 Felly, hi! Rydyn ni'n fawr i chi. Yr hwyl yw'r ffordd ymlaen i'r ffordd, felly rydyn ni'n dweud hynny'n i'r ffordd i chi'n gweithio'r ystod, o'r ffordd i chi'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n ffordd yw'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r FF10 ac yn ymgyrch yn hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n gweithio'r ffordd. Ac ydych chi'n gweithio'r ffordd i chi'n gweithio'r ffordd? Rydyn ni'n dweud i chi'n chyfnoddodd gyda Helin Benedict, ysgolau'r cyfnodd ac yw Mark Evans, yng ngyfnodd yma, eu gwneud i Afganistau. Rydyn ni'n gwneud ymwysig yn ymgwrtio Ymgwrtio Codd, eu gwneud i afganistau ac eu gwneud i wneud i wneud. Rydyn ni'n ffordd o 15 oed, i ddefnyddio'r ffordd, a gyrdd i chi'n dweud i chi'n gwneud i chi'n gweithio'r ffordd, I love to hear what you think and I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you very much for coming. My mom was a junkie and we were always being a victim. She was Mexican but she looked white like me. We were so alike. We were like sisters. Then when I was 16, Granny got cancer. The day before my 17th birthday, she died. I knew that she was sick but you just never really expect it. My grandpa didn't really know what to do with me after that. He made me feel like he wasn't really my grandpa anymore. So I joined the graffiti crew. I got kicked out of school and another. My boyfriend lived across the street from my school so I used to go and see him instead of going to class. I was smoking a lot of weed, really messing up. But in the end I got sick and tired of myself and that's when I started thinking about the army. There were recruiters in the hallways all the time at school so I went to see one. If you sign up with a national guard, you won't have to serve outside the country. National because that means in the country, right? You get 3,000 bucks just for enlisting. The army will pay for college. Do something I was proud of. I imagined telling my grandchildren about something that I've done to protect the country. It was the year after 9-11. I think a lot of people felt that way. So I went to a recruiter and said I wanted to sign up. You're going to have to get your mom to sign that because you're only 17? I hadn't seen my mom in months. But I called her and I told her. If you want to join, forge my name, I don't care. So I forged your name. Right there under the recruiter's nose. We do it all the time. And they take the taxes out. The army never paid for me to go to any college that I wanted to go to. And it turns out you can't sign up for six years. It's got to be eight. So I'm in until I'm li... Travel anywhere? Well, apart from the war in Iraq. The whole time in Iraq was the days. I worked nights and we were shot at every night. Mortars were coming in and mortars was deaf. On the front line, it's the biggest crock of shit. I was a tank gunner. But when I say that I was in the war, nobody listens. Nobody believes that I was a soldier. Do you know why? Because I'm female. Blessed are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times. When I was a freshman in high school, I vowed I'd never be in the army. I wanted to go to college, you know. But my parents are real religious. Clara, you don't need to go to college. You can do God's work better in the army. It's strange. My dad went to college, but they told me I didn't need to go. I was working as a cook in Bible camp in the summers. And I saw how I could make kids happy doing that. So I thought maybe mama was right. Maybe serving food in the army would give me a mission to spread the word of God. So she took me to the recruitment office. I was just 16 then. They gave me the test that shows what kind of jobs you can do in the military. I never suggested that I could be a nurse. I wasn't sure about that. All I'd ever wanted to be was a teacher. But then the recruiter started calling my house all the time. One day this recruiter came to my home. He was three years older than me. This model, picture guy, you know, blonde, blue eye. So handsome in his uniform. He told me I could be a chaplain's assistant and not appeal to me because it was religious. And he was one of those perfect guys, you know? So I joined the reserves. Mama signed a waiver because I wasn't 17 yet. It was 2004 by then, but mama and me weren't worried about the war. We knew you could die just as easily crossing the street. It's all in God's plan when you die, whether you go to war or not. Name is Terris, sergeant to Walt Johnson to you. I'm 37 years old and the mother of four kids. Two boys, two girls. My home is in Georgia now, but I grew up in D.C. My life there was pretty drastic. My stepfather was a drunk, beat up on my mom all the time. Beat up on me and my brothers and sisters too, but he saved the worst of it for her. He hit her with a hammer, lacerated her legs, broke her skull. One time he stabbed her 13 times with a long kitchen knife till the knife sank in so deep he couldn't pull it back out again. She only survived because she was so fat. By the time I was 13, I learned to fight it back. Layed him out flat with a baseball bat once. It was, I've got to kill this guy or he's going to kill my mom. As soon as I could, I moved out and started living with my boyfriend. He's my husband now, a gentleman and a sweetheart. I've known him since I was nine. By the time I was 19 though, we had two kids and I was working two jobs. One at McDonald's and the other selling tour tickets down at Union Station. One day this recruiter comes up to me. Have you ever thought about signing up? The army will pay for college, train you in whatever job you want. Well, that's to get out of DC. DC is such a poison place to me. All you got there is a bunch of drugs and killing. Three of my brothers were shot to death there for no reason. My son was shot in the feet in a drive-by. He was just five years old playing in the yard. Because of the military that my four kids live like they do now. We have a nice house, they go to good schools. So I liked being in the army. Then they sent me to Iraq. I grew up in a small rural town in Wisconsin. It's only about 2,000 people so pretty much everybody knows everybody. There were two types of people in my town. The people who stayed and the people who left. My way of getting out was to join the Army National Guard when I was 17. A lot of people from my high school were in the military. So it didn't seem like any big deal. But my parents weren't happy about it. I come from a very political household. My dad was an elected official and were Democrats. So I had to really argue with them to get them to sign and let me join. Anna, bring in two. But I was stubborn. I wanted to give something back to society, do something for my country. But really it was a rebellion. When I joined the military, I got an overwhelmingly good response from my community. If I went downtown or to the supermarket in my uniform, people were proud of me. It made me feel like I belonged. After all it was pre-911, we all thought differently then. In August 2001, I shipped out to do my training at Fort Jackson. And zero day, the day you meet your drill instructor, turned out to be September 11th. We just finished taking the oath when the sergeant said something about a plane hitting towers. But I couldn't really hear. People were running to the barracks getting hysterical. The sergeant was saying, we are going to war! We are going to war! I just thought it was part of the training. It took me a couple hours to realize it was real. After that, there were rumors that training would speed up and we'd be sent over. But it didn't happen. Training just went on as normal. I stuck bayonets into my safe targets, sang songs about blood and killing, and didn't bat an eye, because we were already desensitized. Generation Air Force. My grandfather and father were Air Force officers, and all my life I wanted to be just like them. So I joined the Air Force Reserves after high school and put myself through school during my listening. I got married too and had a baby girl. My daughter was only two years old when I was deployed. That was March 2003, right as the U.S. was going into Iraq. I had to leave her with my husband. Where'd the horse now? It was so hard to leave my little girl. I kept worrying about what she'd be fed or eyed, what she'd be able to sleep okay. It really hurt to hear her little voice on the phone. Well, I was on active duty for a little over eight years in the Air Force. I was a public affairs specialist. That made combat correspondent and photographer. I loved my job. I am Santiago Flores, 46 years old, and retired after 22 years in the Army. I was a drill sergeant who taught other people how to be drill sergeants. So I have a drill sergeant personality. Used to tell my soldiers a warrior, a being a provider. Everything we find great honor and pride in. And nowadays it is hard to find things that bring honor to your family, for natives. Until I was 10, we never lived in one place long enough for me to finish out of greatest school. My dad kept moving to find one job or another, but also because he was trying to run away from his drinking. You know, drinking is a problem for native people? Well, it was no different for my family. Finally, he bought a house and we stayed put. My dad's a supervisor and a bakery. My mom's a bank teller. He raised me in the town in southern Wisconsin. I didn't have any direction after high school, so I joined the Army military police, became specialist Sylvia Gonsalas. I did for the money and the challenge. My parents didn't have any opinion on me enlisting. If that's what I wanted to do, it was fine with them. So mom signed the papers because I was only 17. And then 9-11 happened. And I was mobilized to Iraq. 9-11 made a lot of people proud of being a military, including me. I wasn't scared. I was glad that I was in an organization that was going to do something about this. I never really thought about the actual war in Iraq at first. There really wasn't my place to get involved in something that I didn't know about. The thing that worried me was that I was going to be away from home for a whole year. They sent me notice three weeks before I had to leave. My parents don't take up my things emotionally, so I just figured out my stuff. And I left. 13th, my dad brings home this white guy to work for him fixing cars, George. This was 1973, and George was just back from Vietnam. He had one leg shorter than the other, and he spent a whole year in hospital with his wounds. And people said he'd raped girls in Vietnam. I hit like, but he started being nice to me. Took me to a drive-in movie. Gave me a joint to smoke and something to drink, and then he raped me. And I got pregnant from that rape. My dad was furious. Thought it was all my fault. Didn't care that I was only 13. So he makes me get in the car and we go looking for George. We find him pretty quick. Get in the fucking car! My dad said he was six feet tall, and people did what he said. So George gets in, that drives us back to the house, sits us down at the kitchen table, pulls out a gun, sets us on a table in front of us, and he tells George, you have five minutes to do choices! You didn't marry my daughter or die! And all I could think was if my dad shoots George, he's going to go to prison, then all of us are going to be without a dad, my mom is going to be without a husband, so I'll be my fault. So I told George and married him. My eldest son is the product of that rape. I love him, but he knows the story and he feels pre-alienated from my family. And he hates having an Indian mom because he sees no honour. For the next few years I'm living with George, he is beating the crap out of me, and I'm turning to drink just like the rest of my family. And when I'm 16, I get pregnant again. Birth control? Nobody told me about that. And I got so much trauma in my life, who would have thought about that anyway. Finally at one point I just can't take it anymore, so I decide to kill George and dump him in Lake Tahoe. But he's such a big guy, I can't figure out how I'm going to get his body there. I'm going to have to put him on the boat alive and then kill him and he's a really strong guy. So I'm thinking, okay that's not going to work. But by the time I'm 20, George has landed in jail again for attacking me and I'm divorced at last. So there I am living in a one bedroom cockroach infested apartment with two kids and I'm on welfare. So I'm thinking, what am I going to do? That's when I decide to join the army. I'll let you be if you're a girl in the military. A bitch, a hoe, a bitch if you won't sleep with them. A hoe if you got one boyfriend and a dyke if they don't like you. So you can't win. In Iraq in the beginning I was considered a hoe because I was nice to people. When I found out what people were saying about me I became a bitch. I wasn't mean but I just had to change so that nobody thought I was being flirty. I changed the way that I walked and the way that I talked. Everything. Nobody over there really knew who I was because I was always putting on an act and a lot of the men didn't want us there. One guy told me that the only reason the military sent female soldiers is to provide eye candy for the guys to keep them sane. In Vietnam they had prostitutes but they don't have those in Iraq so they have women's soldiers instead. It was July 2003 by the time I got to Iraq. We were in Fawb's Ffiker which used to be an Iraqi airbase and there were huge pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. It was spooky. Soldiers would pose next to them and take pictures like tourists. I was attached to an army engineer unit and our job was to build bases and roads to fix bridges. So we cleaned up the rubble and all kinds of disgusting stuff in the building so we could move in. Excrement, rags, bits of military equipment. We prepared the base, built runways, used strap metal to make our own armor because we had no up-armored vehicles. We built a basketball court for ourselves but we were doing nothing to help the Iraqi people. I was petroleum supply specialist. That means I pumped gas. My job was to drive around the base, refueling dump trucks, rollers, scrapers, wait for a couple hours and do it again. When it was busy it was really busy and when it was slow there was absolutely nothing to do. So I wrote a lot of letters, took pictures, threw rocks into a box. My unit was a real good old boys club though and I was one of only 19 women out of 141 people. The leadership didn't trust women to do a good job at anything. They were always hovering over you, waiting for you to screw up. So you feel like you couldn't do anything right and the guys had cases of porn which they'd look at out in the open. They were always calling out things like, Hey Peterford! I like your tits in that t-shirt. It happened so much, you got none. Finally after a couple months I started to go out on missions to rebuild schools. That was the best part of my time there. But then I began to convoy to other bases. I was driving a 2300 gallon diesel truck and because it was taking occasional gunfire it could have burst into flames any moment. It was a bomb on wheels. The Iraqi people were pretty hostile to us by that time. When we went into town we were always looking at faces and hands trying to get their mood. If they're staring at you, not in fear, but because they hate you, well, you know you're not wanted. We were told the kids could be dangerous too. They could be a decoy or carrying a bomb. So if they run in front of the convoy you're supposed to run them over. I've been a daycare teacher before I got deployed and one of the guys on my team who noticed about me said, Ed and I have been talking. If a kid came in front of the convoy we don't know if he'd be able to run him over. I had to tell him I don't know if I could either. But then our first day out a boy threw a rock at our vehicle. It made a crack like a bullet. And I knew then that if I had to hit a kid and kill him I would. Not to save my life but to save all the soldiers who might die. That was really hard to come to terms with. You feel. A time I was deployed to Iraq in 2005. I was 35 years old and I had been in the army for 14 years. Someone else on the plane to Kuwait and all the young soldiers around me were making all kinds of dumb ass jokes about going to Iraq. I gave them a piece of my mind. I don't know what this means to you, but to me this isn't a game. I have four kids at home who will have no understanding if I'm killed. Back when I was training at Fort Brad I knew things were going to get bad when I saw how my command was acting. Instead of the leadership saying we need to work together to bring these soldiers back safe and sound. Too many people wanted to be chief and not enough wanted to do the work. And they were training us like we were going to fight in a jungle, not the desert. They made us practice lying in the grass when taking cover behind jungle plants. Shit, there ain't no jungle in Iraq. Then I had this dream. I'm in a truck and it gets hit. The vehicle blows up and all I see is a big ball of fire above me. My sight goes black for a minute and when it comes back I'm descending from the clouds to my mom's house. My mom is there and she is going berserk because the news has gotten to her that I got killed and that's what hurt me the most. The next morning they ordered me to fire in range to practice shooting with live rounds but I couldn't shake that dream. I get my weapon and when I look up the first sergeant and the commander are there and I'm thinking these morons are going to get me killed. And all of a sudden this anger just comes over me and I can see myself shooting both those morons dead. Sir, I can't go to the range today, somebody needs to take this weapon off of me please. No sir, and I throw my weapon at my Kevlar on the ground and I walk off. It was a vicious and I tell him about my dream and he says it's a warning about my leaders being so weak. So I decide I've got to speak to them. So I go to the first sergeant. Sir, we've been here now for about four or five weeks and for some reason the senior enlisted still have not gotten it together. Now none of these soldiers are going to tell you this to your face but I will. We don't believe that you are able to lead a horse to water. He didn't like that. He slapped me with an article 15 before attempting to destroy government property. That was for throwing my M16 and my helmet on the ground. And then he tried to send me for a mental eval. Sir, I've been in the army 14 years sir and I have never been sent for a mental eval. Just talk to me sir when there's a problem. I know when I get tense my brows kind of frown up but it really doesn't mean anything. I'm not as fierce as I look. So I thought that was the end of that. Two weeks later we were deployed. When we flew into Kuwait there was nothing to do for six weeks. I had my 20th birthday there, sat around playing cards. And then finally in June 03 we convoyed to Baghdad to camp Mustang in the green zone. Our mission was to reinstall the police force, guard it from the looters, fix it up, weed out the good police from the bad. Some were taking bribes, raping, eating the prisoners. We weren't going to allow them to do that anymore. Some were part of the insurgency. We figured it out. Later we were moved to this different base where we were sleeping in tents with sandbags around them. We didn't have any protection from mortar there. This tent just down the road from us got hit. It was shredded. My friend Sandra had just left a latrine when it got mortared. She turned around. My first five months the routine was the same every day. You get up, load the trucks with equipment, go through inspections, meet with the squad about where we're going to go. And then I'd have breakfast and I'd come into a humdy with the two guys that made up my team and we'd convoy through Baghdad to a police station. 12 hours later the next squad comes, relieves you, you load up, go home, put everything away, go to sleep and do it all over again the next day. Being the lowest ranking soldier in my team, I was the gunner. That meant that when we were driving I was sticking out of the rooftop of the Humvee with my 50-cal machine gun and this little gun turret. Now in the turret you're exposed from name tag up. We didn't have any shields. Luckily in the beginning we mostly got good feedback and waves. I had like 20 little kids that were always following us and dancing for us. Some of the women did run away. And then later people got hostile. People stare at you, give you dirty looks, give you the finger because I'm telling you to go home or throw a rock at you. And guys expose themselves because you're female. Now as a soldier the hostility doesn't bother me. But as a woman it bothers me a lot. I hate it when guys do that, Iraqi or not. I think it's sick and disgusting. And some of our own soldiers wear a problem too. They make flirty or sexual comments, stare at you. That was the thing that I couldn't stand. You walk into the chow hall. There's a bunch of guys that just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you bed over somebody is going to say something. It got to the point with me where I was afraid of walking past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. It really wears you down. That's my job and I did. But right from my time at boot camp up until I got out I was harassed all the time. People used to call me Air Force Barbie. I couldn't go anywhere without being watched by a million eyes. I had a senior non-commissioned officer constantly quiz me about my sex life, show up with my barracks at night hours of the night and ask me personal questions that no supervisor should ever have the right to ask. I had a colonel sexually harassed me in ways I'm too embarrassed to explain. These are the people who had complete control over my life. When I worked, when I ate, when I slept, when I could talk or not talk, rest or not rest. These are the people who I was supposed to obey no matter what. One time my sergeant came sit with me in the chow hall and he said, I feel like I'm in a fishbowl the way all these man's eyes are boring into your back. That's why my life is like I said. Finally I went to my leadership and explained the situation. I was told to write an MFR, a memo for record, every time that officer said or did anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Well I did that for months until I had a binder just full of those memos. I took it straight to senior leadership. Did that officer get punished? He went on to make E9, which is the highest enlisted rank in the armed forces. Why am I complaining? It was only words and gestures right, but it should never have happened. I was a hard worker who loved her service in the country. This is not what I deserved. But like so many other females in the military I put up for the good of my family, my beliefs in my country. Well, after my first deployment I decided the constant harassment was all just a part of being a female in the military. And I made the decision not to tell anyone anymore about my problems. Excuse my language, but I decided to be a bitch. BITCH! When I first got to Iraq in November 2005, I was still hoping to do God's work among my fellow soldiers. I was there for a year and in the beginning I was attached to a platoon out of Alaska. My company had 60 men and one long female. Me. I was also the youngest, still 17. Because I was the only female there, men would forget in front of me all the time and say these terrible derogatory things about women. I had to hear these things every day. I'd have to say, hey! And then they'd look at me all surprised and say, oh, we don't mean you. One of the guys I thought was my friend tried to rape me. Two of my sergeants wouldn't stop making passes at me. Everybody's supposed to have a battle buddy in the army. Females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with or the showers so they don't get raped by men on their own side. But because I was the only female there, I didn't have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife. When we drove up into Iraq on a convoy in April, we saw how the people were living. It was so sad. We saw kids on the sides of roads using hand signals to beg for food and water. I mean, kids barefoot and dirty. We saw how they lived in makeshift mud houses held together with pieces of cloth and plastic. It makes us realize how blessed we are. Seeing those kids, though, made me miss my own kids real bad. Now, my youngest, he don't beat around the bush on Mother's Day. He sent me an email that said, mommy, love you, happy Mother's Day. Wish you were here. Hope you don't get killed in Iraq. Okay, bye. We were based at Camp Adder in the south, but it wasn't long before they sent me on a convoy up to Camp Anaconda, which is 50 miles north of Bad Van. Anaconda don't mortar so much. The soldiers called it Mortaritaville. But our trucks had no armor, nothing, and we weren't even authorized to be out on that road. But they sent us on out anyway. And at night, too, it was a suicide mission. I'm driving the middle gun truck when an IED goes off right under the truck in front of me. We were so loud it scared the living shit out of me. My heart was pumping so fast it felt like it was going to jump right out of my chest. But I showed none of what I was feeling to my soldiers. Two days later, the commanders ordered us out into formation. I expected some kind of apology, but they were blabbering on about nothing. Setting up the internet, however violating dress codes by wearing the wrong t-shirts for PT. Dude, I've been fired. I don't want to hear about no goddamn t-shirt. Then they asked, what can you say? But these soldiers were young and trained not to question their seniors. So I raised my hand. Did you all forget about the incident two days ago? Do you realize that none of your soldiers have any confidence in the leadership now? Don't you give a damn about us? First Sergeant gives me this look like he wants to kill me, but he don't say nothing. See, when you have a female with that type of attitude in the military, does not go over well with a lot of men. I deployed to Iraq in 2004 when I was 42 years old and a staff sergeant with 19 years of service under my belt. I was so proud of what I did in the military that when my two sons grew up, I encouraged them to join too. One's of the army, the other's of the Marine. And by the time I got sent to Iraq, they gave me seven grandchildren. I was based at Camp Cedar II, a convoy pit stop about 185 miles south east of Baghdad. I was put to work with the lieutenant in charge of organizing the movement repairs of all the vehicles. But they were so messed up they didn't know how many soldiers they had. You could be missing for a week and nobody would know. So I thought, okay, they don't know what they're doing any better than I do. And I started organizing the whole thing myself. But we were under command of this female major, a white woman who hated anybody who wasn't white and male. She replaced every soldier of color with a white soldier and she made the soldiers of color train the white people who would take over their jobs. She destroyed the careers of many soldiers of color doing that. But if you said anything, you'd be punished. One of the first things she did when we got to Iraq was she made me and the other female non-commissioned officers move into the same tents as the privates. We literally had that much space between our bugs. Now, you do not move a higher ranking soldier in with a lower ranking. It makes you lose your power base because it's their territory. The major new base. Soon the privates are refusing to obey our orders. This one girl, Benson, she had canopy over her bed with pink blankets and I thought what the fuck. But when I tell her to move her bed over a foot to make room for me, she goes into this itty bitty little voice like a baby about what my young soldiers were going throughout there on the roads in Iraq. One was this young female sergeant who trained as a driver but they made her into a gunner because there was a shortage of military police to do the job. That's how a lot of women ended up in combat in this war. Well, she and her team were out on the road one day and they were attacked with mortars and grenades. So, the sergeant fires back with a machine gun. He kills a bunch of civilians. When she gets back, she's all excited, shouting about what happened. She turns up, tomorrow's going to be a different story. Then I realized the combat stress team hasn't shown up. Now, they're supposed to come help soldiers who've been in battle like this. But nobody bothered to come. It'll be fine. The next morning, this sergeant and her team are immense. One's lying in their bunk in a fetal position and the others are sobbing because, well, they've killed all these innocent people. And Benson, the girl with the pink blankets. Well, she was driving a large truck in a convoy. Now over there you drive on the opposite side of the road a lot to avoid IEDs and you drive fast. Well, this car was coming towards her but nobody had time to get out of the way. So the car ends up driving right underneath the truck. Killed four children and both the parents. There was blood and body parts all over the place. So when she gets back to camp, she's in shock. I guess she thought I was still mad at her because she just stood there and didn't say anything. So I hugged her. She started crying. They should have debriefed these girls. They should have had a combat stress person there but they didn't. Nobody was taking care of these kids. So you can imagine the condition they were in when they got back home. And I know it's not getting any better. In October 03, I was sent up to Bakuba, just northeast of Baghdad. We stayed in camp Warhorse. One night we were in the wreck building. I was in my email when the whole building shook. There was this high pitch squealing sound and a flash and it went black. Everybody stared at each other a second then dropped to the ground. 20 seconds later another bump came in. I grabbed somebody's shirt. 10 feet to the bunker. We got outside. There was no bunker. Another mortar dropped 50 meters away. Shrapnel was flying over our heads. This girl was lying on the ground screaming. One inside the building was calling. A minute! Flashlight to see blood was all over the place. This girl was lying on the ground covered in and this guy called Sergeant Hill was helping her. I said, is this blood on hers? Is an artery hit? He said, no, I think some of it's mine. I got hit too but she's worse. I found someone else to help her and then I lifted his arm and there was all this blood. He was much worse than her but he didn't realize because he wasn't shocked. We packed all the wounded into the Humvee. I was holding back this guy's blood with my hand. I didn't have anything else. Another mortar dropped. We had no flag jackets, no kevlar, nothing so we threw our bodies on top of the patients. The mortar stopped long enough for us to drive the wounded to the hospital. Soon as I got there I saw a nurse and yelled, this is Sergeant Hill. He's 32, he's no positive, he needs blood now. How do you know? Because I'm covered in blood and none of it's mine. The first thing that helped me survive my time in Iraq was my boyfriend Stephen. I could not have got through it without him. We met the night that I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey for my AIT. We started talking immediately. He said, give me your number. And then later he texted me saying, what's good? We started going out right away. Stephen's black but he looks kind of Dominican. Real cute. Six foot big muscular guy from New York. Now you're not allowed to fraternize in the army which means have a relationship but everybody did. And because I was a specialist and he was a sergeant nobody could know about us. But everybody knew. And then I got pregnant by him. So I couldn't deploy what he did and the rest of my team did. I had to stay behind it for Dix with strangers. And then after three months I had a miscarriage. It made me feel empty and sad. I really loved Stephen and I really wanted to have his baby. They gave me one month to recover and then they said, you're going to Iraq. Which it made me really mad because one month is not enough time to get over losing a baby. But in February 2005 they sent me to Fobb Spiker. They put me in this chew which is a tiny trailer that sleeps two people. But you got to share it with three. The night I arrived it was so tight I had to squeeze my way into it. I didn't end up getting along with a girl on my right. But the girl on my left she was a friend from before. She was really excited to see me because the last she'd heard I was pregnant. So the first thing I did was I put on my favorite perfume and I went to look for Stephen. Now we hadn't seen each other for four months and he knew I was coming but he didn't know when. So I knocked on his door and his room he said that he didn't know where he was. And then I remembered the time difference that when it was midnight for him it was three o'clock for me and that's when we would talk online. So I thought, I know where he is. So I ran over to the recreational building and sure enough there he was sitting at a corner computer with his back to me. But I didn't go up to him right away. Instead I sat at a computer and I logged online. And sure enough there he was. So I wrote, I'm in Kuwait. It's really cool that I'm on your time zone. And then he wrote, it's weird. I can smell you. I must really miss you because I can smell your perfume. So then I wrote, turn around. And he turned around and he just started laughing. Police station that we fixed up in Baghdad. We'd go through the day searching people coming into the station and searching guard positions. I searched mostly women. Guys were not allowed to do that in Iraq. You'd go through the day standing or sitting. You'd be there for like 12 hours. It's hot. You can't move. And you have to watch everybody all the time. But you get used to that. The thing that I couldn't stand was the people that I was working with. My squad leader was a pervert who was old, like 35 or 40. He used to point out these little Iraqi girls and say disgusting sexual stuff about them all the time. And girls were like 12 or 13 years old. But the worst was my team leader. He made passes at me at first. He stopped. But then he tried to have revenge by controlling everything that I did. I had to eat with him. He wouldn't let me eat with my friends. I had to clean my weapon with him. He wouldn't let me talk to anybody. So I'd sit up in my Humvee turret all day long just to get away from him. Every day. And people knew it. They'd come up to me and say, When I tried to get switched, they wouldn't do it. That really made me hate my time there. It got so that I didn't trust anybody in my company after a few months. I didn't trust anybody at all. During my first few months in Iraq, my sergeant assaulted and harassed me so often I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided to report him. But when I turned him in... The one common factor in all these problems is you. Don't see this as a punishment, but we're going to have you transferred. Then that same sergeant got promoted right away. I didn't get my promotion for six months. They transferred me from Mosel to Rawa. Rawa was nothing but a tent camp on the Syrian border covered in sand. The camp had Marines, Navy, Air Force and Army. There were over 1500 men in the camp and less than 18 women. So it wasn't any better than the first platoon I was in. I was fresh meat to the hungry men there. I was less scared of the mortar rounds that came in every day than I was of the men who shared my food. I would never drink late in the day even though it was so hot. As the portagons are so far away it was dangerous. So I go for 16 hours in 140 degree heat and not drink. I just ate skiddles to keep my mouth from being too dry. I collapse from dehydration so often I have IV track lines from all the times they had to rehydrate me. They made me cook because I was female. Though I wanted to do other jobs too. So I was cooking 1500 meals three times a day. From four in the morning till nine at night the next day. I was exhausted all the time. One day somebody wrote my name on a porter job seeing I had sex with a lot of people. Only they put it in much worse worse than that. When I wasn't working I went to chapel and then I went to bed. That was all I did. Work, chapel, bed. Work, chapel, bed. It was so untrue but I couldn't prove it. I couldn't defend myself. Nobody there wanted to believe me. Nobody was on my side. I'd always tried to stay cheerful. Be nice to everyone. Back in boot camp I was known as sunshine. But within a few months I went from cheerful and smiling to bursting into tears all the time. I couldn't even smile anymore. I called mama crying and told her what they were doing to me. If you were treading in the path of righteousness, none of this would be happening. I was working in the entrance of Spiker. I saw a convoy being hit all the time. Highway one ran right past our base and we'd call it the highway of death because so many people got killed there with IEDs and mortars. One night this convoy got hit and it was like this huge flash in the night and then they drove to us with their wounded. This civilian he got out of his car and started throwing up because his brother who was sat next to him had been shot in the throat. I was on a tank on the road just looking at him. We radioed for an ambulance, but they had to go through all these clearance and shit so by the time it arrived it was too late. The guy was already dead. I never really thought that much about death when I was in Iraq. I figured everything happens for a reason and I'm going to die sometime, right? I'm afraid of dying. What I was afraid of though was losing a limb or scarring my face or tripping because walking is really hard. You got all this heavy equipment and it's hot and the equipment weighs nearly half your weight if you're small like me. I was worried about our equipment too. We had these flat jackets from Vietnam which everybody said were no good against AK-47s which is what the Iraqis are shooting. Our radios were old and broken. Our ambulances rattled and shook. I could not imagine travelling in one of those. I didn't mind working at the checkpoint. I got to work with Stephen that way because he was the team leader and the sunrises and sunsets were beautiful and I got along with the guys on my team most of the time. There were a couple of things they did that bothered me. Stephen went home for two weeks on R&R and when he was gone they hit on me all the time. And then when he got back they made up all these stories about me hoping that we'd break up and that they'd get a chance with me. Oh and if we were attacked they would make me stay right at the back of the tank and they'd be like, no it's going to happen to you. We had to guard out in the road. The soldier that's out in the road is known as the sacrifice soldier because you're the first to be hit if anything happens. For a while they put me out there. Every night they didn't want to hear me say I'm a soldier, a soldier. Just like you and you. My second deployment was to Afghanistan in 2006 with the Army 10th Mountain Division. Now by this time I'm a soldier. With years of sexual harassment under my belt. So I decided this time it was going to be different. This time I decided to put up a wall. Now my wall became thicker and thicker. You know normally I'm a very bubbly person but all that disappeared behind the wall and to this day I don't know if I've ever regained that part of myself. But you have to put up a front and act like one of the boys even if it means losing who you are. You become very cold. You don't show your emotions. And you don't let anyone in because if you do they will walk all over you. Still harassment was worse than it had ever been. A few months into my deployment I was directed to pull knockout duty now. I smoked like a chimney when I was in Afghanistan. This night was no exception. So after a few hours I put my weapon on my radio in the guard shack and walked 20 feet to the close smoke deck. You don't ever leave your weapon unattended while you're in a combat zone. I had a momentary lapse. Thought I would be okay 20 feet from my weapon. I was wrong. I've just taken a few drags of my cigarette when somebody grabbed me in a chokehold and dragged me behind some power generators. All I could see was a man much larger than me in a US armed forces uniform. I struggled with all my strength to get free while he dragged me to the spot. I tried my hardest to fight him off but it wasn't enough to finish his deal. Well I waited until my ship was over and then did what every law and order show says to do not take a shower and go straight to the authorities. I thought they would listen to me. I was wrong. They told me if I filed a claim that I'd been raped I'd also be charged with dereliction of duty for leaving my weapon unattended in a combat zone. That could get me court-martialled. It could end my career. But I shut up. It didn't say anything to anyone. Soon after I got to Iraq they made me convoy commander. Now some of those convoys were 25 trucks long and I was in charge of making sure that every one of those soldiers and drivers did the mission and got back in one piece. One time I'm in the lead gun truck going through a crowded street and a young guy up in the gunner's chute. Now he hasn't been out on the road before. He's been in the office doing paperwork for so long. He was getting called Professor Stapleton. Now we've got traffic coming at us and civilians all over the place and then this car comes towards us too close for comfort. But being that it's my gunner's first time I didn't know what to do. So I tell him by our warning shot he doesn't shoot. So I tap him. I fucking shoot that weapon. You do know how to shoot, right? I close her and close her but the moron still doesn't shoot so I hit him hard. He knows I'm not playing. My gunner panics me. He's only 19. He grabs his head and he yells. I don't think you shot nobody but you still got a lot of shit coming at us. You hear me? So I need you to focus right now and pay attention. But his face is red and he's yelling. It makes him feel like he is matured and it makes him feel like he is matured too. They think I am not some wimpy female because of the job I did in Iraq. The longer we were in Baghdad the worse it got. It got so that you knew something was going to happen every day. You just didn't know what. One day we were driving to this police station in Najif when suddenly this IUD police was up right next to my OB truck and I must have passed out because when I got I went to the hospital and they cleaned me up. They gave me painkillers but I couldn't work for a month because I was deaf so I just hung out on bass. I watched a lot of movies and I slept. My body hurt so bad. But I wasn't fazed about being wounded like that. I was like okay I'm alive. In fact I was kind of pissed that I didn't get hurt worse. I really hated it out there. My shrapnel's still in there. They only take it out if it's really big. They took it out of my face. You can see the scars but it's not hideous. My hearing's not so good as it used to be. My friend Michelle Whitmer she was in our platoon. She got hit too in an ambush shot in the armpit. It hit her in artery. She was 20 years old. My tour in Iraq was a real eye-opener for me because my biggest enemy out there was my own company. Officers would brief us by saying it's Indian country out there. Go get them. I found that very shocking if this was Indian country perhaps I'm on the wrong side. A lot of young people would come and ask me for help especially soldiers of color and I would stand up for them against their command. After all I was old enough to be their mom but that got me into lots of trouble with my command. I was banned from my own unit. I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone and then they sent me to another place in Scania. That's where they send soldiers to punish him because Scania is on a major highway and gets mortar all the time. The whole time I was at Scania I hardly ever wrote home even to my sons. I didn't even think about home because you become hollow like a robot. You get up you do your job you hear people complain you talk about this you talk about that but you don't look inside. My sister sent me a medicine box with my prayer stuff in it so I'd sit at night smoke a cigarette and offer my prayers and I watched the moon that brought me some peace. That and the songs I would hear acumen singing in the morning at Camp Scania the prayer songs the songs would echo and oh my god it was beautiful like angels. I'd wake up peaceful because of those songs I think they saved me from myself because there were times I thought I was going insane. What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I not just getting on playing and going home? What am I doing on this base? It's a concentration camp when I started talking to the Iraqis who worked on the base. The young ones would come up to me and say you're Indian from India and I would say no. Then finally one of them comes back after seeing the movie Dancers with Wolves and he goes you're ready Indian and I said yes I'm a ready Indian and he goes Native American I was invited to have a meal with them at the market they had just beside the base. Same kind of rice my people cook the same kind of bread and chicken we make this kind of bread. Tell me about your people and your religion I want to know about your women I want to know what you think about this war. So many of their traditions are the same mine the significance of the moon our tobacco ceremonies the way we eat a sage and their clan system how people marry in and out of clans and the rules about paying things back. What am I doing here? Why am I doing this to these people I started to see how we were changing their clan system their council system that's been there for thousands of years I started to see how imposing democracy means is not democracy anymore and I began to think this war is a genocide if it wasn't we'd have things in place tell the women tell the children tell the civilians don't care about them I knew if you were going to get extended and I didn't want to be disciplined but then the day finally came sitting on the plane next to Steven I was so nervous I didn't know how my family was going to act or how I was going to cope going back to being a civilian I didn't know what was going to happen with Steven either What every girl hates in the army is you meet a guy and you get close but you never really know what kind of person he's going to be on the outside because people can present themselves however they want over there I have this friend who was so in love with her boyfriend from Iraq that when they got home she took a plane to go visit him and she waited at the airport for him to pick her up and he never came on the plane and I was walking through the airport do you know there was nobody there saying welcome back or nothing nothing just me walking through the airport carrying my bags I didn't believe that I was back from Iraq until I saw my now I never cry only when Grammy died come and hold me it's like you're a ghost it's like you died and you're coming back to life and you have to weasel your way back in because everyone has had to adjust without you I came back a completely different person I'm not as easy going I don't like loud noise I don't like being around a lot of people and I lost how to dance I think I'm so in tune with marching that I gotta be really drunk to dance and I started getting really depressed that's never happened to me before I've always been able to deal with things but I think it was Iraq and being in the army and Grammy and losing the baby it just all got too much and it made me really angry the way that I was being treated as a female veteran we don't get the same respect of men we have to really fight for it tell people about being shot at and seeing death because nobody believes me I moved east to be with Stephen and to go to school to get away from my family and then I got pregnant by him again he is a really sweet guy but he's different than before he's from the hood so he has whoever he had before he had me I don't know if he has them now but he had to go back to his life and I gotta go back to mine so I guess I'm having this baby by myself do you know to this day I've never spoken to my family about my time in Iraq I mean they ask me but I just say oh it was hot I don't want to tell them anything because I don't want to feel sorry for myself people that are close to you they they don't understand anyhow you can't hate them for not understanding but a lot of the time you do if you ask the majority of soldiers do you know what our purpose is in Iraq they couldn't tell you some might give you some political bullshit to justify it or say that because we wear the uniform we're supposed to not speak bad about it but most soldiers would say they don't see the point if you think about this area here the place the military built for us soldiers he got toilets and running water showers he got trailers, beds, mattresses air condition and washers and dryers you know big generators running all night he got Taco Bells Subways PX's Good Food, Lobster, Shrimp, Steak and we're not paying the Iraqis any property taxes or anything at all for all our luxuries but out here on the outskirts you've got Iraqi families living in huts no electricity no running water who are starving and you tell me when I go outside these gates and there's a kid on the side of the road asking for water I'm not supposed to give him some we've got warehouses full of water but I can't give one bottle of this kid out of here who don't have any because we bombed this shit out of his water supply and everything else too the US government is going to stand for anyone coming in and telling us how to run things like that but we think it's fine to go over there and westernize them these people have been living this way for centuries now I may not agree with their way but that's their country and who's to say that our way is the right way you know what we are we're just bullies bullies that's what we are I got home from Iraq I kept everything to myself I thought I was going to be okay I jumped straight back in school I worked really hard but by a year later I was tense all the time snippy to my friends hostile stopped hanging out I did homework every night for hours and I got jumpy loud noises bothered me people walking behind me I wasn't sleeping good either I didn't get any help though I thought my problem was hormones or something girl things maybe that's because those post traumatic stress videos they show you never represent women I don't act like a guy who has PTSD I don't get into a car driving miles so I didn't even recognize that there was anything wrong until my boyfriend said you should get some help so I did some people ask me what the best part of being in the army was for me is it this drive that I have to succeed now or all the friendships that I made I can't think of a best part every day there was a bad day by the time I got home in April 2004 after 11 months in Iraq I was really a mess I couldn't sleep for more than 50 minutes at a time I'd be awake for two hours in between I got angry easily agitated I had nightmares about the mortar attacks flashbacks on New Year's Eve they had fireworks in our town square I heard the booms I felt my knees every time I opened my eyes the faces in front of me would fade away and I'd be brought to that night and were attacked I was crying hysterically my friends didn't know what to do and I had nothing to talk about all my friends' conversations were about movies that I hadn't seen or fashion I didn't know about anything I talked about turned morbid very quick in Iraq death, mortar attacks and everyone would get quiet no one would know what to say I remember this girl talking about how she wanted some designer purse and I said yeah I know what you mean one time in Iraq these kids wanted some food and I felt really bad because we didn't have enough to give them I hate it when you can't get what you want everyone just sat there they felt like assholes I felt like an asshole I was so out of place after I got home I couldn't feel comfortable in my skin and I couldn't talk about it to anyone I didn't know other vets were going through the same thing so I thought I was crazy my back and head were injured too I'm 80% disabled now because my back so messed up from banging around in the humvee no shock absorbers hitting my head on the ceiling compressing my spine and I couldn't stop worrying about that guy on the mortar attack Sergeant Hill and whether he lost his arm and could I have done something more I tried to get a medical discharge from the army to pay for my benefits but they made it so difficult I gave up I couldn't get the tuition they promised me for a long time either for a long time I couldn't even get to a clinic for my medication or therapy because all the VA clinics were so far away I work with veterans now so I know a lot of soldiers go through this which helps it's important for vets to reach out to each other so you don't feel alone and crazy like I do I still think a lot about why we went to war was Saddam a bad person needed to be removed from power yes was he the reason for us going in there not really and it's not the guy sitting in their conditioned offices at the Pentagon we're feeling the aftermath of it it's the mother and father who are getting their child sent home in a box it's the innocent people of Iraq who've been killed and raped and had their villages turned upside down I really do love some of those people of Iraq but I don't know how to help them some of those kids were so beautiful they only wanted attention and food if I had to kill a kid to save my buddies I would how can anybody love anyone who has such horrible thoughts when I came home from Afghanistan I didn't talk to anyone about the rape I felt it was all my own fault it took me 6 months to even tell my mother why I had to leave the Air Force I felt it was all my own fault I felt it was all my own fault if I had to leave the Air Force well I could never go back military has a way of making females believe they brought this upon themselves yes I made some bad decisions but the guilt lies with the predator not me there's an unwritten go to silence when it comes to sexual assault in the military but if this happened to me and nobody knew about it I just know what's happening to other females as well it makes me so mad when I think about the fact that I let them get to me and left the military I had dreams of becoming a heart-ranking officer one day like my father and my grandfather now those dreams will never come true the time I came home I felt like I messed everything up I let my mom and dad down I let everyone down I hated myself September 30th 2006 that was the day it was going to end no more shame would be brought to my family no more shame would be brought to my family it will be over take the tip of the blade to the middle of your forearm touch the top of the main vein press the home steel through your skin drag it down so there's no room for mistakes one shot, one kill that's what they teach in the army see the thick blood running bright red for a moment it seemed that that gash would bring relief I was ready to cut the other arm when the phone rang it was mama she felt God pushing her to call she wanted to tell me how proud of me she was feeling ceremonies those women anymore to me everything they talked about was petty I didn't want to hear it I lost connection with my mother my sons my boyfriend everybody I came back so angry and I didn't know why nobody could stand me I couldn't stand me so it's really hard to admit you have PTSD it feels weak because the military teaches you to suck it up and drive on after I've been back a while my former husband George died he raped me and beat me up but I went to his funeral anyway maybe just to make sure he was dead but there was another part of me that cried not because he was my husband but because he was a Vietnam vet who got lost he didn't come back from war the same he always talked about raping girls in Vietnam so what he did to me wasn't any different from what he was used to so whose fault is it I don't know but I don't think he was born that kind of person I think the military made him like that and I forgave him after all I have two sons from him after I'd been home from Iraq for about half a year I wouldn't even dress up didn't care couldn't concentrate couldn't sleep couldn't work and I became paranoid thinking people were following me and breaking into my house and I was afraid to take sleeping pills because that would make me vulnerable somebody attacked me and I was broke I joined the army to get off welfare 22 years in the military here I was a friend who I'd served with in Iraq came home a year ago they found her dead in her home she'd been dead for two days at PTSD and depression so bad and she couldn't tell anybody because there was nobody to tell so she killed herself isn't it over when you come home one thing I really can't stand is for people to come and say thank you for your service are you taking that are you thanking me for participating in a genocide is that what you want because I am not protecting anybody's country I am taking somebody's even though I never pulled the trigger I feel that I participated in a genocide I feel very responsible and that's a hard thing to live with very ashamed that I didn't see it sooner stand up against it I was a drill sergeant my job was to teach other people's children how could I as a spiritual person teach people to come how as a mother could I send my own sons to war I asked myself that I bought into the whole thing I thought it was an honourable thing to do I can only hope my ancestors will forgive me or that I'll be able to forgive myself myself I've been supporting the human rights organisation Liberty they're looking after our civil liberties please do look at the form and think about joining they have a great campaign on at the moment called military justice so in a moment when the chairs arrive we're coming fill in the feedback form email me so I'm going to go on to the stage Helen Benedict who's the playwright of the play and she'll tell you all about her research and she's a professor from the university Helen if you'd like to come through can we have more live I'd like to introduce Mark Evans he's an ex-soldier and we're called Code Black and this is experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and we've widened the debate the last couple of weeks Mark please come through is we've widened the debate we've had a few after show talks and we've looked at domestic violence we've looked at everyday sexism we had law abase and now we're widening it to male soldiers and the experiences they've had and Helen's done all the research in the States and Mark represents the British Army and we'll see if there are any differences or how they feel so I'm going to start off actually asking Mark I'm going to follow the format of the play which is widened into the army if you'd like to expand on that Mark yeah I suppose to give a bit of background I'm 37 now I joined the army when I was 25 I served six and a half years as an instrument of culture and guards it's very hard to really try and articulate as to why I joined the army I think it's just like what it was for me it was a childhood ambition or a childhood dream number of my friends were at school they wanted to be train drivers they wanted to be lawyers they wanted to be able to do things like that for me it was always the army whether that was because the films I watched or the crowd I hung around with or whether it was because we used to go and hang out in the woods and play with sticks and machine guns but there was a was it a sense of adventure you felt that the adventure was all yeah I mean to a point I think I ultimately saw it as the vehicle to fulfilling my life right and I like to expand on your experiences the book is basically about Mark's experiences in Afghanistan it's quite graphic I actually have read the book and it was quite interesting hearing because some of the things that he wrote about is mirrored in the play and one of them I'll mention is Maria Sanchez in the last part of place when asked about how was it she said it's rather hot and when I was reading the book this is exactly what Mark would say when he was on leave from Afghanistan it's hot and the food's okay and I found that really interesting with some of the comments that he wrote in his book about his timing in Afghanistan hearing what some of the girls said or how they dealt with what people asked do you want to expand on that a little bit? yeah sure we just said well that having watched the play I just came and saw it a couple of weeks ago the experiences and the feelings are very very very similar there's this sort of the suggestion or this possibility that there's a male female divide or that there's an American UK thing but the underlying factors that drive or deliver PTSD I think are very very common to both I mean for myself in terms of war and what brought it on I was blown up shot up had a number of my soldiers under me die killed people fought in brutal hand to hand situations and experienced weakening to describe as the horrors of war and those things themselves are ultimately fundamentally terrible but I think with the PTSD the thing with the PTSD is much the personal processing of it and the way that you deal with it as an individual so when you look at the play and when people talk about the way they relate to their families feelings of responsibility particularly as a soldier the fact that you're afraid is something that really weighs very heavily on your mind and it's those very personal things that lead you to where or something that led me to where I was in terms of PTSD yes they were caused by seeing some pretty horrific things but I think I'm always very very keen to point out that I was a soldier I saw war provided me or maybe got me PTSD but PTSD is something that anyone can have can suffer from I thought one of the interesting points was that when Mark came back from Afghanistan he went to see a medical officer after three weeks and explained that he couldn't get it out of his brain and the chapter said to him here's some sleeping tablets you'll get over it that's what everybody thinks about and he was dismissed I mean Mark's making very light of it but when he returned his feelings weren't really addressed at all what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to transfer over to Helen and find out about the research she did she researched over three years and the men that you met in your research would like to expand on that I think Mark your point that there aren't really that many differences is really important and when I felt feel as well between what men and women go through in war and I very much wanted to write about what war does to people and that's more than the other things that came out more specific to women came out as I was interviewing from the women I did not go in looking for all the stories about harassment and sexual assault I went in looking for what is it like to be a woman in combat because we haven't heard much about that the Iraq war was a watershed for the number of women who were fighting in combat and getting wounded and killed more women got wounded and killed and served in the Iraq war than all American wars put together since World War II so I was very much looking at that so I spent three years interviewing some 40 women who served in the Iraq and some of them also in Afghanistan and in doing so of course I met a lot of men I talked to their their partners who were in the military I talked to their commanding officers to their sergeants to anyone I could find who served with them because I needed to corroborate their stories as much as I could and I also got really good at spotting a soldier or a marine just about anywhere so I began to trying to pick them up on the street where and we would just end up talking on trains and quite striking and then as I began to talk and give lectures more and more came up to me and there were a few stories I'll tell that were very moving to me one was a young Nicaraguan man who had joined the US military to get a citizenship this is one of the things that President Bush promised that you could skip all the difficult things and you would get citizenship and you wouldn't be deported if you joined the military and went to Iraq and he came back and he said I left a wife and child and I came back incapable of being a husband or a father and I'm good for nothing but war and I just I'm going to re-enlist and go back because I don't fit in here and I'm terrible for them and by the way they won't give me my citizenship that was very heart breaking and I've heard it echoed a lot the difficulty of the kind of patients you need for everyday life to fit back in the dullness of everyday life the kind of patients you need to be around children in particular it's very very hard if you've been through war but I also heard an alarming number of stories about men being victimised by bullying and hazing in ways that often involve sexual assault and I just read a report that came out from Human Rights Watch this very month that said the majority of men who were sexually assaulted in the military had done so in the context of hazing and bullying rather than being often drunk in a bar and then being assaulted or at a party so much was interesting I think there's a whole other level when it comes to PTSD there's not only a PTSD of trauma but if you've been assaulted or you've been harassed or you've been bullied to picked on in particularly targetives that causes PTSD too so these soldiers can come back with double triple layers of trauma to work out Just to ask Mark when you got the diagnosis of PTSD how long did it take from the moment you felt the world was spiralling out of control having read his work it's quite interesting that it took a while the world spiralled and there came a point where you looked for help I think you said I came back initially and I went to get some doctor after about three weeks I felt something was wrong and I was told here some sleeping pills and go and you'll be fine and in their defence there is everyone who comes back from war will have a certain amount of trauma and some people the majority the majority of people will recover naturally and that might take a long time but they will come back down and PTSD is when something has happened of whatever reason that you need the assistance coming back but one of the problems that I had and it's common to a lot of people I was told that it was all okay and I sort of made this moment speaking to people what you do then what people tend to do is retreat within themselves you become very isolated and you're living a world every waking minute, every sleeping hour where you're reliving Afghanistan so for me it was Afghanistan and you just naturally assume that everyone else kind of knows that's what's going on and what's going on in your head because if you did it it's real and you're there and you're actually very you're very isolated you're very withdrawn and silly enough to have a few dreams it goes all out of control I thought there was an interesting point in your book that there were some young recruits that you were you were at the firing range and when you heard the gunshots he went straight down like Pablo Middog he went straight down on the ground and another chap did as well he was most recognised I think stuff like that is fairly common and it's something we all recognise I remember walking along with a mate of mine and he'd just come back from Iraq and then there was a delivery van the doors and he found himself on the street on the street it becomes such an automatic response that even though you're back in civilian life that if you hear a sound you react there's one thing for me smells are a real problem that we don't have to talk about I went for a number of years I was blown up in the Land Rover and there's a particular smell that you get when you're blown up in the Land Rover and sat in a sandy condition so it's similar to the smell of bitumen or tar and I smelled a number of years I couldn't walk past it roadworks without having that fight of life I think I'm feeling physically sick without throwing myself but my mind is to throw your way back in that moment I think that's reflected in the play Hannah Peterford when she hears the fireworks on New Year's Eve just collapses and hears all the bombshells and everything and she was transported back into the world of war and the other thing I would like to ask her is when did you how did you get support what helped you to pull yourself out of this sort of world of noise and destruction I was very lucky just to come back to motivations and things the British Army is very similar to the American there's people joined for different reasons and dare I say a lot of officers joined because they want to a lot of soldiers joined for other reasons but it's a job they might not have other options I was very lucky I had a strong family behind me I had a lot of friends and quite frankly it was their support and not so much their support but their direct support because the other time they felt hopeless and didn't have a clue what they were able to do but it was the fact that I had that I knew that I had these people around me and they loved me and they loved me I mean in the play I'm just bringing it back to play is Santiago Flores one of her friends ends up committing suicide she felt terribly alone she had nobody to talk to and that was the end point for her and one of the important things I've gathered from the book is that if you have a support system that it can help you to get on to the next stage but you have to get there yourself and one of the things I think is great about the play and one of the reasons that I wrote the book that I wrote wasn't it wasn't about me it wasn't about necessarily the people who have PTSD it was about people who the people that are around them because the vast number of people are affected by PTSD on the people who have PTSD but their friends, their family and everyone else who is there, who are the people who can actually make a difference and certainly the conversations I had particularly with my parents you talk about me having a good to bad time but I was in my own world they just didn't know what to help they didn't know what the hell to do and it was horrific for them on a completely different level I wanted to ask you Mark if there's a stigma in the army to admitting that you have PTSD because it's a huge issue in the States Yes No Yes and no I remember the first time I remember after I got diagnosed with PTSD and we were talking about it earlier and it was this wonderful moment of relief but at the same time because I had a label I knew there was something wrong but at the same time there was this crashing feeling I went Jesus I'm mentally ill what does this mean but I went back to my job and I went to speak to my bosses about it and very sheepishly sort of put my feet in and explained what happened and they looked they were surprised you know we're in the army and they just said this is what has been going on for forever and the problem often lies not with the institution in these cases where there isn't actually a stigma about PTSD because it has been going on forever and perhaps the army does deal with it although it deals with it often within its own confines the problem is with the individual because particularly in the army where you've got this very sort of machismo based sort of society where you're told you're strong where everything is about you being you looking after the bloke to your left your bloke to your right particularly if you're an officer you have responsibility so you're actually admitting to yourself there's something wrong is so so against the whole ethos the military culture the stigma is actually something that you create yourself rather than what the army thinks about it because quite frankly the army wants to help well that certainly isn't always the case in the US there has been many many reports it wants to help and manages the help and does a very different thing but the number of soldiers who never go to seek help or who try to go and seek help and are shut off or mocked, they're mocked and turned away it's scandalous I mean this has been coming out now it's really been a huge issue and it's one of the things that's prevented people from getting the help and maybe the most, the single biggest thing that's prevented people from getting help along with what one of the soldiers mentioned which is that because there's no national health system in the states you have to depend on the department of veterans affairs and they are scattered through the country and they're not that many of them so a lot of soldiers come from towns hundreds of miles away from the nearest hospital and the waiting lists make the national health but terrific there is a big difference there between the British and the American it's not as through in terms of the size and the scale of what's going on, the number of people in the army it makes it that in itself makes it very very different or quite a different city I wanted to ask Helen was it other soldiers or was it the people at the top where was the pushing back of the PTSD did they feel they'd be mocked by fellow soldiers or was it they felt they couldn't go to it was their command as it was the people they were going to who were supposed to be the vehicle to help including sometimes military doctors themselves but usually it would be their immediate sergeant or their immediate lieutenant they would go to depend on their rank and those people have been a lot of them were exposed as being just completely derogatory and mocking but then to bring it back to the sexual assault thing and that's another thing if you're a man and you've been sexually assaulted the chances of you getting up the courage to report it are really really tiny because then you will be mocked by everybody and the women are already punished and mocked enough for it and blamed but it's actually even worse for men because they're seen as the failure as a soldier if you can't fight off some pervert kind of thing so they're just saw the statistics I think it's something like 11% of men report it whereas it's now up to 24% of women report it can I just, sorry with the PTSD thing as well what there is on the problems is actually diagnosing PTSD is not a straightforward and easy thing to do particularly because it's hard to diagnose people who've got PTSD quite often because you talk about anger and you talk about getting drunk and doing crazy things and these things do happen but a lot of the time people who've got PTSD are within themselves and are actually quite withdrawn from things and so aren't bringing themselves forward into an arena or into a light where people can actually diagnose them and even then as you know it's not a very straightforward diagnosis that leads me to ask Helen did you find there were differences between men and women because one of the characters in the play Sylvia Gonzales says I don't behave like a man who has PTSD how did you find that in your research I think there's much more in common than there isn't I was thinking about this all the way through the play and I anticipated and I know that a lot as Mark said a lot of the things that the women say they feel are just the same for men the withdrawal the the short tempers they're constantly being flying back into actually being all that is very similar there are studies that show that women tend to be less violent outwards and more soft destructive right nevertheless more men do commit suicide than women so it's complicated to sort it out plus again it does come back to sexual assault because a huge part of the PTSD is a combat compounded with harassment and assault for women much more than it is for men so I mean one in three women and that's where the culture of blame makes you really withdraw into yourself and not seek help and just to cite another study came out this month if you report a rape whether you're a man or a woman or a sexual assault in the US military you are 12 times more likely to be punished for it or to experience retaliation than the accused is likely to be investigated why? because it's not a problem that the wow why is that I can't write a whole book about that because I don't know if Mark will agree with me on this but the military is an insular world unto itself and very very defensive of it the reputation and because of the chain of command to the people who do the assaults of usually the superiors to the victims and they are often the ones in charge of deciding whether to investigate or prosecute in fact they always are so they're being asked to investigate themselves which is an obvious conflict of interest and because of the old boys club mentality women are seen as second class soldiers anyway they're seen as traitors they're seen as wimps as soldiers if they've been assorted they're blamed for it they're seen as bringing down the men all the old rape myths come in and they mix with the culture of the military and it's defensiveness not wanting to know anybody to know it's dirty laundry and it ends up being a very very oppressive atmosphere that is a super short-hand answer I'm just talking about my experience with the British Army I served with women throughout my time and I took women in Afghanistan in the same situation where I was I think one thing I would say is that one thing that Afghanistan has done with the British Army I think has made the position of women much more tenable but what it's done is it has brought about what a lot of people consider to be a very open playing field where everyone has gone on their thing and women is the big thing at the moment in probably the British Army you go back to something every decade so 20 years ago we had an issue of race and there was a lot of institutionalised racism that there's still some that exists but we know that's a part of that's a reflection of culture as much as the wider culture as much as anything else ten years ago it was about homosexuality and homosexuals in the army again combat has helped to move these things on within the military and again you still have people come from some way before to join the army it's rather come sometimes I'm using to talk about institutionalised racism et cetera because people have got an understanding of an idea of things like this and the bigotries before they actually come to it and I think at the moment and there's been quite a lot of press particular things have been said in the American press my own infantry and it's not perfect, it's not but I think it's something you can speak in the British military where post Afghanistan there is a shift and it is born unfortunately of conflicts and combat I think in your book you mentioned a particular medical person who was tough as nails and I just can't remember her name at the moment but it really showed that there was little respect for this female medic who was tough as nails who do the job just as well as not No, what I'm trying to say is that there is that understanding that women are in position Of course that's true let's not get carried away with generalisations because of course there are individual women majority of women are not sexually assaulted and they are they have every in America they are allowed to actually in combat that was lifted there of course women who are respected but not enough the statistics show it and I believe they will show it in the British military too because it is a very extremely machismo world and it's a long long history in the militaries of all the world of seeing women as booty and loot and not as fellow soldiers and there's objects of sexual objects of prayer and I think maybe I've had American soldiers tell me they think that the British military is more disciplined and less chaotic with the American military and better run and that might help it would be I think it would be naive to say that it isn't a problem because we know there is a horrible evidence of women that's coming out more and more I take time to two points in a way that one is that it's interesting what you talk about this sort of into the organisation which looks after itself it's naturally defensive and even talking now as somebody who was a soldier I have to be very careful about naturally falling back and defending the army and actually sometimes all the things I want to say are actually quite anti it but it's something but it is something that's the training work the training work to you absolutely why what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to open up the debate because I think that you'd like to ask would anybody like to ask a question yes please since it's obviously like history of knowing of post-traumatic stress and just the general like post-bored psychosis mental health issues all kind of degrees that come out of that how is it's like not more like just training and awareness given to the soldiers as like part of their work going into that so they're aware of it coming out and having like even within the military like supports for soldiers like leaving and going back home to say like this is a good doctor you can go and talk to if you feel you've got post-traumatic stress it's a really good question would you like to answer there are some I mean there are processing and there's debriefing and when you first come back in the US minute you spend some time in the time of compound before you're released and allowed to go home where you're examined by a psychologist you answer questionnaires and you're given lectures about don't beat up your wife and you know but most of the soldiers I've talked to find it all a bit laughable because it's very formulaic and they do push a lot of pills they really push a lot of pills both at war and afterwards but it's not as if they're not acknowledging that there's an after map of war in that that there's soldiers half in shell shock as it used to be called so there is some question is how effective it is sorry to a couple of things about that I suppose I'll come back to that it's been going on for ever in a minute because I think it's an interesting experience for my own family my grandparents in particular things I learnt when it was discovered that I had Peter Steeve and my grandfather's return from the war that it wasn't a new thing the way that the military deals and again I can only talk about my own experiences in the British Army and what I've seen is that over the past probably about 10 years the way the British Army deals with things it's not perfect they lose and again I should add that I currently work with a charity at the moment and we look after in fact we take veterans a lot from the PTSD to do archaeology and one of the biggest problems that we know that is faced is losing people in the system because if somebody leaves the army the military has a duty of care up until the point that somebody leaves and then they hand them over to the NHS but a lot of these people slip between there's a lot of charities out there things like Health for Heroes now these days they get a lot of good press or back stress they do some really good stuff but they get a lot of good press being this new thing that's been going on but military charities have been going on since the Napoleonic times and it's the way we've always traditionally dealt dealt with something and it almost has to be in some respect because if you look at what the military is in terms of the greater politics and economics it's there to fight wars that's what it's there to do it has a budget and that budget goes towards buying bullets and it goes towards killing people for people's defence it's not there as a support mechanism or as a mental health organisation and that's why you have things like things like the NHS but instead the problem there is a disconnect somewhere in the middle there and it's very easy for people to slip slip through and it's not a good thing Just one would you like to say about your grandmother what she said to you some of the best advice Mark had was from his grandmother would you like to explain one I have here is my grandfather passed away and I mean I remember quite vividly him dying and all sorts of stuff going on around me with family and people in tears and stuff and I was sad at playing on a computer game just totally disconnected but it's something that has taken me a long on time to deal with but at the point you were making was we were at my grandfather's funeral and I'd been back from war for about two years by then and my parents had made an active decision not to include my grandparents in what was going on with me because they didn't know how to deal with it they didn't want to worry anyone else and I think it was the other side having a cigarette having spent the funeral with everyone else in tears and myself sort of fairly reaching and not really dealing with anything and I was talking to my grandmother and I sort of said grant, your rights I've got PTSD and she said of course you do, you've been to war and I said pardon she said of course you do your grandfather had PTSD they all had it when they came and we saw a generation of men come home and we saw what happened and there was a sort of like old moment of a huge amount of relief and realised that all these people out there experienced from both sides and her advice was to say to me what are you doing, you've got this all this medical support all this support from your family and doctors and things just go and use it go and get involved because your grandfather didn't have any of that no I would like to see, I think one of the things I found most heartbreaking in my research is that I finally took two studies of the US Marines that showed that half the enlisted men have been physically abused as children and half the enlisted women have been sexually abused in many so that means half the enlisted that means below the officer ranks had joined the military at least in part to get away from violent dysfunctional homes and maybe to feel stronger themselves so they wouldn't go through life feeling like victims but it meant that when they came out of PTSD they did not have support of men to go back to and when you look at the high population of homeless veterans that is often the story behind it there's two interesting points one is the predisposition to PTSD and about the environment you've brought something in the way and how you feel about yourself and all in the mental state you were in a war actually being a catalyst as opposed to necessarily an effect and then the other one is yes you're right we take British Army again doesn't like to talk about this because it's not good for accruising but if you look at it if you're open and honest about it and you look at where the army accrues from it's not necessarily it's not from middle classes it's largely educated it's largely from people who don't have another choice and if they don't have another choice for reasons for it because of how they've grown up because of the support they've had because of all those things so you're already starting off with a group of people who are more likely to have had experiences that predispose them to PTSD then you have this ironic situation about where literature training is actually very good at effectively promoting PTSD because what you really want to do in terms of PTSD and avoiding it far from doing a lot of yoga and a lot of meditation but you want to be able to deal with your emotions and process them and come in you accept them you understand them what the military teaches you to do is under extreme circumstances to be a not a human being to carry on with your job not deal with emotions not deal with extreme situations they bottle up and then they blow I had several soldiers say to me that they dismantle the civilian and build up the soldier instead but the trouble is when you come home they don't dismantle the soldier and build the civilian you're just left on but there's something else I want to bring up about PTSD which I think may be the most difficult to talk about cause of it and the one that I find perhaps at least among the Americans I interviewed the biggest which is remorse and self-loathing especially those who fought in Iraq because there's so many questions about whether that war could be justified in any way and after it was discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction the morale went very low and I think that that is actually and that was expressed very much as you saw in the play by several of the characters I think that's a huge, huge burden to get over and it's a very heartbreaking one It's an Afghanistan as well there are definitely problems associated with the issue of dealing with it and if there isn't a rationale if you can't understand that yourself and rationalise it yourself and explain it yourself then it becomes very complicated I'm going to just take one more question from the I've got so many questions I'll just take this first lady over here sorry Institutional behaviour is what you were raising and you just said the question why you just think well how far can we go back why is what I think is the way they are still in today and looking at the difference between the UK and the US is actually really interesting One institution that I personally live in well is the NHS and the NHS has done loads to help with the situation that they were fighting in the 80s where people were silenced far too much and in the 90s we got more doing positive things, positive work and then now a lot of transparency and using the digital day that we've got to have more transparency and just let people have more of a voice and do you I think the US is good at looking at the UK and how they are changing things in the right back and bringing more women into the army and actually giving them more of a voice but do you see a way of data digital and digital use of technology to be able to help slowly changing the situation especially in the US I think that probably well one of the veterans and soldiers and veterans in the Iraq and Afghanistan war was the current ones have probably told more about their experiences and recorded their experiences because of blogging because of email because of little cameras everybody has because of iPhones than in any other war before in history there is so much documentation out there in the ether I was able to watch thousands of YouTube videos taken by the soldiers themselves in the middle of battle goofing around on the base or raping someone they just record everything so that and that has also enabled more whistleblowing more overt talk there are lots of Facebook groups that have formed that I belong to women military that are closed for each other women military veterans something specific and need to reach out to each other so all of that I think is made much easier online but it doesn't well obviously the discussion is much more open now than it's been before and that's been a combination of you know journalists like me of films coming out and of people speaking out sometimes in person and sometimes online in one way or the other where they can hide a bit more so I suppose yes there's some hope with that I just like to say the play because the play has allowed the voice of these women to be heard to a lot more people by reaching out so that the discussion continues on can I just take one sorry the technology is great and also because these are fantastic because there's a sort of simple equation with this that it is good to talk about it and it's great because it helps the individuals it helps everyone understand but that needs to be there are ways that you can do that there are good things, there are bad things I look at my own treatment there are things that work one day there are things that work for me there are things that work for people other people and it's not necessarily about controlling it that is about managing it so yes these things are wonderful tools but they need to be understood and used in the wider context and made the most of on that note I'm going to take one more question and that will be it after you when you were writing it did you go straight to the modern law of war or did you experiment with other forms first and other stories the play is the third form in which I've written about this material so I've got a nonfiction book which is a narrative nonfiction book means it's not just the interviews directly from from here it's not just transcribed interviews I tell the stories through the soldiers interview and give historical background things like that and I wrote a novel called Sam Queen happens to be up there on the table and I did that because briefly I felt that there were times when I was interviewing soldiers where they couldn't talk anymore the memories were too painful or they didn't or the memories had gone black or they started having panic attacks literally couldn't breathe or they wouldn't tell me people had their barriers and I was not going to re-traumatise them and push them and exploit them beyond where they were willing to go but I came to feel that it was in those moments of silence that the real story of what war does to your soul and your individual soul and heart lay lies so that's the territory of fiction so it was sent and also allowed me to delve into the Iraqi side too so the novel goes back and forth between the Iraqi character and the American character but I had all these transcriptions and the soldiers were telling really good stories they were telling them really well I mean they were very articulate and they were also being so politically honest and at the time when I was gathering these things in America it was much more unusual to be that critical of the war especially as a veteran of the war so these women were showing enormous courage and I wanted to honour that by putting it together without mine my voice anywhere in it except that I just shaped it but it's all absolutely in their words and we've all been very religious about honouring that Thank you I'm just going to ask Mark after the PTSD what's the future do you want to tell what the future is yeah so what's the future I mean it just turns on a positive note for somebody who's gone through a war survived had a diagnosis and has come through the other end it's really important to maybe get an insight I left the army in 2010 and set up a yoga studio which is what you do so I myself and my business partner opened up the first yoga studio in the city of London thinking that a busy professional needed yoga I was doing a lot of yoga and meditation at the time which was great if anyone ever has PTSD or knows anyone that does have PTSD suggests to you suggest you sort of gently coerce and waive them ever running their own business because it is not good for your stress since so we've been through that and now I work for a charity called Waterloo Uncovered I was an archaeologist at university and I got drawn back into archaeology and what we've found is that archaeology is a fantastic means to help versions with their recovery and this whole sort of issue of integration back into normal life civilian life whatever you want to call it so we just come back from Waterloo we're focusing on Waterloo because it's a bicentenary and we've just spent a good couple of weeks out there taking some soldiers out there to go and do proper very highly professional archaeology but also putting them in a situation where it's nice and relaxed they're doing good, hard physical work and they're learning and they're learning through not being taught they're learning through doing and mixing with mixing with civilians which is something they don't often get a chance to do and archaeologists on a hold are quite relaxed and I can be here after work and it's a nice environment for people to experience. On that positive note I'm going to thank Helen Benedict for the playwright and it's been a real privilege to direct the play I'd like to thank her and I'd like to thank Mark Evans for coming and coming at the last moment we had an original speaker so I really appreciate you pitching up I'd like to thank all the actors over there who've done a marvellous job our technicians and I'd like to thank all of you for supporting the play it's not an easy subject thank you all so much for coming