 So welcome, everybody. Thanks so much for coming out here. We're here for coming home dialogues in the moral, psychological, and spiritual impacts of war. This is a collaborative event and part of a larger collaborative grant that Jesse's going to speak about. My name's Daniel Rothenberg. I'm a professor at Arizona State University. And I co-direct something called The Center on the Future of War that is a partnership between our school ASU and where we are now in New America. And some of you know something about this, for example. David Wood was a fellow, an ASU Future of War fellow at New America with us for two years. And then other folks here are familiar. Tony and other people have worked on projects. But what's interesting about this linkage, and we're very proud of it, is that it's an experiment to connect a major public research university, ASU, which kind of prides itself on innovation and trying new things and trying to craft the future of higher education in a lot of ways. And then New America, a similarly nimble think tank. And I think it's probably fair to say that there are not that many situations where these kinds of institutions not only have somebody go and sit in office and work on a research project and share a grant. That's very common. But actually construct an integrated, a structurally integrated relationship which involves the movement of real resources, money, and people, both directions. And we're very excited about that. The experiment's going quite nicely, we think. We've created an online master's degree program in this way. We have a sort of flagship, and you're all invited to this conference every year called the Future Security Forum. It will be April 28th, 2020. We do a number of, we have some big research initiatives when I'm proxy war. And a lot of other things happening. We have done a few moral injury initiatives such as this one. But I'm just saying all this because part of what's allowing us all to sit here is a partnership and the vision of the partnership isn't really just restricted to ASU and New America, proof being some of you in this institutional link. It's just something that's a broader idea that we should try to break through institutional structural divisions such as those that push policy, that develop policy ideas in DC and universities that often seem distant from that world. Similarly, we try to pull together and bridge linkages between civilian and military worlds. In any case, we're thrilled that you're all here. Thanks so much. Oh, I'm supposed to, yeah. There has been some technical difficulties. So we apologize for the audio. They were building wide network changes made over the weekend that have affected our audio. We thought that was fixed. I'm not sure you're hearing that, right? And I believe that our live stream should have fine sound and that all the lavalier mics and these mics and the mics for questions are all working fine. That said, there are some audio issues and just it should work fine and we're thrilled again that you've come to join us. Great, thank you, Daniel. And thank you all for being here. A big thanks to the speakers, to those that helped make this event happen. The staff were really, really excited. I'm gonna tell you just a little bit about the coming home project and I know that we're already, I think we're running on academic time here, which means that we're about 10 minutes late so I'm going to be very brief. With that being said, I'll tell you a little bit about the coming home project and then the run a show for today. So the coming home dialogues is a project that's supported by the National Endowment for Humanities. It's been co-directed by myself, Jessica Patrick from George Mason University's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy with Ed Barrett from the US Naval Academy and in partnership with Daniel Rothenberg. And so the real goal of this project is very simple. It's to engage military veterans in dialogues on their experiences in war using the humanities as a point of departure. So we've conducted a series of these dialogues over the course of three years at all of the major service academies, the US. And so we have engaged numerous sailors, soldiers, airmen and women, and marines. So this is the capstone of the project, which is why you're here today. So we have two amazing panels and a keynote. The first panel is on the topic of torture and moral injury. The keynote, which would be by David Wood, is on moral injury when two worlds collide. And the third is moral injury and combat, the personal policy and philosophical reflections. So I'm going to, I'm the only thing now keeping you all between myself and an excellent panel. So I'm going to invite our first panel to come up and allow them to introduce themselves with the moderator. So thank you very much. Good morning, I'm David Luban, I'm a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown University and I also have the chair in ethics at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy. I'm very glad to see you here. The issue of torture is something that's been back in the headlines this fall. Many of you may have seen the new film, The Report, with Adam Driver playing one of the staffers on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It's about the making of the torture report. Last week, the newspapers published a series of extremely disturbing drawings that were done by Abu Zubaira, who was the first man tortured in the CIA's rendition detention interrogation program. And these were drawings by Abu Zubaira, depicting the ways in which he was tortured and they're disturbing and horrific. Now, we've had something called the Torture Debate in America for many years now, for 15 years, and it's really a mix of several different debates. One of them is moral, is torture ever permissible, if it saves lives, for example, or not. And a second is legal, is torture, the things that we do legally torture and is torture against the law, should it be against the law? A third, which I think is a slightly more debased one, is does torture work? But there's a fourth one, and that is what does torture do to the people who are involved in it? The Office of Medical Services of the CIA issued a report last year that I think that report's actually older, but it came from a FOIA request that was only honored last year, in which something's mentioned about the interrogation of Abu Zubaira, and that is that all of the onlookers and participants found it so disturbing, what was done to him, that they were, a request went back to the Office of Technical Services of CIA, could you please send us some therapists? To, so that the people who are involved in the interrogations can cope with them with what they're seeing and what they're doing. Now, that brings us to our topic for today, which is about the fourth torture debate. What does torture do to the characters of the people who see it, participate in it, or collude with it, or think that they're colluding with it? So, I guess the official definition of moral injury is a kind of mental harm that's caused by fearful things that one has done oneself or failed to prevent, or just witnessed things that break your moral code, and it's different from the kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that comes from having had the fearful thing done to you. And Abuz Abeda and some of the other Guantanamo detainees have been severely traumatized and continue to suffer from PTSD from what was done to them in 2002. But we're talking about something different, which is the kind of damage to the character of the perpetrators or people who have witnessed it or people who have failed to prevent it. Now, thankfully, we have come a long way from 1943 when General Patton famously slapped a combat-stressed soldier and called him a goddamn whimper and coward. And now we have come to understand that more compassion is needed. I mean, at the time General Eisenhower made him, made Patton apologize to the soldier. And one of the first steps was realizing that psychological help for disturbing symptoms and syndromes like PTSD is important. But one of the insights about moral injury is that there is a moral component as well and that we need to address these disturbances to the characters of our warriors, not only through therapy, although therapy is important for those who need it, but also through moral processes of working out the implications of what they've done and when necessary, atoning for it. Now, in today's panel, we have three tremendous speakers and I'd like to introduce them before I turn it over. First is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Edmonds who wrote a searing book called God Is Not Here. Subtitle, A Soldier's Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War, a book published in 2015. Bill is a former Special Forces officer in Mosul and he's still at an active duty currently stationed in Tubingen, Germany. And one of the things that he writes about is assisting and witnessing an interrogator, a Kurdish interrogator who used vicious methods and what it did to him and the way in which he came to cope with it. Second is Ian Fishback, a retired Army major from the 82nd Airborne, who in 2005, witnessing troops torturing. I'll read what he wrote, death threats, beatings, broken bones, exposure to elements, extreme forced exertion, stripping sleep deprivation and degrading treatment after fruitlessly going up the chain of command, wrote a letter, an open letter to Senator John McCain in which he said, this is a tragedy. I can remember as a cadet at West Point resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act, that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard. Ian is currently completing a PhD in philosophy at the University of Michigan and tells me that he's writing about the rule of law aspects of counter-terrorism operations. And our third speaker is Dr. Kate McGraw, who is the Deputy Division Chief of the Psychological Health Center of Excellence in the Defense Health Agency. She is currently part of DOD's Sexual Assault Advisory Group to the Psychological Health and Readiness Council and also a member of the US Peace Corps Sexual Assault Advisory Council. She started as an Air Force ICBM launch officer. She served as an aerospace psychologist for the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training Program and Flight Commander of Mental Health. Knew she was the chief of the deployed team that provided operational mental health support for the DOD Port Mortuary during 9-11 and also at the Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster. So without further ado, I'm going to ask my speakers to come to you, whether you want to stay there or come to the podium is your choice, but Bill Edmonds is up first. Hi, I'm Bill. Dave already talked about my experiences. So I don't want to talk about the experiences. I think what's important is that we become wise not only by creating new knowledge but by remembering things that we've always known, but then we have forgotten over and over again. One of those wisdoms that have been unlearned is really that war may be necessary, but it's always a choice and it's never moral. And as a warring nation, I think it's a sacred obligation that we take what has become unseen and then we make it into more explicit. We peel away the layers of euphemism, essentially, and no war is organized killing. And when we ask young moral Americans to participate in war, we're giving them the responsibility to try to bring goodness out of these impossibly bad situations. It's helped me to see war kind of like a moral minefield and where every step, literally every choice can sometimes feel like dying a little death and we put young men and women into the center of this minefield and we ask them to often just wander blindfolded. Some of them don't get to come home and those who do often carry that war within them. And when they do arrive home, too often we, and I'll take a line from Dr. Wood here, too often we tell them to suffer alone and in silence and too often that suffering can last an entire lifetime. So how do we respond? You haven't already noticed on the topics of the moral, psychological and spiritual impacts of war, there's diverse opinions and many different perspectives. But I would truly believe that rather than a weakness, this is a strength that is actually essential. The late anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss captured this phenomenon, I think, perfectly, when after a lifetime of searching for the one true version of a myth, he realized that the greater sum could be found in the sum of all the different versions and the same could be said for the truth about those invisible wounds of war, are just less visibly apparent. These invisible wounds, they're relative truths and they're impacted or they're inflicted by the subjective. And some of the people that have helped me to at least frame and understand my experiences have helped me to put those experiences into words. Charles Darwin said a long, long time ago that of all the differences between man and the lower animals that the moral sense are conscious is by far the most important. Michael Tomacello, who's a behavioral scientist, I think at the Max Planck Institute, said that morality defines us as a species. Stephen Pinker, a experimental psychologist, said that morality conveys to us the meaning of life. Morality is a double-edged sword and they've captured one side. Ita Sereni captures, I think, the other edge. She's a British historian who spent her entire life trying to understand the nature of evil and it's converse, human goodness. And after a lifetime of searching, she realized that when you remove morality, you can extinguish the human being. I would absolutely agree with her words and all of those words, but I would put them in a different, I would use different words. Morality is perhaps our single greatest organizing principle. Once we come into this world and over the course of a lifetime, we meticulously construct a set of codes, values, and ideals that govern nearly every aspect of our lives and from morality, from these strongly held beliefs, we drive a sense of well-being when those beliefs are adhered to by the world, by other people, and by ourselves. But at the same time, though all different perspectives, and we come to morality with sometimes conflicting, if not diverse perspectives, no, I think there's one thing that we can all agree about morality. It's that morality is an immensely powerful source of meaning for the men and women in our military. We select for it. Men and women almost universally self-select for morality when they raise their hand and volunteer for service. And then from day one, assuming that there's an innate and nurtured morality, we still inculcate that source of meaning into them from day one and for every day to come, we teach them that there is a right and wrong. We teach them that there is a good and bad, and that when our nation chooses to go to war, then by definition that war is declared moral. But no matter how moral the service member, no matter how moral their choice is, no matter how necessary the war, there will always be a moment when the world or other people or yourself violate or transgress or sometimes utterly extinguish these very important beliefs that we've come to depend on for a sense of well-being. You know, the life and lonely death of, I believe, Dave, you talked about him, the life and lonely death of Noah. He's a young soldier who in Iraq, ran over an Iraqi child with his Bradley fighting vehicle. Several years later, he ended his suicide letter with a silent scream, essentially. He said, I am a bad person and now I'm free, okay? When we experience some morally traumatic event, that the meaning that we've come to depend on for well-being can be stolen, and in that place where we once held meaning, there becomes nothingness. And into that, it's like a vacuum. You know, we instinctively claw and search for some new source of meaning, and meaning doesn't have to come from the positive. In fact, negative meaning is a immensely powerful source, especially when something like morality is taken away, something that has been lost and you're grieving, okay? You need to find blame. You need to judge. You need to assign responsibility for something that wasn't supposed to be possible. And so, you know, two forms of meaning, organizing principles come into that space where morality once existed. I rage. I rage at the world and everything in it. I rage perhaps at existence or God or institutions I've come to the trust or other people. But also, I rage. I turn that rage inward. Rage turned inward is shame, you know? Rage and shame are like quasi-entities, and they're utterly exhausting to live with. And in time, you know, these entities can convince a person that not living can somehow seem preferable. So, you know, but there is change, and it is actually quite easy, you know? If, for those who suffer from the moral, spiritual, and psychological impacts of war, one thing that we can do, and I think it's important, is that we engage them in some activity that requires the focusing of their attention, okay? That's essential. And in that space where they follow that pursuit, any pursuit, as long as it's something that engages them and focuses their attention, that has to be taken place in a space that is both safe and compassionate, a space where judgment cannot literally exist. And maybe, just maybe, you know, they will break their silence. You know, I like to think of this space as actually a place, a place where service members and veterans can escape the prisons that they've entrapped themselves in and they've been living and unrealizing it. You know, the prison is past and future, and they can actually return to the present moment. And in that present moment, you know, we can help them to practice an immensely powerful new way of living, okay? They can, memories, despite what everyone's told us, memories never just fade away. When they ignore memories, especially most painful memories, those memories can come alive and seep and reach through time with searching and grasping claws. And memories that you actually resist or persist or deny, you actually strengthen. And those memories can consume, but in those safe spaces, you know, we can teach them that the memories that they can hold without judgment, you know, they can process. And the memories that they can process, you can transform. And the memories that you can transform cannot haunt you, okay? And honestly, I think that should be our new clarion call. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks. Our next speaker is Ian Fishback. Thank you. I'm a little bit under the weather, so I apologize for the voice of the sniffles. There's somewhat of a misunderstanding, I think. And this is not unique to this experience. This often happens. It happened in the most hurry and it happened in the media and it happened when I was making my stand for democracy and against torture. I wasn't really arguing specifically about torture. And torture didn't bother me that much when I witnessed it. It was after the fact, when I was approaching for clarification about what was going on for 17 months that I came to the all things considered decision that torture was wrong and should be absolutely prohibited. However, in my opinion, and I don't think it's an opinion, I think it's the truth, the most dangerous thing about torture is its threat to liberal democracy. I don't think, if I had to choose between killing a child is collateral damage and torturing somebody who I was 99% sure was guilty of heinous crimes, it'd be easier for me to torture the person that's guilty of heinous crimes but I could do both. I just don't see the reason to torture. There's no reason to do it. For a while, there was some discussion about whether or not I had suffered a moral injury and I even wondered whether I had but it didn't have to do with witnessing torture. It had to do with trust in institutions. That was a mistake on my part but I clearly see now that the problem was that I just shouldn't have trusted those institutions. I now have enough information that it's clear to me that I should not have trusted the United States. I'm not gonna go into the details of all of that but I asked Congress to open investigations in July of this year and they have yet to respond. I'm in contact with them. Congress has requested information from the Department of Defense and the CIA and the Department of the Defense and the CIA has not done anything with that request to my knowledge. It's clear to me that I was probably retaliated against in pretty horrific ways that you would never be able to tell. It's also clear to me that the timing of that retaliation coincides with Obama's war against whistleblowers. So you can put those two things together if you want. From my perspective, that's not ironclad but that's a lot of evidence. Where do I think that fits into the landscape of moral injury? I don't know. I don't feel as though in any way I have an injury. I feel as strong as ever about where I stand with respect to freedom and democracy. I stand for freedom and democracy. I am not injured, the United States is injured. That is clear. You can look around you. If you don't see that, then you have problems with perception. If we're to ask ourselves questions about morality and what morality does for soldiers. Morality and morale are closely related in terms of etymology. And if you have a strong sense that you are moral, your ability to do things is much greater than if you question yourself under ordinary circumstances. In this sense, the Waffen SS was the most moral unit in the Nazi regime. They were the most motivated in terms of morale. They clearly believed in what they were doing. And they were able to do the most heinous crimes. So when I look at the SS and the SD, the SS is a complicated organization. It's not only the SS, but the SD was the intelligence apparatus that was similar to the SS. And I look at US Special Operations Forces and the CIA. I see a lot of that morality. And I see those organizations functioning much the same way. So when we talk about moral injuries and what types of things bother people and what they're capable of doing, the primary problem isn't the prevalence of moral injury. It's the sense of self-confidence in one's cause that is just unwarranted. It's completely antithetical to democracy. The move in the United States over the last 15 years, unfortunately, has become more and more like the Soviet Union. It's interesting to me to look at the Soviet Union in the United States during the Cold War, neither of which was perfect, but they were very different. They had different ideologies. In some ways, they honed each other intellectually. They both had dark sides, but they both had good aspects. It's as if the United States and Russia have converged in the worst possible way. I'm beside myself at how this could have happened. How could the United States institute policies that were intended for gulags on a massive scale and then attempt to sweep it under the rug, as Obama clearly did. I'm beside myself on this point. Is that a moral injury? No, that's not a moral injury, that's just being right. Why isn't Obama morally injured? I have no idea. Why isn't the United States morally injured? I have no idea. How do we look at these problems, grapple with them, come to some kind of consensus that resembles reason, that resembles compassion, that resembles some sense of moral justification? I don't know, but that system's clearly broken. So one question that I have is whether you can have a moral injury as a society. What would that look like? And I think it looks like where we are right now. Our morality is just broken. I think the Obama administration is worse than the Nixon administration. And I don't think that that should be debatable. What's really interesting to me is if you look at what happened with Nixon, society came to grips with what happened with Nixon. And then it elected Carter. Whatever you think of Carter, he was the most human rights respecting president in U.S. history. The U.S. didn't come to grips with Obama, and then it elected Trump. And where we are morally is just vacuous. And the left likes to blame Trump, but the left isn't going down a good path either. So I've been at Ann Arbor, I was there from 2010 to 2012, and I've been there from 2015 till now. And it is two totally different experiences. When I went there in 2010 to 2012, when people disagreed, they talked for long times, for a long time, they'd share ideas. At the end of that conversation, people would walk away more intelligent than when they entered the conversation. Now people are just angry. When you challenge the way someone thinks about something, you're either labeled as racist or sexist or some other ism, and the conversation stops. It reminds me of the medieval church. It's so different. It also reminds me of Iraq during the Civil War and the types of problems I had to overcome in Iraq. Substitute left-wing ideology for religion and whatever the right-wing audience is for religion right now, and that's what you've got in the United States. So what I would challenge those who are listening to this talk to think about is if individuals can suffer moral injuries, can societies, and is there some kind of process that societies ought to go through in order to come to grips with what's going on, and if they don't go through that process, what's going wrong? Thank you. First I'm gonna say the opinions that I'm gonna express are not the official opinions of the Department of Defense. I'm speaking on my own behalf, and I usually speak extemporaneously, but today I felt like I needed to write down what I wanna say because there's so many pieces that have moving parts, and so I'm titling this speech in which I explain probably not so much. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion today. It's an honor to participate. I've been fortunate to have been invited to support the Coming Home Dialogues over the past few years, and the experience of facilitating and engaging in discussion of war through poetry and short story with other veterans, active duty and scholars has certainly changed the way I view the world. I wasn't sure how I'd start my remarks today if I should begin or end with a poem or perhaps with a story, so I've just started to start with a story, my story of how I find myself in this place at this moment. I was never a military type in childhood, not interested in guns and planes, and rather strangely, my adult professional life began as a musician. I shifted course abruptly when I joined the Air Force as a missile officer. There my training as a pianist was put to good use because I was the fastest one in my squadron when translating war orders for nuclear missile launch. I'm also a painter and poet and luckily my military life has, from time to time, wandered into an intersection point between the arts and the military, such as with the Coming Home Dialogues. I am a peace-loving but action-oriented artist at my core, and at the same time a senior military leader. My first ever discussion related to morality and war was when I found myself in missile school for several months. We'd regularly meet for an hour to discuss the moral and ethical challenges of serving on missile crew duty and whether we thought we were actually capable of turning keys when directed by the president. My argument to myself, one that made it acceptable for me to proceed with this duty, was that I would rather be actively engaged in defending my loved ones and my country if incoming nuclear bombs were en route rather than being passively blown up in my bed in my sleep. I served my first tour of duty at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where I was part of the base's initial response to Desert Shield and Desert Storm. This sudden change of the military from a state of peace to one of war inflicted the first chink in my armor of false invincibility. It's one thing to take an oath to defend your country, to put a uniform on every day, and to work on a base during peacetime in a very different reality when suddenly you're at war and are called up to actually get up and go. A few years later, the Air Force sent me to earn my PhD in clinical psychology and then I returned back to active duty at Shepherd where I was eventually transferred to Dover Air Force Base. Within days after I newly arrived at Dover, planes flew into the Twin Towers and none of our lives were ever the same. I was immediately tasked to lead the deployed mental health team to support the port mortuary efforts to recover and return with dignity the remains of the lost 225 souls from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania plane crashes. Our team began 24-7 operations which lasted several weeks and required us to support the behavioral health of mortuary personnel as they worked their solemn duties in the mortuary. This is a shock to me for so many reasons. I led the ongoing behavioral health support of the mortuary for the next two years. Over time, I adjusted to standing masked in the once foreign environment of the autopsy room and to the stark embalming lights, stainless steel tables, smells of antiseptic and bombing fluid, burnt flesh and blood. From these subsequent slashes at my internal sense of security, two scars remain. The first, seeing every day the personal effects that were emptied from the pockets of the remains of brave women and men, our fallen heroes. These reminders of the intimate parts of their lives were spread out to dry and protective layers of tarp with the utmost care. There would be photographs, ticket stubs, love notes, chewing gum, wedding rings, combs and some soggy dollar bills. These objects connected us to the person attached to the remains and pierced our protective shield of professionalism. This was the reality, the humanness that was mowed down. The second memory was how some of the visiting, distinguished non-military leaders would find it difficult to look directly at the human remains, delicately averting their eyes and at times even physically turning away as they walk past during one of our many facility tours. The first memory always brings me great sadness to recall, but the second memory stirs up my curiosity, a bit of compassion for their shame, and yet more than a little bit of concern, I had so many unanswered questions. Who's responsible for the charge to war? How exactly are we making decisions to send brave young Americans into danger? Would these decisions be different if the leaders who made the decisions are literally faced with the physical impact of the choices they make? Forced to look squarely at the results of battle. It took me several months after ups ended before I could cry in the shower, and afterwards it was almost 10 years before I looked at any media coverage about 9-11. It was difficult for me to integrate my pre-9-11 thoughts about people, life, kindness, safety, a sense of fairness, into a revised version of the world, which has twisted around my scars to produce a life periodically punctuated by memories of the mortuary sight, sounds and smells of the dead of war. As a keeper of stories and explanations, my life experiences have greatly informed my practice as a psychologist. As a researcher and clinician, it's clear to me that we as a profession struggle with language to fully capture the challenges that service members experience after combat-related trauma. The label post-tomatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a term developed by scientists and clinicians through a vigorous evidence synthesis process looking at research results in order to successfully treat symptoms that sometimes appear after trauma. Even with this organizing language, we still don't know why some service members develop PTSD and others don't, or how to prevent it. The PTSD label is also used by diagnosticians both to decide which type of evidence-based medication or therapy will help them treat patients to overcome symptoms and to bill for insurance for reimbursement for services rendered. Some clinicians have proposed a different term, moral injury, which describes additional post-combat symptoms experienced by some service members after trauma. This moral injury is seen to be related to damage to one's strongly held moral values that incurred during combat trauma. However, the body of research evidence for treatment of PTSD does not yet support treatment of moral injury. These are murky waters, this business of labeling symptoms and finding evidence for and against certain concepts or approaches to treat a particular condition as we currently understand it. What is very clear to me as a clinician, though, is that the hundreds of service members who've sought treatment with me over the past decades have shared that they were stunned by their experiences of death, of killing someone else, of seeing someone die or nearly dying themselves, grieved for the loss of their innocence and of their shattered sense of identity and purpose. Many of them have experienced difficulties connecting to others since their return home and inability to feel compassion or empathy and a sense of helplessness at feeling emotionally numb. They seek me out to tell me their story to make sense of their experience to connect the fractured pieces into a coherent whole and to learn to connect with others again. They've struggled with a lack of shared narrative with their families, a lack of sense of belonging to or understanding from the world outside the combat zone and a pervasive confusion and shock that often accompanies the sudden experience of being sown permanently to the palpability of war's violent destruction. I must also add that many of the service members who've shared space with me while sorting it all out have also demonstrated an inspiring resilience of spirit and heart and tremendous courage in facing their unfacibles. And instead of turning their back to their experiences, they found growth after their trauma. Through our work with Coming Home Dialogues, we've created a space to connect through common and recurrent themes of poetry and literature from past and current wars and by finding our own voices. I wanna end with a poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda about the Spanish Civil War who sums up my relatively recent experiences quite eloquently from his viewpoint in 1937 back when he was the Chilean consulate in Spain. And this is called Exclicos Agunas Cosas. I explain a few things. You're gonna ask, and where are the lilacs? And the poppy peddled metaphysics? And the rain repeatedly spattering its words and drilling them full of apertures and birds? I'll tell you all of the news. I lived in a suburb, a suburb of Madrid, with bells and clocks and trees. From there, you could look out over Castile's dry face, a leather ocean. My house was called the House of Flowers because in every cranny, geraniums burst. It was a good-looking house with its dogs and children. Remember Raul? Eh, Raphael? Federico? Do you remember from the under the ground, my balconies on which the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth? Brother, my brother, everything loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises, pile-ups of palpitating bread, the stalls of my suburb in Arguez with its statue like a drink to inkwell in a swirl of hake, oil flowed into spoons, a deep bang of feet and hands swelled in the streets, meters, liters, the sharp measure of life, stacked up fish, the textures of roof with a cold sun in which the weather vane falters, the fine frenzied ivory of potatoes, wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea. And one morning all that was burning. One morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on and from then on blood, bandits with planes and moors, bandits with fingerings and duchesses, bandits with black fires spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss like children's blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise, stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out vipers that the vipers would abominate. Face to face with you I have seen this blood of spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives. Treacherous generals, see my dead house, look at broken spain from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers, from every socket of spain, spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's eye of your hearts. And you'll ask why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Thank you. Well, we have a few minutes left. I'm going to ask members of the audience to, if they have questions or comments, but I actually want to kick it off with my own question. You know what I've been hearing? Both an individual and a collective theme about moral injury. Kate and I think Bill, you've both talked about the effects on the individual, but one of the effects Bill that you mentioned about the effects on the individual warrior is a sense of betrayal by leadership and by institutions. And Ian, for you that seems like it's the heart of the matter that even for individual warriors who haven't endured moral injury, they come home to a country that you think hasn't fully taken responsibility for evils that is. That is done. It seems as though every warrior begins by swearing an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. And there's a kind of unwritten social contract. I'll give my unconditional allegiance, but don't abuse it. That institutions and leaders should not be putting the individual warrior in a position where she or he has to do something that violates their moral code. They shouldn't be misused. And if they have been misused, how should the country come to terms with this? The Germans have introduced the concept of mastering of the past. Mastering of the past, for them, there's a post-war experience. It was an experience born of seeing what crimes they had committed collectively and individually. How do we come to terms with this? And it seems to me that we've got both the collective and the individual question here. The collective question, how does the civilian population of the United States come to terms with mastering the past? And the individual question, how does an individual, as you beautifully put it, take memories that won't go away? Or memories that might be destructive and turn them into something constructive? And I'm wondering if you would like to reflect on this. My allegiance is not unconditional. This is not. Like, I never made an unconditional oath to the polity of the United States. I made an oath to values. And I didn't need to make the oath. That's just what I was boiled to. And the United States has betrayed the Constitution, has betrayed itself, and in so doing, so have betrayed me, but that's... I don't see that as primarily an Ian Fishback challenge. It has led to challenges in my life to figure out what to do with that situation. Mostly practical challenges. In terms of the Germans, I respect the Germans' ability to come to grips with their past. I went to a Rammstein concert this summer. Did anyone know what Rammstein is? It's a German head metal band. They have a song called Deutschland. Some of their music is a little bit over the edge for me. But this is my favorite song, actually, not just from Rammstein, but of any song, anywhere, Rammstein's Deutschland. And some of the lyrics in German are, Germany, I love you, Germany, I hate you, simultaneously. And what I like about that song is that it's patriotic, but it's also honestly acknowledging the flaws within Germany. And Americans seem utterly incapable of doing this simultaneously. Like the idea that an American could at one time be very enthusiastically proud of American, at the same time acknowledge everything that happened to be very unsettled by that, but people in America tend to fall into one or two camps. They're not able to do those things simultaneously. And I can contrast the Rammstein concert, which I think a lot of Americans, without being able to speak German, if they went to that concert, they would be, oh, this is like skinheads, which it's definitely not, it's the opposite. Not jingoistic at all. Contrast that with the George Strait concert I once went to, which was the most jingoistic, blind, completely culturally blind event. I've ever been to in my life. Americans just, they can't do it right now, and they don't want to do it right now. And until America is able to do that in a constructive way, it's not the home of the brave nor is it the land of the free. And if it wants to reclaim those mantles, then it has to earn it. That stuff is not just out there. You're not just born free and brave. You have to earn that. And a lot of Americans earned that to various degrees. And for whatever reason, in this particular time, America does not deserve that label. In terms of practical ideas about what we can do as a country to help our service men and women who are struggling is just embrace them and afford an opportunity for them to tell their narrative, to share their experience in a way that's non-judgmental and supportive. And that can go a long way to helping somebody feel reconnected with society in general. I want to kind of slightly go on a slight tangent back to torture. I've lived with it for a year and I've been thinking about it for many years to come. And I struggled for a long time to truly put into words what I just felt deep down inside. And that, if we go back over 5,600 years of recorded human history, we can hop, skip, and jump from human atrocity to human atrocity, but it's too, I think it's too easy to become angry and despondent. And if we went back to every single person who was responsible and we asked them a personal question, they would all come down to something like, essentially the present moment is somehow deficient. The future that I envision is better and I will bring us there. And I'll do that by acting right now. Now my choice might be immoral, but that future is less moral or more moral. And I honestly believe that that is the dysfunction of the human species in that it is unfathomable and unspeakable misery that we've affected not only on ourselves but we've inflicted on other people because the future doesn't have an objective existence out there. The future is a mind construct. And the most moral thing you can do is the act that you're choosing, all right? The end doesn't justify the means. The means infects the ends. I think since we are on academic time, we started a couple of minutes late, we have time for a couple of questions from the audience. Yes, please. War and the circumstances of war have incredible ambiguities with regard to these moral values that you folks are talking about. Every soldier is trained and taught in terms of rules rather than the personal values and emotions that he or she must weigh and consider in all the circumstances that they're faced with. Lawrence Colberg, a long time ago in his work on morality, taught us that those kinds of rules that we train these people in are not successful in practical circumstances where we have to individually weigh the value of each situation and all the circumstances. In the Cold War, we weren't being faced, we weren't considering equal parity of size in terms of what we did and what the Russians did and how that had meaning with respect to our societies. Those kinds of things that Obama had to wrestle with and that our current situation has to wrestle with in terms of the ambiguities and the meaning of those ambiguities with respect to our constitutional value and lives are not being untangled, are not being discussed at the nuanced level and the ambiguity that we face as a society. So the only thing that I could hope for is that somehow the institutions are responsible for this kind of training and these kinds of practical, real concerns with our soldiers on the battlefield will get their stuff together and start teaching and training and giving the kind of emotional background, the emotional intelligence that's necessary to sift through the things that are practically happening when you're out there. That's my comment. May I respond to that very briefly? Yeah, very brief response. And then I think we were about out of time. That was the way the system was until Bush intentionally broke it after 9-11 and Obama didn't fix it. So there were clear rules. Abbotzay, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld dismantled that system and put something new in its place that led to widespread torture. Rules about privacy. Obama dismantled that system. Means and ends. The right to privacy and the right against torture are really derivative of the respect for freedom. So if a president dismantles that stuff and then holds lowering in soldiers who used to have clear guidance responsible when they act in conditions of vagueness and ambiguity, that is a betrayal. Like those presidents and those officers are horrible leaders of the highest order. Please, just one last comment. Well, I'm sorry, I'd like to see if anybody else had comments for it. So, yes, and this, I think, this will have to be the last one because we're out of time. Dan Perlman, clinical and political psychologist, also at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason. And I've been very involved in psychologists for social responsibility. And Rachel McNair, who's the past president, she coined a term, perpetration-induced traumatic stress, like PITS that relates specifically to that. And also, during my very close colleagues challenged the APA and brought up the whole issue of Mitchell and Jessup and how they got, and there was another report, the Hoffman Report about the role of APA and working with the military and trying to get grants. Just two things. One is there are de-traumatization techniques, like EMDR, to reduce the cascade and the flood. You're still aware of everything, but it has less of a grip on you. So I'm thinking about treatment. And also, after the Vietnam War, like Robert J. Lifton and people were starting T-groups. So I'm just wondering about that. And also, I feel for you and I understand about how Obama treated whistleblowers. And the only person to go to prison was John Kiriakou for saying that torture was going on. And I think we have to come to grips with that. Well, thank you. We are out of time, and I've gotten a lot of food for thought. I'd like to thank our panelists and those members of the audience who've given us, shared their thoughts with us. So thank you. I'm a fellow here at New America. And also, like a few people in the audience here today, a veteran in my own right. I spent five years living and working in Afghanistan, working first for the Washington Post as a correspondent there. And then later for the International Crisis Group. I'm here today to introduce our keynote speaker, David Wood, who is a fellow, a fellow fellow as it were, and a colleague. And I think very much a brother in arms. For those of you who don't know David and his work, he has done quite a lot. And in some ways we have quite a lot in common, although I did not spend 30 years on the front lines a little bit less time. David spent a lot of time in the 1970s and early 80s covering another chapter of prolonged wars, proxy wars. In fact, on the African continent, while he was the bureau chief in Nairobi for Time Magazine. So he saw firsthand I think some of the beginnings of the kind of moral compromises that we are now kind of rustling with in terms of our unipolarity and how that has sort of shifted over time. He has spent a lot of time also covering national security issues in the White House, Pentagon, State Department. Most importantly, he has taken a long journey in our longest war. And I think it's worth noting, for those of you who haven't seen today, that The Washington Post has published a series of reports and documents about the lessons learned or un-learned from America's longest war. Caveat, I was one of the interviewers actually who interviewed many of those folks that are documented. And I can say, I think with conviction that many soldiers came home certainly with moral injuries, but many civilians did as well. And I think while there's ample room to interpret or misinterpret what you see in the Post today in terms of the Afghanistan papers, there's a lot there, I think, that speaks to that moral injury that many people came home with in the hindsight that they have to reckon with today as we realize that we're 18 years into a very, very, very long war. And I think, to some extent, David will probably speak a little bit to that today and the moral injuries that we carry with us. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce David Wood. Okay, so the thing here is slanted and I have a water bottle, I'm not quite sure what to do with it. It's nice to be here and thank you all for being here on a day when not much else is happening in Washington. So I wanna talk about one of the people that I met during my many, many deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And in general, I'm gonna talk about things that I've learned about moral injury and war over. I'm embarrassed to say about 40 years of covering wars and the military. So the guy I wanna introduce you to is named Nick Rudolph. He was a Marine that I got to know in Afghanistan. He was in the 1st Battalion, six Marines. He was one of the units I abetted with. And by the way, when I abetted, I mean, this was pretty typical. I went to Camp Lejeune, spent three or four weeks with them as they went through their pre-deployment training. And then we all went to Afghanistan and I was there with them in Afghanistan for three or four months. And I cut that in bed short because of the death of the family, but it was, I got to know them fairly well. So Nick Rudolph, nice kid, little taller than me from California, Central Valley, California. And in a firefight one day, he killed a child. So the situation was a pretty typical situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban are holed up in a farm compound with the, you know, the Adobe wall around it and the Marines are trying to flush them out. So there's this firefight going along. And at one point, Nick Rudolph sees somebody coming around the corner of that wall, shooting at him and his Marines from the hip and gets that person into sights and realizes, it's like a 10 year old kid and shoots him dead in about the same amount of time it takes to tell that. So, so Nick Rudolph has killed a child. By the way, his term, not mine, he thinks of that as a child. I don't know how old this person was, 10, 12, 14. Really doesn't matter because in Nick's mind, he killed a child. Now, in that circumstance, in that situation, it was the tactically correct thing to do, right? It was a legally justifiable thing to do because as far as I know, the laws of war and the Geneva conventions don't define combatant by age. You could even say it was the morally correct thing to do because Nick was protecting not just himself but the people he loves most in the world who's fellow Marines. So it was in that circumstance, a noble act, right? Now Nick goes home to California. A couple years later, he's out of the Marine Corps where he goes home and now he's a person in our moral universe where we burn people in the electric chair for killing a child, right? So how do we not think this is a moral injury of the first degree? And how does Nick deal with this and how do we deal with it? So I wanna talk about something that I've seen as a major driver of morality and moral injury and that's, that begins, I think, as far as I can remember from boot camp. When you first show up to be inducted into the military, you're told, one of the things you're told is you're responsible for your battle buddy no matter what and various kinds of forms and that's a rule you have to learn and then it becomes an internalized value, right? And I've seen this happen in many ways, large and small, during normal kind of life in the military. And then under the pressure and stress of a deployment to war, it becomes what I call unconditional devotion to each other and we've seen this, right? And we call it camaraderie but that's such a weak word. I do call it unconditional devotion. Even the people you don't like, you know? And this is the thing, you know, the cliche, which unfortunately is true, that people throw themselves on a hand grenade to protect their fellow Marines or soldiers. So it's love. I hate to use that word in the military context but that's really what we're talking about, unconditional devotion. And like any kind of love, it carries the seeds of its own demise, right? Because it's gonna end. You're gonna lose the people you love most in the world naturally or unnaturally and in war often it's unnatural. Somebody gets killed. And then for returning veterans, well, let me talk about another person I think may help illustrate this. This guy was a Marine squad leader and he was a really, really smart good squad leader. And I walked a lot of combat patrols with this guy, Richard Diaz, Sergeant Marine, sorry, also a Marine. And he was a master at being a Marine squad leader in combat. And I don't know all the things that he had to do to become a master. Clearly he'd been well-trained, he'd been mentored. He'd obviously thought up a lot of these tactics and procedures himself, but I always felt safer with him and when I was first told, yeah, you're going out with Sergeant Diaz, I was like, which one is he? And somebody pointed about it in a room full of Marines or a tent full of Marines. And I said, oh, that's him, not an imposing guy. Somebody said, yeah, he's a righteous Marine, which is pretty high praise from a tough crowd, right? So now Sergeant Diaz gets out of the Marine Corps. He's maybe 26, maybe 27 years old. Goes home to Las Vegas and who is he? He's not Sergeant Diaz, squad leader anymore. He's not a squad leader, he's not a righteous Marine. And nobody knows what he did. Even if they know he was in the Marines, he was deployed, he was a squad leader. I don't know what that meant. He brought all his guys home alive, right? Huge accomplishment. Nobody knows that, and worse, nobody cares, right? Nobody in Las Vegas cares. They're too busy doing other stuff. And here's the thing about unconditional devotion. It's gone also, because we don't have that in our society. Outside of our little immediate family, we're not unconditionally devoted to anybody. And the sense of loss that is felt by somebody like Richard Diaz, no longer Sergeant Diaz, that nobody's looking after him and he doesn't have anybody to look after. A gigantic loss of identity, right? Here's the thing I wanted to mention about the impact of moral injury on the people we send to war. So Richard, Nick Rudolph enlisted in 2007, like a lot of the Marines I knew in the first battalion, six Marines. And in that year, 2007, the Defense Department was desperate for manpower, right? Because they had two hot wars going on. So that year, they enlisted 17-year-olds, 7,500 of them, 7,517-year-olds. And because of the way the pipeline worked, you could go to ship out the boot camp, go to your advanced training into your first deploying unit. If they were ready to go to war, you could be in a firefight at age 17 or maybe 18. And so that cohort of people that they recruited that year in 2007 that we sent into two hot wars, the cohort of people aged 17 to 20, not yet 21, 86,000, that's who we send to war, which is okay, everybody knows we send young kids to war, right? But here's the thing, when they get done, after they've deployed once or twice and they've spent four years or six years in the Army of the Marine Corps, the Air Force and the Navy, they get home. That's the only thing they've ever done. They don't have any other life experiences, right? Maybe they've gotten married for a couple of months before they ship out. And so that experience in war has totally defined them. They don't have anything else. And even if they did have something else, this experience in war is so searing and so all-encompassing and so riveting that it would always be the only thing that they've done in their life. And you can see that, you know, I gotta, I see these guys with, you know, they're the World War II or Korean War, Vietnam War veterans, and they've got the ball cap on that has their unit on it, USS Coral Sea, you know, which was cut into razor blades that decades ago. But they're so proud because that's the biggest thing they've ever done. Now, here's where I introduce the main thing I want to say is this image that I have of war as its own moral universe that's so different from ours. So when I was a kid, bear with me, I just want to tell this story. When I was seven years old, I saw a movie called The Sound Barrier and it completely mesmerized me for years. And it was one of David Lean's films, I think, and one of his probably least known, maybe least successful, but to my mind, it was a blockbuster. But the thing was that nobody knew, this was 1952, what would happen when you crossed the sound barrier? And all these imaginary things, but in the movie anyway, guys would, you know, get a test pilot, get in there, excuse me, they're jets, go way up high and then dive down, trying to get kind of break the sound barrier. And as they approached the sound barrier, the plane would start to shake and shake and shake and it was buffeting really hard so you couldn't see the instruments and it was terrible, just this awful chaos. And then in the movie at least, as they just about to pass through the sound barrier, the controls reversed. So as they were pulling back on the stick to pull out of the dive, it steepened the dive and they all crashed. And to my seven-year-old mind, this was just unbearably tragic. But I think about that in terms of, you know, it's not a bad metaphor for people coming out of the moral universe of war into our moral universe of war where Nick Rudolph, killing a child, good to go, right? That's what the military calls a good kill. And our moral universe, as I said, we burn people in the electric chair for killing a child. So how do they navigate this transition from that moral universe to our moral universe? You know, there was another person I came across in my reporting who I'd never met, Jake Sexton, who's his name. And I knew his father pretty well. Jake was in the Indiana National Guard. Two deployments. He was a turret gunner and a gun truck, right? You know, for some reason, the RME, or maybe it was just the National Guard, I can't remember, but it was used to put the youngest, most inexperienced guy up in the turret. I don't know why that was, expendable? I don't know. But anyway, that's where Jake Sexton was. Young kid, probably 20 when his first deployment. And on that first deployment in Iraq, first science said to the gun truck guys, you're gonna go down, block off the intersection, and nobody comes through here. Not for any reason. Nobody comes through here, because the rest of the companies, you know, have been blocked a block and a half away. So there's Jake Sexton, first combat deployment up there to turret. And of course, you know, here comes a car barreling down the street at him and it's dusk. And he goes through all the escalation to force things. You know, he flashes his lights, puts out the siren, send up a flare. I don't remember all the things that he did, but the car keeps coming. And he remembers first sergeant, you know, nobody comes through here. And he's like, oh shit, what do I do? And of course, you know, the only thing he has to do is put a couple of 50 cal slugs into that car. And of course, it's a civilian family, I don't know, on their way to a hospital or something, but some reason why they were speeding down the road and everybody in the car dead or wounded. And you know, Jake is, of course, devastated. It comes home from that deployment. Never talks about what happened. You know, like a lot of veterans, you know, when you ask them about their service, they sort of growl, you know, don't want to talk about it. How could they? That happened in another moral universe. So he goes on his second deployment and it was also pretty bad. But when he came home from that deployment, his dad, Jeff, really hammered that and told me what that was like. Tell me what was going on. And he knew Jake was sending nightmares because he'd wake up screaming in their little house in Indiana. And eventually, Jake said, well, there was a situation where I had to shoot some people and they turned out to be civilians. And I feel, you know, I killed a bunch of people. But he wouldn't say much more about it than that. And then one night after that second deployment, after he got home, the family went out to the movies and Jake put his firearm to his head and pulled the trigger and killed himself. So, you know, again, that transition from, you know, you know, when a lot of veterans have said to me was I did all the right things that bad shit still happened. I think this falls into that category where stopping that car was an absolute thing he had to do. And you could argue whether, you know, was there a right or wrong that he did things right? That he not, well, that's arguable, but he didn't get in trouble for it in the military. It was only when he got home back into our civilian society that he couldn't cope with it. He couldn't cope with it. So this transition from the moral universe of war to civilian, the ancients got this. It's only us that don't, we don't, we don't haven't really comprehended this. But, you know, there's all sorts of references in the Bible. I think in Numbers 36 verse 19 maybe where it says the Israelites who'd gone to war returning from war couldn't come into camp for seven days until they had been through a ceremony of purification. Recognizing that in that other moral universe they did things which are not acceptable when you come home. So you have to go through that ceremony of purification. And everywhere you look, societies have done that. You know, if you were a soldier for William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and you killed two people, you had to do a year's penance for each of those two people you killed. And if you killed, you know, like, dozens, you know, that was the rest of your life doing penance. They didn't fool around during those days doing penance. It was pretty severe. And of course, you know, the Navajo Indians, you know, everybody has these ceremonies of purification for returning warriors. Recognizing, again, that what they did, even though we asked them to do that, go kill our enemies, but we recognize that that involves things which are not acceptable back here and so you have to go through this ceremony of purification. I want to tell one more story. This was an interesting and perplexing one. I saw a photograph one time of the liberation of Dachau, the German death camp. And in the photograph, there's SS guards lined up against the brick wall and there's a bunch of GIs with the rifles out and they're shooting them. And the guards are surrendering. I mean, it is clearly a war crime. And there was one person in that photograph who was identified, his name was John Lee, and it took me a couple of years to track him down, but I finally did. And I went to his house outside of Cleveland and knocked on his door and said, hey, I'm a journalist, I want to hear about Dachau. John Lee then was probably in his mid-80s. So we talked for a long time. I mean, he had the good grace to invite me in. And what he said was, you can't judge unless you were there. I think he's wrong, but it was an interesting thing. What he said was, we fought our way across Germany and he was like 19 or 20, I can't remember how old he was, but no other life experience kind of situation. And he said, we were told, go up the road here and there's some kind of police station or something, our prison, go up there and take care of it. So we were walking up this road, going past these box car after box car of emaciated corpses. And he said the word went around, no prisoners. And when they got there, they were just boiling with anger and horror and shock. And the SS guards were laughing and taunting them so they're minding off the shot. And there was an investigation, Patton's army did an investigation, nothing ever came of it. And so I went away thinking, you had to be there to judge, is that, how do I feel about that? I think he was wrong. But here's the interesting thing that struck me about that whole experience of talking to John Lee. And that is that he, you know, so this was probably, I don't know, mid 90s or maybe mid 80s. I don't remember when this was that I interviewed him. But for all those decades, he'd never talked about this. His family had no idea and when they read my story, they were shocked and horrified and angry at me. But he'd never talked about it. The biggest thing that ever happened in his life, never talked about it. He couldn't, because that was there, you had to be there, right? And now he's here and he can't talk about it. How do we think that's not a moral injury? Even though he insisted he was in the right. But knowing that nobody back home would agree with him. So let me go back to Nick Rudolph for a second. About five years after this incident with the child in Afghanistan, everybody, all the guys that I knew in one sec were out of the Marine Corps now. And for some reason our paths crossed in Philadelphia and so I rented a hotel room and we sat around drinking beer and swapping stories. It was like, it was like a late November Sunday afternoon. And I was getting, so the whole afternoon we just talked and I was sort of getting dark. And at one point I said to Nick, hey, tell the story about killing that little child. Because I don't remember exactly how it went down. You know, when something like that happens, it goes so fast, you know, and what happened was there was a firefight, the kid got killed, the firefight went on and eventually the Taliban faded away and the Marines moved forward and they went on and then that day segwayed into the next day and the next day it was pretty much the same thing happened over and over again and then until the deployment was over. And there's no time to do that. Take a deep breath and go, wow, what was that like, you know? So anyway, I asked Nick to tell the story and he did and it was hard for him to tell the story. This is five years later. And you know, it kind of choked up and there were long silences with his head down and he got tears in his eyes talking about this and when he finished, I wanted to say some words of comfort, you know, like, I don't know, it was war and you couldn't help it or I couldn't think of quite what to say and there was somebody in the shadows, one of the other Marines said something that I instantly recognized as a perfect thing to say and what he said was, yeah, that was fucked up. And I thought, oh, that's perfect, you know? Because there's no blame attached. It's not like you fucked up or the Taliban, the kid did or the commandant of Marine Corps or the president, nobody, it just was, right? And it's a discreet event that happened in the past. It's not, that is fucked up, it was and it's over and we're still here because we love you, you know, that unconditional devotion and we hear you and we acknowledge something bad happened which I think is so critical in this business of relating morally injurious stories. So, I told this story not long ago, I was asked to speak to a peace group and they gathered in this big church in Rhode Island, one of these New England white, you know, and you know what this is like. It's sort of cliche-ish, but there it was there were a couple hundred people in this church and so I started telling this story about Nick Rudolph and we're getting together in Philadelphia and late Sunday afternoon and he's telling this story and somebody speaks up from the shadows and says, and I suddenly realized, oh my God, I'm in church, you know, can I say this? But I was already rolling, you know, I was already, so I said, yeah, that was fucked up and there was a shock silence and then everybody started laughing and applauding because they got it. You know, this essential thing of listening to a veteran's story and with validation. I think that's a term I got from Bill Nash, the famous psychiatrist. You know, listening with validation, recognizing, yeah, something bad happened, but there's something so healing in that opportunity to encourage a veteran to tell his story in a safe place, in a place where he or she feels I'm not going to be laughed at or nobody's going to be, oh my God, you killed a child. You know, how could you, monster? You know, not going to be that kind of reaction but people are going, okay, we recognize this. And here's why I think it's important because you know, you raised the idea that we're all morally injured and I totally subscribed to that but maybe in a slightly different way than you were talking about. We send these kids off to war, we don't tell them what's going to happen even though we sort of suspect it, that bad stuff is going to happen but we don't tell them that and then when they come home, we're like, we don't, we're not and we don't want to hear about it, we're not. And I think that's why these random encounters between civilians and military people, like at an airport and somebody says, thank you for your service and it's kind of awkward, right? And I imagine, I don't know this for sure but I imagine there's some guilt involved like you went and I didn't, I chose not to. And you know, I just think that we, so I like to think that we as a society suffer or bear some moral injury for having done that to these kids and then disavowing any responsibility for it. So that I think it's important that we listen to veteran stories, that we create opportunities for them to feel safe in telling their stories and that we listen with validation which is to say, yeah, we recognize that something bad happened and we could take that in and we're all, we're still here because we love you and value it. So that's it. I'd be happy to take, is it question time now or what's the, a little bit? Okay, questions. Yes, sir. Yeah, you're talking about a lot. I'm Ken Mayer. This all, isn't it? I'm Ken Mayer, I record. Anyway, but there's a second moral impact it seems to me, if you come to the conclusion that the war you're fighting in is immoral, of that you were in a country illegally, you're committing aggression which then turns the killing you do basically into murder. I wonder how widespread amongst the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, that sort of moral injury exists and kind of further, oh, I think that might suggest why some veterans are not anxious to talk about their war experience because they feel like they were hoodwinked into participating in these wars, that they were suckers and nobody likes to admit that about their past behavior. That interesting question and thanks for the question. I don't speak for the military and war combat veterans in general because I'm never served in a military. In fact, that was a quaker, a conscientious objector. That's part of my background here. I do know that thanks to pioneering work by Dr. Sheeran McGinn, who's a VA psychiatrist and a lot of other people, that killing imposes a cost on the killer. That even in a just war, in a perfectly Nick Rudolph kind of justifiable situation, that those who kill are more likely to have significant mental health issues later in life than those who don't kill. And that doesn't quite get to your question. It's kind of as close as I can come. But what that suggests to me is that the people that we've sent into war to kill and who have killed in, again, justifiable situations in that moral universe are gonna have significant mental health issues. I think that that crest of that wave is yet to come. I hope we can deal with it. And I think that all the material that the Washington Post published yesterday and today is gonna, about how people here in Washington, the decision makers and policy makers here knew the war wasn't, neither war was gonna end well and wasn't going well and didn't say anything about it, just kept adding on to it. I think that's gonna accelerate that secondary or later on moral injury of people who we asked to kill in combat and then didn't wanna hear about it. Yes, sir? I take it from your concluding comment that the Marines did nothing in a prophylactic way. I take it from your concluding comment that the Marines did nothing in a prophylactic way to prepare pre-deployment for these moral ambiguities and problems that their soldiers would be facing. The SAS, on the other hand, recognized that kind of treatment, that kind of prophylactic pre-deployment treatment would save them a lot of PTSD problems later on and they have significant statistics to show that. Yeah, the Israelis do the same thing, of course. Short answer is no, the Marines of 1-6 never got any formal introduction or nobody ever mentioned the impact of, psychological impact of killing, of course not. You know, there was, many of you know Peter Kilner who's a West Point professor and I think he's an Army colonel maybe at this point, who's thought a lot about this and he came up with a way of teaching young recruits how to think about killing. It was a really interesting program and I can describe it later on if you're interested, but they did a pilot program for the Defense Department and it worked really well and of course the Defense Department said, we don't want that. So that was the end of that. So there, as far as I know, at least in the case of 1-6 and probably for other, in other boot camp and advanced training, they do not deal with, you know, what you're gonna experience as a killer and how to absorb that, okay? Thanks. So it is for a little break though. My aim through my research and my writing this year is to honor the men and women who comprise US Special Operations. What has been really remarkable for me to observe and experience as I've labored to create something of value is the incredible support I've received from within academia, the VA and beyond. Much of this support has come from people in this room. There's one person who's not present today and I really would be remiss if I didn't mention her by name and that's Nancy DeLette. Nancy is an employee at Arizona State University and she has done more for me in this endeavor than any other person. She's the best. The propensity for moral injury among Special Operations forces has been heightened by its organizational identity and culture. Moral injury is defined as an invisible wound to one's inner self. Dr. Tom Frame from the Australian Defense Force defines moral injury as the result of harm or damage which leaves a wound that reduces the functioning or impairs the performance of the moral self which causes an injury which is that part of a person where moral reasoning and moral decision making takes place. Due to the constraints of time this morning I'm gonna simply state that the United States Congress Special Operations Forces leadership is personnel and I would argue you ladies and gentlemen representative of the American public through recent reporting in the media recognize that something is a mess. The myriad of incidents indicating moral drift among Special Operations forces are not mere aberrations. Rather, they suggest systemic dissonance between a spouse Special Operations Forces values and Special Operations Forces values and use. The moral injury literature mainly focuses on the individual, agency and the action but I assert this is insufficient. It is not just about the person rather it is about how the organization utilizes its personnel and exposes them to moral drift and here the leadership bears significant responsibility. What I'm suggesting is the following. First of all, organizational identity creates seemingly rational behavior. Secondly, organizational culture entrenched and replicates the underlying assumptions of seemingly rational behavior and makes them unquestionable. And thirdly, the only real way to break the cycle is to adopt a new organizational identity. I argue that Special Operations Forces experienced a major identity shift in the mid 2000s. They greatly heightened the propensity for moral injury among the force. Prior to 9-11, Special Operations had multiple flavors and component identities and it was a break glass in case of emergency force. After 9-11, it became a singular identity based on the counter-terrorism and counter-network mission. Special operations of all stripes became focused on destroying networks and kill capture of those comprising them. This shift of focus came with high moral cost to the personnel assigned to Special Operations Forces formations. The life and service of a Master Sergeant incredibly close to me serves as an example of this. Tommy has served his country for upwards of 30 years, during which time he has deployed on eight occasions. Tom is the most resilient warrior with whom I've served during my time in the military. In the service of his country, he has been stretched physically, mentally and emotionally, often to the limit and at times beyond. In 2017, Tommy's unit received notification of a pending deployment in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. Tom did not need to deploy. He should not have deployed. However, he felt at the time and feels today that he couldn't say no based on identity. The only rational choice was to go out the door, which he did. This is called the logic of appropriateness and both individuals and organizations are subject to it. This is an expression of what I'm calling organizational identity and illustrates the problem this form of organizational identity brings with an overemphasis on kill capture. The theory of victory assumed that we could kill capture them faster than they could replicate and consolidate. After 15 years, we know we're wrong, but our organizational identity has made replicating the same behaviors unquestionable and seemingly rational. We just keep doing the same thing over and over without accounting for the cost to our people. Why do we do the same things over and over? The overwhelming proportion of the force entered special operations after the identity shift to counter network and it's all they know. A few old timers remember special operations differently, but they are now in the minority. There is a path dependency or habitus to organizational culture. It becomes habit to repeat the process as people cycle in and out filling billets, never questioning why the process is in place or the assumptions underlying them. Habitus is more than standard operating procedures. It is the discourse, the symbols, operating concepts and the speakable and unspeakable ideas that permeate an organization. Simply put, these are the components of organizational culture and identity. More importantly, the identity of special operations forces is that we are a kill capture force, so doing other things seems inherently irrational. We have difficulty imagining ourselves in some other way. In short, the organizational culture is there to replicate the recruiting, training and deployment of SOF for kill capture. Leadership expects it, career progression demands following the template and we keep going with no end in sight and this informs what is regarded as success. The logic of appropriateness of an elite kill capture force cannot stop. We tell ourselves that no one else can do this job, that we're the best and that we cannot say no to a mission. Mission first is the motto, no matter how little time we have at home. This, I assert, increases the propensity for moral drift and moral injury as personnel lose the grounding of being a member of society and bend the rules for the sake of mission. All it takes is for a new member of the team to be taught by a senior who has drifted morally. That senior sets the example which then radiates through the organization over a short period of time. This normative behavior becomes what right looks like or how we do business. But the moral injury is not just to the individual alone, it is to the family as well. Soldiers often find themselves in an impossible situation. The organization demands more and as a result, the family suffers. The family too is wounded. Placing the onus on the individual misses the point. There is not enough ethics training or spiritual support that can prevent the downstream moral injury members of the force will face so long as the identity of the organization is a mission first elite co-capture organization. If the theory of victory is wrong, and I believe it is, then we will be at the same level of deployment as a force for another 15 years. The only way to break the cycle is for the organization, meaning the leadership at the three and four star levels to challenge the organizational identity and culture. Only then will it be able to identify new ways to imagine special operations forces proper role in the U.S. arsenal. Change what appears to be rational behavior. Change the path dependencies or habitats and reduce the propensity for moral injury among special operations forces. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes my presentation. It was an honor for me to spend a little time with you this morning. Many thanks to New America in conjunction with Arizona State University, in particular, Dan Rothenberg. Dan, I want to thank you personally for this remarkable opportunity. Thank you. Okay, Nancy. Thank you very much. And I want to give a shout out to the background for the coming home dialogues and that's to Bro Adams, who was the head of the NEH a number of years ago, himself a Vietnam veteran, philosophy professor, president, I think of University of New Hampshire, with whom I had dialogues when the idea was germinating and it came to fruition and I'm so delighted that it's still in operation. And thank you to Jesse and thank you to Dan and my fellow colleagues. I want to begin with a story and end with a story. One is contemporary and another one is ancient. I am a philosopher of ancient philosophy, not an ancient philosopher though. I'm getting there. And the first one comes from a journalist. I didn't collect the story myself. It's from Chris Chivers, C.J. Chivers. And it's a Navy aviator, Lane McDowell, who was in Kosovo and everything looked great and then the image started to get grainy. And when he got back on the flight deck, he saw clearly what was then grainy and that what he had dropped an ordinance on was a carport and there were four small bicycles. Chris Chivers spent a lot of time in the Pentagon trying to get the background of this story. It appears in The Fighters, his great book. And he never really could get resolution nor did the Navy really come clean on it, but the moral burden was carried by Lane McDowell in a series of repetitive dreams in which he goes into a house, it's smoke filled, there's a lot of dangling wires and he goes and sees a little boy and he cradles the boy and when he looks the boy has no back of his skull and it is in fact his own child, Landon. So that's a story in which it's not collateral killing. It's an accidental killing. There's no advantage, no military advantage, no military necessity, it's not an element of killing and it's justified or at least it's excused and the moral burden is really personal. It's carried by this individual. It is transgressive of someone. Children were killed, we presume, who were not liable to killing and it's not part of any proportionality calculation and the burden goes on. So I take it that this is a salient case of military moral injury. Moral injury is much, much wider than military context and it's, what's interesting is the agent can't exculpate himself, herself, though the doctrine of war can and that is a part of the phenomenon of moral injury. So what I wanna just focus on for a few minutes today, a few of the minutes that I have is that that increasing awareness of moral injury in the military community witnesses, conferences, a set of panels is in tension with another aspect of military ethos that it's not just the masculine ethos that you spoke of, Caroline, but it's rather the stoic influence that there's a tough stoic grit kind of notion of resilience that really sits at odds, it seems, with recognition of the suffering of moral conscience that moral injury suggests. So in part, as someone who studies texts, I wanna ask can the stoics come clean on this? Do they have anything to say or are we stuck with a kind of tough, tough it out, suck it up notion of conduct that's so common in the military academies and elsewhere where service members are, oops, excuse me, are trained? So we've heard a little bit about the clinical side of moral injury and I also wanna talk about the philosophical side. So on the clinical side, and Shira McGuinn has been mentioned, Bill Nash, and also Brett Litz. Military, I'm just gonna give you that for a second. Military moral injury is a syndrome of shame, self-handicapping anger, and demoralization that occurs when deeply held beliefs and expectations are transgressed and it can be from the point of view of the agent, perpetrator, whether it's a real or apparent moral injury, can be from the point of view of a closeup observer, witness, and it can also be from the point of view of the victim. I do believe that that's part of it. The key part of the clinical research is that 1980s definition of post-traumatic stress, which came in the heyday of behaviorism, is about a response to fear, it's a fear threat. Well, most of the people I talk to, I'm sure those that David's spoken to, the leading symptom you might say if you wanna talk pathology, but what often comes up is a conscience break. It's not necessarily, it's not only a security threat or fear threat, but rather a moral stressor. So from the point of view of philosophy, I've found very useful going back to a 1962 article by P.F. Strassen in which he talks about reactive attitudes, and these are attitudes that are constitutive of our responsibility practices. They are manifest in feelings of when they're self-reflexive, guilt and shame, we've heard that. They're manifest when they're toward another, resentment toward a third party that you're perhaps observing where you are not the victim but you feel for the victim. It could be a moral indignation, something of a stipulative term. But the idea is that these are negative feelings that are part of how we take responsibility, describe responsibility, hold ourselves and others accountable. And there are positive aspects of this as well, modes of forgiveness, self-forgiveness, methods of atonement, ways of coming back into the community, lifting of the blame, sometimes simply by validation of the stories that have taken place. Now, can stoicism handle it? And I bring in stoicism in part because I've written a lot about stoicism and still work on it, but it's a popular view out there. There's an uptick in being stoic and in it being a kind of a way to deal with the stress of life, a way to find tranquility and calm, be like Marcus Aurelius, be like Epictetus. And it's taught in service academies, definitely, at the Naval Academy. And at Army West Point. So, can it handle it? I think it can and I appeal to Seneca. A wonderful read, if you haven't read some Seneca, he's a great orator, but also he is a pragmatist. His hands are dirty. He is the speechwriter, spin doctor, and moral tutor of a very problematic emperor called Nero. And he often is his apologist, but he's always yearning as a moral aspirant, a moral progressor to do better. And so the theme in his letters to others, in his consolations is that. And so can he handle an emotion like shame, which is a recognition, perhaps, that you did something wrong? But it's also an impetus, a moral push, an umphi thing to go better, to do better. And also the lifting of shame through something like self-forgiveness, if there is a real wrong, through something like empathy, not the term really discussed by the Stoics, but mercy is, there's a lot of discussion of mercy. So I wanna just suggest a little bit to you of this. In the Greek world, the tears of alcibiades is a trope. If you haven't read the symposium lately, you might go to the back at the end of the symposium. Alcibiades comes running in and says, the only person in the world can really make me cry is Socrates because I never do as well as he does. And I feel so ashamed in his presence. Alcibiades is the bad boy of the Greeks. He probably betrayed the Greeks in the Sicilian expedition. But at any rate, he always wants to do better. And so the tears of alcibiades and his shame become a bit of a trope of the moral aspirant, the moral progressor. Can the Stoics handle it? And in fact, Cicero, writing about an ancient Stoic named Cliantis says this, sure, he's trying, the good emotions typically don't include stress or distress or moral distress because you're supposed to get rid of it. A sage wouldn't feel that. A sage would feel no stress at all, be calm and without perturbations. So we hear about this emotion from Cicero. Surely you wouldn't claim that the circumstances which occasioned alcibiades to stress weren't really a bad thing. Wasn't it good that he recognized that there was some wrongdoing and that maybe he has to do better? And he, Cicero goes on, suppose a person is upset about his own lack of virtue, his lack of courage or responsibility or integrity. The cause of his anxiety is indeed a bad thing. Isn't it an impulse toward virtue itself? So this, Cicero writing about the Stoics and then Seneca himself too, think that you should have a place for the disturbance that can lead to a better calm or perhaps to some sort of form of atonement. And so I wanna end by thinking about how Seneca handles it. He has an essay on mercy and the essay is essentially about Nero but himself, about holding up a mirror to his own wrongdoings and thinking that maybe he can go a little bit lighter on himself on occasion. But he also writes a play and the play has shades of what I began with and that is of Lane McDowell's experience. The play is Trojan women. It's post-bellum. The Greeks have won. The Trojans have lost. The Greeks are now cleaning up but they have to figure out what to do with the children and the women. And it's not pretty. And Agamemnon, who always seems to have a problem with wind, again has a problem with wind. He needs wind to set sail back home. And the only way he can get wind, it seems, if there's a sacrifice. Again, we've heard about this before with Ifig and Anne. And the thought is that they're gonna sacrifice a young woman, a Trojan woman, on the deathbed of Priam's son. And excuse me, on the deathbed, forgive me, of Achilles' son, Pyrrhus. And there's a claim, mercy often means giving death not life. And the mother of this young child screams out, no, no, no, please. You must sort of show some mercy to my son. And she even tries to hide him in a tomb. And then finally there's a pyrr, a funeral pyrr. And another child has to be essentially killed or else he may grow up to be a Trojan who starts the war again. And the child is Astonianics. And the child in this setting, it's almost like an amphitheater. It's really lunchtime recreation for the Romans who like gladiatorial fights. This is the theater and they're gonna throw this boy off a cliff. And the mother screams, the mother heck, he screams, can this boy raise ruins? This wreck of a city turned to dust? The boy may be a Trojan royal, but he's as good as a slave. Just put a yoke around his royal neck. And so in fact he is killed as part of the post-bellum cleaning up. And he's thrown off a cliff and essentially there's shattered body parts coming down. And it's a strange play for a moralist of calm but maybe not. It's a cautionary tale. It's the flip side. It's the evil side you might say of mercy. This is when mercy hasn't been shown. So I just want to return to the naval aviator, Lane McDowell. No formal investigations of this incident over Kosovo. He was very reluctant to fly when it came his turn to fly in Iraq. Not clear if there was a violation of fuller procedures but and so if the accident could have been averted but I suspect not so. The judgment revisits McDowell routinely in the flashback scene I began with of cradling a boy who is in fact his son. And what he pictures is just strikingly like that of Seneca's subject. A young boy's body shattered the back of his head missing and innocent made all too vulnerable in war. And what we hope for this aviator and many is some mercy, some self-mercy, some lifting of the self-punishment that is so excruciating, the rage that you spoke of Bill, that's so excruciating as part of war. So I just sort of say Seneca is a weird moralist of calm. He's complicated. He yearns for simplicity and tranquility as one who's attracted to the messy world of politics and high-stake power and violence. But modern-day warriors are also in that complicated moral world. They're yearning for autonomy and self-discipline but willing often to be in institutions that vast and in larger systemic moral universes that limit their control, expose them to situations that constantly test their best judgment and their capacity for steady restraint. Exposure to moral injury is no surprise in that environment. But I think the Seneca lesson that I've been urging is that injury is a part of resilience, stoic grit, and there's room in the stoic kind of mantra of being tough and finding grit for a good moral distress that also needs a good kind of moral repair. Thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you to Daniel for this opportunity to sit and have a conversation with everybody on the panel and all these team panelists here. And there's a common thread and I think that's really kind of impressive. And when I was originally asked to participate in this, I was thinking about it and I, to be really frank, hadn't given a lot of thought to moral injury and thinking about my service. I had just very specifically looked at it as very mechanistic to what my service was. And so a little bit of background there was, in 2006 I joined the military for a very specific purpose and the purpose that I had was, I had spent way too much time watching our short snager Rambo movies and knowing very clearly that this was a calling of a generation and we weren't going to be going home anytime soon. I thought it was important that I participate in the calling of a generation. And so that led me to have a mixed bag of active duty and national guard time. And so in this process, I went both Afghanistan into Iraq and I think where this needle gets threaded together is probably the time that I spent in Afghanistan. And in 2012, 2013, we were sent there, a very small team. We were a 12 man operation and a very far flung piece of Afghanistan. And where we were was, if anyone's familiar, is Argendab River Valley. So it's this place where the Taliban believes their religious birthplace was. It's also where the poppies grown and it's this confluence of area where it's just hyperkinetic and hypercontested. And so when we were there, we happened to be one of the most kinetic teams in the most kinetic area in Afghanistan for the entire battlefield, the entire fighting season. And when you do that, and we were in a very far flung place, we were not on a fob, we were on what's called a cop combat outpost. We didn't have any formal structure there for us to be taking care of no real support and we were in kind of no man's land. And so there was this very specific spirit of core of the team taking care of itself and the team being responsible to itself and everybody kind of digging in. And for me, again, being hyperkinetic, it boiled itself down to there were times we had hand to hand combat. I mean, it was pretty ridiculous. And so coming back is kind of where when I was talking to Daniel and thinking through where the moral injury occurred. For me, again, our team and our activities, my entire military career in deployments and spaces like that, I think had less to do with it was more mechanical, more of the training, thinking on those and it was upon return is when that moral injury occurred where we were, and if you don't mind me asking, would you, are you able to recite that definition that you used a moment ago when you'd find moral injury? Oh, sure. Something like the sense of shattered moral identity and the self-handy capping feeling of shame, anger and for a transgression suffered or a transgression that you witness or that you yourself perpetrate. Participate in, yeah. And so for us and for coming back, we had, again, been kinetic and I didn't realize it at the time, but we had been blown up. We got hit with IDs constantly. I think we hit with like 40 while we were there. We were just driving around. And one of them was specifically bad for our team and I very specifically had hit my head inside of the vehicle when we rolled over multiple times and it was blacked out. I had brain fluid kind of in my ears. You know, you go have a conversation with our medic, they're give you a couple of days, you're good to go, go back to doing what you need to be doing and that's it. And then coming home, about six months of coming home, I watched my entire team fall apart. For me personally, I had these latent onset TBI effects where I was not doing well. I couldn't remember where I was. I couldn't remember why I was where I was. I couldn't turn around and turn back forward, I'd black out. I was making very erratic decisions and you start going through the spool of someone who has PTSD or TBI and for all these clinical definitions, you have all of these symptomatic behaviors. As an individual, you dismiss those because you're like, well, that's just this one, like instance of behavior or that's just this one thing. And for me, it took this looking at a picture of all of these activities and this is symptomatic. Uh-oh, I've had a problem. And I turned to my team and I'm looking around and I'm realizing that this person has a DUI, this person has a DUI, this person's been arrested twice, this person has just gotten a divorce. I'm like, oh, this isn't good. Our entire team is literally falling apart. So this sends me on this path to figure out, how do I get help? And the guy who's going through a divorce and gets into a spousal abuse situation, we're trying to figure out how to be helpful. I'm calling the chaplain, we're trying to get all the services that we can to get to this person, nothing's there, right? So it boils itself back down to three people from the same team have to drive somewhere in the magnitude of a thousand collective miles to go intervene in this person's life. And Lamentine, I'm looking back at this mountain of services that are available to us from the VA, from DOD resources, and then everything that exists in the community and not being able to comprehend why there's no way for us to take care of each other. It has to be the two of us. And so this leads me to this path to have these conversations with the VA and for me going down my own, I need help. I need to understand something's wrong cognitively and I need an outcome here. And very, very succinctly, I go through this process and they basically tell me there's nothing we can do. You can take drugs, I don't want to take drugs. I don't want to take any drugs, no thanks. And what happens when I don't want to take drugs? So they shrug their shoulders. So that's not a very good answer, right? And so the next conversation is, well, I think I have a cognitive deficit. So they give me a baseline test and go, you're normal. So how do you know if I'm normal if you didn't give me a test before I got hit in the head? I said, sorry, you're okay, that's PTSD. I was like, that's not PTSD. You're like, stop crazy, you're being crazy. I was like, all right. And so I'm looking at the rest of my team and everyone, again, is going through these same things. And for me, not knowing what to do, I also then lose the job that I have when I came back. And I have my own personal relationships are all starting to erode. So it's this very impressive sense of helplessness. When you're with a team and we're doing very kinetic combat operations, calm as a Hindu cow, like absolutely no issues whatsoever, come home and where you should have structure and you should have support and everything should be fantastic. It is complete chaos and there's absolutely, seems like every door is closed and there's no way to get any help. And it just, it feels like you're falling and you're not gonna stop in this free fall. And somehow, and that's where like to me the discrimination part comes in. I'm a veteran, I come back, everything should be a red carpet rolled out, right? That's a sense that you get and all of a sudden you're trying to get help and you can't get it. And then you have this stoicism of like, I should be okay, everything should be perfectly fine. And it turns out that like, how do you ask for all of this help, right? And so this led me to this path where it's kind of a longer story for how I come out of this, but I make a very clear decision and taking care of the team that this responsibility needs to be much more broad and decide I wanna, you know, like I literally said this out loud at the time that I want to lobby for veterans. I had no idea what that meant. And I just was like, this needs to be fixed. And so this led me down this path of trying to figure out, I took an AmeriCorps job, you guys know what that is, like, you know, almost no income whatsoever. And it's literally just you doing the Lord's work and trying to do something. And I took this because I wanna do veteran activities and I wanna get bonus fees in this space. And so I worked for a chamber of commerce and I built a program. I was allowed to have a lot of autonomy to dig into regulations and policy. And so I did and I just read and read and read. I wanna understand the way that laws works and the way that these structures are and why there wasn't services where and when they could be. And then gave very specific policy recommendations and built some programs. I got the attention of Senator McCain in Arizona, just where I'm from. And I'm sorry that I left this out of this equation. I was also from Arizona. So when I went back to the VA to try to get help, I happened to be at the Phoenix VA in 2014 when there was this epicenter for national scandal. I didn't know better. I just thought the VA was terrible. And so I go down this path and I go work for Senator McCain and build programs in the state. And then he asked me to come to DC to work on programs as well. And there and as in DC, he asked me to work on a program and because we were allowed to cuss, I'm gonna quote Senator McCain. When I was in Arizona, he grabbed me and pointed at my face and he said, I need you to go to DC. I need you to unfuck choice. I said, all right boss. And I had avoided it when I was in Arizona at all costs. And if you guys are familiar, the response to the crisis that we had in Arizona was a program that allowed you to figure out how to get your care. It looks a lot like tri-care, honestly, but as you get care in the community, kind of source these things. And Senator McCain's position on it made him a pariah. He didn't know what to do with it and he just wanted to give everybody a Medicaid card and it's not very logical because it's gonna cost a lot of money. And so I found another way to thread that needle and it took the better part of 11 months to come up with a policy and another year and a half to get it passed. And so right before he passed, I ended up going to work for the White House, the White House asked, because this was a presidential priority for them to focus on how to do choice. And so after getting all of that done, all of that to say that it's like a three and a half year span from the time that making this decision after this moral injuries occurred and all of these things to get this done, all of that was entry so that I could get to a place where we can have a conversation around behavioral health because in my opinion, and what the experience was that both I had and my entire team had, we aren't quite there in figuring out how to demystify the process for someone that has an injury of some kind, has a neural deficit of some capacity and how do you take it from, I'm in the fog and I don't know how to get out of this to I'm out of the fog and very few people of my peers and my cohorts can ever explain to you what that linear process is and it's not recyclable for anybody. And so in the White House, the last thing I was able to do before I left was a national strategy for suicide prevention and of the ilk and of the belief that suicide prevention needs to start way upstream. It's when injury occurs, but it's not at the point of crisis but it's very, very early on. And so the entire federal structure is reorganized itself to figure out where does research go on this and how do we do supportive services to make sure that we can deliver that. That then led me to Arizona State University. So here in DC, one of the challenges is always that we're on Mount Pius and we always think that we have the greatest ideas. We concoct these things up here on Mount Pius and we shoot them down like lightning bolts to the community and nobody ever knows what to do with them because they weren't in the room and it was being concocted and no one's explained it to them. And so it never quite works the way that it should but you still have federal dollars attached to it. And so knowing that that would be the case and that there wasn't a very good body of evidence to be able to respond to this in a more meaningful way, what better place than to go to Arizona State University which is the largest student body on earth is the most innovative school, six years running, five years running, I'm sorry, and have the opportunity to deliver some very substantial partnerships and think through what does that look like? How do we deliver some of these very specific things so that we can move the needle forward on this? We don't have this crisis that exists in perpetuity. We're not going to stop having wars anytime soon. So how do we make sure that when people come back we can take care of them and make sure we deliver outcomes so that they have healthy lives and are able to be thriving members of the community and be those students? But I'll leave it there and look forward to having a further conversation. Thank you. Thank you. All right, thanks for those great presentations. What I thought I'd do is just go ahead and open it up to the audience to see what kind of questions you have. Yeah, Dave, Dr. LuVan. No, I'd like. Is this on? I'd like to thank you for fabulous presentations. This is specifically to Michael Manning. I noticed that you were talked about moral drift and special forces for the achievement of mission. What we've been seeing with the seals in the last half year has been moral drift. It has nothing to do with mission. The scandals have been child porn. They've been rape. They've been drug abuse. And just the thing that, I mean, without saying anymore about it, Lafair Gallagher. Is there a way of connecting the dots between what you've been studying, which was it sounds like turning into an elite kill capture operation as the moral core and these other kinds of moral drift? Thank you for your question. I think there's absolutely, I think the two are undoubtedly interconnected. You know, I had the good fortune of having a conversation with a gentleman whose name's been brought up a couple of times today, Dr. Bill Nash, and who's devoted the great part of his adult life to looking at moral injury and PTSD and the like. And the bottom line is when an individual is exposed to these, to events or to incidents where they're, where their core beliefs are shocked to the core or where they're in an environment or where they're forced to perhaps make a choice that, again, as Dr. Wood mentioned, you know, it's in keeping with what the military will tell you this is a good kill, but it also, it runs contrary to a deeply held belief. And again, challenges your own personal ethic. It changes you as an individual. And so if you look at what special operations forces per capita deployments deployed more than any other organization within the arsenal of the US military. And so you put the same people over and over again in these morally ambiguous environments and it changes them and it permeates not just their conduct in combat, but also I believe in their personal lives as well. And I think that's what we're seeing here is we're seeing these wounds to the soul that have not been addressed and something that I spoke to. We haven't had an opportunity as a formation. This is, I think, really true of the whole military. Certainly with special operations, but there hasn't been an opportunity to take a knee and heal. And because of that, these injuries have just compounded upon themselves. And I think we're seeing this moral drift in every and all aspects of life. I don't know if that gets to your question. Yes. Have you looked at Frankel's man's search for meaning and Nietzsche's how, if you understand the why you can endure any how, that sense seems to tie together a number of the speakers including Mr. Woods' premise that the meaningful values we find on the battlefield don't get transmigrated into the civilian world when we come home. And we find then an inability to connect our emotional residue from the battlefield to the world we're now in because the culture does not understand or even care about what we did back then and we're kind of lost for our meaningful connection to our world. And I think that's a biological problem. I think every man, every human being needs to have meaning in life in order to live. I've read them a long time ago, but I haven't refreshed my memory on Frankel in that particular aspect of Nietzsche. I want to say this, that worrying, soldiering is a very special role. And the killing, I believe, I'm not a pacifist in certain circumstances, not necessarily the ones we're in and the wars we've been in, but in some circumstances is justified and I leave it to my just war ethicists to tell me exactly when and where and who and what. That said, even in the most justified conduct with an enlightened unit and an enlightened institution, there are a few of them, and an enlightened country, to go back to Ian, you still come home into a non-military world. And in that world, killing in war, fully justified if you're not a pacifist, is not murder, but in the mind of us mortals, maybe biologic, where we try to, philosophical concepts don't just go in and then we see the world through them. We teach as if that were the case, but that's not really it. It's very hard to square that circle. It's very hard to see the raw imprints of detritus, war detritus, killing in terms that look moral, in the most, when they are, my dad was a World War II veteran and I think much of what he did was pretty okay, but he came home shattered as a medic. So roles are, my role as a mom and as a spouse and as a professor don't always work together that well. Roles as a soldier and a civilian are very hard because partly of the way the brain, TBI is a very good case, the way the brain imprints stuff, it imprints in very visceral ways that aren't always cognitively accessible to us when we switch universes. Can I have something? Sure, quickly. Something Mr. Wood mentioned in telling the story about the World War II veteran that you spoke to and then you just spoke to this. I think one of the part of the experience for soldiers and sailors, Marines coming home from the war is that if you look at past generations, in particular World War II generation, there was this shared experience and we were rowing well and live. Everybody, you were either in the fight or you were supporting the war fighter and there's this sense, 18 years into this, 18, 19 years into this fight, we come back to a society that is increasingly more and more separated from us. And the Greeks were mentioned, you mentioned the Navajos, the Israelis. The Greeks had this through their Greek tragedies and what I've been reading is this, there was this, it was for healing, right? It was healing, bringing the young warriors back but also preparing the next generation of warriors to go out the door. We don't have anything of the like. There is no opportunity for us to bear our souls and to heal and for the country to say thank you, less than 1%, that wore the uniform. Thank you for your sacrifices. Thank you for your loss. Thank you for the sacrifices of your family. We appreciate you, we love you and it's okay. I just want to do one quick thing, Tony. On the tragedy sides, the Greek side, Sophocles was a general. He was writing for what, 4,000 or so who would fill in that amphitheater for returning service members in part and the society to which they returned. That's a big ritual, yeah. Oh, and you had a question. A lot different experience. I didn't see a lot of moral injury. I saw a lot of people who had no problem committing war crimes and it came from the top. So when I was in special force training as an officer I was in a group of about 15 captains getting ready to take attachment command. A major who had already served as attachment commander showed us the battle for Algiers and told us and taught us that we needed to use interrogational torture for kill capture missions. That's not rogue. That's not random people. That's coming from the top. When I made my stand, NCOs would come up to me and talk to me and say, you don't understand, Rome Settle wants to do that. What happened, I would grab that was wrong, was taking pictures. So when I tried to lead in special forces and when I led in special forces the challenge for me was getting people to do what they were supposed to do despite the massive momentum to commit war crimes. Did I misinterpret your narrative? Because it seemed like you had more of an idea of rogues going out and doing things and that causing problems. What I hope to I think positive share was that the organization, the culpability of the organization. So I think that the thread throughout the organization and that leaders at all levels is that there's this orientation towards mission success, right, mission first and that there are certain behaviors that otherwise have been abhorrent and that would have been the swift justice and punishment form but because they were effective they'd been rewarded. And that's become the habitus. So I think that, I think we're in, I'm sorry? Well effective meaning that as delineated or as ordained by the mission, by the particular mission set, in this case the kill capture. So I think in large part I think we're in the same space in that what we're seeing here and I think I stated this is that these aren't just aberrations. We're seeing systemic issues of misbehavior and it's ranging everything from war crimes as one of our colleagues mentioned Eddie Gallagher to incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment, et cetera. So it's across the spectrum. We've got big systemic problems and the organization it's not just we can't just look at the perpetrator, we need to look at the organization, how the organization is behaving, how the organization is replicating those standards and there's culpability and responsibility all the way up the chain. So if I can comment on that, I think it is so important to acknowledge that it happens at all these elite levels and it doesn't necessarily take the place of war crimes. I believe the operations that we executed from the air, we were supporting troops on the ground who were calling in the weapons and doing all that but when you get in these elite units and it becomes really the sounding chamber and it can be all different types of behavior and then really for some people it's coming home from the actual battle itself but a lot of it is after the fact whether it's transitioning out or retiring after 20 years when you finally leave and get a little bit of distance and so how do we continue that conversation on the inside and not infiltrate but get the support systems that you were talking about that you need when you come back and yeah, great point, sorry. You and then, you and then. Okay, stripes, stripes, no. Oh, did you have a question? Oh, okay. Oh, I thought I had a question. No, he had a question. I'm sorry, I don't know your name, but yeah. My experience 32 years of it is with special forces and all of the special ops units involved. I disagree with you considerably. What's happened with the SEALs I think is different than what has happened with special forces because of the recruitment of the mission orientation of the people who wear the trident and the different mission orientation of the special forces soldier who is responsible for indigenous relationships and the counterinsurgency type missions. The nature of those people is very different and what you, the nature of those people is very different in terms of the training that they get and the mission orientation that's required of them. This is, my son is currently in special forces so I'm aware of what the Q course is doing today. I'm aware of what Robin Sage looks like today and I'm aware of what it was in my time in the Vietnam time. And I know that a lot of the senior NCOs including the cadre believe what I just now said as being the truth. I also want to make another point and that is that if you restore, if you can maintain the sense of self-worth of the individual that comes back from the battlefield and enters into our culture and our society if he understands that the meaning that he gave to life then in what Mr. Wood has explained is still relevant to his world. He doesn't care about the institutional problems and about the institutional paradoxes and about the institutional dilemmas because he's connected in a real life way to what's happening now. The sense of self-worth overrides that institutional bullshit and somebody, I can't remember which speaker in the original panel said very early on, is the first speaker said very early on we recognize is pie in the sky and is not congruent, lacks the integrity that we as individuals can respect. So we do away with that. But in terms of self-worth, we can't do away with it. Thank you for your comments. If I, what I'd like to just share with you in response is that through my research and what I was able very, very through my association with the Joint Special Operations University and through the command, contributing to not, right now, General Clark, the current sitting SOCOM commander had initiated and ordered a comprehensive review of the SOF effort. It's been completed, was supposed to be published on the 18th of this month. It looks like it's gonna be at the new year. But previous to that, General Thomas, who was the previous Special Operations Command Commander, he had also conducted a review. And various surveys and kind of meet and greet, and if you will. And what I would share with you is that the opinion that you hold many, many senior non-commissioned officers and officers within the Special Forces community and Special Operations writ large would argue with your point. And what I'm speaking to is that there is this sense that there's been a shift in identity, okay? So if you will, as one Special Forces NCO, very, very senior Special Forces NCO has been doing this for two to three decades at this point. As he stated, is that you are correct in that Special Forces, the mission was with foreign internal defense, unconventional warfare. That was how and why they were created. But there's been this shift from the Renaissance man, if you will, to now the action hero. That was the actual phrase that was used. There's been a change in identity, which I think is directly related to the way that Special Operations to include Special Forces are being missioned today. So my name is Rasha Elas and I'm a former war correspondent. And I spent time in the Middle East, mainly in Syria, two years covering the war there as an undercover correspondent pretending to be an ordinary civilian because you can't be a reporter without being targeted. And I'm originally from there, so I could pass for a local person. So upon returning to the US, I mean, and among many of my reporter colleagues, we can identify with a lot of the sort of reentry challenges, even simple things like being in a shopping mall and feeling completely perplexed as to why am I in a shopping mall? Why are all these people in a shopping mall? Why are they buying things? Where are we? What is the meaning of life? All this sort of in a shopping mall. Existential questions in a shopping mall. So my comment to you actually is twofold. One, I feel the conversation about the whole narrative about war and moral injuries often very narrowly focused on the archetype of the male warrior coming home. And it doesn't include a lot of the other experiences, not to mention female warriors, of course, but also everybody else and not just war correspondents, but civilians. And people here, Americans who have families who live in the war zone and experience the war one step or moved. I mean, those are all, I think, part of the conversation that are not being included in the conversation. That's one point. The second point is some of you referenced ancient Greece and old world countries, European countries. And I mean, all over the world, really, there's traditionally been a culture that reintegrates the warrior back into society. And we don't have that here, but I think what's missing in that narrative is that, well, first of all, this is the new world. We are a superpower. We're never worried about Canada invading us overnight and taking territory. And actually part of the conversation that's missing is that anything we do, anything this superpower does in terms of war abroad, whether it is action like the invasion of Iraq or inaction, like not engaging with ISIS for two months, for example, which, by the way, we were there and we were all wondering why is the Obama administration not doing anything? Either way, has major ramifications on the world and on the American warriors there. So that also, I feel, is missing from the narrative. And that's my comment. Does Biden, Nancy, I think, or Drew, you guys probably have a... Maybe very, very quickly, I really welcome your comments and applaud what you did in Syria. Yes, the hyper-masculinist male soldier coming home or training, that is unfortunately a narrative, and I'm glad you're breaking it, and I've worked really hard to break it in the academies, certainly, are challenged to do something else and hopefully moving forward on that. The civilians and the local population and moral injury needs to cover that as well by all, and we need to do much better, those of us that write have to be able to tell those stories as well. And go back as well. And then there was one other point, your description of the mall and existential angst. Yeah, I think that captures it for many, coming on whether it's with... The underlying story is that TBI is there and it's not just those of you that kind of know that it's there. There are many who go undiagnosed for very, very long times, and I'm so glad that you're trying to do something about it. I want to hear more about thinking about being in areas where you're exposed, but also special forces also are in very contained areas where there's a lot of muffling of sound and that reverberates on brains in ways that are probably undocumented, but it's there in addition to aging and it comes way too soon when the brain is exposed to this kind of concussion. So to kind of finish one of those points off too, like re-inculcating warriors, I think it's going to be a challenge when the federal structure is designed in such a way that you have bright shiny lines in between agencies and those bright shiny lines are the castings for which people fall through, because it's really hard to do handoffs between them, right, between DOD and DOL or VA or things like that. And so I don't know that we're going to get to a place that we can do that really well. It's their institution-centric as opposed to person or veteran-centric. And this is something we've been swirling on for a long time when we were originally doing stuff for, actually the White House called me yesterday to ask a very specific question on a policy that I'd worked on before I left. And it was for employment and transition. And I'm like, you know, we've been working on it since 1947. We still can't figure this out. Like we're still like, companies want to hire veterans, dudes want jobs or like people want jobs. Like why can't we make this happen? I don't understand why this is so complicated. And it's because, you know, I have an appropriation as agency. That's how I view things. And like I need to box this other agency out. I'm just interested in this person. I just have numbers on spreadsheet. Like this is how I get more money for my appropriation. And so that's just a frustrating challenge of the structure. And then to go back and kind of kind of where we're going and feel free to sharpshoot this as necessary, but I'm of the ilk and believing and we're having these conversations that people, service members get bonked on the head or they have crazy experiences. Either way, a neural deficit's going to occur. And when they occur, we need to figure out how to treat that, right? So if you had a knee injury, you de-inflamed the knee and then you do PT and you get better. You start walking and you have a brain injury. You know, it's a sacred count and who knows what to do with this. And a special forces community is actually doing an exceptional job. Unfortunately, Pensacola where you just have this attack happen, but there's an exosuscillator that's out there. They have 100% efficacy in what they're doing and guys who get injured and they're getting them back to teams and they're taking a radically different approach. It's pretty simplistic and it's no sexy new drug or something like that. It's literally just epigenetics in the front of this. Where and how should they be? And then figuring out, you know, with your hormone structure, with your integrant system, where do we need to get you and then reinforce that through good behavior like sleep, exercise, nutrition. Like it's not complicated. You have 100% efficacy of getting guys back on the line because these are very expensive pieces of equipment, the software that you invest a lot of money in. Can't just demo it. You have to figure out what to do with it, right? And so we can't really publish there. So this is the conversation we've been having while I went to ASU of like, great, let's actually take this from kind of woo-woo science because the, you know, mainstream structure doesn't really take this as a treatment protocol. And so how do we do that? So we're gonna partner with Mayo. We're gonna partner with, you know, NFL and NCAA, they're already thinking this way, bringing in exos and special operations community and then NADDs as well and build a human performance living laboratory to actually prove this. Whether or not you sustain an injury, either emotional or physical, can we get you back to good? Are you just a regular person? Can we improve outcomes? And then that then leads to aging and leads to other things, right? Like how do we do a better job at focusing on these things? Because when you spend more time on the prevention side, all the dollars that our government go to in treatment, we don't have a good treatment. So why are we spending all the money on treatment? Come up with a new treatment and do that. And so that's the hard part. It's hard for people to think that way. It's hard for the government to think that way. Again, you go back to these very specific lines for how the structure is operating and I need to appropriate it to that. New and different is confusing. People don't like that. So hence why we have 20 years of the same outcome. I think we have one more time for one more question because we're reaching the limits of tolerance that academic time can provide. And so, sir, and you get the last one. It's limited relevance of our diagnostic criteria and our treatments to moral injury. PTSD is very different diagnosis than any other. It's defined with reference to an event. And there isn't a lot of emphasis on moral injury as the event. It's about personal threat or seeing people threatened with you, that you identify with. And the treatments focus on being able to talk about either for exposure or for cognitive processing or there's also some re-narrating of nightmares. And all of them involve the veterans having to talk about their experiences. And it's a real prohibition about talking about some of the things they've done. I've certainly witnessed really artificial discussions developed in a therapy session that we were researching reconstruction of nightmares. They wanted to re-narrate the nightmares. And nobody could talk about the events that were really bothering them. They were events involving moral injury. And instead, they had to talk about something else that they saw or experienced that was horrible but wasn't the same thing. And I think that there's, because the diagnostic criteria don't acknowledge moral industry, the veteran injury, the veteran isn't given permission to talk about that in treatment. The treatment gets very artificial. The treatments that we were studying, the implementation of supposed evidence-based treatments. Treatments are shown to work better than placebo, but they don't work very well. They cure no one. It's PTSD is a chronic condition. I think part of the problem is that it doesn't recognize how morally injured some of these vets are. Can I just say something really fast? I was recently in Amsterdam with a unit that called Centrum 45 that goes back to the resistance fighters in Amsterdam. And it's a tertiary-level mental health care where things don't work, things don't work, and finally you get there. And I was literally engaged in a very interesting, probably their versions of it here, actually at Walter Reed and I think in Florida. It's a version of prolonged exposure therapy and also EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, reconstruction, I think. But anyway, you get on, and part of it is this goes back to Bill's comments about attention, focusing, moving your attention away. Get on a treadmill, you're harnessed in, and you've talked to someone once or twice before about your experience. So these are people that have come, have been through lots of failed therapies. And you're in a room, sort of like this, with three walls, and you've talked about music that you can handle, that you like, and you've also talked about trigger events that really cause problems for you. And in a period of about 45 minutes, a therapist to your side on a treadmill, you are going, you're being exposed to that image or replica of it, with interspersed with calming music afterwards. And also, after that, a ball that has numbers on it and the numbers keep changing. So what's that about? That's partly about getting, first of all, getting the buried memory out, which you're seeing in a trigger event, and it being exposed to in a prolonged way, intermittently. And now that it's in your short-term memory, not having it occupy all the space, and so you have this ball, five, four, two, three, one, you know, I was doing this for 40 minutes. I was pretty tired. Also, I was on a treadmill, and I was going toward a trigger image that I told them was on my mind. It was very, you know, with a therapist talking to me right there, so I wasn't gonna go very far, very safe, trusting kind of environment. It's interesting, they're having a lot of success with this, but it is, there are therapies that have to be worked on and with lots of silo breaking to be able to share it. Thank you for your comments. I very much appreciate it. All right, I think that's what we've got. I'd like everyone to thank our panelists for the excellent job they did, and thank you guys for coming and for presentation. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanna say thanks everybody for your time for coming today. Thanks especially to New America, to Melissa, and David, and the comms team, and for all of you, and we'll stay in touch on this and have a good rest of the day. Thank you.