 Okay, thank you Martin. It's my great pleasure to introduce Carl Marlanis and the reason I'm up here is because he and I served in the same infantry battalion in Vietnam in 1969 and that was 1st Battalion 4th Marines and we had the pleasure of operating in the very northwest corner of what was then the Republic of North, sorry, the Republic of Vietnam. Right along the Laotian border and what was laughingly referred to as the demilitarized zone. I'd also like to introduce two other of our colleagues, Jack Higgins and Tim Rabbit, who are also serving the Battalion at this time. Several years ago Carl asked me if I would review the manuscript for his novel, Matterhorn, and if I liked it, if I would write a blurb. So I was agreed and I was soon immersed in one of the truly great works of war fiction that I'd ever read. And here's what a part of what I wrote for the publisher. No other novel about Vietnam, including Jim Webb's Field of Fire, does a better job of capturing the essence of what it meant to be a grunt in Vietnam than Matterhorn. Matterhorn is a powerful work of literature and a tribute to those who fought and died at the end of the line. Now I have to confess that also I thought it was extremely powerful. I somehow didn't think that a novel about an unpopular war written in the midst of another popular war was going to be very, there's going to be much of a market for it. So Carl has to be very thankful that it wasn't his literary agent because of course it became a bestseller. Carl is a very remarkable fellow and something of an anomaly among Vietnam veterans. He's a graduate of Yale and when everybody else in the Ivy League was headed for the Hills in front of Boyd's service, he gave up basically a Rhodes Scholar scholarship which was reinstated later to come home and fight. For his actions in Vietnam he was awarded the Navy Cross, I like to call it the non-possimist Medal of Honor, and Two Purple Hearts. He became a successful businessman after the war but admits to having to deal with the demons that accompanied him home from Vietnam. And that's one of the reasons to Europe both Matterhorn and what it is like to go to war. You may remember that when Admiral McRaven was here last week, he spoke about something called hard combat and how long exposure to hard combat changes a person. This is the central theme of what it is like to go to war. In this book Carl describes quite candidly what it means to sojourn in what he calls the Temple of Mars, where he writes, I experienced a surprising love for those who entered with me. There I prayed for deliverance from horror, carnage, and death. He ends with a discussion of how it might be possible for citizens of a modern liberal society, such as the United States, to better relate to Mars. The underlying organizing power that creates and sustains those physical and terrible aspects of war that seem beyond the comprehensive comprehension of our small psyches. Carl suggests that one of the reasons for writing what it is like to go to war was to share the experience of hard combat with other veterans, so as to help them with their own quest for meeting and their efforts to integrate their combat experiences and their current lives, as well as to convey to those about to join the military what war is really like. As he remarks, the violence of combat assault psyches confuses ethics and tests souls. This is not only a result of the violence suffered, it is also the result of a violence inflicted. Along these lines, I should note that Carl is teamed up with writer and movie maker Sebastian Junger to press for the creation of a national commission to deal with the past 12 years of war in a way, as Carl puts it, a more sober and meaningful way than having another picnic on Memorial Day weekend. It's important to note that although Carl turns his own experiences in Vietnam, it is not per se about Vietnam, it is about war in general. For far too long, Vietnam has been singled out as somehow unique in the history of warfare. The fact is, however, that Vietnam was no more brutal than other wars, the war in the Pacific, and what many of you in this audience have basically experienced in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And that's what makes Carl, what Carl has to say, all the more important. Unfortunately for the utopians among us, barbarism exists in the world. Civilization can suppress barbarism and savagery, but cannot eradicate it. Thus war is not an aberration. Carl writes that as long as there are people who will kill for gain in power, the United States will need soldiers who will kill to stop them. But this requires honesty about war and its cost, especially in terms of the split that war creates in the soul of the soldier. In part of all, Wolfram von Essenbach captures the nature of the psychological split engendered by war. Shame and honor clash with the courage of the steadfast man is motley like the magpie, but such a man may yet make merry for heaven and hell have equal parts of him. Please join me in welcoming Carl Marlantus to the Naval War College. One last logistical announcement for those of you who have copies of either of Carl's books. If you'd like to get them signed, he'll go to the table out in the foyer at the conclusion of the session at three, so please feel free to do that. I first saw Carl on the Bill Warrior show on public television. It was an extraordinary interview. So as we talked about the format for this, after some discussion, he concluded he'd rather do something like that than to give a formal presentation. So to that end, I prepared some questions for him, and he's seen them advance, so we'd have an opportunity to think about them. It won't necessarily march through all of them. I want to make sure you have plenty of time to interact as well, but let me give, let's get it started. You begin your book talking a lot about something we all know that there's this great inhibition to talk about combat experience, both on the part of the returning combat veteran and often on the part of their civilian counterparts as well, who may want to thank you, but don't really want to hear the details. Can you say a little about where you think that comes from and what good and harm it does? Well, you know, there's, I only say it half a ceaselessly. I mean, in our culture, there's, there's a great amount of inhibition against two things. One is whining, and the other one is bragging. And my experience of combat is that it's 99% things to whine about and 1% things to brag about. So it doesn't, but doesn't leave you very much room to say anything if you have this, this cultural inhibition against those two things. I think on a more serious level, what happens is, is that you come back and, and you've done terrible things. Now you've done terrible things for hopefully the right reason, but that doesn't take away the fact that you've done terrible things. And you're the one that bears the burden. And, and you're a little bit worried about, do I really want to, you know, say this? And when is it appropriate to actually say something? I mean, if you say it, something about, well, you know, this is what happened to me in Fallujah at dinner. Well, I'm afraid the dinner party's dead, right? You know, it's over. And so there's a great deal of inhibition on the part of the returning veteran to talk about the real stuff, because you don't know how people are going to react to it. You don't know if you're going to really be judged and who likes to be judged. And so you throw that into complaining and whining, and there's a lot of inhibition on the part of the veteran to just even talk about it. On the other side, people of good will are, are reticent to ask because it's like, you know, I don't want to disturb him. I don't want to, I don't want to make him angry. I don't want to, you know, confront anything or, you know, I don't want to get into politics. And so everybody sort of clams up on the other side. And it's, it's damaging. And the reason it's damaging is because the fundamental issue of the returning veteran is to get back into the community. And, you know, what we used to call primitive societies had all kinds of rituals that, that brought warriors back into the community. And we don't have them anymore. We have to sort of figure out how to do it on our own. And, you know, as, as, as Mack was saying, it's, it's sort of having picnics on Memorial Day is not doing the job. And so we have, you know, the silence, which I wrote a whole chapter about called the Club of Silence. And we just have to start to break it down. I had a really interesting experience. I'm trying to do this commission and we had the launch and there were probably about 100 people in the room and Sebastian and I are up on the, on the stage doing, you know, Q&A and, and, and Colin Powell's chief of staff whose name went right out of my head, who I could never run for politics. The, and at the end of this sort toward the end of this, a, a Vietnam veteran clearly stood up and just unloaded, I mean, anger. And you could just see everybody in the room just, just recoiling. And he stomped out. And I said, I asked, I said, how many people have ever, ever talked to an angry veteran? None. None. And that's what's the, that's a problem, isn't it? It's like, it's like, well, they go over there and they do their thing, they come back, but they'll have to deal with that themselves. And so one of the ideas of this commission, if I can make a plug, is that it will go out to the community and, and in fact, have the community involved and actually have to start confronting that the republic's been at war, not just the military. You know, you came back from a very unpopular and highly politicized war, and you're pretty graphic about the, this being spit on and the Bart in San Francisco and the reception that you got. The veterans in this room come from a military that is, as we heard this morning, the most trusted institution in this society, but also from a war that's been fought kind of out of sight and out of mind of the American people. So how do you think their experience is going to be different from yours? Well, you know, I think that moving from hostility to indifference is an improvement. And but indifference is not exactly where we want to be. And I think that's where we are right now. I mean, certainly, I mean, there's small towns in America that welcome their, their returning veterans, but in general, I mean, you know, the vast majority of the population, I think that the returning veteran is, is, is feeling a sort of, I don't know what the right feel. We were just talking about last night. I mean, it's like when someone comes up to you at the airport and thank you for your service, it just for me, I don't know about you guys, but for me, it's just like, you know, that's what you do when you thank the waiter for bringing in your coffee, you know, thank you for your service. It's just, it's just, I mean, it just isn't there, is it? It's, it's, it's, and so the veterans are going to have to deal with that. They're going to have to deal with the fact that quite frankly, until this nation starts to get a shift in its consciousness about having been at war, it basically is going to be a very difficult thing for the returning veterans to do. I think another issue is that of course, the vast majority of veterans from Vietnam were drafted and when they came back, they were done. The vast majority of people coming back from these wars are, are professionals and they're going back, they're still in. And that's a very big different thing too because you run into this, this issue of things like reintegration into the culture and society. Well, it's very easy to reintegrate back into your military culture, but, and the military culture is increasingly separated from the general culture because of the, there's no draft anymore. And so I think that is something that current returning veterans are going to have to deal with, that the Vietnam veterans didn't. So it's a, and then, then there are the fundamentals of all wars. I mean, if you read the Odyssey, I mean, Odysseus was clearly suffered with post-traumatic stress. I mean, you can just read it and, and Homer understood it. Those things will never go away. The tension and, and, and the killing. And those, those are the same. You know, one very strong theme throughout your book is this is a, for lack of a better word, the spirituality of war. You mentioned already the reintegration ceremonies for warriors and, and other cultures like you give some Native American examples. Part of your commission idea is to create a sort of modern secular version of those things for your veterans. Could you share some of the thoughts you have about what might be effective if, if it's not the Veterans Day picnic? Yeah, I think that, that for example, an idea of, of a solemnity. We have it wrong. And one of the great things about being a writer is that I can say anything I want because the politician has to say, I wonder what they think I ought to think, you know, I don't, you know, this is what I think you're going to get it. It ain't football. And we treat it like football. So when people come home, we've got to stop treating it like football and CNN and ABC have got to start, you know, day 17, the Iraq war. I mean, I'm coming like, what do you guys are saying? This is some, we're killing people over there. You know, and I'm not saying that because of some kind of moral judgment. It's like, you know, the war, some are for it, some are against it. I mean, I happened to be for that one. Certainly. But the thing is, is that you can't treat it like football. So the first thing that I would do is I would like to see a change in the way that we mark the ends of war and the return of the, of the, of the warriors from war. And my image is that you solemnly have a parade where the rifles are turned upside down, where the sword is, sword is sheathed and that you're not cheering because these people have themselves been wounded. They've lost their friends. And let's face it, a lot of civilians have been killed and a lot of the enemy have been killed. And when you pull back from a war, you have to start to realize that the enemy that you killed were probably misguided people, mostly kids. And they end up blowing themselves up because some, some guy at the top decides that they should blow themselves up. So are you going to cheer about that? And then America cheers about it. And so I think that the beginning is to start us, is to get rid of that. You know, a question I've often pondered is whether the kinds of things you just expressed about the sort of tragic nature of war, the fact that combatants on both sides are probably young and not well informed and somewhat misguided. It's clearly true. And it's clearly a reflection that people our age find fairly easy to make. Is it can a 19 year old go to war with that attitude? Well, you know, I had a guy ask a question. He was he was he was a lot meaner than you are. I was at a reading and it was it was it was a clearly a retired military guy. He didn't identify which branch of the service. But anyway, he he he was like, Oh, I get it. He's being sarcastic. And he says he wrote this book and he says, you know, it's like when we're when we're in the sophomores in high school and people say that we're not going to teach you Shakespeare and Tolstoy. And, you know, we don't give a damn about that and we don't understand it. But they always tell us that that someday when we grow up, we'll be able to understand it. That's what your books all about. And I looked at him and he said, Yes, 19 year olds are our best warriors. Absolutely. I mean, you give me a platoon of 35 year olds versus 19 year olds. Are you kidding me? You know, Oh, God, Lieutenant, let's think about this, you know. But your 19 year olds they're not going to be reflecting on this. But if you can, if you can plant the seeds, if someone had planted the seeds for me when I was that young, when I started doing crazy behavior at the age of 40, you know, 15, 20 years after the battle, I'd have gone. Oh, that's what they were talking about. And I might have gotten help faster. I might have healed faster. One of the things that I'm off on a tangent here, but think about the way that the human body protects itself. We don't have shells. We don't have, you know, insect, what are they called carapacees? We take the hit and we have an immensely active immune system that goes to work immediately to repair the damage. So there's no way that you're going to protect a 19 year old against taking the hits of war. You're not going to be able to do it. But if you can plant the seed so that when he comes back, that that immune system, that healing system, kicks in way faster. That's the strategy. You know, I found your reflections on the experience of killing in combat, both insightful and at least to those who haven't done it somewhat counterintuitive. You talk both about the pleasure and about the what you call the mystical quality of killing, even in those religious aspects. You said to Bill Moore's in this interview, our idea of religion in this culture is pretty much all sweetness and light. We like Christmas, we don't like Good Friday. Could you comment on that? Yeah, you know, how I got onto that thought was I've done a lot of reading and comparative religion and mythology and stuff. And virtually all the great religions have dark sides to them. And if you think about our own Native American religions, I mean, the Urquois had ritual torture and the Aztecs, you know, cut people's hearts out. And I mean, there's darkness there. The Tibetans have, you know, demons guarding the gates to paradise. And you have to get through the demons and even in Christianity. It's about a bloody ritual sacrifice of a God dying for his people. I mean, these are things that are actually already in the religion, but the culture would rather have pixie dust. I mean, you know, it's just a lot more fun. I mean, you know, and so what then, like that knowledge, combined with this observation, which is this, that all of the mystical traditions, and I don't care if they're Sufis or if they're Christian mystics or if they're Hindu mystics, there's certain things they have in common when they go through this mystical experience. The first one is they are always aware of death. They're always aware of death, that we are mortal. And death is, you know, Don Juan in the Carlos Castanada's book says death is right over our shoulder. And you can see death. The other thing is that they're always in the present. I mean, they do years of psychophysical exercises to be present, be present. Don't get out of your head. You know, don't think of the past, it's not in the future, you're here now, it's the only time that's real. So they're present. The other thing is that they try to sort of step away from their egos. In other words, they lose their egos and they lose their egos for a greater good, and for joining something larger. And they're all members of a group, generally a convent, a monastery, the ulam, the sangha. I mean, every religion is has these groups. And if you think about combat, absolutely every one of those things is present. Every one of them. And so I'm going like, well, is this a mystical experience then? It's certainly the equivalent of it. And when you think about, you know, St. John of the Cross, I mean, he didn't call it the lovely night of the soul. He called it the dark night of the soul. And there is this darkness that we just have to start to recognize that, I mean, the whole issue of evil. I mean, it is around us. And you can't just sort of go around saying, oh, well, that doesn't exist. Sorry, you know. One day I was in India. I spent a lot of time in India because I ran a corporation there. And I was getting off the train station in Calcutta and a little girl was begging and she had a cup hung around her neck because someone had cut off both of her hands so that she would get more money begging. And I mean, I was reeling with that. I mean, the sense of evil that just hit me. I mean, I just, I didn't know where to put it and what to do with it. And so going back to the war experience in everything, you, it's the equivalent of sort of coming back from it. And it'd be like, you know, St. John of the Cross comes out of the monastery. And we say, well, you can get a job at McDonald's. You know, I mean, it's just, I mean, we're talking about some kind of an experience that is just far beyond ordinary experience. And is it the other side of the same coin, yin yang, the dark, the light? Or is it just the equivalent? It doesn't make any difference in terms of its practicality. And the other thing that I talk about, and I think it's something we need to really own. There's a great thrill. I mean, I have never had a high like combat. And you can't go around and tell people that, oh, yeah, I have war as hell. Yeah, it is hell. But if you deny that there's a that there's a great high, your BS and whoever you're talking to, there is a big high. I remember hitting a guy once it right in the head. And I felt great. I got him right between the eyes. I mean, I just felt great. Now, should I be proud of that? I don't know where to put that. But the fact is, it was a feeling that I had. And and I've talked to other veterans and they, yeah, I kind of miss that. But it's like I tell people, it's like crack cocaine. Yeah, you can get high on crack. But boy, the costs, the costs of crack. And so that's what you always have to remember. But always bringing out this, this, the spiritual side and this and this, this excitement and high are truths that we have to speak about. You know, this is a point of privilege, but we were talking upstairs just before we came down about our sharp love of this Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita, which we read in my Stocktoe course. But I think probably most American students are kind of surprised or have never heard of that book. But you incorporated pretty substantially into your book. Can you tell us what it is about the Gita you think that has a permanent message for people not of that culture of Western culture? Well, yeah, it's, it's the Bhagavad Gita. I think it means the song of God. And it's, it's part of the Mahabharata, which is a huge epic work of Indian literature. But this is a poem. It's a long, long poem. And what it is, it's about a warrior whose name is Arjuna. And he is about to go into battle. And because it's a civil war, his own, his own kin are on the opposite side. And he loses heart. He doesn't know what to do. He says, how can I kill? That's my cousin over there. How can I, how can I do this? And the charioteer is actually, is it Shiva? No, Krishna, Krishna, yeah, blue Krishna, Krishna is the charioteer and has taken the incarnated as its charioteer. And so the whole dialogue is between Arjuna and Krishna in the form of his charioteer, giving him all the reasons why he should do it. And he goes through all the usual stuff he tells him about, well, you know, you do it for your country and you, well, you do it because of your manhood. You do it because you want to be brave and you do it for all these reasons. And ultimately it comes down to the fact that you just have to do it with your own noble heart and you have to do it because you've been placed in this position and you had nothing to do with that. And that you just carry the roll out that you've been assigned. And it's a really good piece of work because you see all the arguments and they all fade after a while until you finally realize that for some reason, and you don't exactly know why, the gods or God placed you in this position on this side. And you do have to remember that it is your kin on the other side that you're killing. But you have to just, you carry it out because you're a warrior and that's what you've chosen to do. And that's the basics of why I incorporated it. Decades after the events you went through in the war, you described in your book an experience of driving down the road at night and seeing the eyes of a Vietnamese soldier that you killed at close range. Can you talk a little about that experience and what that moment revealed to you about your mental and if you will spiritual state about having killed so long ago? Well, you know, I have to tell you that a couple of things to preface that particular vision that I had on I-5 at two in the morning. First of all, the way that we can kill people is that they're not people. And you know, the political corrects say, oh, you can't dehumanize people. You go to bootcamp and you learn to dehumanize people. And my answer to that is there is no other way a decent guy can kill anybody except to dehumanize them because we've been taught all our lives thou shall not kill. And suddenly you're 19 and they're giving you all the messages that now we want you to go out there and kill. How do you do that? I use the word pseudo-speciating. You turn the enemy into an animal. You know, haji, towel head, gook, crowd. I mean, we have words for it that will go back millennium. And why? Because you can kill an animal. If that animal is trying to kill your friends or if that animal is trying to kill you, you can pull the trigger way easier than if it's an actual human being. Well, what happened in this particular case is that we were on an assault and it was a very steep hill. And the NBA were entrenched in bunkers and in fighting holes up above us. And it was probably, I mean, it was really steep. And saw a couple of chai comms come flying down to us. And so we scrambled to get uphill so that they blow up down below us. But I was slow off the mark and it blew up right in front of me and knocked me out. And when I came to, there were two other guys with me and they'd thrown a couple of grenades. And then chai comm, a couple more come flying down. And we scrambled around to get out of the way and we throw our grenades back. A couple more come flying down. And finally the lieutenants' brain starts working and I go like, this is not, I'm going to be out of grenades on the next throw. So we got to change tactics. And so I told the guys, I said, look, I'm going to get around to the left of this fighting position, which I know is right up above us. We couldn't see them. And I said, I want you to throw the grenades. And when they pop up to throw them back, I'll get them with the M16. And just an aside, I always carried an M16. This thing about officers carrying 45s, I just thought that one went out the door the first day I got there. You know. And so I got myself up there in position and I was on the ground and I was probably closer to that hole than the front row here. It was close enough that I could see the kid's eyes. One of them had already been killed from one of our grenades connected. And he stood up and he had the grenade cocked. And I had him in my sights. I was laying on the ground and just had him at the end of the M16. And we locked eyes. That doesn't happen very often. He was suddenly human. He wasn't a gook. He was some 17-year-old kid scared to death. And I remember whispering. I was whispering out loud. I knew he couldn't hear me because there was just the battles going on. And I don't speak Vietnamese, but I can remember saying, don't throw it. If you don't throw it, I won't pull the trigger. If you don't throw it, I won't pull the trigger. Because see, if he was still an animal, I'd already killed him. But I had to hesitate it because he was human suddenly. And he snarled at me and threw it and I killed him. And it was about 20 years later, 1990, that I'm driving down I-5, which is the north-south freeway and, you know, country Western music on the radio and two o'clock in the morning. And I know a lot of veterans love that. You're in complete control, but you're going someplace. You have a goal, right? And all of a sudden, in the windshield, I saw his eyes. And what that was, I mean, I'm sophisticated enough to know that there's not the eyes that are there. What's happening is that my psyche is finally just saying, Marlannis, you've got to deal with this. You've got to deal with this. You killed a human being. Doesn't make any d- The feeling is not one of guilt. The feeling is one of, I carry the burden and I'm very sad. I was in a war and I was doing my bit and trying to be on my side just like he was. But he was human. And that's what started me really writing the second book, is how do you come to terms with all that? And what it was is this idea that pseudo-speciation drops sometimes and it's necessary to drop immediately after the fight. I mean, that's where I think atrocities come from because we stay in that mode. Well, you talk about the importance of being part of feeling a part of a team or even an organism as one of the moral armors that allows you to do this. And as you tell that story, it sounds to me like one of the things that's key about that moment for that moment, you're not part of your team anymore. You're face to face with another human being. I think that's absolutely that's a good insight because, you see, you have these, you could call them, you know, some psychologist who would psychologize it would say, well, you have these psychological protections about pseudo-speciation and being part of the group and not an individual. And I think that all those things are true. I think that that group feeling, though, is far beyond just trying to protect your psyche against the killing. That's what actually, that's where you lose your ego completely. And I can remember this feeling of being the group. I wasn't me anymore. And so in that sense, there was no sense of me dying. Now, I wasn't, I mean, I wasn't like this except for brief, brief moments of time in the middle of combat. The rest of the time, I'm sitting around being scared to death all the time. But at that moment, I lost that sense of who I was. I was just this marine unit. And we are invincible. I mean, I could die, but there's no way they're going to stop this marine unit. And if this marine unit dies, then by God, the whole core is going to show up. And there's just no way it's going to stop. So this sense of immortality that comes from the group that I think is extremely important and contributes to that mystical sense and that feeling that you come back from that to humdrum. And it's tough to reintegrate. Yeah, you brought it up at the end. But as you were speaking, I was thinking that's precisely a kind of description of mystical self-absorption, loss of self. Yeah. And mystics report that they rarely attain it and keep it for any length of time. But remember, it's very fleeting moments of their lives. And they can never explain it. Never explain. Yeah, it's ineffability. Yeah. I can't describe it to you. But yeah, I was there. But I was there for a brief moment. And I wish I could get it back. But I don't want to pay what I paid to get that one. I mean, one of the great stuff, talking to some guys, I mean, what about your Vietnam experience? And he says, well, he says, I wouldn't trade it for $1 million. But I wouldn't pay a nickel to do it again. It's a good explanation. And one of the most dramatic scenes I found in the book is when you describe this moment when your soldiers, your Marines, started cutting off the ears of the enemy and sticking the ears in their helmet bands and presented you with a sort of leadership challenge of how you're going to deal with that. Can you say something about that? Yeah, we'd been fighting for several days. And the enemy had stacked up. I mean, that's an exaggeration. But there were dead bodies right below our fighting holes. And I'm walking the lines after we had a contact that night. And all of a sudden, I see a notice one of the kids. And I'm talking to kids, 18 years old. And he's got a couple ears in the rubber band that's around the helmet. And then I see another kid. And he's got a couple ears in there. And I just, I'd been there a long time by that time. And it didn't shock me. I mean, the carnage that you see in infantry combat is just, I mean, a couple of years is nothing. But I realized that you just can't let this pass. Because this is desecration of the enemy. And what had happened is just what I was talking about earlier is that they were just dead animals. And these guys were just collecting antlers. I mean, that's what the letterman jacket trophies. I mean, that's where their heads were. They weren't trying to sort of, I know what the word is, desecrate the enemy to shame them or something like that. They were just collecting antlers. Just like they'd shot a deer that morning. And they put it on their helmets because they were proud of it. So I went up to them and I said, you know, I understand. They killed your friends. And you know, you killed their friends. And you killed them. And I said, you just can't do this. I mean, these are human beings. And so I want you to go down there and bury them. Take the ears back and bury those bodies. Now, this was not trivial because we were still getting shot at. It was occasional sniper fire. So no one wanted to get out of their hole again. But anyway, they went down there and they started digging. And they both started crying. They just both started crying. And what hit me is that suddenly they were burying human beings. They had regained their humanity in the ritual of putting a body into the ground. And we don't do that. Had you not done that, what do you think the consequences would have been? Well, I think that if I had not done that, that would have been, hey, the lieutenant just winked. Or I guess it's OK. I mean, I think it's just that simple. It's like, I could have said, oh, that's stupid or whatever. But if I didn't take an action on it, it would be quite clear that it's OK to cut ears. In fact, there were commanders in Vietnam that said, I'm going to see ears. We're not going to call it a KIA until I see the ears cut off the head. Come on. This is that tough guy bullshit that I just cringe about. And I think that right there and then, if I had not acted on it, the next step would be peeing on the bodies. I mean, you have to hold the standards. And even though I wasn't angry at them, I don't judge them morally. Because like I said, I just knew where they were coming from. They were collecting deer antlers, but that had to stop. And when it did stop, I think they felt bad about it. You know, when we first talked on the phone, you mentioned that you had just given a talk at the Naval Academy. And you were surprised where the midshipman put their focus in your book onto the story of P-dog and his little marijuana cigarette. And I actually thought a lot about that, both the conversation of why that was. I said, I think I can explain to you why the midshipman upset about that. Let me hear that, yeah. Because they've been trained in a very simplistic moral code that tells them it's always wrong to lie. And yet in the story that you give, it seems to me anybody of even moderate moral maturity would say absolutely lie about the cigarette. So I wonder if you could tell the story. And then it's, yeah. P-dog is a made-up name for, I'll tell this group, is a kid named Warner, who was just one of the great machine gunners. And he was, I think he was just out of high school and went to boot camp and came over there. So he must have been 19 or late 18. And he'd been there for a long time. And he did what is called a 12 and 20. In other words, he only had less than 10 days in country. And so we usually let him off of ops if they only had 10 days ago. Because they were pretty much useless anyway. They were wearing three flak jackets and hiding and 30 feet under their foot. So it's like, might as well send them back. And I had been just transferred back to the rear. I took over the S1 job. And I was called the S1 Zulu. But the S1 was an alcoholic that spent all of his time reading porn magazines. And so I took over the job, basically, and got a call one night. And it's like, we got three kids from your battalion down here, they've been caught with smoking marijuana. Back in those days, smoking marijuana was a dishonorable discharge. And it was like three strikes you're out. There was no well mitigating circumstances. It was like you were smoking dope, dishonorable discharge. And P-dog had been a great marine. And he was just hanging out. Well, so I go over to another. There wasn't another battalion. And they got them all spread eagle with their hands on a bench so that they couldn't reach their pockets or anything. And the duty NCO over there said, well, these three guys are yours. They're not mine. So I said, OK. And I said, well, let's get in the Jeep. So I put him in the Jeep. And I was with one of the sergeants, a clerk. And halfway over back to where the battalion lurch I said, you know, sort of like, I have to go take a pee. And you do, too, don't you, sergeant? And so we stopped the Jeep. And we just turned our backs on him. And we could hear all this fumbling and throwing. And people going through their pockets like mad trying to get rid of the joints. And we got back in it. And I thought, well, let's problem solved. So I got back to the battalion, which in it goes 24-7. And there was probably about, I don't know, eight or 10 clerks there and a gunnery sergeant. And so I line him up. And I say, OK, we're going to search your pockets. And, you know, like that. Well, Warner had been wounded. And he still had a bandage on him. He fumbled. And out of it, he had put a marijuana cigarette. He told me later. I met him just about a month ago and talked about it. Didn't come out of his pocket. Like I said in the book, he said it came out of the bandage in his arm. But anyway, popped right out on the floor in front of everybody a joint. And if you ever want to see a black kid turn white, it was when his joint hit the ground. And I told the other two, because they were clean, I said, you get out of here. And they just, they're gone. Now here I am. I've got a career staff NCO and eight witnesses that just saw a guy pop a joint on the floor, dishonorable discharge. And so I said to the gunnery sergeant, I said, Gunny, I know this kid. He was in my platoon. He's a good Marine. I think that's tobacco. And this gun, he looked at me. And he looked at it. He says, I don't know. He says, if you say he's a good Marine, and you reach down, he picked up this joint. And it's just like back in boot camp. He marches around and sticks it under. Everybody knows, one by one, is this a marijuana or is this tobacco? It's tobacco, Gunny. Is this marijuana? It's tobacco, Gunny. And he comes back to me, says, well, Lieutenant, I guess it's tobacco. And Warner just got out of there like that. And the midshipman couldn't get around that. You lied. And I was surprised. Every class, that was one of the questions. They were really struggling with it. And I'm really struggling with it. And I tried to explain it to him. I said, look, I said, we all know that the helmsman has to do with the captain says, right? And if you give him a course, like 360, that's what he's supposed to do. He doesn't make up his own mind to suddenly go 270, right? That's 360. But I said, if he sees rocks, the reason for the rule is to get to your destination, right? Well, then he has to go around. He has to break the rule, doesn't he, in order to achieve what the rule is trying to accomplish? You can see the wheels turning. And I said, what are rules about? It's about how an organization functions. The marijuana rule was about functioning. You don't want people high on dope if they're supposed to be doing their jobs. But on the other hand, this guy wasn't doing anything that was wrong. I said, and the reason you have rules is also it's about fairness. It's about justice. And I said, if we sent him to a Portsmouth Naval prison and gave him a dishonorable discharge after all he had done, is that justice? Yeah, but you lied. And he broke the rule. I mean, to me, that argument is dead simple. But it wasn't to them. Well, no. And having taught it in an academy with perhaps even a more rigid honor code at the Air Force Academy than the Naval Academy, I know what the party line would be. Well, I mean, the sense of the non-toleration rule is there. But you get these downright rabbinic trying to parse these cases about what's a lie, what's not a lie. And maybe at the level of an 18 or 20 old where you're trying to get them to think at least straight about moral questions, maybe oversimplification is necessary. But at some point, the kind of more mature moral reasoning you engaged in on the spot is something every mature adult in that room immediately recognizes an appropriate force of action. So any thoughts about when we let it be complicated? Well, gosh, that wasn't on your list. Yeah, I think that the higher in rank you go, the more complicated you can handle as a maturing individual, and the more complex the issues become. In other words, if somebody is 18, maybe the best way to do it is to just say give them some rules. But then I think that it's quite clear by the time you're a field grade officer or whatever you call a field grade in the Navy that it ain't black and white. Everything's got this sort of shades of gray. And so the higher rank, the higher your maturity, I think you have to let it in. But I wouldn't hesitate to try and move that kind of thinking down to a 19-year-old. I think that quite frankly, they're capable if somebody takes the time. The easy thing to do is to say thou shalt not, right? Thou shalt not smoke marijuana cigarettes. And then they'll go off and do it on a weekend. And then people will say, well, then your friends are doing it. And then if your friends are doing it, how come it's not favorite? You can tell a 19-year-old that kind of stuff. So I'm kind of on the side of educating. You talk about another event many years after Vietnam where you bumped your head on a cupboard. Another one, someone honked at you with a stoplight, both of which revealed your PTSD to you. Can you describe those events? One of the things that a lot of people, most people in this room, I mean, maybe somebody in this room doesn't know this, but a lot of people might. PTSD is a physiological issue. I mean, people tend to psychologize it. It certainly has psychological issues. And there certainly are moral spiritual issues to it. But quite frankly, what happens is that your brain, the organization of your brain changes in combat under extreme adrenaline loads, apparently. If you hear a sound, the input, whether it's taste smell or whatever, goes through the cerebral cortex if you're in normal civilian mode. And it's like, I wonder what that is. I wonder, could it be the wind? Or maybe it's a leaf falling or a bird or something? Oh, maybe it's an NBA soldier. And by that time, well, you're dead, all right? So what happens is that the brain rewires. And the statistics are pretty clear that it's early in someone's tour that they get it. The odds of making it through the tour increase the longer you're there. And I think a big part of that is because your brain rewires in a healthy way to protect you in combat. And so the wiring goes directly to the amygdala. The amygdala is the fight, flight, freeze, reptilian response. There's a sound, and you shoot it. There is no thought. You just wheel around and pull the trigger and blast it. Full automatic. And then you figure out what it is. That's when the thinking comes back and starts kicking in again. Well, what happened is I was in the kitchen and I bumped my head on a cupboard that had been left open, probably by me, because my wife's always shutting the cupboards. And it surprised me. And I turned around and I took the whole thing out with my fists. I mean, there was cans and broken crockery and cups and glasses. I mean, the floor was in splinters. I mean, my hands were bleeding before I finally started thinking again. And then my kids come in and it's like talking about frightening to a little family. It's like, gosh, Dad just took out the kitchen cabinets with his fists. What's going on? And the same thing happened at this intersection. I was a little slow off the mark because I didn't quite know where I was going. And I had my little girl Sophie with me and a guy blasts the horn behind me. Again, I don't remember anything between the horn blast and becoming aware that I was trying to kick his windshield and I was on the hood of his car. And when I come to my senses, in other words, the cortex comes in again. I look back and there in the middle of the intersection is my car with the door open and my five-year-old girl sort of, you know, what's Dad doing on this other guy's car? And this other guy, luckily, he didn't have an oozy or something with him. I mean, he'd been dead. But that's that instantaneous reaction and no longer thinking. And it's very hard to turn around. There's medicine and the most important thing is awareness. I saw a lot of VA therapists and I had some good ones. I was really very happy with them. And now, if a guy comes up behind me and he blasts the horn, I still go into like this. I mean, it's amazing. It's just like my whole body just goes like that and I start to shake. But I've been trained. I go 10, 9, take a deep breath, 8. He's just some assholes had a bad day at work. 7, 6, 5. He's not trying to kill you. 3, 2, you know. And then I just drive on. I mean, I'm shaking for a half an hour. But I don't make a fool of myself. Nor do I endanger everybody in the intersection. And I had never heard of PTSD. Never heard of it. And my family thought I was going crazy. So that's those three instances that I began to go like, something's wrong here. One of the, I guess, and I had to put this, honest, most difficult to assimilate, strangest, but very authentic things in your book because it's a description of this presence of evil in your house. And your need to deal with that through various kind of ritual means. I think that's probably outside the experience of many people in the room, but totally very real for you. Very real. So I know it's difficult. No, it's fine. I mean, I wrote it in a book. I'm not going to be coy and say nothing to talk about it. What happened was, I was doing a lot more crazy things than that. I mean, I could hear a sound outside and I'd find myself outside naked in the neighborhood trying to see where the sound was coming from. This is not normal behavior. And so my wife said to me, she was reading in the papers that there's a local workshop put on by the county psychologists. And they're sort of talking about job stress. I think you've got some job stress to deal with. We didn't know it, but so I went to this guy and he started asking questions about the symptoms and stuff. And I'm in the school cafeteria with about 80 people there. And I described it to him. He looks at me. He says, were you ever in a war? And I break down sobbing, just not coming out of my nose. And I mean, I cried for about 20 minutes. And he said to me, he says, you got PTSD. Have you ever heard of it? No. He says, I want you to go down and see this guy. And I wrote down the name Larry Decker, who is a VA psychologist who was at the Veterans Outreach Center down Santa Barbara. And I went down and I started that process. And during the course of that process, Decker had said to me, he says, I've never seen anybody come to terms with PTSD without a spiritual component. He says, I don't care if it's Buddhist or if it's artwork. He says, or Lutheran, I don't care. But he says, I have never seen anybody get through it without a spiritual component. So I said, OK. So I went, if you believe this, went to the Yellow Pages. And I went under religion, our church, or something. And I went to see who the closest one was to my house. And it was an Episcopal Church night. So I knock on the door. And he's in his office, the priest. And he says, what can I do for you? And I said, well, I'm trying to cure PTSD. And I need a spiritual component. So I thought, you know, it's like too much marine training. So anyway, he says, well, you know, that's not my line. But there's a capuchin monk who's in a monastery up the valley here who has been dealing with veterans. And so I said to him, I said, well, OK. So I go up there. And his name is Brother David. And he starts to talk to me about spirituality. And we start to deal with the spiritual side. And one day he says to me, he says, there's an old ritual in the church that we don't use anymore. It's called the Mass for the Dead. But he says, it's where you actually talk to the dead people. And I'm kind of going, uh-huh, right. And I says, no. He says, you've got to take it seriously. He says, if you want to do this, I'll do this with you. And I said, OK. And he says, what I want you to do is I want you to write down all things you want to say to all the people that died over there, ones you killed, ones that were killed with you. So I prepared for that. And that night, we had that ritual, just Brother David myself in the old Mission San Andes in a dark and stormy night. And it was incredible because we went down and opened these giant doors about two in the morning. And I could feel spirits coming in. And you're going like, yeah, right, my experience. I could feel spirits coming in. And I went up to the front of the church. I could see guys from Vietnam. And I'm going like, OK, you know they're not there, but they're there. You know they're not there, but they're there. And you're in this sort of in-between, hypnagogic sort of state. And then I saw my grandparents walk in. Now I did not expect that. And they sat in the front row. And so we went through that whole ritual. And I had talked to these people. I talked to people I hated. I had some evil I really hated. And I just realized that they were in over their heads sort of like I was. And I talked to guys I killed. I talked to guys that I thought had died because I made mistakes. When we get through all that, we go back to this point. I had to bilge up the story. The night after that ritual, I'm in my bedroom all by myself. And there was this presence that came into the room. And I cannot explain how dark and evil that presence was. It just terrified me. And it was filling the room. And I'm a pretty rational guy, actually, in spite of all this crazy stuff I write about. And I'm going like, is this really happening? And it was like, this is really happening. And I grabbed a crucifix. And I started praying to every saint I could think of. And Jesus and Mary. And it was amazing. And finally, this presence leaves the room. And I hustle down to see Brother David about six in the morning. And Brother David, we got trouble. And he's going like, you know, he says, I don't know. He said, we may have just uncorked something that we don't know what to deal with. And so he called a guy in his order who was at the Vatican and who was an expert on this particular ritual. And what the guy said is he says, when evil starts to lose its hold, it'll fight very hard not to lose its hold. And what you've done is you've started that process. And so Brother David came over and he sprinkled holy water around that sort of thing. And the next night, the same thing happened. Well, I was pretty shaken up. But by this time, I was in this PTSD group in Santa Barbara. And this goes back to what we were talking about way earlier than what we were talking about. There was a guy in that group whose name was Bear. And he was a Chumash Indian. And he was a long range, a Lerp, long range, a reconnaissance patrol guy in Vietnam. And he's after the group meeting, he comes over, he says, this guy, you didn't say a thing. He says, that's really not like you. And I said, yeah, and I told him about this. And he said, you know, my great uncle is a shaman. He says, that's evil spirits. He said, we know how to deal with that. I said, great. He said, no, no, no, you wait right here. I was at a coffee shop. He was wait right here. He said, I'm gonna go talk to my uncle. He says, I'll be back, maybe an hour or so. So I'm sitting there waiting for my company. And Bear comes back with a cassette tape that his uncle had made for me and a bowl of white sage and green sage. And he says, okay. And he says, now, my uncle's gonna be Channy. I want you to play this in your house. And I want you to light these on fire. And I want you to go around all the corners and the four winds and stuff like this. And then try and channel along with my uncle. And it'll be all right. We do evil spirits. And I did that. And he never came back. And the funniest thing about, I said, well, I think I joined the Catholic church after that because it seemed to be a home for me. And then I think it was Higgins over here. He said, jeez, Marlanas, you should have become a Chumash. All right, I have one last question. So please prepare your own. We've got some time off. So my last question is this. Toward the ending of the book you write, and I'm quoting, I'm constantly told, usually by people who have never been to war and who apply varying degrees of simplistic reasoning, that all is fair in love and war, that having rules of war is total nonsense. This is simply not true. To sink through the position that fair play and the impulses of good character have no place in modern war, taking some sort of tough guy, real or politic stance is something the ethical warrior must never do. As we wrap up this Ethics Symposium today, I'd like you to elaborate on that thought. Yeah. First of all, if you're an ethical warrior, you're fighting for something that is worth fighting for. If you're fighting for money or for power, I don't think you're ethical. And the very thing that this nation thinks is worth fighting for are ideas like fair play, mercy, justice. So if you don't exhibit this yourself when you're fighting for those ideals, you're putting yourself into a terribly hypocritical position and one that's very, very difficult for you to argue your way out of. It's like, oh yeah, I really believe in these things, but right now I don't. So the first thing is that your actions have to line up with what you should be fighting for, which are those kinds of ethical ideals. The second thing is on a very practical level. Well, it's both practical and moral. I mean, there's the golden rule that every religion has due unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you were in the situation of, well, the example I use is in World War II, Von Look, who was a German armored reconnaissance guy, was out in the desert and they got caught flat footed and it looked like RAF, but he said he thought it was a Canadian aircraft though, it was a Spitfire. And it came rolling in and hit him hard and they scattered and one of the soldiers had to go back because the radio was there, he needed to retrieve the radio. And the Spitfire rolled in again. Now, the man was totally defenseless. He was on top of one of these armored recon things and all these things had been hit hard. I mean, they were going nowhere. And that Canadian pilot just tipped his wing and just went right by the guy and let him live. That's an image that has stayed with me a long time. If you were that guy, would you have wanted the pilot to say, well, the guy will come back to fight again, you know, so kill him now. You know, I mean, that's that tough guy stuff. Well, the fact is that that armored reconnaissance patrol was defunct, it was done, its mission was aborted. It could not go anywhere further. I mean, I don't know how they got out of it alive because their vehicles were shot up. So just on a practical and also a philosophical thing, if you were in that situation, you would want your enemy to behave the same way. And then finally, you're gonna have to make peace with these people. The war is gonna be over at some point. And if you've behaved badly, the chances of a peace coming along are very compromised as opposed to if you behaved well because there's gonna be a sense of, well, I think it's gonna be okay if we surrender, we're not gonna get tortured and have our families burned down, whatever they would imagine because of your conduct. So there's an ethical, moral reason for behaving that way. And there's also a very practical reason for behaving that way, for keeping rules of warfare and keeping to them. Thanks very much. Okay, thanks so much, Carl, that's been wonderful. I do...