 to join us but we'll get started right now. My name is Tom Gibbons. I'm the Associate Provost here at the Naval War College and today it's my privilege and my honor to introduce my classmate Greg Martin, Major General Retired Greg Martin, and my former colleague Dr. Martin Cook who's going to have a discussion with Greg about his work with bipolar disorder and Greg's experience with that. Greg has a book coming up so please join me in welcoming Dr. Cook and General Martin. Martin over to you. Just a couple of preliminary remarks if you don't mind. Greg and I have known each other a long time as you'll hear in our conversation and he has written a really important book called Bipolar General that's in at the publishers now. I hope that this conversation will be an appetizer course because the book is very important read. Greg is brutally honest about what his entire experience was like. It's quite a harrowing journey. Fortunately it has a happy ending and that Greg is well and happy with us now but I highly recommend the book. Furthermore Greg is now kind of on a mission from God to talk about mental health issues in the military and mental health issues in general. So when you leave Newport and go to your new commands and you're thinking about a guest speaker for your unit or your installation, Greg is readily available I think in many cases to be willing to talk to any group that has an interest in this and he's kind of made it his mission at this stage of life especially in the age of Zoom when it's so easy to do it. So please keep him in mind as a future speaker. He's a very good speaker as you will hear. So without further ado let's start. I first met in 1999 when he was a student at the Army War College as a colonel. I'm an Air Force brat but I was pretty new to the Army. It was only my second year at the War College so I was very much still learning Army culture and Army terminology and so forth and my impression ahead of Greg at the time and that of most people who know him was he was extremely energetic, extremely high energy, very enthusiastic about everything and what I didn't know at that time was this Greg's personality, is this just Army who has stuff? What is it exactly? So I guess my first question Greg, we think back all the way to 1999, 2000, do you think that energy level, that kind of perhaps toxic positivity almost was in some ways a precursor of what later befell you? Yes it was definitely a precursor. I have since discovered that I actually had a condition called hyperthymia which I picked up probably as a teenager and it carried me all the way through the time at the Army War College. Martin, when you and I worked together and then all the way up until through Brigade Command until I actually went into true bipolar. So this condition of hyperthymia is not a mental illness. It's below the level of a mental illness and what the characteristics are in this increase steadily all the way until my bipolar hit was just a it was like having a natural high. It was like being on an infusion of energy, enthusiasm, drive, more creativity, optimism, happiness and it really gave me an advantage and a boost all the way from junior high, high school, all the way through my years in the Army until I actually got triggered into true bipolar disorder in 2003 as a Brigade Commander in Iraq. Right, you've all read his bio I assume so let's quickly review Greg if you would the commands that you had after you left the War College. So after I left the Army War College and by the way, I'm also a proud graduate of the Naval War College class of 1992. And I really loved it. It's an honor to be speaking with people from the Naval War College at the Navy War College. I love my year there. It helped me a lot both what I learned and the people I met and became friends with so enjoy the year. I know you're working hard and it'll pay off. So after I graduated from Carlisle in 2000, and then they kept me on the faculty for two years. I then went to Brigade Command in Germany the 130th Engineer Brigade part of US Fifth Corps, which ended up becoming the main effort for the attack on Baghdad in the first year of the Iraq war. We basically, Fifth Corps attacked with about 100,000 troops, you know, armor mechanized in all, you know, Apache helicopters and all the enablers. We attacked up the Euphrates River Valley to Baghdad. The Marines were the supporting effort going up the Tigers River Valley. So it was quite an operation. I would say that it since my experience with bipolar has been evaluated. I was looked at by two different organizations, the VA and the Army Medical Department and they both came to the conclusion that my bipolar was triggered from the intense stress of combat in the Iraq war that prior to Iraq, I did not have bipolar. I might have been approaching it and getting close to it, but I didn't actually have it. And it actually helped me in combat because what it did is it kicked me into a high-performing mania with an overabundance of energy, enthusiasm, drive. My mind was incredibly sharp and focused, so my problem-solving skills were at a very, very heightened level. I was creative. I could anticipate and solve problems before most people even knew there was a problem. And I literally felt like Superman in my mind and in my body. I didn't need much sleep. I felt pretty much fearless and moved and maneuvered and did circulation all over the battlefield in a two Humvee mobile command post. So it was an incredible experience and in the mania, the high-performing mania, it actually helped me. And I didn't have any depression at all during that first month in Iraq. It was pure mania. However, once we settled down into the base camp and the counter-gorilla counterinsurgency aspect of the war, then I actually started dipping into limited episodes of depression to quickly be followed by much more mania. And that went on for the year in Iraq. You know, just an aside, if you go to the Naval War College's YouTube channel, you'll find an excellent talk that General Martin gave about the pre-deployment buildup for that deployment to Iraq. And he did something I think shows considerable moral courage, which is to the greatest may of his commanders. He canceled a plan partnership for peace deployment of his unit because he felt he had to focus on getting ready for the invasion of Iraq, which was becoming obvious. And that's a very good talk about a really hard choice that Greg had to make. Do you want to comment on that at all briefly? Greg, I know it's a bit of an aside, but... Sure thing. Before I even went into command, we already knew just informally that we were going to invade Iraq. We knew that Fifth Corps out of Germany was going to be the main effort. And therefore the brigade I was going to the 130th, we would be the main engineer brigade. And, you know, providing mobility, counter mobility, survivability, and all the things that engineers do on the battlefield, which is really immense. I've written a couple articles that are in Engineer Magazine, basically describing and analyzing what we did during the year in Iraq. And it was extraordinary. Lots of firsts and biggest and best since World War II. But I got to Germany, we knew we were going to go to war. So I put my smartest people to work looking at maintenance, supply, training, administration. And all my smartest people came back and said, hey, sir, we are not in good shape because the 130th Engineer Brigade had done Desert Shield, Desert Storm. Then it did the Balkan Wars, you know, including Bosnia and Kosovo. And it did all these smaller contingency operations. So the equipment had been run hard and ragged and never had a focused maintenance stand down that it really needed. So I basically went to the Corps commander and said, hey, sir, we are in terrible shape. We need to take the remaining months that we have prior to deploying. And we need to focus all of it on equipment maintenance, supply, readiness, training for what we are going to actually do in Iraq, etc. And so I said we need to take our entire budget and push it into those aspects. And the Corps commander kind of gulped and said, okay, but basically if the war doesn't come, what are you going to do? You are not going to have any money left. And I said, we will do light infantry training for the rest of the year until we get the next budget. And meanwhile we had a big mission, partnership for peace in the Czech Republic, and they got record floods. So they really needed the engineer humanitarian relief. And I said, we can't afford to do this. If we go to check, we will not be ready for Iraq. And there's a high likelihood we will fail on our combat mission. And, you know, this was the number one mission of the US Army Europe four-star General MiGs. It was his number one mission. And so I basically, my chain of command back me up, General Wallace, three-star, General Wojcikowski, two-star, they took the message to General MiGs, and but he wanted to talk to me. And he was like incredulous that we were in that bad of shape, which we were, and that we couldn't do this mission. And so but he listened to me, the brigade commander, and he backed me up. And that focused effort in the months prior to the deployment made all the difference in the world when we actually got into combat. So again, there's a very good video of that. Just go to YouTube and put General Martin and Naval War College in the search block in YouTube, and you'll find his talk on that, on that decision, which is a really important one and a real example of moral courage. So Greg, when you came back from Iraq, you were evaluated by the Army, of course, to see whether you had post-traumatic stress, mental health issues, and so forth. Can you describe a little about how that went and what it tells us about Army mental health treatment? Yes. I described, you know, my first month in combat, all mania, high performing. And then once we settled into the base camps, we got into the guerrilla warfare and all that, IED war and so forth. I started, as the war went worse, I started dipping into depression. And then I go back into mania, more depression. And I started going up and down, kind of like a yo-yo. And we got back to Germany without the rush and the adrenaline and the thrill of being in a combat environment. I plunged into depression and it was very serious. I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that something was really wrong with me. I felt terrible. I didn't have energy. I was withdrawn. I didn't want to be around people. I started drinking more alcohol in an attempt to self-medicate. And during our post-deployment screening, you know, one of the steps is you have to see the psychiatric people. And they said, okay, how do you feel? I said, terrible. And they said, well, are you suicidal? Do you want to hurt anybody? Or do you have a plan to kill yourself? And I said, no to all of those. And they said, well, how do you deal with your depression? And I said, well, I drink a lot. I try to do intense physical fitness because that elevates my mood. And then I listen to really intense hardcore rock music that elevates my spirits. And I get really into religion. Like I have these Bible verses. They're the power verses. And I recite them and I pray. And that's my attempt to get out of the depression. And they said, well, that's really good. Does it work? I said, no, nothing works. And they said, well, we think you're fine. Just go back to work. Everything's okay. Which was a complete misread of my condition. I was on the, you know, I'd been way up in Iraq. Now I was on the serious plunge into depression, which completed my first bipolar cycle of up and down. And I stayed in really bad depression for 10 months. Talking to psychiatrists, they said the thing that saved me was the military structure, the army structure of having to get up, having to do PT, having to go to meetings and so forth. That that kept me going until such time as the depression naturally lifted. But it was a misread. The first of many, as far as bipolar, but I was stationed, I moved to Heidelberg where I was on a four star headquarters staff in a grueling, dismal job as a, you know, colonel. And I felt so bad. I actually went to the doctor in Heidelberg and said, Hey, there's something wrong with me. I mean, I used to be high energy, happy, optimistic. I feel terrible. I'm depressed. And they did a complete physical on me. And they said, well, you know, you're in a hard job. It was hard in Iraq. And you're just, you know, kind of a natural recovery period. Again, the second complete misread, when if they had diagnosed, if they recognized the depression, tied it to the mania that I had been in, they could have diagnosed me back in 2004. It was a serious depression that was not picked up by anybody. And I didn't know there was something seriously wrong with me. Just like in Iraq, when I was manic, I didn't know there was something wrong with me. By the way, we should have mentioned this beginning if you have any questions, we put them in the chat. Tom is going to monitor the chat room. So we'll have at least 15 minutes for questions at the end. So please put them in there. So Greg, as you look back at all of that, was this, do you think a one off failure of army mental health screening or was this systemic? In my case, it was systemic, for sure. I think the military, and I'll speak, most of my research has been on the army. I think we've gotten a lot better since 9 11. We're way better than we were, you know, during and after Vietnam. But I think there are real problems systemically with the, you know, being able to identify, detect and diagnose mental illness. And in particular, bipolar. So you and I kind of lost touch for a while there. When you went to command at Fort Leonard Wood, I don't think I was in touch with you in that period. I think the next time I saw you in person was when I came to speak at Carlyle and you were the commandant there. I remember having lunch with you and Maggie at the house. What was your time at Leonard Wood like? How were you doing in that in that period? Well, I was the commanding general of Fort Leonard Wood from 2008 to 2010. My mania, after I pulled out of the depression that I just described, I started going into higher levels of mania, lower levels of depression, psychosis, delusions, paranoia, hallucinations started working their way into my brain. And then I started going into higher mania, greater depression. And at Fort Leonard Wood is the CG. My mania was pretty serious. It was it was a very serious mania, but it wasn't acute or what they call full blown. I did some my energy levels for the most part were extremely high. My extroversion was incredibly high. I started drinking more and more started doing crazier, more Hua things. One example was, you know, I went to one of the one of the balls was actually the military police ball. And, you know, a bunch of the young NCOs were doing keg stands where you you're held upside down and the spigot from the keg of beer, they put it in your mouth and drink as much as you can. And I started doing keg stands with the troops and the NCOs and people, I mean, they loved it. You know, they're yelling CG keg stand. And I'm in my dress blues. My wife is horrified. And I mean, just a completely immature, unprofessional thing to do for the two star commanding general of the base. I mean, when you go to a ball like this, I mean, it's okay if the young troops are doing keg stands, but I should be off dancing with my wife, maybe talking to some younger people, and then leave at an appropriate hour. But instead, I did keg stands and got bombed. And I'm lucky, nobody took a film of it and sent it to the chief of staff of the army, because I would have been fired the next day. You know, I'm sure that your senior subordinates saw this increasingly odd behavior with you. And I guess this is a question that runs all the way up to your firing at at National Defense University. But in retrospect, given the structure of the army, could a subordinate in any way have helped you or intervened or gotten your superiors to realize you had a problem? Or was that just the rules of loyalty and subordination in the military are so strict that that would not have been feasible for anybody? That's a great question. And I've gone back and interviewed lots of people that worked under me around me and above me all the way from the time I was a lieutenant, all the way through NDU. And there's I've identified four big reasons why people didn't confront or try to help or, you know, get me mental health support. Reason number one, by far the biggest is people did not know what it was they were seeing. They couldn't identify the basics of mania and bipolar disorder. You know, people have become pretty good at identifying depression, PTSD, and the indicators of potential suicide. But bipolar and, you know, the mania, which is the biggest characteristic, are not well understood. And people don't they're not trained on what it is. In fact, so that's the biggest thing people didn't know what they were seeing. Lots of people loved my leadership. They thought, wow, this guy's so positive and enthusiastic, and he's making big transformational changes. This guy's awesome. I would follow him anywhere. I mean, loads of people thought that all the way even through NDU. They thought it at Carlisle. They thought it at Fort Leonardwood. But on the other hand, I had subordinates who said, we thought in retrospect, now that you describe, you know, your condition and what mania is, we thought you were kind of crazy. We thought you were losing it. We thought you were a madman. In fact, one of my nicknames was Mad Martin. And so, but they didn't know what they were seeing. One guy who was a one star general under me, he even said, sir, I wrote you off. You were no help to me. I had to figure out how to work around you because you were nuts. And but even he didn't know what the problem was. So lack of identification. Number two is many people really liked me, particularly because of the manic qualities. The third big thing is there is a fear factor in a loyalty factor, which you alluded to, Martin, where people think, hey, this guy's the commander. I mean, I'm not I'm not going to tell him he's nuts or crazy or has a mental illness or should go see a psychiatrist. And so people freeze. And what you really need is safe channels of communication. You know, it my different jobs, I had other generals who worked underneath me around me, I had ambassadors, I had SCS is senior executive service. And so if people did see something wrong, and they felt intimidated to come, you know, deal with me directly, which I totally understand. They could have gone to these other very high ranking people who could have easily talked to me with, I mean, what does an SCS or a general or an ambassador have to lose by talking to the commander? I mean, really nothing. So there is a fear factor, but we need to have safe channels. The other the fourth reason why people didn't come is a lot of people said, well, if your wife and family didn't think there was something wrong with you, then who were we to think there was something wrong? Another factor is generals in the army at least, they rotate very quickly. I mean, I held seven jobs in 10 years as a general officer. And so you're rotating every year or two, and you can go into a job in the mandate for all those years was transformation, lead change, do better with less money and less people. And so you come in and you put these transformational plans in place, but you're only there for a year or maybe two at the longest. And so people never really get to know you that well, they can't see a change when they're only with you for a year. So they don't know what you were like before you got there, they don't know what you're like after you leave. And so they don't see it. And so a lot of these manic behaviors and depression were masked by the rapid changeover in positions. So that was that was another big, big factor. But I'll tell you an interesting thing. So I worked for General Dempsey about a whole bunch of times. And, you know, he went from the trade off commander to training in doctrine command all the way to chairman. And he was chief of staff of the army in between. But when I took command at the Army War College, in his speech, he said, don't be surprised if you see Greg Martin repelling down the side of Root Hall, which was the academic building, quoting Klaus Wittes. And that got a big laugh. It was ha ha ha, isn't that funny? He was describing someone with pretty serious mania, but he didn't know I had mania. He just knew that I was, you know, kind of out there, you know, a bit eccentric, but who was a results oriented driven leader who treated people well and got results. And he loved that. And when I left two years later, the new trade off commander was Bob Cohn, the late Bob Cohn, he unfortunately passed away. Bob Cohn described me in his speech, he said, you know, Greg Martin is a force of nature. He is literally like a cat five hurricane. Somebody called down to National Defense University and tell them to put out the hurricane warning signs because there's a cat five coming their way. And everybody laughed. But that's not funny. Think about the destructiveness and the danger of a hurricane. I live in Florida now. I mean, hurricanes are no joke at all. I mean, it's scary. And he was describing a force that again, he thought was positive because I was I had led change at Carlisle. Now I was going to do it in Washington, D.C. And he said that in a very positive, happy way. But in retrospect, he was looking at a guy who was very highly seriously manic had very serious bipolar disorder, but he didn't see it at all. And neither did people on staff. Okay, so indulge me in a couple of hypotheticals here. Okay, so one day you get a knock on the door, you are, let's say the commentator of the Army War College and your exo or your chaplain come in and sit down and say, sir, I think you really got a problem. How would that conversation have gone? When I was intensely manic acutely manic, which I think I got very, very serious by by the time I hit Fort Leonardwood, I was pretty bipolar. By the time I got to Carlisle, I had serious bipolar. And then of course, at National Defense University, I got acute, full blown. I mean, I was really in a state of madness when General Dempsey fired me. So here's how the conversation would have gone. When you're manic, you think and believe and are certain you are the smartest person in the universe. I mean, my level of grandiosity, my invincibility level, my, you know, assessment of my brilliance, which is called grandiosity, my religiosity, believing I had a direct connection and mission from God, my what they call flight of ideas, my ideas started spinning faster and faster, more ideas, better ideas, at least better in my mind. I would have listened to them. And I would have said, I don't think I think you're wrong. I don't know where you're getting that information. And of course, the paranoia or psychosis is part of bipolar also. So my paranoia had been growing steadily for years, where I thought people were out to get me, to get me fired, to get me, you know, criminally charged, to put me in jail, to take away my retirement benefits. I believe that stronger and stronger. And the more people resisted and pushed back bureaucratically on my transformational changes, the more the harder I pushed back on them, and the resistance spiraled up and up the paranoia grew. And so I would have essentially looked at the chaplain and the people who came in to talk to me and said, you're you're one of my enemies, you're part of the bureaucratic resistance, you're part of the Taliban, who have dug in and are opposing my mission, which I got directly from God, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So you're you're one of my enemies. I thought you were my friend, I thought you were one of my allies. But now I know you're one of the enemy forces. That's how it would have gone. Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I thought. And the other question, I happen to know Greg's wife, Maggie, not really well, but she's a wonderful woman and hung through, hung through all of this with him. And that's important. But surely Maggie saw some of this by now. How did those conversations go at home? Put a family member of intervening in an effective way? Yes, they could have and they tried. And in fact, I see my son Connor is on the listening list. And he was living at home at NTU and going to going to college in DC. And he tried to talk to me, tried to slow me down, told me, you're you're losing it, you're going over the edge, because people would come and talk to him and tell him some of the things that I was doing. And he tried to slow me down and reel me in all to no effect. I mean, I had pretty much gone into a state of madness like I just described. My wife, Maggie was a little bit different. She definitely saw indicators of problems. But in the book, she actually writes a section. And she, you know, she met me when I was a second lieutenant, when I had hyperthymia, you know, that that continuous level of mild mania, happiness, enthusiasm, energy. And it increased steadily from the time she met me as a second lieutenant, until I was a two star general 30 some odd years later. And she described herself as being a frog in a pot of water that a little flame was put under the pot. And gradually, it became boiling. But she never felt the difference because it was so incremental that she never noticed that I had gone mad until the very end. And there were people who came and spoke with her, but they didn't talk forcefully enough to shake her up or get her to take any strong action. They said things to her about my very strange over the top erratic manic behavior. But they said it gently, kindly, you know, in a subtle manner. So it was never, it never hit her hard enough to say, whoa, you have lost it, we need to go, you need to go get psychiatric help. And so she didn't realize I had gone completely mad until about the time that general Dempsey made the decision to fire me. And at that point, she realized I really had gone completely over the top. You know, one of the great strengths of Greg's book is he's brutally honest about some of the more bizarre things that he was doing at the worst. And a couple of episodes occurred to me, Greg, and perhaps you want to bring up a couple others. But I remember you described the climbing the fence at the swimming pool at Carlyle. And you describe grafting an entire lawn party into your house at National. Those are the two really stood out to me. Would you describe those and then add another anecdote or two for you? So at Army War College, summer of 2011, I was in my going into my second year as commandant to start general, we had this wonderful welcome picnic for the new class, you know, like, like at the Navy War College, it was, you know, mostly 0506s and a bunch of international fellows and civilians. And so after the picnic, there's a really nice Tiki bar there. And so I was down at the Tiki bar. And one of the things that happened to me with bipolar is I started drinking more and more. When I was in a state of mania, I wanted to drink alcohol because it just the mania fueled my desire to drink. And then the more I drank, the more I wanted to drink and the more my mania went up. And conversely, when I would slip into depression, then you want to drink because you're depressed. It makes you feel better. So anyway, I was in pretty much a state of mania. I was very extroverted. I'm with a bunch of the new students. It happened to be a group of about 10 or 12 special forces guys, you know, Rangers, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Air Force special ops guys. And I'm just, you know, reveling and hearing their stories from Afghanistan and Iraq, and we're all drinking beer, getting a buzz on. And suddenly one of the Rangers goes, hey, see that? Look at that swimming pool over there. Wouldn't it be great? It was kind of a hot night. He said, wouldn't it be great if we go over the fence and go swimming? And then he looks at me and says, and General Martin's our senior Ranger, and he'll lead us over the fence. Well, I knew the guy was egging me on, but I was like, yeah, that sounds great. Next thing you know, I'm leading a dozen special ops guys, we climb up over this 10 foot fence, and we're jumping around in the pool, splashing, you know, grab ass and all the rest. And then one of the guys said, hey, we better get the hell out of here before the MPs come by on their patrol, then we're going to be really in trouble. And so we got out and, you know, we were all yucking it up, the MPs didn't come. And so I drank a bunch more beer, went home soaking wet, and, you know, completely immature, you know, terrible behavior for the commander. I mean, this is really bad. I mean, I was breaking my own safety policy by going over the fence into the pool. The next morning, my deputy commandant, he calls me and said, hey, sir, I need to talk to you. And I said, can we just talk on the phone? He said, no, I got to come see you face to face. So he comes over, and he said, I got a report that you went over the fence, you and a dozen students, you're in the pool is, sir, I have to ask you, is that true? Yes or no? I said, yes, absolutely true. You got a completely accurate report. And I said, I know you have to figure out how to deal with it. I said, I have no problem. Just call the chief of staff of the army or the tradeoff commander. You know, if I get relieved, you know, I deserve it. No problem. You're doing your job. I'm fine with that. He said, sir, are you kidding me? I don't want to see you get fired. We love you. You're a great commander. We think you're wonderful. So no, I just want to verify if it was true or not. I don't plan on telling anybody. And again, you know, there I was in this completely manic, you know, behaving terribly, that a private would get in trouble for. And my deputy who's, who's a 06, who's a very straight lace guy, he's like, he's like, we like you. We don't want to see you get fired. Very, very typical. By the way, every time I saw those guys in the corridors of the war college for the next year, we would get a big chuckle out of that. But well, some other crazy things, my religiosity extremely high. I was when I was at NTU, I was probably doing between a dozen and two dozen religious events per week. I mean, that is extreme religiosity. I was speaking in tongues. I'm seeing the Holy Spirit come down out of the sky. I thought I was God's apostle to the US military. I developed this concept called global security university, a network of networks globally that would solve all the world's security problems. And I pitched that and I talked about it. I was endlessly fascinated with the development of commanders coins and slogans, as if somehow if I got the coin perfect or the slogan just right, I would solve all the problems of the universe. Let's see a couple of other things. I started being late for everything. I mean, I didn't do I stopped doing administrative work, which was terrible. I started walking around going into lectures and classrooms, taking over preaching and talking about global security university. I started doing midnight bike rides all around Washington DC, where I would hallucinate that I was up over myself flying around the Capitol. I'd look down and see myself peddling on the bike as I flew over the monuments. At my son Connor's graduation, I was supposed to drive a bunch of people to the school in DC. I suddenly abandoned my mission to be a driver, took off on my bike, sweltering heat. I get to his graduation. I didn't sit down. I was jumping around like an ape dancing, leaping, yelling who are doing chest bumps with the graduates. I mean, completely out of control. My son Patrick's graduation. I was supposed to get in the car and drive away from DC down to Fort Bragg for special forces graduation. I was supposed to leave at nine o'clock. Well, I ended up going to a board of visitors meeting in my PT clothes and spending the next nine hours holding impromptu unscheduled meetings where I talked for hours and hours without stopping. So we got to the graduation late. I made a complete ass to myself, missed the barbecue, et cetera. I could go on, but I had reached a state of full blown acute mania where I was out of my mind. I interviewed one candidate to be the Dean of one of our colleges and he later said that I talked nonstop for more than four hours to where he couldn't figure out what I was even talking about. And I didn't ask him a single question or talk about the job that he was being interviewed for. There were literally hundreds of incidents like this, most of which I can't even remember anymore. But what ended up happening with, and I don't want to jump ahead of you, Martin. I could tell you how that led to my firing, but I'll let you pace it a little more. I think that's the right place to go. How did this information finally filter up to General Dempsey? It was basically came up to General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, through anonymous complaints from everything from students, faculty, staff, instructors, deans of the colleges, the provost. They started doing, first off, they did a whole bunch of stories for Tom Ricks in foreign policy. So Ricks wrote a few articles about me that basically saying this guy's gone mad, which was true. But at the time, I just thought it was my bureaucratic enemies out to get me, which furthermore by that point, Ricks was the person on Grotto with the army. I know he was not even allowed to be invited to the Army War College at that point. So it's easy to cast a major enemy because the whole army thinks of him as the enemy. Basically, my subordinates painted a pretty accurate picture to Ricks in his articles weren't too far off the mark, but it had zero effect with my seniors, the chairman, the three stars, because they basically, they called me on the phone and said, Greg, don't worry about it. Ricks is a bleep, bleep, bleep. He's written really bad articles about me and my friends. We don't pay any attention to what that guy says. So forget about it. Just keep doing your job. But anyway, over time, over the months, more and more reports came in. General Dempsey started getting concerned. And meanwhile, I am seeing him on a regular basis because he would come to NTU to speak to the capstone course for the new generals, give lectures, and so forth. So what Dempsey did, and by the way, he had been a mentor and a friend and a boss all the way back when I was a battalion commander as an 05, he was commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment and I was his battalion commander of the engineers. And then he was my commander when I was at Fort Leonard Wood at the Army War College in NTU. So we had a fantastic relationship. And I got along great with him. And so he was, he didn't know what to make of all this. So he did three different independent assessments that looked first at the curriculum of the NTU, then he looked at the faculty, then he looked at the students. And these panels were led by very high ranking illustrious people, like retired three stars, big SESs, etc. And all three of the reports in this, these were done in April, May, June of 2014, which was, you know, my second year at NTU, all of them came back and said, what Martin is doing is nothing short of remarkable in transforming NTU. It's, it's amazing. He is, he is carrying out your intent in the mission you gave him above and beyond what you could hope for. Number two, he is a very likable guy. Most of the people at NTU not only like him, but they love him as a leader, his enthusiasm, energy, vision, and so forth. But number three, we think he's gone mad and is mentally ill and needs to go to see a psychiatrist to get evaluated for mental illness. And there's abundant evidence of his mental illness. So Dempsey took aboard all these three assessments. And I think he was in the process of deciding to, you know, basically remove me from command when, lo and behold, some of the people at NTU, one of the employees got really scared and said, you know, we think he's crazy. Don't generals keep pistols in their safe, in their office. And she said, I really want his office searched for a weapon because I'm afraid of this guy. And so one of the high-ranking civilians conducted a search for a weapon. They opened the safe, looked in, and I, I kept the weapon at home, the geo pistol. And so there was no weapon. But in doing that, that search, the high-ranking civilian who did the search alarmed and scared the people in my inner office. He scared the XO. He scared the AIDS. They were very, very worried that this guy was out to get me and might do me harm. And so anyway, the next morning, a report came down that that individual, who was, you know, very high level, had brought a gun to work and that he may be meaning to do me harm and shoot me. And so that report was taken as a serious report. It went immediately to the MPs. The MPs went into a active shooter exercise. So the next thing you know, there's MPs flashing lights, Washington DC police all swarming all over NTU. And I was at home because I had just finished up PT. I was on my porch in one of those beautiful houses at McNair. And anyway, they found the guy that the alleged was potentially the shooter. And he had no weapon. They interviewed him. They said, you know, this guy's not going to shoot anybody. He's fine. Then they came to me and they said, you know, do you want protection at your quarters? Do you want physical MP protection of you and your wife and your quarters? And my my wife by then was just horrified by what had been happening at NTU, people writing articles, people out to get me. I was paranoid. I was telling her, people are out to get me. They're doing all these bad things. They want me to get arrested, put in jail, murdered in jail, you know, take away any pension for Maggie. And she said, yes, I want protection. So we actually had MPs guarding our house for a week. And the chain of command said, okay, Martin, don't go into work for a week. You're suspended. And the guy who was the potential shooter, you're suspended for a week. Don't go to work. And so then they did a 15-6 investigation. And that was the fourth investigation, essentially, went to General Dempsey. He got all this together. And now the evidence was, you know, you couldn't refute that I had gone mad. And so I got a call, hey, the chairman wants you to see, he wants to see you in his office. The call came in on a Friday. He wants to see you Monday morning at 10 o'clock and your wife is invited to come and encouraged to come. And so I knew that these investigations and stuff had gone down. But I actually thought he was going to say, Greg, you've done unbelievable. I'm going to extend you in command. Here's some guidance for your upcoming years. I thought he might revert the NDU position back to a three star, which it had been, and promote me. But and then I remotely thought, well, and maybe he's going to get rid of me, whatever. It's like, hey, it's God's will, inshallah, you know, no big deal. So anyway, I report to General Dempsey, and I'm going to tell you, if you're going to get fired, what the hell, it might as well be by the top military officer in the entire country. And so I reported to Dempsey. And again, thinking this is probably going to be something really good happening. And that's, that's mania in action, my brain thinking, oh, yeah, he's going to promote me and congratulate me. So I walk in and I meet the first person I see as the lawyer. I'm like, oh, I guess, I guess this is not going to be a good conversation. And so Dempsey walks across the room and he gives me a big hug. And he says, Greg, I love you like a brother. You have done an absolutely amazing job. You have moved the ball from the end zone into the red zone. But you have until 1700 hours today to resign, or I will fire you. And oh, by the way, you need to go get a mental health exam command directed at Walter Reed this week. What are your questions? And I said, that sounds great. Thank you, sir. That's wonderful. Because I know that God has bigger and better plans for me. So this is fantastic news. And he looked, he's looking at me like I am crazy, which I was. I mean, I was in a state of absolute madness. And then he said, well, what do you have to say? Like, what do you, what's your side of the story? What do you think? And I said, oh, sir, you know, I've, I've exceeded your expectations. I've only got five more Taliban to root out and get out of India. If I can get these five more people out, we will have success. We'll be 100% successful. And into you will reach, you know, Nirvana, the state you dreamed of. And he, he's looking at me like I'm nuts. I said, five more. And I have a plan on how I can, you know, move all five out of into you. And he said, wow, so you're like Sisyphus. You just keep pushing the boulder up to the top of the mountain. And you're just, you're not going to give up. I said, no, sir, you know, I'm just going to keep going forward. So we had a nice conversation, very friendly. He's looking at me in, you know, with an amazed look the whole time, the lawyers in the back corner of the room taking notes. And they said, okay, let's bring Maggie in. So I call, I asked Maggie to come into the room. She comes in and, and she said, Hey, do you want to, Greg, do you want to tell Maggie what we just talked about? I said, yeah. Hey, Maggie, you know, you're going to be happy. I'm, I'm leaving into you. I'm gone. You know, today is my last day. And, and she actually, she took the news fairly hard because it was disappointing for her that my career, you know, after 35 plus years would end on such a, you know, what she rightly perceived as a negative note. And I said, Maggie, it's great. Don't worry about it. You know, we'll be getting, you don't like being stationed in DC, which she didn't. You will be getting out of DC sooner. We can go on to a more normal life and I'll do even bigger and better work for God. And so anyway, that was pretty much it. The chairman gave Maggie a big hug. He was a super gentleman. And by the way, he made absolutely the correct decision. You know, one of the things he said, he said, Greg, I've seen peers of yours, other general officers who have been in situations like this, and you cannot win. He said, the best thing I can do for you is get you out of there because like in, you're like Gulliver, you're, you're tied down and people are just going to stab you to death with little pitchforks until you die of miserable death. You can't win. You're going to get tied up in legal knots, IG knots, and so on and so forth. And of course, he was exactly right. And he had seen this over, I mean, he had seen this movie dozens of times, which is very not uncommon for flag officers to get taken down that way. And, yeah, we've only got about seven minutes left before we go to Q&A. So I think we maybe should move forward. The book is really excellent. Greg goes through basically two years of utter hell, seeking mental health treatment, and nothing really works. And he's very eloquent and graphic, describing all of that, until they finally put him on lithium, which is the med that has stabilized him. So, Greg, I guess with the seven minutes left, I'd like you to make use your own discretion. What would you want to talk about? You want to talk about that? You want to talk about lessons learned from mental health in the military and more generally, the floor is yours, and at the top of the hour, let's go to Q&A. Okay. So I went in and did the command evaluation at Walter Reed. I was evaluated three times, one, two, three, by various psychiatrists and doctors at Walter Reed. During July, I'm in acutely manic, and all three of them said, you are perfectly healthy, there's nothing wrong with you, you are fit for duty, you're good to go. And they were completely wrong. They didn't identify that I was bipolar until four months later, after I had spiraled and crashed into crippling, hopeless, dark depression was, you know, I couldn't function as a person anymore. I had terrible psychosis with hallucinations, delusions, etc. And at that point, they were able to piece everything together and say, aha, bipolar disorder. My care at Walter Reed, and I don't mean to throw a rock, but the care was inadequate. It was not helpful. They gave me all kinds of different drugs, none of them work. I should have, knowing what I know now, I should have been put in inpatient immediately and gone in for a couple weeks, a month, whatever. And they should have gotten to the root and started really treating me effectively, which never happened. When I left the army a couple months later, I had no continuity of care. I went to New Hampshire, you know, found my condition got worse and worse and worse, found a civilian provider who was okay, but that didn't work. I finally, with the help of a friend, got into the VA. The VA did great. They asked some questions that no one else ever asked. If there's any medical people out there, they said, in addition to, are you suicidal? Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you want to hurt others? They said, do you have any morbid thoughts of death or dying? And I did. I had several. One that I would be thrown underneath an 18-wheeler and my body ripped apart. And I would see that over and over, or that I would go to jail in prison. I would be stabbed to death, die, gurgling in a pool of my own blood. And I explained that to the doctor. And he said, whoa, those are passive suicidal ideations. And they can quickly morph into active ideations where you may have no plan to kill yourself, but you just do because the way the thing morphs. So they put me in inpatient and the VA was wonderful. I can talk about this in Q&A, but they helped me. I started getting better. The inpatient was the best thing they could have done, but I still didn't get better until I took lithium. And within a week of taking lithium, I came out of depression. I started reverting back to my old personality, happy, upbeat, optimistic, and so forth. And then we moved to Florida. The sun, the brightness, the warmth really helped. And I've been on a steady rebuilding, climb back into a new life of health, happiness, purpose, meaning ever since. So over five years, haven't had a bad day. So the key to my health now is holistic health, mind, body, spirit, take my medication, see a therapist, you know, workout, healthy diet, low stress. And then I just heard a great lecture where they talk about people, place and purpose. And I've got wonderful friends and I see Linda Mitchell on the line. I see Jessica on the line and, you know, family, Connor, people make the network of people, the connections, human connections, make all the difference in recovery. And then a place, a place that you love, that you're comfortable, that's safe, low stress, and then a purpose, which I've got a purpose, which now is telling my bipolar story to help stop the stigma and save lives. I'm going to change the institutional lessons and Martin, how many minutes do I have? Oh, five or so. Okay, plenty of time. Number one, what do we need to do institutionally? I would say first, training and education on what mental illness looks like. Number two, leaders need to lead by example. They need to take this stuff seriously, you know, one in four people on the planet are estimated to have a mental illness. I don't think it's unreasonable to extrapolate one in four people in the US military. If we have two million people, that's half a million of a mental illness. I don't think that's unreasonable at all to assume that that's probably true. And we're going to lead and take it seriously. I would point to a guy named Major General D.A. Sims, Commander, First Infantry Division, Fort Riley. He is setting the standard on how to deal with mental health issues. And he just got picked up for a third star. But take a look at his program. There was a big spread in military times last summer about what he's doing. Third, I think we need to institutionalize this idea of a battle buddy system or confidence or peer support, where everybody from private to four star has got somebody, a confidant, a trusted peer that will talk to them and give them the news, the good, the bad, and the ugly of how they're doing. No varnish, no sugarcoating. And there has to be an agreement that you won't get mad or punish the person for giving you bad news or news that hurts you. Then if you don't take the news to heart and then go do something about it, there need to be safe established channels for people to go report up the chain to get you into mental health. And then hopefully you can go get mental health treatment without it being a stigma where you lose your job or you lose your security clearance or something like that. I think there are some personnel policies that need to be looked at. I'm a big believer in a 360 degree feedback program. And I'm told that this is on the books throughout the military, but it's just a pencil, paper, drill. People don't really take it seriously. I think we should figure out how to reduce assignment turbulence so that you don't mask the symptoms of mental illness. I think senior leaders should have professional certified coaching. And most of these coaches are super experienced, knowledgeable people who have a different perspective. A retired SES or ambassador or flag officer has a very different or a civilian, pure civilian coach. They have a very different perspective than somebody, a flag officer who's in the trenches fighting. These jobs are hard and having that perspective would help. I think people need to accept the reality of mental illness. It is not a character flaw. It's not due to lack of willpower. It's real physiologically. I realized that it's real when I went into acute depression. That had never happened to me before where I physically couldn't function because there was something wrong with my brain. People have to say it's real. There shouldn't be a stigma or shame or embarrassment any more than somebody who has cancer or diabetes or heart disease. That's real and we should treat it the same way. I think we need to increase the availability of services, not only in the military, but in the civilian sector as well. We need to increase both in DOD and in the civilian world, research into the causes, the prevention and the cures of mental illness. Why haven't we figured out what the genetic biomarkers are for bipolar or other mental illnesses? We should be able to do that. It's on the cutting edge of science, but we should be able to figure this stuff out. I think DOD, mental health, should really tighten its collaboration with the VA and civilian providers. I left with no continuity of care. There is now a system in place to provide continuity of care for people with mental health problems. I sure could have used that and many, many people fell through the cracks because we didn't have that. The VA has real strengths that I think the DOD could learn from. My treatment in the VA was vastly superior to what I got at Walter Reed. That's not a hit on Walter Reed, it's just a fact. I think that we should consider mania as a potential factor in every conduct problem in the military. Here's why I say that. Coming up from platoon leader on up, all the cases of bad conduct, like how did a good soldier suddenly go bad where they went from good performance, good behavior to they take a bat and they smash all the windshields out in the parking lot or they tear up the barracks or they go to a bar, they start smashing people with bottles and getting in fights, smashing chairs over people, going to jail. That sounds a lot like mania to me when somebody who previously never got in trouble is suddenly doing insane things. By the way, one of the parts of mania, I described all the energy and enthusiasm, happiness, but another side of mania is anger, meanness, violence. That's why so many people with bipolar end up in prison. I think it should be something that's looked at routinely in conduct problems. I think big picture, mental health needs to be dealt with equally with physical fitness and physical health. Can you imagine if we put mental health on the same level as physical fitness? We do PT practically every single day and we teach soldiers sailors, airmen, Marines, about Coast Guard, about diet and sleep and so forth. What about mental health? That's one of the things that General Sims, Fort Riley has done is he's elevated mental health and nobody can say DA Sims is some kind of touchy, thiele guy. He is absolutely the most rock solid infantry ranger killer that you'll ever find and so Sims has done that and I think the whole military does. I think this idea of a stigma is medieval, it's cruel, it's barbaric and there's people who are battling mental health, they should not be seen in a light of stigma. They should be looked at that they're fighting a heroic cause like women fighting breast cancer. 50 years ago, breast cancer was shameful, it was kept in the closet, it was embarrassing, until Betty Ford, the first lady, said I have breast cancer, here's the truth, here's what I'm doing it and now 50 years later it's heroic. You know, NFL and Major League Baseball, they wear pink shoes, everybody wears their pink ribbon as it should be and I think mental health should be seen in the same way. I'll stop here. Okay, great, thanks. I hope all of this has been a really big appetizer for all of you so please find and read the book when it comes out. Asperg this morning do we have a publication date and we don't just yet but watch for it. The bipolar general is the title.