse that I had with that and One day I finally just it was it there was an experience that I had I wrote about in the novel of a mass for the dead that people say either you're you're on the spiritual path Or you're crazy Marlanta, so I mean I tried to choose the other one, but but as a result of that and and getting in that kid's skin Realizing what he was doing. I Owned it. It's just like I got blood thirsty. I Got blood thirsty. I owned it and then I don't I wasn't feeling as guilty about it anymore because I just accepted that I had I had failed myself and the result was was horrible Shame is is a more difficult thing because it's I hadn't violated any kind of an ethical code See with that with that example I I got blood thirsty and gone, you know Marines are supposed to be blood thirsty I mean that's that's kind of what you know We were trained to go get the enemy and and he wanted to kill them too and you know all that sort of stuff So I didn't feel as bad, but the one that I feel bad about as we had premeditated Not taking any prisoners a very iconic Marine was killed and so revenge was in the air and I was I was really young and I didn't stop it and I'm fact participated in it and when we took this hill We shot every one of them down. They didn't have a chance to surrender and Everybody's still have wars hell and that's all that sort of stuff As you know, I think that we can be better than that and so the feeling that I have from that is that I fell short of my own standards and I carry that with me and Again, the only solution to it is you just have to own it. Am I owning it right now? I've owned it before I would have been able to talk to it and can I use a swear word here You just have to when you screw up like that. It's done. You have messed it up You have done it. You have messed it up and there's only one thing you can do You just have to say ah shit And say it out loud to yourself Because then you go like you accept it and you're you're not perfect part of guilt and shame is that somehow you could have been better Yeah, you should have been better. That's the ethical position, but I wasn't perfect. I'm still not perfect and I screwed up Shit, I wish I hadn't done that. I won't do it again Discussion you have in what is like good or the experience of killing in combat is nuanced and I think articulates some things that are very rarely articulated clearly In particular, you give voice to what you call the unique pleasures of killing Does that connect you think to your discussion of the Jungian psychological concept of the shadow in each of us? that you and That you talk about so eloquently. What's what's the connection there? well The shadow the Jungian concept of the shadow is it's repression. It's it's parts of yourself that you don't like and You press it down inside of you. It's hidden in your own psyche. You don't want to admit it You know, it's like it's like if you're a little bit pudgy and overweight And then you go around saying all these fat people are lazy. I mean, that's it's actually just you feel bad about yourself but you're not conscious of it so you throw it out there and When it comes to killing We are not the top animal on the food chain because we're nice We are a savage fierce primate. There is just no doubt about it and I think genetically we evolved to hunt and it would be species enhancing to have a thrill from hunting and And there's no doubt about it that that when you're when you're in on the kill And I think if it was when what 50,000 years ago or if you're in on a kill in combat This comes up. It's it's genetic. It's it's it's in us And we just as you have to recognize the shadow you have to recognize this part of being a human animal It's like sexuality If people start to try to repress sexuality like oh, we're pure. We're all angels. We don't I don't have needs or all the different things Even the even putting it in terms of whether you're an angel or not is putting moral things on something It's just purely physical biological You get Victorian Society where you know, they cover the legs of pianos because You know, this was this was something that we had to watch and all that is is repression The same thing goes with aggression. This this we just have to recognize it and the issue is and this is the issue for leadership Is you have to be able to understand that when that happens and that thrill happens? Then you've got to say okay, you know BB King the thrill is gone. You got to stop you got to come back You got to come back to this reality But you can't do that unless you first recognize it's down inside of you people who say I could never do that I I think they're dangerous because I think they very well could do it if if if push came to shove And I certainly did and I own I it was thrilling It's like crack cocaine If you say to a kid well, you know, you're not going to get high off of this. It's all going to be bad I mean, they know you're lying, but the costs the costs of crack cocaine That's where you focus but don't deny it the other side This isn't one of the questions I write down But you describe this one scene where you're calling in an airstrike in a valley and you talk about the power that you experienced in that moment Could you talk about that a little too? I know I'm throwing this at you out of the blue well, you know, I mean I think that the institute talking about it was a friend of mine. It was an a4 pilot a carrier pilot, but But I've had that same experience because I ended my tour being an air observer forward air controller So that sense of power. I mean we all aspire to a sort of a godlike state and you know People people are always trying to sort of, you know be rock stars. I mean how wonderful is that? Well, what's above that? Well, you know, you could be Thor you could spew thunder and fire down on people and it's it's it's almost You could say it's childish, but you can also say it's just primitive power. I mean This friend of mine said that he flew into a valley in North Vietnam And he hit it with napalm and he lit up the entire valley and he felt fantastic about it Think about what you can do with with jet aircraft And I think that it's exactly the same kind of thing If you don't own that there's something thrilling about lighting up a whole valley and burning it down Then I think you're dishonest You know, maybe at least I would be I'd be dishonest because I did like it and and there's something about it That is that made you feel really powerful It's a false power. I mean, you know, we don't have a force when we drive to work, you know So you have to get get that into context But again, I think that what I'm arguing for is to be psychologically honest recognize these things and You can choose to ride the horse or you can let the horse run away from with itself And these emotions these primitive parts of us are the horse that we ride we're born into this world and We have to ride this horse called our body and our emotions and our our genetic sort of Dispositions and the issue is are you in control and are you riding it? And you can't be in control of that horse unless you recognize where it is and how to control it Decades after the events of the war He described driving down Highway 101 and 19 when I was in California 5 And you see before you the eyes of a Vietnamese soldier that you killed in your windshield You'll listen to the country radio driving through Central California Yeah Can you talk about that experience? What do you think it says about your mental and spiritual state and why that guy in particular? Okay, yeah I'm there's a couple things that that lead up to this and one of them is That in combat you very rarely see and connect with the person that you kill. I mean Most of our armed forces in fact do it at considerable distances even the infantry. It's quite often Certainly in Vietnam there would be lead flying all over the place and a fire fight And you wouldn't see anything and just be you know, you're dead and they're dead when it was over because some skewered by jungle But even a little bit of distance. I was in a in a situation No, the second thing is is that the reason that you can do this Kill up front and personal or even kill at a distance is that you I use the word pseudo speciate your enemy Towel head haji gook crowd nip You know, we have lots of words for for our enemies and Sort of the more, you know people who actually don't understand what what military people do so what's this horrible? You're objectifying people if you've been raised to be a good Christian Judaic citizen of this country Thou shalt not kill is one of one of the primal ethical Lessons that you imbibe and you incorporate How do you pull the trigger if if you're not supposed to kill somebody well you kill a towel head you kill a haji you don't kill a person and That is not something that I think is bad In the moment of combat, I don't think you can get the job done if you don't do it that way I I don't think you can Question is as soon as it's over. What are you doing? If you don't get out of it? You get me lying you get out of grave you get problems in this particular case, I was on an assault and Just as somebody was saying here. It's like, you know You can have the plan but unless all the people down at the absolute bottom level know what what is required What the plan is it's chaos and we were in the chaos phase And so I I we already broken through a line of bunkers and there were some holes above us It was a very steep hill And I had three guys with me that just had happened to collect my radio man and me and then there was a couple of the Marines Because everybody was going crazy and I was trying to organize them that people have been in combat in infantry understand that phase of the Battle and I saw two chai comms coming down. Those are those potato match or hand grenades and And I could I still remember them coming through the air sort of end over end like that and they blew up And and what have knocked me out and I lost my sight for a while. I was unconscious, but came to very quickly and So we all got our grenades and threw them back up there and then two more chai comms came down And we were scrambling to go up underneath them because what we were hoping is that when they'd come down They'd fall behind us and go down the hill below us. So we were trying to go up But of course the higher we went the closer to the grenade throwers we would get And then they came again and we threw again and finally the lieutenants brain kicks in and it's like we're going to be out Of grenades on the next throw here in Marland is so we better do something else And so I said to the two guys we want to one of us had gone down I said, okay, I'm going to go around the side and when they stand up to throw their grenades You throw your grenades and when they stand up to throw them back I'll be in position to get them with my m16 So I crawl around the side and I get to a position and I'm laying down on the ground and Our two grenades come sailing up and I could see these two NBA soldiers in a fighting hole one of them was already dead our two grenades hit and this kid NBA soldier probably about 18 same as all the Marines that were with me Stands up and we lock eyes Now that is really rare. I mean, I'm no further away from him in the front row And I've got him in the sights of my m16 and he looks at me and I look at him and we connect This is not an animal This is not a good. This is a kid a kid with a hand grenade in his hand And I can remember whispering to him saying because I couldn't speak Vietnamese Another issue about where we go and fight our wars with people who don't know it can't stand out like sore thumbs But I I I kept whispering don't throw it. I won't pull the trigger. Don't throw it I won't pull the trigger and he just snarled at me and threw it and I pulled the trigger and I killed him The first thing that is very interesting about that about me And I think that people should try and get this is that what did you feel when you killed him? well What happened is that I anticipated the recoil on the m16 and I bucked a little bit called bucking your shot And so the the end of the barrel deep goes down just a little bit So I hit the lip of the hole he was in and it sprayed the lip of the hole and then went went into his chest So what would I thought when I killed him you bucked your shot and I mean You know marine rifle instructors kick you if you buck your shot, you know, they walk around the line It's like, you know, I Bucked my shot. I didn't think of anything. I didn't think of anything other than that and he was gone and that grenade went off just next to me and I was fine and We had to get ready for the counter-attack and we still had holes to take and so I didn't think anything of it other than that I bucked my shot 20 years later I'm riding down I5 and the little bubble of country music all by myself I mean, I've got five kids and you know two o'clock in the morning by yourself in a car is really a luxury and The these eyes appeared in the windshield Now I'm sophisticated enough to know it, you know, this is not a ghost out there on the highway But I just thought it's my unconscious saying you haven't dealt with this. I didn't I bucked my shot I was busy. I didn't think about it at all. I didn't think about it for 20 years and then Up it comes and I'm going like I think you need to deal with this and That's what I was talking about a couple questions ago. I had to own I killed a human being Now I don't kick myself about that. I killed lots of human beings I mean he wasn't the only one just that he was the one that I killed when I knew he was The rest of them are more abstract As I'm sure some of you I understand but that one I had to own I had to understand it I had to deal with it and I Wrote that book, you know what it's like to go to war motivated in large part by trying to understand that and Again, the only advice I can give you is that Yeah, that happened. Don't try and hide from it A friend of mine identified it really well. He said he said Carl Ghosts haunt you they're inside of you and they haunt you and they make you do really weird things and I was doing weird PTSD things and You need to turn your ghosts into ancestors and What what he meant by that was that you just your ancestors are part of you as well I mean who I am is a person that killed this kid on some hill in in Vietnam and a whole lot of other things But that's I can't get rid of that. I can't say I'm not that person But as long as it was a ghost it was haunting me When I started writing about it and got honest about it and got it out in front of me I own it. I still did the killing, but it's out here now It doesn't haunt me and there's lots of ways you do that you talk to people you can do poetry music I mean the arts are amazingly good for it psychotherapies good for it the process of getting the ghost out into an ancestor still owning it but no longer haunting you and That's what that book was about You talk about going to war is entering the temple of Mars and the book starts with an account of you as a young boy hitting some Boy scout leaders around the fire where that's talk about their own experience and at some level thinking as a young boy I definitely want to go to that temple. That's where I prove my manhood and so forth But you also reflect a great deal on the fact that we don't do a really good job realistically preparing people to enter the temple Our current chief of naval operations has stressed toughness as a core attribute that we need to cultivate in our training Do you have any thoughts about how we would Consciously work on building toughness to prepare people to enter the temple of Mars. I I'd use a different word. I Would I would use resiliency Toughness sort of implies first of all a defensive sort of I can take it kind of an attitude and It's also it also implies more rigidity than I would I would want to sort of inculcate I'm thinking more that that what what you really want is not toughness, but but constant steady I won't quit aggressiveness and That kind of toughness that so that if it doesn't work this way, it's like water You're I mean think about this country. I mean the unbelievable resources we have the Economic power the the weaponry and and it's just like this this this water That just keeps coming and coming in you're the person that has to keep it going so that if you get stopped here You come out here. It gets out there. You come up there How do we teach people to be constantly doing things like that so that the enemy just finally says Here he is again. Here they are. Oh my god I mean, you know, I we just got through fighting him and I thought we beat him and now they're coming this way at us now They're coming this way constant pressure and that's hard that requires unbelievable Discipline and stamina because the thing is if you win the battle what you want to do is Relax, you know, but if you really want to win the war, that's when you keep the pressure on the enemy You keep going you keep going you read your military history how many times Opportunities are lost because we don't have that kind of toughness And how do you develop that? Well, I think that you know, I mean Marine Boot Camp does a pretty good job at that I mean, it's like you You go up this hill with full pack and you'll be exhausted. Oh Gee somebody just tripped you It was a DI, you know, why did he do that? Because he wants you to get up and go at it again and then and then they'll make you do it when it's raining and you know Doing exercises like that instead of saying well, let's let's schedule it substance such you should you should do training exercises when it's snowing and it's miserable and and the constant constant effort is Becomes inculcated in you it becomes part of who you are And so I think that that this kind of training with the idea of relentlessness is what what I would say is About toughness. I think of the Finns in the winter war and I am part Finns So I'm you know, but that the Russians couldn't believe it. I mean they they had overwhelming power on them And and the Finns would just keep coming at them. I mean they were just like I mean when did these people quit? Well, they never did quit That's the that's the that's the kind of thing that I would call tough just in a site Have you ever seen the wonderful little movie about that fire and ice? I've never seen that finish war. Yeah, it's very good I know you had one combat tour and then you left the Marines But many in this room experienced multiple deployments over many years How do we deal with military personnel who had those multiple combat tours? Especially as many of them now are returning or perhaps going to garrison for the first time. Mm-hmm Well, there's a sort of the the the meta level which is you know shorter wars and more people to fight them That would solve quite a bit of that problem But since that's not in dark power to do I I would I would think that the first thing that I would do is is I would make it Make mandatory counseling. I mean there is this stigma, you know, I'm I don't want to go to this shrink I mean, you know, I'm fine. It's okay, and I'd make it for the families as well now, okay That means more more resources you do the math Somebody could probably see 30 Marines or sailors in a week. Okay, that means you're gonna have to have you know Five for every every company you're gonna have to go out with big contracts to get people that are skilled in this But it's not gonna last forever But I think that that's the first thing I would do is I would I would make make it mandatory that you just go The Israeli army has a has a psychiatrist at the battalion level just like we have a battalion surgeon They have a battalion surgeon and a psychiatrist and there's no stigma about going like, you know I feel like my stomach stomachs upset go see the surgeon. It's like I'm feeling a little crazy go see the psychiatrist I mean it there they don't have this sort of Stigma, it's just like, you know, we need help either way and I think that's one thing The other thing is I think a little extra training I think the corpsman and Army medics you could give them just two more weeks of stuff to start to see signs It's like, you know, if you're trained you can pretty soon start to see if someone's getting suicidal And you can get it faster It wouldn't take very much more training to do things like that and the other thing is I think that there should be places Ritualistic spaces and I don't mean that you're gonna have people beating on drums and doing sweat lodge stuff But our quote more primitive ancestors did have these ritualistic spaces Warriors would come back and they would sit by a fire and talk or they would go into sweat lodges And I've been through one of those you get I mean I thought I was gonna die and the reason that they do that is because you get reborn and it's a Psychological transformative thing we can do the 21st century version of that simply by having places where it's safe to talk And it's and it's okay. I mean just placement where people listen. I mean, maybe you could do something like on Veterans Day You just this place is gonna be open and all all veterans want to can go there and just everybody gets five minutes Nobody's gonna say a thing. They're just gonna listen. I mean we can do things that we that are simple really simple Like that and I think it would help a lot It's related to Lenny's talk this morning You have an entire chapter in your book dealing with lying and yeah, you give some wonderful I was trying to revise in my mind. Oh my god Give some great examples where you lied and you clearly feel you did the right thing in doing so I mean one of them involves this machine gunner P dog and his marijuana cigarette and another involves lying over the radio about the effects of naval gunfire When you were flying as a forward air controller Could you briefly tell those stories and explain why in your mind those were clearly justified? Yeah, this is a lie. All right Like I said now that I heard people talking about sport. I was going on my mind. So are they still justified? Are they still because these these are gray areas? They're hard, you know, but I still think I was all right on these The first one is I was I was flying in an old one Charlie and we had a cruiser offshore and We were right up on the Ben High River and I happened to glimpse something That I thought that might be a bunker and so we pulled pulled in and came down low of the ground and sure enough We took fire and I didn't have any artillery batteries around and there was this beautiful cruiser right offshore And so I I contacted this cruiser and I said, you know, I've got a target for you here now Naval guns are not like how it serves. They have a very flat trajectory and these are bunkers They're not, you know, it's this one on top of the guns of Navarone here We're talking about log things dug into the ground. Okay, doesn't lend itself. Well to naval gunfire but these guys got on station and Started firing away and I was directing it and and they were all over that bunker. I mean it was a complex and After the smoke cleared we went in We still took fire Automatic weapons and I got out and someone was on the radio wanting the damage assessment and I said well you guys did a great job I mean you hit it with everything you had you were right on target, but I'm sorry. He didn't get any bunkers destroyed, but you sure blew away all the camouflage I've got some phantoms coming up from Da Nang and we're gonna take care of it from there There was a sort of long pause We didn't destroy any bunkers over they said no he didn't but but it's great It's absolutely in the wide open. They're they're toast. I mean it's going to happen. We got these phantoms coming And I said I'm out of here. I'm low on fuel. I got to get back and so we we turned away We were radiating into another Fact to come up with these phantoms to help direct them and I get another call and the guys the guy is I Clearly another a higher officer of some kind and he says Can you can you just please check again? I'm going like why what's so what's the story? And then I start thinking well they haven't probably had a fire mission for weeks And it's like you know they just shot up a whole lot of ammo. Maybe they need to Justify it so I talked to the pilot and he says oh god. Okay, so we go back and we go Across a bunker complex and I'm looking to see if they got anything and they didn't I mean it wasn't their fault But we took fire again. I said I called him. I said we're out of fuel now, and I said we got to get out of here I'm sorry no damage, but great job. I mean we'll get them later We're head and south and This this I can't remember the call sign, but it was something like this is skip jack six Well, that's the captain, you know of a cruiser and he I'm a lieutenant right Marine lieutenant So now going oh my god the heavies are involved here and and it was like Basically he's called us cowards. He said you're not you're not going back there And you're not seeing the real damage that we just did and I'm gonna report you to your commanding officer for Darrell I mean he was out of line, you know, but clearly he wanted a damage assessment So I I just you know turned him off, and I talked to the pilot And we didn't even turn around and I said okay, and then I waited about ten minutes, and I called in 83 meters of trail destroyed and seven bunkers, so I just made it up and The justification was I Didn't want to die and I didn't want the pilot to die for something that was silly Because it wasn't going to do anything to help the tactical situation that bunkers were open We had jets coming up to take care of it. There was not going to be any intelligence of Advantage for my damage assessment being a lie or being just to what it was which was zero which they didn't accept anyway and So my justification was it that this guy wanted that Wanted a lie and he wanted it because it would make his career better And I just said that I'm not going to die for that and I still I still think it was a good idea But there's a shades of gray in there because you know He was a Superior officer and he ordered us to go back and I just disobeyed the order You can't really have a military if the people just choose to disobey orders I I get that and that's why it becomes shades of gray I mean what's good for the whole organization and make sense is in this particular situation didn't make much sense didn't do any good the The other incident was to me a little more clear cut and it was much more a clear lie I had a machine gunner I call him p-dog and His name was Warner and called him worm. It was his real day, but I just didn't use the real name of the book and He he had he had been wounded twice he was a fabulous machine gunner 19-year-old kid from North Carolina and African-American and you know that with the news around his neck and I mean the whole yard I mean these I love these kids because They were and he was like about three days short of rotating and he'd been wounded And so he was sent back to the rear and I had just been sent back to the rear about a week ahead of him and I'm on duty that night and Get a call about one in the morning from the duty NCO of another battalion. He says I got I got three of your guys here and we got them. We got them smoking marijuana I went oh god. All right, you know, I mean I've been in college just a you know a year before I mean smoking marijuana What's that no big deal? It's legal in Oregon and Washington now, but then automatic time in Portsmouth Naval Prison automatic dishonorable discharge So I thought well, I got to go pick them up So I duty sergeant I get the Jeep we head over to this other battalion's area and there's these three kids Squatting with their hands on a bench in this gunnery sergeant standing over him and he says I've searched our TUR DS and These are yours. So you you search him. I said, okay, I'll take care of it Gunny and I Heard him into the into the Jeep and I drove off and I said to the driver I said I really have to pee and look back at these guys in the back of the Jeep. He said, oh, yes, sir I think that's a great idea. So we stopped the Jeep and we we got out of it We both stand by the side of the road and there's a scrambling going on I mean, you know, and I thought well that'll be time to get rid of the evidence and So I get back in the Jeep. We go back and we're now we're in the bright lights of a big squad a big hooch that was an administrative hooch is probably about 12 clerks working the night shift and a gunnery sergeant Who's who was the night NCO duty officer and we come in with these three kids and They're looking pretty cocky, right? You know and he said, okay, these because he already heard about it So yeah, I picked him up here Gunny. We're gonna search him right here. They you know and so I said, okay I'm to your pockets and there's these grins on their faces. They're doing this, you know and Worm I didn't get this right in the book because I saw him later. I said it came out of his pocket It actually came out of the sling of his wounded arm a marijuana cigarette and it hit the floor I Mean if you ever want to see a black kid turn white that was the time I mean it was just amazing and This is silence and I went my heart sank. I mean he's a great Marine. I mean great kid Automatic Portsmouth Naval Prison automatic dishonorable discharge for that So I picked it up and I'm honestly my hands were trembling and he's on his way out of the Marines. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I mean he's done his done his thing, you know very well And so I go to the gunnery sergeant And I'm literally my hands shaking because I don't lie normally and I said gunny this looks like tobacco to me And he looked at me and he looked over and he told the other two kids to get out of here and they just they're gone so now it's just a war and He looks around everybody else. He looks and you know these gunnery sergeant. I mean they're actors Sniffs it he does this, you know, he looks at it, you know You know God, you know, and he goes around to every clerk in the place and he says What do you think is this marijuana or tobacco looks like tobacco to me gunny, you know One after the other after the other and Warner is just trembling in his boots and so finally the gunny comes back and he says Well lieutenant he says I Don't know what kind of a Marine you got here, but you say he's a good one Everybody here thinks it's tobacco. I guess it must be tobacco and I told war and get out of here. He's gone, you know, and and that was it. Well The thing is is it for a rule that in general makes sense. You don't want people smoking dope particularly in combat combat zones There was a cultural issue about marijuana at the time But for a rule it generally made sense in this particular instance, there's a bigger rule and that's that's what I call compassion and Moral conflicts are often too valid moral Things hitting at the same time and I just chose compassion. I couldn't live with myself if I'd sent him to Portsmouth for that Just couldn't do it and quite frankly. I don't think anybody else in the hooch including the gunny could have because he didn't One last question. We'll go to the audience questions Toward the very end of what is likely to worry, right? I'm constantly told usually by people who have never been to war and who apply varying degrees of simplistic reasoning That all is fair and love and war that having rules of war is total nonsense This is simply not true to sink to the position that fair play and the impulses of good character have no place in modern war Taking some sort of tough guy real politics dance something the ethical warrior must never do We're about to wrap up an ethics symposium Could you elaborate on that thought? Well Yeah, I can I mean it's it's there is this sort of cynicism about well, it's war. Isn't it? You know, we should just be able to do everything. I mean I Don't think that that's true. I mean for example, we don't wrap Dynamite around our kids and send them off to hurt the enemy. There are so there are there are ethical lines that we won't cross and Those ethical lines are there for good reasons because you see your behavior Gives permission to the enemy to behave the same way We have an issue with drones right now how we're behaving with drones is giving permission to every other country in the world to start using drones the same way we are so It's that universalizability law if you actually say it's okay to behave this way You are saying it's okay for you to behave that way against me and believe me if I was taken prisoner I would hope to hell that I didn't have a dumb mule tenant Marlanna's on the other side saying that we're not taking prisoners today I would want there to be an ethical standard that says once once you've given up and you're no longer a threat Then it's murder. It's not it's not killing an enemy because I don't want to be treated that way Golden rule, I mean It is a standard and I think that we must maintain it in warfare The other the other thing is is that how you live with yourself these horrible things that you do if you do those things Breaking moral laws as in addition it just redowns on you again I mean, you know the Hindus would say it'll come back as karma, but it'll come back as psychological trauma this These these kinds of moral wounds that you take so there's a lot of good reasons and And I think ultimately the there's there's the reason that The military isn't there to kill people. It's actually there Change people's minds. I mean that's what we're actually trying to do I mean we're actually trying to say you know We think that you're trying to behave in a way that hurts our way of life that we value and cherish or you're trying to hurt my family or our country and I Don't want to kill you. I want you to stop now. You can stop somebody by killing them But that is not the object. I mean Gandhi. What do you call it? I mean he actually wasn't a pacifist He told Nehru to send the army into Kashmir when the Pakistanis invaded because he said it's a violation of our national boundaries But his his idea was not pacifism It was changing people's minds and this is just another way of changing people's minds what you want to do is is have a system where you Do the minimal To get that accomplished because believe me in How long was it before we were analyzed with Japan and Germany five years and if and if we had been Horrible we had done things the way the Japanese did to us and our prisoners and stuff I don't think we could have made that alliance and I think that we have to meet people as human beings as as quickly as possible and Make sure that you live in a world where where they don't want to take revenge or behave this thing this in a savage way because you can get people to change their minds and You can actually make the world go forward Better more effectively if you have moral rules in in war Okay, guys, we have a little less than half an hour. So plenty of time for some good questions I hope they're out there. So please don't be shocked