 Good evening, everyone. My name is Jay Simbita. I'm with the Yale Veterans Association here in Washington, DC. Thank you so much for taking the time to come out for tonight's presentation of bridging the civil military divide, the role of the media. First, and on behalf of the Yale Alumni Journalism Association too, many thanks to the New America Foundation. They are hosting us this evening, so thank you very much for providing the venue. Thanks to the local chapters of Washington, DC and the Greater Maryland for getting the word out so we get so many of you into the room this evening. But before we begin, and I will turn this over to Katherine Chaney, I just want to give you a little context to how this all came together and the reason why this timing is so good. Katherine Chaney, it was her idea back in the fall, believe it or not, to come together the Yale Veterans Association and the Yale Alumni Journalism Association on a topic that would make sense for both of us and be something that would be of interest to a broad audience. The timing worked out really well because, perhaps you've heard, the Yale Veterans Association is hosting its first-ever Yale Veterans Summit next week in New Haven, Connecticut, and this is open to everyone, by the way. So now you know about that and perhaps some of you will be able to attend. What you should also know is that this morning, both Katherine and Adrian, one of our other panelists, were in New York City, hosting a very similar event with Tom Dow from The New York Times talking about this exact topic. So the credit here really goes to Katherine and her energy in being able to bring this together. And with that, I'll go ahead and turn this over to Katherine. Thanks so much, Jay. And thanks to our panelists for their time here before we get started. Thank you guys. So really grateful to have all of you gathered in this room to discuss such an important topic, which is not only the civil-military divide, why it matters, what we can do about it, but specifically what the media can do. And we're joined by three of the people who are best positioned to talk about this because they in their careers have done a lot to bridge that divide. Just a quick note, I happen to be a journalist and a military spouse, so I'm very interested in this topic. And two things that have kind of struck me in the past few years in terms of the divide, and then I want to hear how you all have experienced it. So my husband happens to be stationed at Dover Air Force Base, which is home to the mortuary, as many of you may know. And I just feel that being within miles of the mortuary gives you one sense of the reality of military affairs and not being there gives you a completely different sense. It's very easy to disconnect. And the other thing is actually just last year, my husband deployed for six months, and when I spoke with people about this, it was he's deployed. And I knew the question they weren't asking was why would he be deployed? What's the conflict happening right now? So I'll do a brief introduction of you all, and then I want to hear from you about your stories and also how you've experienced the divide. So as I mentioned, these are the three best people we could have on stage talking about exactly what the media can do to bridge the civil military divide. We'll have a conversation and then we'll open it up. I'm really eager to hear your questions and ideas. So Tom Ricks, just next to me, is the senior advisor on national security for the international security program here at the New America Foundation. He also writes Best Defense, a foreign policy, and gave a plug for our event today. So thank you very much for that. And one of his recent books, hopefully several of you have read it, is The Generals, American Military Command from World War Two to Today. He, we actually, in the event Jay mentioned that we had earlier this morning with Jim Dow from The New York Times, Jim Dow basically launched and still leads the at war blog at The New York Times, and he credited Tom with really looking to the military as a beat, saying no one had properly done that before Tom Ricks. So we're very lucky to be with him today. Next to Tom is Kayla Williams. She is a former US Army Sergeant, a veteran herself, and she's the author of Love My Rifle More Than You, Young and Female in the US Army, which we'll talk about. And more recently, this came out a year ago, and just recently in paperback, plenty of time when we get home, Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War, which we'll also get into. And finally, Adrienne Bohnenberger, who was mentioned earlier. He's involved with Yale Veterans. He is a Yale and a veteran, a freelance journalist, a former US Army infantry officer, and a huge part of putting this event together. So thanks to all of you for being here. So just to get started, I only gave very brief introductions as to who you are and what role you have played personally in bridging this divide. Can you all expand a bit on your background? Why this divide matters to you and how you've worked to bridge it? Sure. I graduated from Yale in 1977. And I think I probably graduated from college without ever meeting anybody in the military. My first boss in journalism was an old Marine named Peter Braestrip. Some people may recognize the name because he was a Washington Post correspondent in the Vietnam War and wrote a terrific book on the military and media in Vietnam called Big Story about the Ten Offensive and how basically it was miscovered. And he put me through a year of journalism boot camp. I remember him calling into my office, his office in 1979, 80, he said, Rex, I'm paying you 8,500 bucks a year. You went to journalism school, you pay them 8,500. So I figured you're making 17. Also Yale graduate, by the way, Peter Braestrip and a combat veteran and wounded combat veteran of the Korean War. So it really struck me as a reporter that there really were two worlds in the United States, the world of the military and the civilian world, which is why I wound up writing that piece for the Atlantic, the growing divide between the military and the civilian world of America. So I served in the Army on active duty from 2000 to 2005, including a year long deployment to Iraq. I took part of the initial invasion in 2003 as part of the 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault, under General Petraeus. You may have heard of him. When I came back, I realized that most of my countrymen did not really know that women were in the military, certainly didn't know we were at war and had no sense of what we were doing at war. Some people asked me if I'd been allowed to carry a gun because I'm just a girl. And others asked if I'd been in the infantry, which is still not happening, although the formal DOD regulation banning women being in the combat arms jobs or units was lifted. I saw that in the media, the only representations of military women that I saw were Jessica Lynch and Lindy England, neither of whom were the people that I wanted representing me and the women that I had served with. And so I decided to write my first memoir to give a little bit of a richer exploration of what I had experienced in the current conflicts and what it was like for me to be a woman at war. And when I was talking to publishers in New York and then talking to journalists and on my book tour, I realized that there were some other real fundamental misconceptions about the modern military. And that a lot of people seem to really profoundly believe that if I can be very blunt, only stupid people and poor people end up in the military. They were surprised that I would have enlisted with a bachelor's degree when I had other options. And that is really profoundly at odds with the modern military, where you have to have a high school diploma to enlist. Currently, only 25% of young people ages 18 to 25 qualify to enlist in the military. The rest are disqualified due to either obesity, criminal records, or not having a high school diploma, not being able to score highly enough on the ASPAB, the test of aptitude. So college recruiters and military recruiters are really targeting the same population, but the general population still believes that it's the poorest people that are feeding into the military. And the military, because of the higher standards, has really lost its place as a big driver of social mobility, because unfortunately those in the lowest ranks are least likely to be able to access into the military. So I found myself really pushing back against that misconception and trying to help people understand who serves in the military today, that it is predominantly the middle class. And while I was in the military, I met and married the man who became my husband, Brian, who sustained a penetrating traumatic brain injury from a roadside bomb while we were in Iraq and subsequently developed post-traumatic stress disorder. And as I helped him navigate his recovery, I also started seeing this really weird, what I see as a really weird dichotomy in how many people cover or view service members and veterans. It's almost like while troops are in the military, they're heroes. They're on a pedestal, the military is the most trusted institution in America. We look up to them, we lionize them, we adore them. But as soon as we get out of the military, a lot of people think we're broken, that veterans are homeless, unemployed, suicidal, homicidal. I've seen some particularly egregious headlines like police getting training to deal with ticking time bomb veterans. Really atrocious. And that cued me into how much people fundamentally misunderstand the wounds of war and how treatable many of them really are, that the vast majority of folks with PTSD go on to live fulfilling lives and continue to be contributing members of society. So my second book is really an exploration of my family's journey to healing after that war trauma and digs into the potential for not just post-traumatic stress disorder, but the flip to that, which is post-traumatic growth. My name is Adrian Bonenberger. I guess the part of my background that is relevant to this panel would be that when I was in both deployments I did to Afghanistan as an infantry officer, the first with 173rd Airborne, 2007, 2008, and the second with the 10th Mountain Division, 2010, 2011, the 173rd, I was with the first battalion. Second battalion was covered by Sebastian Junger and Tim Heatherington, which, and the two of them did a documentary, Restrepo, Sebastian Junger did a piece in Vanity Fair that was fairly well received and wrote a book called War. And then my second, that was second battalion, not first battalion, I was in first battalion. And my second deployment, the New York Times, Jim Dow and Damon Winter, embedded with my battalion and followed my company around quite a bit. So I got to see, as a member of the military, sort of what the best of journalism was because both of those teams were really superior and very sensitive to military issues. When I left, I went to Columbia Journalism School. I graduated from there last year, studying investigative journalism. And I do, so I do, freelance journalism is the easiest way to say it, but it's probably not quite that exalted even. I wrote a war memoir, which is an epistolary form. It's a series of letters that I wrote back when I was in the military and before, which Tom was generous enough to review, although you called me a weenie. Because you were in the Elizabethan Club. Fair enough, fair, fair enough. And then, yeah, so I'm actually in an MFA program right now. I'm working on a satire, an absurdist satire set in Afghanistan. And, you know, I'm sure one of the things we'll talk about is how, you know, it's both the responsibility, you know, what responsibility is the media has to representing veterans and the military, but also probably the limits of that as well. And, you know, that journalism strives for journalism and memoirs strive for factual accuracy and fiction, I think, you know, opens it up a little bit and allows one to get at deeper truths. And that is a contentious statement, which I expect to draw fire. Let's jump right into that, actually. I mean, both the question of why it's important not only to have we were discussing this veterans in the headlines and military families in our news media. But veterans and military families sharing their own stories, either through nonfiction, you know, memoirs, for example, and through fiction. We were talking about Phil Clay's recent book. Do you guys want to jump in on that question? You were talking about it. Do you want to continue that? Well, sure. Yeah. So the thing that I saw that I felt was interesting and I've seen as well in reporting is and you were getting at it earlier with the lionization of the military and veterans. And is in your piece from from 97 Atlantic piece is that there are these there's a sort of narrative around the military, right? And you can say certain things and it's OK to say them. But if you don't say them, it's if you don't say them, you're you're insensitive. And if you say bad things about the military, then you're worse than insensitive. You've blown all of your credibility. You can say that in the context of fiction. There's space to say that in a tactful way, like I think Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. I don't know if anyone is right in here, but I want to say it was 2006 or 2007 National Book Award. He one of the things that happens in that is a part time CIA operative tries to frag a Green Beret outpost. But it makes sense within the context of the book. It brings up interesting issues. You could never say something like it would be plausible to frag a grid. That's a horrible thing to say in the context of journalism. But in fiction, you get to consider it. And this I know I'm drawing a lot of threads together here. But so with I think the place where this really comes in hard is with nonprofits is that there are a lot of places around the military that function near or around the military, where people do not do effective reporting because they're afraid of saying things that will get them in trouble. I just want to point out the Vietnam War was a very different war. I once came across, this is a true story, an NCO in Vietnam who fragged his company commander. He was court-martialed, did time, but it was only like they only sentenced like six months. He stayed in the military and did a full 20 years. Partly because the court-martialed competing authority found that the fragging was more or less justified. Wow. That is a different. It was justified at the top of the homicide on a really abusive, mean company commander. That's extraordinary. Yeah, so to me where this can be really important, fiction especially, but also good journalism, you mentioned Phil Klye, I'll steal the phrase from him, it's a failure of imagination. So I've had a lot of civilians say to me, I just can't imagine being in the military or I just can't imagine going to war and on the flip side of that, I probably have been guilty of saying earlier and when I was more recently back and I've heard so many of my fellow veterans say, you can't imagine what it's like. You can't know if you weren't there. And that is a huge failing on both sides. So by going to the movies or to see phenomenal art or reading terrific journalism or looking at amazing photographs, we can imagine fighting blue aliens at war. We can imagine sentient robots that we form emotional connections with like Wally. We can imagine being slaves hundreds of years ago. We can imagine what it's like to live in rubble in the aftermath of an earthquake or a tsunami. And that imagination can allow us to empathize and connect with people that we might never meet and open our wallets, open our hearts to feel that human connection that shared experience or even non-human connection. But to feel that emotional connection to another being and to say that we can't do that to service members who grew up in the same country and are fighting a war that our government sent them to is kind of shocking. And then for... Can I interrupt? Please. I'm always worried about interrupting women these days. As long as I can interrupt you back. Sure. I emotionally disagree with that. I can't... And this really came home to me. My wife and I were watching a strep row together. And I'm sort of like, yeah, I got it. You know, been there, done that, typical. And at the end of the film she says, that was amazing. That's what soldiers... These soldiers did this? And I said, honey, this is whatever he's soldier does. What do you think I've been doing for the last 15 years? When I walked out the door with my helmet and flat jacket. And she was like, oh, that's really interesting. You know, you've been living with this for 15 years. But maybe in denial or maybe didn't want to accept it. I know when I was deployed, my parents had totally different reactions. And my mom was like, la, la, la, la, you must be in a totally safe environment. They wouldn't let anything happen to you. So maybe your wife was there. I could be. But good. But the film gave her that window. Allowed her to feel that and sense what they were going through and connect. And when we as veterans say, you can't know what it was like, we close that off. If we can tell our stories well in a compelling way through art, through writing, through journalism, through photographs, through whatever, we can start to bridge that. People talk a lot about the civil military divide. And I think when I hear vets talk about it, they're usually blaming civilians for not trying to get in. But I think we're just as much to blame for not inviting people in and for not being willing to open up and share our experiences. And it's interesting you bring that up. I think another thing that may be misunderstood about the civil military divide is people often think of that as civilians not understanding our military. But it really goes both ways. And so I want to get into that a little bit. Yeah, exactly. So we brought up a couple of times this 1997 piece by Tom Rex. And some of you may have read this in the New America Foundation Event Description. But just to give a little bit of background really quickly and then we can dive in. In 97, Tom wrote a piece called The Widening Gap Between Military and Society. This is for the Atlantic. And you talked about an experience following a platoon of Marine recruits and kind of coming back from that experience, they felt so disconnected from the society from which they came. And we can talk about why. Flash forward nearly 20 years earlier this year. James Fallows wrote a separate piece for the Atlantic on a similar topic on the civil military divide. And this was called The Tragedy of the American Military. And just a quick quote from that piece. This is where he calls, you may have read this, he calls America the chicken hawk nation. And he says, the American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chicken hawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combined to lure America into endless wars it can't win. And he goes into, when we talk about why does this divide matter? One example would be, in his opinion, the F-35, for example. That's one reason why it matters. So big question with a bit of background for those who might not have read those pieces. I guess Tom, to start with you. Can you talk about, think back to when you wrote that piece in 1997. Flash forward to today, nearly 20 years. How has the divide improved? How has it worsened? And what are the stakes? I think the divide has gotten much wider. And we've seen the evidence, the sort of this feeling of the discrepancy between the experience of the veteran and the thoughts of the rest of American society. We have now, as Fallos pointed out, created the society that has wars being waged in its name, yet doesn't seem to be aware that they're going on. For me, the bottom line in journalism was always do your goddamn duty as a reporter. Your duty as a reporter is to get the facts, get the story, be fair and seek comment. But if you do your job, that's all you really need to do. And I have the same feeling about the military. Do your goddamn duty and things will work out. Follow the rules. Do what you need to do. And by the way, I would remind general sometimes, you're took a note to support the Constitution. That includes the First Amendment last time I looked. So I'm not on your battlefield. I'm not in your battle space. I'm covering our military. And you know, you'd box your ears a little bit and think you used to it. But the reminder that really struck me was don't expect anybody to thank you for this. Oddly, I once went into David Halberstam about a year before he died. And Halberstam famously, John F. Kennedy tried to get Halberstam fired from the New York Times for Halberstam's early stories about the Vietnam War. And you know, seriously, Kennedy basically called up the New York Times and said, this Halberstam's a family ask. Get rid of him. And the Times said, you know, thank you very much for your interest in journalism. And I saw Halberstam and I was saying, look at you, like, Romsfeld has mocked me at press conferences by name. Let's have a round of applause for Tom Ricks. And all his jerk aides would clap. It was, you know, and I said, this is pretty rough, Halberstam. And he looked at me and he said, suck it up. They're not going to thank you. Don't expect them to thank you. Just do your goddamn job. And so that became my bottom line. Everybody do their goddamn job in a workout. I mentioned this in the context of the civil military relationship, because I think that basically the media is more or less doing its job. And veterans are doing what they should be doing. The people who are not doing their goddamn jobs in the society is the U.S. Congress. They provide almost no serious oversight of the military. When they do, it's only arguing about money and contracts. It has not been a significant congressional post for about 30 years. The person who mentioned this to me back in 91 was a very interesting figure in Washington. He knew a lot about the Congress, a lot about the executive, the White House and the Pentagon. And he said, look, he said, you just got to face it. The armed services committees are tertiary. No one wants to be on them. This person who told me this was Dick Cheney. Cheney actually told me he tried to kill the V-22. He said, partly because you're going to give Congress something to fight about. And he said, if I didn't pick the V-22, they'd pick something else. And I figured the V-22 was a good thing to argue about. He said, focus their attention or else they'll bite you on the ankles. And so basically, I don't think Congress really, we have a Congress that is no longer engaged in national security in any serious way. Isn't that how, I mean, that's probably how the military is failing in terms of journalism. The Marines are pretty good about running PR, but I know firsthand the Army is horrible at it. And I mean, a journalist's radar goes off when they are not allowed access to something. They assume that something horrible is going on. And when the Army says, like, no, you can't cover this war, you can't cover this battlefield, then naturally the journalists assume that. And usually there isn't anything horrible going on. There's boring patrols and waiting around on OP. It's just that you have run into, the Army has an extraordinarily whisk-a-verse culture these days. They would rather not fail than succeed, literally. This is the story of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so I came to learn that being in the media is just 1% of the larger problem of a whisk-a-verse Army. I'd always please me when I see, like, Army officers not be able to get on flights and stuff, because I think, oh, it's not just me that can stick around like this. They do this to everybody. This is just basically the post office with weapons. So the question for you, you mentioned that you think the media is doing its job when it comes to covering the military. But I think there are two parts to this. One is coverage, and maybe Kayla disagrees, so I need to get back to you on that. Why don't you let her do it now? Yeah, go for it. She's going to pull it off. I'll ask my question. I'll ask my follow-up. Do you agree? I think that there are some journalists who do a terrific job who really dig in and do in-depth, rich reporting. But I don't think that that's the norm by any stretch of the imagination. I would say that's particularly problematic on cable news, where I was once asked to be on a segment. They said, we're going to do an in-depth look at torture. We're going to spend five minutes on it. They're like, I don't think that in-depth means the same thing that you do. So that's not serious journalism. And even a lot of the short-form pieces that I see done by people who maybe aren't on the military beat, who don't have a deep understanding of these issues, they chase stories that seem titillating or interesting, and they pick just the top numbers, but don't dig into what it really means. And maybe focus on the narrative that people expect it to be. So they'll look at sexual assault in the military as these poor military women are such victims that they make it a women's problem, and they don't compare effectively to what it looks like in the civilian, incomparable civilian populations. And so you end up getting these pieces that you feel like you learned something because there were numbers in them, but you didn't actually learn anything about whether women are more at risk in the military than in civilian settings. You don't really learn the fact that more men are sexually assaulted every year in the military than women because women are such a minority in the population. So there are all of these things where there's lazy, shoddy journalism where they don't explain the figures that they're putting out there. They don't explain the context. They don't compare to other eras in time or to other contexts or to other militaries. They just put these shallow pieces up, and that makes me really crazy. It's obviously not always the case, but that's the type of news that I think most people see, and it's really frustrating. I just want to say I agree with all of that, but the job of Campbell News is to be shallow. But I can still tilt at that windmill. Oh, yeah. I totally agree with what you said. I think what's also tricky is, you know, with new media and the rise of online journalism, there's so much out there, and there's a lot of great stuff out there. But the question is not just, is that powerful storytelling about the military happening, but are people reading and watching? And are they reading and watching the right things? So, I mean, any thoughts on that? Just sort of, yes, the media has a responsibility, but also the public has a responsibility to seek out that content and to be that audience and to pay attention to these stories that are worth telling and absorbing, and if we want to understand our military. I mean, I'd love to see what the metrics are for the Daily Mail and BuzzFeed and HuffPo, and when an article about the military that doesn't involve some American sniper-type action or the Medal of Honor or an F-35, F-22 fiasco, what's the click-through rate? It's probably not very good, because beyond those very facile superficial narratives, there isn't a lot of interest, unless you happen to have a brother or a sister or a father or mother or husband or wife in the military, in which case it becomes personal and interesting to you, almost annoyingly. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know what the, I don't actually know what the comparative numbers are for that, but that would be a good way to find out if people, how people are engaging with the question of the military. I kind of sympathize with that though. I mean, at some point you do get tired. I've given myself a pass on the war in Yemen. Not going to read about it, call me when it's over, but just something I'm not going to invest in. And it's hard to work hard on something where you put a lot of thought into it, you do a lot of research and pour your heart into it and you get no click. And then you do some puff piece on responding to something stupid, like, oh, there's this glamour article by a woman who is in the Air Force and people are all up in arms about it, so I'll throw off a really hasty response and everybody reads it. I'm like, why do you care about this? It's stupid. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious to hear, I think there are definitely upsides and downsides when it comes to the media being able to play this role in bridging the divide and the plethora of content out there on the military. So we've talked a little bit about the downsides, right? Scattered audience, it's hard to draw people to content that really matters. What are some of the upsides? What are some new solutions out there in terms of storytelling and the military that you're excited about, whether it relates to technology or not, but in the nonprofit space you were talking about earlier? Well, so I think the best example of, and I think the media does a pretty good job, overall, being that it's a business. But projects like A Year at War, the one that focused on 187 First Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, and to a certain extent, Alpha Company. This is the New York Times piece. That was the New York Times piece. I mean, I've talked to Jim about it and it sounds like it happened almost accidentally. They got dedicated some resources and he and Catron Einhorn, the producer in Damon Winter, just kind of ran with it as far as they could. And there were a couple, they got on some patrols that were, traditional conflict reporting, explosions, gunfights, mines, a set and the other. But those weren't the really effective, interesting pieces, I think overall, in terms of the project. The project, and they're still, they're actually still running with it. I think Jim mentioned this morning that one of the guys, there was a Sergeant First class, he was a scout platoon sergeant, and he got shot up by the Taliban trying to rescue an Afghan soldier, an Afghan policeman. Was put in for the Silver Star, which not surprisingly was downgraded to a Bronze Star with valor, because why would you ever just accept a Silver Star for risking your life for an Afghan? But so they're still looking at that story. It really is the human interest component. It's, he's a single dad with two kids. It's the sergeant who deployed and it kind of looked like his marriage was on the rocks and when he redeployed, his wife left him. It's those stories, I think actually those got like the most traction in a year at war. So it's media, I mean those puff pieces, the American Sniper type, purile interest stories, not to suggest that that's the impulse to see like, oh, somebody killed 160 people, which is of course extraordinary. Those are the ones that fund the deeper stories that affect everybody, the American population rather than just you know, what does Hercules look like in human form? What does Thor look like in human form? What about you guys? Any things you've watched recently or that are on the horizon that give you hope for the role the media can play? I think that, and this is not new, I think that photojournalism can be a really powerful way to connect people. Some of the images that we've seen from the current complex, I think have just as they did in previous eras have allowed people to really get a deeper connection to the people involved. One thing I'd add is, you don't need to be a vet to cover the military, but there are vets who cover the military beautifully. My lead example would be CJ Chivers of The New York Times. Carl Prine of The New York Times? I like Carl Prine. But CJ Chivers, he was covering up, he's a former Marine officer, infantry officer, was on a patrol in Afghanistan. I just had a beautiful moment of story, just really stunned me sitting at the breakfast table. He said we're on a patrol, there's an explosion. We can't find the soldier in the patrol who was hit. We're looking and looking. There's not even like cloth on the ground that we look up. He's in the top of a tree. Whoa, when that just brought home, that whole moment just captured a sense of a day in the war for me. So I want to open it up to audience questions and I know that the panelists are eager to hear from you as well. But before we do that, I'm just curious to get a sense from the audience and I know given that you're drawn to this topic of conversation, it's going to be a different mix, but the most recent figure I read is that one in three millennials know someone who is in the military, right? Have any kind of direct connection with the military and that that's part of the problem and part of the reason for the divide. So can you raise your hand in this room before we open it up to questions? If either you have served or are serving or have a family member who has served know someone who has served at the very least. I'm guessing it's a large portion of people in this room. Is there anything up hand? Will you hold up your right hand if you served in Afghanistan? Would you hold up your left? Must be a Marine. Keep that hand up. Right hand if you served in Afghanistan. Left hand if you served in Iraq. And then put them down now, please. And just stick up a hand if you served in another war. So I would say the majority of people here are veterans of wars. It looks like close to me. That's amazing. Well I'm eager to get you involved in the conversation. In fact, for the panelists or for any of you chiming in, I would love to hear thoughts in addition to your questions on something I've read a lot about in the media lately which is don't just say thank you for your service but ask me about my service and ask me what's next. I think to me that is a message that the media has done a better job of conveying lately. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts as a side note. So let's go ahead and open up to questions. Jay's going to help me out and thank you. Go ahead. This is primarily directed to Tom. You alluded earlier to the mid-nineties in your book that you wrote about making a Marine which I thought was a great book. Toward the end of it, you flirted with the ultimate issue that's caused by or could be caused by the military civilian divide when you intimated that you thought that there was a possibility that the Marine officers that you got to know could be the founders of a military coup against the United States government. I departed from you in my approval of the book at that point having been a Marine for a long time and knowing on a first name basis the leaders of the Marine Corps then and the leaders of the Marine Corps now. I think there's virtually no chance. I've never even heard a disgust or even joked about and I'm wondering whether 20 years later you still think that's a possibility or a concern. Really quickly. I meant to ask everyone and I'm sorry I didn't ask. Can you state your name and you mentioned your connection with the Marines, your connection with this topic? Yeah, I'm Tom Esslinger. I, after I left Yale, I joined the Marine Corps in 1966. I was a Marine Infantry Officer in Vietnam, Company Commander, two different companies. And then after I retired, I got out of the Marine Corps, I became a lawyer. After I retired eight years ago, I became the Chief Operating Officer of the Marine Corps Association which is the professional association for the Marine Corps. So over the last six years, I've been very much involved with Marines at all levels. We should ask, how many people here went to Yale? This is probably the most unique audience in America. I agree. We were talking earlier when you crossed the campus, I can't remember the name, but through the battle monument, you know. And I was asking, because I haven't been through the campus the last few years, whether there are any names up from our recent wars. Because I used to run through there. I was in Timothy Dwight and I was an English major, so all my classes were at Linsley Chit. So I was constantly cutting across the campus. And I always noticed the battle monument and sort of, you know, all the names from World War II, World War I, Korea, Peters out in Vietnam. But as best we know, there are no names up from Gulf War I, Gulf Iraq War, Somalia, Afghanistan. Okay. On the, I think in the book, honestly, I haven't read Make in the Core for 15 years. I read it when they did a 10th anniversary edition or something. But I think what I was citing was a paper written at the Marine Command College on a military coup or something. Some officer was advocating abrogation of civilian authority or something. I've never thought that a coup really was the ultimate or the biggest problem in civil material relations. The biggest problem in civil material relations is a failure for civilians and military leaders to listen to each other seriously and to formulate strategy and to formulate a way to fight wars. So for example, you get Tommy Franks believing it is not his job as a commander to think about what happens after he takes Baghdad. You get a command structure when you persisted in having an Iraq for over 10 years, which nobody's in charge. You have a civilian chain of command and a military chain of command and more often than not, they fought with each other and stymied each other's initiatives. So you had Bremer rightly or wrongly trying to carry out a social revolution in which the Bathurst were banned in which the free market was imposed and they were going to have flat taxes. This was going to be basically Texas goes to Baghdad. And you had the military believing without any authority to do so that their job was stability. They'd always say our mission stabilization. And I'd say, that's interesting because I've read your mission statement that's not in it. And they said, that's what it means. I said, Baghdad's, Bremer's doing Baghdad year zero. He's carrying out a revolution. Well, that's not what we do. So in real effect, what you saw was, for example, the CPA under Bremer assuring bankers that they would be operating normally and American commanders of the battalion brigade level going into banks and saying, give me bricks of cash. I'm going to pay all these people to pick up garbage. Totally at odds with each other. So that's what is the that's the consequence of war, civil military relations. You get presidents who are not hearing the truth from generals and don't want to and you have generals who don't know how to tell the truth. You had this in the Vietnam War when that, when President Johnson on good accounts swore foully at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and kicked them out of his office and not one resigned after being so treated. George Marshall, if you would call them a shithead, would have said, sir, which was what? LBJ said, some of them is more mild terms. He would have said, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. President, clearly I've lost your confidence. I will clean out my office today. But Marshall was picked for his ability to speak truth to power. FDR was a world class bullshitter and he knew he needed somebody to throw the flag on him. He was a good enough politician to know you need somebody who's going to tell you the truth. Johnson was not good enough and didn't get it. He wanted consensus. Likewise, President Bush wanted consensus from the Joint Chiefs. Consensus is the opposite of strategy. A friend of mine once said, if you're not crying, you're not making strategy. Strategy should be painful because you're surfacing assumptions, you're fighting over what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. It should be hard. George Bush, a rather naive and ignorant man, sought rather to just make sure everybody agreed, which is not what you want. I got to see, I'm sure there are other people in the room that were in the military during, I was commissioned by proxy by President George Bush because every officer is commissioned by the President. And so I joined in 2005 and I left in 2012 and I got to see the military reacted to leaders and I can say I heard extraordinary seditious things under President Obama that I never heard under President Bush from officers and enlisted alike in the Marine Corps and the Army. On the other hand, also I was in camp victory on the day of the presidential election when Obama won. And what I saw was a general shrug from, I saw smiles on black soldiers and a shrug from white soldiers. When Bush was re-elected, I was at Fort Campbell and I understand women are really small minority so it's probably hard to get these stats but some of the coverage of opinion polls would break out men in the military. Like how were they going to vote? Nobody ever broke out women in the military. But when he was re-elected and I was in the locker room after doing PT in the morning, all the women were like, eh, guess we're going back to war. Like that was as the universal response. Guess I'm leaving my kids, guess we're going back to war. I thought it was interesting. I wondered if women had had a different opinion than men at that time. Really interesting. And you don't read about that. Other questions? Yeah, go ahead. And yeah, just a reminder to state your name and your connection or interest in the topic. Yes, my name is Bob Cottrell. I've been, I had been a long-term reservist and it was recalled to active duty during Desert Storm where I served at DIA, the Anacostia Theater of Operations, if you will. Well, they also serve. Had a question for Tom. You were, you raised some very good criticisms of the army and army leadership. And yet I wonder if that's the real problem. I think the problem actually starts with the political leadership who demands a certain leadership from the armed forces and in fact gets it. And to some extent it is just that there's been a lack of clear thinking in my opinion as to chain of command, unity of command and how to conduct at the headquarters level a military operation. If you take Iraq and the question of who was in charge the army or the state department and you had similar conflicts in Vietnam in some ways it seems to be absurd. Let me sort of raise a kind of test for anybody in the audience. We all know that in the spring of 1944 Dwight David Eisenhower was in charge of U.S. armed forces in England, in the United Kingdom preparing for the D-Day invasion. Does anybody know the name of the U.S. ambassador to Britain at the time? No. You know. Why not? You do, okay. Yeah, I just finished writing a book about World War II. Okay. Very good. You may be the only person. And the predecessor was a jerk named Joseph Kennedy. No, he was before the U.S. entry into the war. That was in the 30s. But the point is that we recognize this is a war and the prime actor in this will be the commanding general. The ambassador may have tea with the king and queen and that's fine but the prime decision maker is going to be the commander-in-chief. Once the war is over things would obviously revert to civilian control with the State Department running affairs with Britain. We have I think since then we've lacked that kind of clarity that this is a military operation. The person who makes the decision is the senior military commander. And to the extent that civilian agencies have a role at all it is clearly subordinate. But again this has to be decided by the president that that's the way it's going to be conducted. Let me address some of these. Okay. Yes. Political leaders do pick the leaders of the military. And I think of this as the Colin Powell problem. I was covering the Pentagon when Colin Powell was chairman of the joint chiefs and he scared the political leadership of this country. And that's not a political statement but left and right were scared. I remember when Les Aspen was Secretary of Defense six percent of Americans recognized the name Les Aspen 66 percent recognized the name Colin Powell. There was a determination unspoken but heartfelt among political leaders that we're not going to pick somebody else to be chairman of the joint chiefs who could overshadow us. And for several years under Bill Clinton and under George Bush they picked men they knew would be pliable that they could push around who would not become political. I mean who they who they picked up the successor to Powell was Shalik Asfili his dad was a Nazi. This is not somebody who's going to have a great political platform. And again and again Richard Myers is probably the weakest chairman we've had since the Vietnam War. They knew what they were getting when they got that. They knew what they wanted. So it is partly a political problem. The Obama administration has really done poorly in this as well. They have politicized decision making in the White House on national security much more than any other administration I've seen. They traditionally when you got down in the situation room to discuss deployments wars the campaign manager types were not in the room. Obama has had the Valerie Jarrett's and Abled Axelrod's in the room with him at those points. And that's a departure from American tradition and I'm a traditionalist on this. Partly because Obama neither likes the military nor knows much about it and doesn't have anybody around him who does. And I think that's a hit on him. He's kind of tone deaf on military affairs. He really doesn't know how to talk about it. You can see it's not his vibe. Do you think that the president frankly plays an important role in bridging that divide or or could someone in that role? Franklin Roosevelt was a cripple who had never been in the military. It had been the secretary of the navy but he had an ear for it. He knew we needed to understand this stuff. Although Marshall throughout World War II complained Roosevelt would refer to the Navy as us and the army as them. But this is but in a way I think Marshall like that this was a guy whose identity was with the military of some form and Obama has never conveyed that for one second of his presidency that my heart and soul go with you. I think he's tried to outsource that to his wife. She cares more about the vegetables. But I think Michelle Obama and Dr. Joe Biden with their Joining Forces initiative they've tried really hard I think to reach out to the military family community. Yeah I agree it's an important issue. On this government issue though it does worry me when you say the military is in charge. The military is not actually civilians are in charge of wars in this country. And it's not like call us when it's over. I could easily see having a war run in which a civilian in country is in charge. Honestly I don't care whether it's or a general or a pro console. But somebody should have been charged in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am the go to person and this is where you know the ultimate decision presides. When you what you call lack of clear thinking I agree with but I'd call it lack of seriousness. I remember a general McChrystal saying when he was out in the field talking to soldiers in Iraq when he said like to platoon or company commander if you were here war or less until the war is over for the duration would you operate differently. And then all their eyes get big and they oh yeah he said clearly they'd all thought about it. If I were here for like several years we'd be doing X Y and Z. At this point was nobody thinking this war seriously. Everybody's rotating in and out. Nobody owns this thing. I have a question for you speaking of general McChrystal. So you know the topic we're looking at and I do want to hear some more questions on this from the audience is specifically the role of the media in bridging the divide. But I think there are other things that can bridge the divide. And one thing that's often talked about and that general McChrystal pushes through the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute is national service. National service in some form not necessarily military service is something that could bring this country back together. What are some other things you would point to whether it's national service things beyond the media maybe that you want to just include in this conversation in terms of how we can bridge this divide. Why do I think I have them first though. Yeah please. Why don't you take this one. Well I guess the first thing that I think about that is you know the lack of seriousness is it's that's probably the fundamental problem when it comes to the divide right. And is it fair to expect civilians who tend not to be and I'm going to sound like you know sort of an embittered veteran here but tend not to take war very seriously to suddenly take it more seriously when that's not something they seem ever to have done and in fact that the point of the military is to protect civilians from having to take the military seriously right. I mean the more that civilians are taking the military seriously probably the more skin is in the game and when that reaches 100 percent that means you're probably in some sort of existential struggle which you hope to avoid. So the military has done its job if the civilians the civilian population is fairly insulated from the horror of war that they should never have to encounter the trauma that they should never have to encounter. At the same time you know the word citizen should probably carry more weight to people. And this is something that I'm sure everybody complains about republican democrat because everybody wants their issue to be taken more seriously. But that would that would be a really I think it's an easy route to that but it's probably a pretty good one national service because you're you're putting skin in the game. So everyone remembers that you know 18 to 24 months that you I think was the the German model was what we were talking about like the you can serve 18 months in the military or 24 months in some sort of AmeriCorps or teach for America. What you're talking about is a service a year you know a year long commitment at least yeah but you think that gets us there part of the way there at least. I would hope that that wouldn't be necessary for a citizen of the dang American you know United States of America but it probably is necessary. When I came back from Iraq I was fairly opposed to the concept of a draft and I'm still not sure that I would having served with a lot of people that it was hard enough to be there with them when they voluntarily enlisted. I wasn't I wasn't really convinced that I would have wanted to go to war with people who were dragged kicking and screaming but and I'm not sure that I've changed my mind on that but I'm getting more and more to the point where I think that that some form of national service may be beneficial because of that that sense of disconnect that people are not are not connected to the country and and that is an odd I don't I don't know I'm I'm starting to starting to come around to that thought at this point. How many people in this room think this country would be better off if we had a draft? Do you mean military draft or just national service draft? That's who's starting it's worth that. I would raise my hand. Right. Country be better off and with the military true arts food yeah and a draft versus other forms of service. Well I actually I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about two years ago in which I I laid out a national service plan. I said you could have a shorter term for military service and you could actually make overseas service as part of that voluntary which some European countries do. You could just come into the military and take out the garbage replace some contractors drive around generals for a year. And I think that would be great. And then number two would be alternative form of service. No I'm I'm a CEO and I profoundly believe you're all evil. Fine. Do a slightly longer form of alternative service. Bring meals to elderly shut-ins stuff like that. And then I have a third libertarian option which is hey you don't believe that you should be subjected to any form of conscription. Not a problem. Just never ask Uncle Sam for a dime again. No federal home loan guarantees. No tuition subsidies. No nothing from Uncle Sam. You can drive on the roads. You can call the police and call the fire department. But basically don't ever ask the feds for anything. If you change your mind when you're 50 fine great. Coming in to drive a general around for a year. Still though I do like the idea of some sort of draft because I think it's fundamentally the only way to plug Congress back into national security. I haven't advocated national service for a long time. That's probably only a few years from after 30. You know I'd love to see somebody like Congressman John Lewis as one of my heroes get behind this idea. John Lewis performed a great national service when he had the shit beaten out of him by the cops at Selma. He basically redeemed the soul of this country. And showed despite the Vietnam War that this country could repair itself on real race relations somewhat. I think I think we're still at the beginning of repairing our self and race relations. It's just beginning it's not over at all. I'd love to see John Lewis or somebody like that embrace that. And I think if he did you might get the civilian equivalent of Goldwater Nichols or two people from different sides of Congress coming together. So if we implemented your proposed plan of having a shorter term of national service required for military service but national service being required I wonder if that would be a way to finally move the needle on the percentage of women in the military because it's been stuck at 15 percent for decades. I think it would and what you do is you'd also say you do military national service you get totally free tuition and room and board at any college of your choice. So it's basically my father got with the G.I. Bill coming out of World War II. And that's the reason he wound up not a cowboy in Wyoming which is what his father was and instead a professor at Harvard. His father my grandfather was famous in Jackson Hall for reading Milton while he's rounding up cattle. But he also carried a 30-odd 30 across his saddle over the Milton and shot elk when he saw them to feed the family. I'd love to open it up to another question. Jay, you have your eye on someone. Hi, my name is Amanda Hills. I was an Army Public Affairs Specialist in the Reserve for the last six years. I just got out last month. And I was in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012 in Regional Command South with the 82nd Airborne Division under General Huggins. And so one of the things I noticed was that the support MOSs or jobs for the other services aren't really paid attention to by the media and by the military as well. But consistently support services and support jobs are placed in positions that are dangerous. Even I, working at a headquarters command was in a situation that earned me a combat action badge and I was actually with a member of a major cable media outlet was in my vehicle when it happened. And um Do you remember that? Sorry? Did the reporter cover? No, he acted like it wasn't a big deal. And um he actually never asked my name. He never looked to me in the eye. He kind of just treated me like I was like the person driving him around. So um I'm kind of wondering if that is a so when I came home I was really sort of yearning for these stories that kind of talked about what I was feeling. Like I had this frankly really fantastic transformative year and because it wasn't necessarily very sexy no one really wanted to talk about it. So I had to read you know really intense infantry stories I had to watch Restrepo to kind of see that camaraderie again and see that storytelling. So I don't know if that is a issue on the part of the military where they want to be seen as heroic and they want to be seen as like very strong and untouchable or is it a problem on the side of the media that because the support MOS's aren't sexy enough they don't want to like talk about us. What year were you sorry? What year were you enough after? 2011 2012. So you mean we used to joke about this in Baghdad in 0304 you could start an ID story easily. Fly right onto the front page and we used a joke that everybody every reporter in Baghdad did I got hit by an eye I was near an IED then the next round of story I got hit by an IED my convoy and then the next round was like my dog got hit by an IED by 06 you couldn't sell an IED story. I mean they you know it was like do you have anything else going on? Come on we've had like 2000 of these things and as war goes on it gets harder and harder to sell interesting stories. You always remember the stories you don't do I remember I was up in Baiji in Iraq once and for some reason I went over to the post office guys the combat post office guys and they were the most rattled people I'd seen they were driving from Baghdad through to Crete to Baiji like twice a week and they were just getting bombed every time and I wanted to do a story about the combat postman sort of like the combat mailman is the most you know vulnerable and like it just couldn't compute with my editors and I sort of like no this is this is much worse than infantry. Infantry feels trained and protected and controlled these guys feel like nobody trained us for this stuff and we're out here getting hit constantly and you always notice they were actually when you if you go through the the army's annual very good military health assessment studies it was the support units that had higher rates of PTSD for precisely that reason it especially transport transport PTSD rates were off the charts because of that we're not and everybody knows this is studies combat trauma and PTSD and that's one of the key elements do you feel well led are you in a cohesive unit and do you feel trained and equipped for your job or the four basic characteristics and transport and those MS's don't when they went outside the wire that was very hairy but basically tell me the war movie about that that was the feeling I had talked to editors they just didn't get it so and on that note too I think that in the memoir market from what I've seen I'm sorry but by and large the memoirs by men from these conflicts have been white guys in the army in the Marine Corps in the infantry it's and it's their becoming men stories that's what it is it's how I how I went to war became a man and that narrative is not there for women you don't join the army to become a woman and so if you look at the at the see everybody laughs interesting but so if you look at the memoirs by women in the military from every branch of service officer Ian enlisted a bunch of different jobs pilots translators military police and much more ethnic diversity and so I find that to be a really interesting thing that I think that publishers and editors when they're when they're looking at memoirs they're like oh here's a story that that makes sense to me combat arms guy and looks like what I'd expect to look like and we'll go with that but women because that that narrative isn't pre-written you're getting more diverse stories from us I thought your book was terrific did you have a hard time selling it nope but mine was the first so that was it was it was it was a little different back then but still I mean I just I've seen I've seen books by an Asian American woman African American woman just a lot of diversity compared to the male memoirs well in defense of my memoir it is a coming of age story at which at the end of which the the protagonist myself sort of you know I leave off sort of right when I leave the military and I'm very much in the grips of alcoholism and PTSD which is still a response to the traditional narrative but yeah I mean I I think that narratives like that are very important and the exciting news I would say for you is that because there's a a dearth of that type of story regardless of whether or not this generation is receptive to reading or hearing it as a writer you're writing or a storyteller you're writing a story or telling a story because you're compelled to firstly and secondly you're actually not writing to anybody here we're all going to be dead you're writing really for the ages you know and if there is that one story this you know the things that I had to to read it at Yale to you know just to finish my degree or very niche stuff in satire there is that will be remembered and read by somebody and it will be helpful to somebody years from now decades from now I think what he's trying to say is fill that hole that you found when you got home yes actually there's actually a nice documentary I watched about a national guard unit I think at a New Hampshire in the woods guard reserve but but it's worth watching because their experience was so different from active duty they come back and it's sort of like they're in a community that oh that's right you were gone and kind of treated by the active duty like we're actually civilians sorry sorry oh by for people who are civilians most of the time and then treated like by active duty like we are civilians even when we go over there to support them it's really hard to go from being in this like soldier mode and then to come home and then have this like a long stretch of time where you're away from it and then have to jump back into it back and forth back and forth and then no one really cares about your story so well maybe they do and no one's told it but friend of mine is writing a book about an army reserve unit from Maine which is where I live most of the year there was a sign to succeed the Lindy England unit in Abu Ghraib can you imagine that job nobody wanted to talk to them they were just like whoa you guys like just are handling kryptonite over there and their experience and there are many of them from a small island where I live so I think we have time for just one more question and I want these guys to have the final word go ahead thank you so I wanted to bring Jonathan hate sort of into the room you know this sort of idea of of different moral bases being common in different parts of the society at this time and the idea that you know loyalty and accountability to certain types of authority is more accepted in sort of if we want to characterize it as the red state half of the country and it's very much the sum of the foundational values for you know army values and so on and we see that recruiting is going on better in these areas of the country the bases are moved to that area of the country so we're sort of reinforcing an existing non-communication in the country and that's being projected into the military and where your statements about national service were very interesting because I have friends particularly some I knew in graduate school at Yale who were from Israel where they have a mandatory service but the ones who go into the military and the ones who go into the other branches of service are very different and that Tel Aviv Kharkun that caused all this trouble with the last Netanyahu election was right along those fault lines where people weren't communicating and so nobody really had a good idea of what everybody was going to do so I wanted to to see if you have some ideas about the way the press which where the bluest crowd probably a military assembled any time recently a Yale joke how is the media going to talk across a divide that is is almost limbic and bring together forces that are being pulled apart on a very fundamental level it's funny because just before coming over here I wrote out for myself a two page summary of what I think my next book might be and it's part of the the theme of the book is what would a 21st century military look like what would an information in the age military look like and you just made me think that what you're seeing in those red states is clinging to the values and structures of the industrial revolution there's a reason that the military doesn't resonate in silicon valley information age military is going to look a whole lot different the military we have now basically comes out of the early industrial era hierarchical information flows up commands flow down there's a lot of friction in that system but it's a good way to control mass armies of literate peasants we no longer have mass armies of literate peasants as you pointed out there's a reason you have an officer gentlemen just an officer enlisted distinction because the presumption was that enlisted could not read and they needed nco's to beat the crap out of them and officers to watch and make sure the nco's didn't go too far all militaries reflect the the means of wealth generation in their society and the military of the 21st century is going to probably have to be a distributed network system that looks a lot more like silicon valley than it looks like us steel and it's very important to plug in the blue states because that's actually the part of the country that generates wealth the red states are basically free riders in our system these days and so in the 21st century I mean for example it's fundamental if you were to design west point today it would not be a civil engineering school designed to produce people who can build railroads and bridges it would be obviously a computer sciences school which people majored in had had minors the languages and cultures so we have a lot of work to do about how we change our military and I think people have no conception of how different it's going to be it's going to wind up looking I think a lot like special ops we're probably going to have to do away with core battalion division and all that which by the way are all french terms that come from the early industrial revolution there's a reason we use those terms we'll look out for your book I'll speak to a slightly different part of your question which is the values in the military and where they where they align or resonate and that is that I think you know there's a tendency for us to go to the common narrative the assumed narrative and say oh military loyalty and duty and those are red state values and that's that there's that connection but there are other values that are deeply present in the military that align to what we think of as being more liberal values like equal pay for equal work which women get in the military and so far as I know pretty much nowhere else in our society still subsidized daycare and universal health care and all of these these other values it's a very socialist system and then you see things where the officer that more senior people always eating last making sure that the junior people eat first so some of these other types of values of ensuring that everyone is cared for are very much at odds with what you were describing so I think that both of those threads exist in the military in kind of an interesting tension with where they do and do not exist in external society and I don't have anything to add that's for wonderful responses well thank you all so much for your time and basically wrap things up just a quick plug for given the Yale connection in this room and for anyone who's not connected with Yale I just wanted to talk about what did you say I said donate to the fund there's a storytelling workshop that we're going to be putting on at Yale called thread at Yale so if you're interested in storytelling I'd love to see more storytelling around veterans and military families per our topic of discussion so just check out thread.yale.edu and it's open to all to apply and you can look into that but we're going to continue the conversation to our online audience thanks for tuning in and to everyone here thanks for being here if we didn't get to your question please come up after the fact thank you to Yale veterans thank you to our panelists and the new America Foundation and I hope just one more time you'll give our panelists a round of applause