Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Echoes of Valor - Sebastian Junger on the Bonds of Battle and the Spirit of Veterans Day

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

As Veterans Day approaches there is no better guest than Sebastian Junger, a journalist known for his profound connection to the soldier's experience and his frontline reporting in some of the world's most volatile war zones. Sebastian is able to offer an intimate glimpse into the lives of those who've served, reflecting on the deep bonds forged in the crucible of conflict. As we honor our veterans, Junger also introduces the Vet Town Hall project, his heartfelt initiative designed to provide a communal space for veterans to share their narratives, ensuring their sacrifices resonate within the civilian conscience. Vet Town Hall Project: https://vetstownhall.org/ Explore and sign up for Starlink Service here: https://www.starlink.com/residential?referral=RC-14303-34690-52&utm_source=Starlink2MoAndy **The 2-month free offer will only show in your account after you fully complete your account and activate the service** This offer expires 12/1/23. Offer available for the United States and Canada only The Speed of War Comic Series: https://www.thespeedofwar.com/ Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to the show. I hope your week went well and you're ready to launch into the weekend. It's Friday in case you didn't know, and now you do. Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and Veterans Day can be tough for a lot of people. Personally, I don't even know how to talk about my thoughts on my own personal service, the veteran community, in a manner that I feel is approaching. I do the best that I can, but I struggle often. And most of the time when I do talk about it, I think right after the conversation was over, oh, I wish I would have said this or that.

And in honor of Veterans Day, I wanted to do something that specifically discussed the community, the impact of service, and potentially the impact of things that can be done post service. I thought one of the best ways to do that was to talk to somebody who was never actually a soldier, but has been reporting on war for the better portion of their life. His name is Sebastian Younger, and I have been a fan of his work for a really long time. Not only is written work, but I think one of the most accurate documentaries about warfare in the modern era, specifically Afghanistan and the global war on terror, is called Restrepo. it doesn't paint a picture of warfare, it presents a picture of warfare. And the access that Sebastian and his crew or team had, to me, is unprecedented. This is an important conversation. And the conversation today with Sebastian is actually based around his latest initiative, the Vets Town Hall. I'm not going to try to unpack it right now because he unpackes it inside of the episode. But it's a tool and a mechanism for not

only veterans, but the communities that they live inside of to come together, to share, and to hopefully heal. And with that, I'll leave you with today's episode with my guest, Sebastian Younger. Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. I think the only place I can start is, I've got to be honest, I'm a huge fan of your work. Whether it's the written work that you've done, I've loved the book, Tribe. And the documentary Restrepo is actually something that I point people towards when it comes to a realistic exposure, not an explanation, because you're not trying to explain anything. You're exposing people to what the global war on terror was like, or specifically in

Afghanistan. So I had to start there. I'm super excited that we were actually able to link up and talk. And I've loved it when you've been on Joe's show. It's an amazing thing. I really appreciate what you've done. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to talk to you. I look forward to it.

So, of course, I want to talk about the vets town hall, the newest initiative that you have going on. But it would be a total disservice to talk just specifically about that because I think a lot of people would lose the context of, one, where you got the idea from, what you're trying to do. And I think the best place to start, honestly, would be, if you could, just kind of unpack your career and what. you have been doing peripheral or even inside the military industrial complex, for lack of a better term. Yeah, sure. So this is relevant, quite relevant. I studied, I majored in anthropology in college. And I was a really good distance runner in college.

And I did my field work on the Navajo reservation. They have amazing runners. There's an old tradition of running. And I trained with their best guys. And I came back and wrote a thesis on Navajo long distance running. and it's there are definitely women who run, but the running that was used for hunting and warfare was done in male groups.

And I wound up sort of studying how male groups work. And they work in similar ways in pretty much every society around the world. And I really became interested in that dynamic. And eventually, you know, after I got out of college, I did construction for a while. And I was a high climber for tree companies, taking trees down. I did the aerial work for them with a chainsaw on a line. I got hurt doing that.

I did a lot of different things in my 20s, but I really wanted to be a writer, and I eventually started writing about dangerous jobs, and that led to my first book, The Perfect Storm, but it also led to an interest in war reporting. My dad was a refugee from two wars. He was born in Germany, in Dresden. They left. His father was Jewish. They left.

They went to Spain. They were driven out by the fascists with Franco in 36. Went to France. We were driven out by the Nazis. Came to this country. I was really interested in how war worked. And there was a civil war in Bosnia. The city of Sarajevo was besieged.

And I went there to sort of learn how to be a war reporter and eventually wound up covering wars all over the world. I was in Afghanistan in 1996. I was in Sierra Leone. I mean, none of these wars had anything to do with U.S. forces, right? These were just civil wars that were bubbling along in the world. And eventually, I really sort of fell in love with Afghanistan. I was in, I was there with Ahmed Shah Masud in 2000 as he was fighting,

uh, the Taliban and al-Qaeda in North and Barakshan. And, um, after he was killed, um, I rushed back there. It was on, it was right before 9-11 happened. I rushed back there and I was with the Northern alliance when they took Kabul. And, um, I eventually, you know, I eventually became interested in the U.S. military. I mean, the Afghan win should have been an easy one. It was initially, in my opinion, we lost our focus, went to Iraq and thereby lost Afghanistan. And by 2005, I was like, wow, I grew up during Vietnam. I never thought as a journalist I would ever cover an American ground war. But here we are in Afghanistan.

I want to know what it's like to be with American forces. I was really curious about it. And so I wound up in the Corungal Valley in eastern Afghanistan in 2007, 2008. And I just thought, I'm going to bring a video camera. along. I didn't know anything about shooting video, but I was like, can't be that hard. And I'm just going to document everything. I'll learn how to shoot. And if I'm going to write a book about a deployment and I might as well make a documentary as well. And so, and I had the good fortune to team up with Tim Hetherington, who was a brilliant British photographer and videographer.

And we teamed up halfway through the deployment. He started shooting video. And we made our film Strupo and it just caught people's, I don't know, it caught their mind, their imagination. They caught something and it went, you know, we went all the way to the Oscars with it. How were you able to get the access that you were able to achieve to be almost by with and through, whether it be before working in the Coringal? I mean, the idea of reporting on a war zone, it's fantastic. The logistics involved in actually getting over to a war zone, earning the trust of people, or even communicating with them in the first place to be side by side at their hip to capture these things.

How did you do that? Well, with the U.S. military, it's easy. I mean, they have a system in place for embedding journalists. And so thanks to George Bush in Iraq, during the Iraq War. I didn't vote for Bush, but one thing that he did that was very good was institute and embedding program after journalists were completely barred from frontline reporting during the first Gulf War, really was a pity. Democracy's really should allow, not unfettered, but close to unfettered access to military operations by the press. It's really, really important. And so, you know, that's easy.

You just, it's like applying for a credit card. You mean, you call the public affairs office and they set you up and off you go, right? But then once you get there, your conduct will determine what kind of emotional access you have to the soldiers that you're with. And Tim and I were, you know, off and on we were there off and on for a whole deployment. So the guys got to know us really well. You know, most journalists because of tight budgets, you know, they come and go in a week or two, and then that's the end of that. We weren't, you know, we weren't doing breaking news reporting.

We weren't covering the events of the war. We were fully immersing ourselves in the reality of a platoon in combat. We had no, we had no hard news deadlines. We had nothing. We were just, we almost became part of the platoon. I had no pretense of objectivity in this. I was utterly completely subjective about what was going on, right? We weren't certainly around to the Taliban side.

It's like, oh, but on the other hand, which is what the press should do, really, right? They really should try to understand both sides. And not that they have equal moral merit, but they both do need to be understood, right? And that was not what we were trying to do. So we had great emotional access just because we were there for so damn long and we're in so much combat with those guys. and I made lifelong friends there, right? The military itself sort of forgot that we were doing it. And had they known that two journalists were spending...

Yeah, yeah, you know, if they'd known that two journalists were spending that much time with a unit that was in that much combat, I think they wouldn't have been comfortable with it. But that said, they never stayed our hand, right? They never asked to look at footage. They never asked to vet anything. They never asked to delete anything.

There was no attempt at sort of PR management. And, you know, honestly, it's one of the few militaries in the world where that can be, where you can say that about them. It was absolutely extraordinary the amount of the lack of oversight and the trust that the military had in us. And their belief in freedom of the press, right? They knew that a free press is more important than controlling the message coming from a war zone. And my God, they really, they're in. They're absolutely exemplary in that.

Other journalists haven't had that experience, but that was my experience. Did you request to go to the Cornwall Valley, or did you just find your way there by happenstance? No, no, no. Nothing happens by happenstance if you're embedded with the U.S. military. And so what happened was I had randomly been placed with the 173rd in 2005 in Zabel province. And, you know, I grew up during Vietnam in a really liberal household and a liberal part of the country. And I was extremely skeptical of the U.S. military, right, for some sort of cultural reasons, right? And I got there and I was like, oh, my God, these guys are amazing.

And what we're trying to do in Afghanistan is amazing. And so I thought if this unit goes back to Afghanistan, if they go to Iraq, I don't want to cover it. I just, I was, I could not have been objective about Iraq. I was against it, right? Afghanistan, I was not against it. I was for it. I thought we could do a lot of good there. And it would get to the root of what caused the tragedy.

on 9-11. I didn't think Iraq would do that. So that said, I thought if this platoon, if battle company goes back to Afghanistan, I want to follow them for a deployment. And they were slated to go to Iraq. I was like, oh, well. And then at the last minute, they got sent into the Corps and Gal Valley, which I'd never heard of. No one had ever heard of it. And, you know, I was in the east. All the fighting was in the south. I was like, all right, well, that's going to be a boring year, right? We're just going to sit around drinking tea with the elders and play poker at the b you know at the fob right or what's it it looked kind of uninteresting and i got there and it just you know immediately kicked off like crazy and i was like oh shit this is intense like this is what i

thought vietnam you know as a kid i imagined vietnam was like and um i don't mean that as a political statement i mean just as a reality of combat you know ground combat and um so uh so it was a it was a really random thing and the guys i was with didn't they didn't know the corongol was going to be that intense either. They were quite disappointed to not go to Iraq because they wanted to get into it with someone and they thought they were getting sent to this backwater, sleepy little backwater where nothing was going to happen. Yeah, you know, about Iraq. So the first time I set foot in Afghanistan was in 2002, late 2002. It was at the very tail end of the Karzai detail after he, I don't, you know, I guess you could call it an assassination attempt. It was one of his guys in uniform that

turned on him that was dealt with. It was logistically intensive, but absolutely nothing kinetic when I was there in 2002. And then I was in Iraq for the initial invasion. I mean, we were forward-staged in Saudi Arabia watching Bush give, what did he give Saddam? It said, 24 or 48 hours, whatever warning it was. Was it 24? I can't remember. There was a number of those. Yeah, there were a number of red lines in that process. Yeah. And the first target that we were assigned to, I was at an East Coast command at the time, was the number one Kembio target in Iraq. And I remember my father's a Vietnam vet, and I've spoken about this before, we really, we disagreed about Iraq. And it was because my headspace at the time was closer to what you had described. I was doing a job that I had wanted to do. And it'd be like a race car. driver who only gets to watch races on TV. And then you get the opportunity to go get inside of an F1 car. You're going to look for every reason why you should be able to get into the F1 car. You're going to justify it. And I remember arguing with my father about, no, this is essential.

You know, I believe what I was hearing, probably if I'm being totally honest, because I wanted to. I had an underlying motivation that I wanted to go do my job. You know, fast forward, 10 years of war later and eight combat deployments. You know, I wish I could have had a little chat with my younger self about what I was going to be getting into. But that my father had the same feeling, his experiences in Vietnam, the information, the way the information was portrayed, the after effects. And it's, I wish I could go, well, I can't go back in time, you know, and I do believe that

the experiences and mistakes you make along the way, turn you into the person that you become. But it certainly was a belief in headspace that I look back on, you know, many years later now. And I regret the thoughts that I had. I was not objective at the time. So I can understand their desire to, oh, I don't want to go to the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan. And what are we going to be doing here? What is this part of land that nobody could find on Google Earth if they were given a million dollars to try to find it? And then you get there.

And I can only imagine, because obviously I wasn't there, we would travel in and out of that valley from time to time very strategically. How quickly, though, once boots were on the ground, did you realize that you guys had found your way into a hornet's nest? Oh, I mean, just landing at the cop, as the company headquarters was called, you know, it was so remote. It was the side of this mountain, and it just, and I was like, damn, if they're in a place like this, this is going to be interesting, right? And, and, and, you know, within, it was the first, you know, the first, first foot patrol that we did, we got ambushed pretty intensely for about half an hour. And it's a miracle we didn't take casualties.

We're in the wide open. I mean, they really nailed us. And we were hunkered down, man. It was U.S. infantry taken cover, just getting hammered for half an hour. I was like, damn, I didn't know this happened to the U.S. military. I thought we did the hammering. Like, what's going on here? I couldn't believe it.

And so that was, you know, I was a couple of days in, I guess. And then that kind of thing just kept happening. And then they started taking casualties. And so, yeah. Can you, for people who haven't watched Restrepo, which I highly recommend that people do, I've actually watched it with my 18-year-old son and my 20-year-old son. It was not when they were at that age. It was a little bit younger because they, it's been interesting.

my children were very young while I was operationally deploying. The last deployment I did in 2010, which was to Zibul province of all places, it's interesting, the same amount of terrain that we have shared over time. I kissed my daughter goodbye in a crib. She has zero recollection of any, you know, which is in hindsight, I think that's a great thing. And because she didn't have the awareness or processing to understand what I was doing. My sons that day, I was trying to get out of the house quietly. And my family had come down. It was a total just shit show of events.

My mom had just been diagnosed with cancer again for the second time. They were staying at the house. I was trying to get out of the house quietly. I walked down the stairs and both of my sons were standing at the landing of the stairs. And I don't know if they had just heard me or they knew that something was up. So I gave them a hug. I was able to make it into my car. I think I made it around the corner and absolutely just broke down in tears crying and didn't continue driving to work because I didn't think I could safely drive at that point.

But they asked and have asked in the years since so few questions about my old job, which I'm deeply appreciative of because I don't want, I just want to be their dad. And I'm actually, that's all I really care about. But a few years ago, they started asking about just general questions of what was my experience like? what was Afghanistan like, what was Iraq like? And I think it's because of the, you know, the schooling system. And I don't know exactly what they were being taught or the subjects being covered. But I sat down with both of them and we watched Restrepo. And it was probably the quietest time period for that short period of time, the length of the documentary that I have ever been around my two sons.

Because they're what could be aptly described as chatterboxes. Yeah. It was impactful. And it was really meaningful. and it helped me actually, even though my job was completely different. It helped me unpack my own experiences to a way that it actually led to more questions, not a crazy volume. They still, I think I'm the most uninteresting human being to my children, which is just the way that it goes.

I still don't get that many questions. Yeah. It was a fantastic tool for me to try to bridge that gap between trying to physically explain what it was like and to be able to show them that medium. And the conversations around it, I think, were unbelievable. So I highly recommend that anybody who hasn't watched it, go watch it. But for those listening before they have, you know, there was the cop at up in the Coringall. But can you describe the outpost?

I don't even know what they ended up calling it, but the incredibly small terrain feature and infrastructure that they built and what was all around that? Yeah. So about 1,000 feet above the cop, which was the company headquarters and very rustic as U.S. military fobs go. And about 1,000 feet above that was this craggy ridge that the enemy would shoot down into the cop from. So Captain Kearney was like, all right, we're going to put a position on that ridge so that takes that terrain away from the enemy. So they went up there at night and started digging. And it was all rock, right? So they're filling sandbags with chunks of rock that they're picking out of the ridge.

And as soon as it got light, they got hammered and they sort of threw themselves down and shot back. And then the firing stop, they went back to picking rock. And it's 100 degrees. And then their body armor. And it's just brutal, right? And they fought and dug for 24 hours straight. And so they created this little outpost that had some sort of jury-rigged plywood hooches. that had kerosene heaters in them for the winter,

and some hescoes and a lot of sandbags and gun positions. And it was, you know, we could accommodate maybe three squads. And then there was a squad of A&A. And it had some 60 millimeter mortars, I think, and a 50-Cal and a Mark 19, that's it. And, you know, everything was MREs. There was no internet. There was no electricity for the first few months.

There was never any internet. There was no communication with the outside world at all, except by radio to the cop and to the battalion headquarters, I guess. And it was all men. And, you know, they got really bored. And, you know, they would sit around, you know, wishing for a firefight because there was nothing to do up there. Absolutely nothing to do. And there was tarantulas and flies and, you know, there was a cougar and monkeys and a lot of combat. It was crazy.

It was really a really crazy place. And in some ways a wonderful place because, you know, it was like it was an experience for many of those guys. And certainly for me, of this sort of like the most intense non-romantic intimacy conceivable, right? Like the bond between these guys that I was eventually, I feel quite honored to have been included in, was, you know, basically as an anthropologist, I was like, this replicates our evolutionary past. I mean, humans evolved to survive in a harsh environment and groups of 30, 40, 50 people, mixed age, mixed gender, obviously. But, you know, a group of about a platoon size where people are affiliated with each other to the point of risking their lives for each other, because without everyone else, you're dead, and without you, they're dead, and you're all in it together. And that sort of forced loyalty transcends all kinds of personal problems.

So as one guy said to me, there's guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other, but we would all die for each other. That's more or less our evolutionary past as a species. And so when you recreate that, you take people in modern society, which has a lot of great things about it, but is also missing a lot of great things. You take people from a modern, affluent Western society like we all were from. And you put them down in a situation like that that basically reproduces our evolutionary past. We are deeply wired to respond in pro-social ways to those circumstances. And we are deeply wired to find that in intensely gratifying and fulfilling. And then when you leave it, you miss it.

And this is all for some very, very profound evolutionary reasons. and that's what we all got to experience. And it was the experience of a lifetime for me, and I think for many of those guys. How was it coming home for you? Well, there wasn't one big homecoming because I sort of came and went. My Tim and I did a total of 10 trips either together or individually. So we covered a lot of the deployment,

but we were continually shuffling in and out of there, and every time was kind of a transition. I mean, you know, after I sort of bonded with those guys, I would come home and I'd be incredibly worried about them. and worried that something was going to happen out there, and I wanted to be there for it, for them and also for the experience, because I wanted to experience what they experienced.

So my sense of myself, my affiliation, was substantially outside of my life in the United States. I mean, I was married. You know, whatever. I mean, I was, you know, I was 45 years old in the middle of my life, married, and one of my strongest identification, as a person had nothing to do with any of those things. It had to do with a very small piece of hilltop.

And, you know, 30 guys I'd met a few months earlier. And it was, so it was very, you know, I'd get back out there. And along with a lot of anxiety and dread and everything else that comes with combat, would be this huge relief. Like, oh, finally I'm back. Like, this is where I feel like the most me. And if you have to leave a place where you feel like the most me and go somewhere where you're a lesser version of yourself,

that's not going to feel good. And for a lot of combat infantry, I feel like that's one of the reasons they have such trouble transitioning is because back home, they feel like they're a lesser version of themselves because they do not have to perform at that same level because they're not under attack, right?

Like it's easy street compared to Restrepo. But that means that you're kind of a lesser version of yourself. And like, so what am I, what distinguishes me? from the average slob walking down the street. Not much right now. You know, I got some interesting history, but that's over. So really, today, what distinguishes me from that guy?

Virtually nothing. You know, and then that's, I think, for some sort of important ego reasons, that's actually quite hard, kind of a bitter pill to swallow. Yeah, and the gap is widening between those who have worn a uniform in service of their country and those that have not. I think 0.5% is the current statistic. believe it was 6% at the peak somewhere near World War I and World War II where the drafts were the most active. And then you look at, I think, all four or five, depending on where Space

Force lands. I still can't figure out where they fit in the DoD and exactly what they do. But they're all under their recruiting goals as well. So not only is the gap widening, it seems as if the interest for people to pursue that path, which I can understand, you know, depending on the stories that you have been told or the information that you have received in the way that has been painted in the picture that you're seeing can view those decisions. It certainly does create that gap of, you know, not only what's special about me, nothing really anymore, but also, and I've seen this in my own community that I came from, there is a sense, and I'm not sure whether or not it's real or it's a story that we tell ourselves that we don't have anything in common with people

that didn't have our experiences as well. And I personally believe that's a very dangerous way to talk to yourself because I do believe we have a vast amount in common. Our experiences differ. But as a human being and what we believe, there's a lot of common ground there. I don't have a solution for it either. I look at the veteran community. I was just for whatever reason yesterday in my social media feed, a moving graph showed up. And it showed suicide rates starting, and I believe in about 2000 in the veteran community.

versus the civilian population in the United States. And the veteran one was higher, even to begin with. And they tracked along relatively parallel until about 2002. And then the veteran suicide graph took off at about a 45 degree angle. It peaked a lot higher, came down. It was interesting. It was the civilian and military graphs would peak and come down a little bit, but there was always this massive gap in between the two with the military veteran

personnel at the highest point. And I don't have any answers. I have so many questions and I don't have any answers. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on what could be, just based on your own experience and the time with those individuals and the experiences and seeing them come back, why do you think that there is such a gap between those two population groups? Well, there was a huge gap between the combat infantry and the Korngal and the American soldiers at Baghram.

I mean, the guys I was with hated going to Bagram because they were like, they're a bunch of Fobits. I got nothing in common with those guys. And they were wearing the uniform. But they were not, you know, they were not getting shot at and they were not shooting their rifles and they weren't having a whole lot of experiences that the guys I was with were having. And they were enormously disdainful of those guys, right? So that's just a microcosm of a sort of general disconnect between all those guys. I mean, guys in the male, female sense, you know, both at Bagram and at Regram and at Reckham. Repo and all and every other pha, you know, and the civilian population, right?

But so the combat infantry is capable of doing that with non-combat infantry as well. And I think if you go through something that's extreme, you know, firemen get it, I'm sure. I think professional athletes probably get it. I mean, you, you know, you go through something very intense and painful and triumphant and everything else that bonds you very closely. And then you sort of look at everyone else like, oh, well, you're just a civilian or you're not, you're not an athlete or you're not a fireman. You're not, I think it's a very natural human thing to do.

The problem is that for most of human history, small-scale tribal societies, like, everyone went through the same thing together, right? Like, I mean, the reality was an all-encompassing reality. Maybe the warriors were doing the actual fighting. But the rest of the population of that group was in such close proximity to danger and violence and hardship that basically everyone was combat infant. country, right? And so there wasn't the sense of, oh, well, you pampered, you know, you, you pampered members of the Sioux Nation who never had to like make any sacrifices. Like, we just

came back from the war path and like, who were you? You don't get that because it's just too small as society to have those divisions. In a modern industrial society, things are parceled out. So, you know, I think it's, you know, I mean, women could plausibly say to men, what do you know about childbirth? You haven't been through that. Shut the hell up, right? Like, you can't know what I went through. Yeah, you're right. I can't know what you went through. But that's, but anyone can say that. I mean, you know, being a school teacher in the inner city is a pretty damn hard job. They can say that too. People who drill for oil. I'm sorry, you know, loggers, the mortality rate in some industries like the oil industry, logging, commercial

fishing, you know, as high or higher than many combat units. So people, largely men, largely working class men, frankly, in those industries, industries could also say, what do you all know? You know, you've never seen a well blow up and, you know, kill your best friends, right? So that's just the downside of a big complex mass society where you have these very specialized jobs. And, you know, I think one way out of that would require a lot of people, including veterans, to say, you know what?

none of us would be here without everybody else. Right? Like without the school teachers and the shrinks and the doctors and the guys who pick up the garbage and the combat infantry and the nurses and this. You know, it takes the whole goddamn thing to keep this going. And so let's stop with the rankings. Right. Yeah. It's interesting.

I know exactly what you're talking about with individuals who are out at the front leading edge, whether at the cop or up at Restrepo. you go back to Bogram and you're going to get your Timmy Horton's coffee, you know, maybe, maybe pick up some pizza hut and go to one of the several gyms that's available, maybe catch a movie. I don't know, whatever you're into. It's very easy to lose or to, I guess, develop a very myopic focus on just what your role is out on that front leading edge. And it's common, I think, with people from the special operations community as well. They focus on what they do and they lose side of the fact that those people at Bogram that are blowing up the helicopters with the water bottles or the MREs or the ammo resupply or all of those things, you're proper fucked

if they don't do their job as well. And you cannot do your job unless they do their job. But it's got it. I mean, even when you are actively fighting an enemy, we will waste energy and bandwidth looking for reasons to nitpick our own internal organization and rack and stack against it. And that's just inside of the military, which people probably wouldn't, wouldn't understand unless they had seen it firsthand. Do you think, based on what you saw around the military members and kind of the aftermath of what has happened with some of the people you have direct contact with, do you think the military is actually capable of facilitating a healthier transition from a deployment like that or the end of a career like that back into the civilian sector? Or should that even be the role of the military? Or is that maybe perhaps better served by?

NGOs or organizations that are separate from both of them because I feel like people say, wow, the military, you know, they teach you how to break things and you don't learn how to put stuff back together. And that's true, but they're by design. You know, they're teaching you how to do your job when you're in the military. And I've just, I don't personally know if the military is capable of developing that transition program, nor do I know if they would be the best suited for it. Yeah, I mean, you got to be, I think we have to be careful of having sort of military structures within civilian life. I mean, when soldiers get out of the military, I mean, there's the VA, but that's not

a military or, I mean, that's not part of the military, right? Essentially part of the health care system and part of the federal government. And, you know, I think you have to be careful once you get out of the military, like, I think you probably don't want to turn to the military to help you adjust to the civilian world. Like that, it sort of sends the wrong message. And, you know, keep in mind, a lot of people have trouble with this transition. Firemen who retire, cops who retire.

Hell, fishermen who retire, right? Commercial fishermen. Yeah. The Peace Corps volunteers who'd spend a couple of years in a, you know, not a war-torn country, but, you know, sort of rough third world like environment, small village like environment come back and one quarter of Peace Corps volunteers lapse into a significant depression when they come home. That's almost exactly.

I did not know that. Yeah. So you don't need to get shot at to have this problem. It almost sounds like the similarity there between all. all of those would be more of a crisis of identity. Yeah. You're part of a small group, small meaningful group, where people are willing to make sacrifices for each other.

And then boom, suddenly you're back home and you're living in a suburb and no one's willing to do shit for anybody else. You're like, you know, of course you would get depressed. Like that's a healthy, you know, depression is a healthy human response to a negative environment. And, you know, modern society in many human ways is a negative environment. It doesn't call out our sort of our best human traits. It requires us to suppress them.

So, of course, people get depressed. I would also say just to add, you know, yeah, it's tragic that 0.5%, et cetera, of the country serves and it shouldn't be more. But actually, I don't think the nation is wealthy enough to have a larger military than what we have. Like, I mean, if we had a military that was 5% of the population, the cost of that would be unbearable. And we don't need it, right?

I mean, we're a tactically savvy, high technology, highly trained military. We actually don't need millions of soldiers fighting world wars. That's not the kind of wars we're fighting anymore. And so it actually is more of a specialty force like the police. It's actually a really good point. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective, the upfront cost. And then again, there's, of course, the back end cost. I don't think most people realize that one of the largest sections of the DoD

budget is actually paying retirement, health care benefits, disability. All of those things are encapsulated in that budget. And I haven't seen the stats or haven't looked at it recently, but it's into the 30th or 40th percentile of their overall budget. So the cost on the back end is also immense. Right. And that's with 0.5 percent of the population. Imagine if it was 5 percent, right?

Forget it. Yeah. We couldn't do it. So, you know, I mean, that small percentage should be acknowledged. of people who serve, not so that it should be larger, but so that those small, that small percentage that serve, so that we should understand the nature of the relationship with them, right? And, you know, I think if there was a World War on the scale World War II,

I think what you would have is, would probably replicate what was happening in this country in the 40s, where virtually everyone knew someone who was over there, right? And we're saving, you know, tin cans because the country needs the scrap metal. I mean, I think that would happen. And, uh, but thank God, it, it doesn't need to happen, uh, at least for the moment and hopefully never. Uh, yes, I definitely fall in line with you on the hopefully never. Again, conversations with my younger self who, I don't need to go be a soldier and prove

myself. And now I caution people, be careful what it is that you are wishing for because sometimes your wish comes true. And it's the things that you know, didn't. know about and we're never openly discussed about your wishes that can come bite you in the ass later on in your life. Yeah. Absolutely.

It's a Veterans Day is Saturday that we're recording this on a Thursday. I'm going to turn this out and get this out tomorrow. And originally, was it John who connected us? Was that the name of the interview? Okay. Perfect. I feel like I call that name completely out of my hat, so I'm lucky that I guess correctly on that one. Originally, he reached out because of your current initiative, which ties, it actually ties directly

into your experiences covering war, Veterans Day on the horizon, what we've kind of talked about, the struggles that veterans face post service or even in the military while they are still in. But it's the Vets Town Hall. And you sent me the link to the video, watch the video. I actually watched it again this morning. And I recognize a lot of, even the opening scenes where people that were involved with a documentary Restrepo. And it's hard for me to watch. I can see, I can feel the emotion in their eyes. You can see the struggles.

And it's absolutely real. It may not be real for everybody, but it is absolutely real for those people. And it ties into what you're trying to do at the Vets Town Hall. So I'll just kind of turn it over to you if you could explain what that concept is and what you're trying to achieve. Yeah. Thank you very much. The Vestown Hall idea was actually described in my book, Tribe, because when I was writing that book, we had already done our first one. And the idea is very, very simple.

For most of human history, when people were traumatized by hardship, by violence, by combat with an enemy, they were traumatized in a group, and they recovered from trauma in a group. They were a tribe. They were a community. They were a survival community. what's very, very complicated for modern societies is that people are traumatized in combat, people are traumatized in a group, typically a platoon or a company, and then begins a lifelong process of recovering from that trauma without a group, right? Like humans have never tried this, right?

This is completely new in human society, right? And the people you went through bad stuff with, invariably are the people that you recover with. And that's for the first time in history on a large scale that's not true. And obviously, we don't do it very well. And so I just, as an anthropologist, excuse me, I thought, I'm just getting over a cold. I apologize. I thought, okay, how did tribal societies help warriors sort of re-engage with the civilian world, with the world of the older people and the women and the children coming back from the, from the warpath, as it were? having engaged in extremely brutal combat.

I mean, imagine what combat was like in physical terms, you know, in the 1820s, 1830s, in the Great Plains. I mean, Tomahawks and Spears. And, I mean, talk about hand-to-hand fighting. He must have been unbelievably traumatizing as badass as those guys were, right? And so how do you bring that? How did the tribes do it, right? And these are psychological processes that every human has. You engage in violence.

You have to unhook from it. And so one of the ways that was quite widespread was based on something, a Kiowa ceremony called the Gourdes dance. It was very, very simple. The warriors would come back from whatever they'd been up to. And each warrior, and, you know, this is small-scale combat. It might have been 10 or 20 guys, right? Each warrior would have the chance to sing and retell and dance and brag about his exploits what he did for his people to defend his people against the enemy,

whether the enemy was the U.S. cavalry or a rival tribe that they were in conflict with. And so what would happen is that the individual would perform, basically perform and recount what they did. And the tribe itself, the community was there to hear it and celebrate it. Or mourn. I mean, you know, mourn the loss of brave fighters as well. And so I just thought, okay, you know, we're a modern society.

We can't all gather around the sweatlods. It's not happening. But how do we do? How would you do this in a modern context? And it occurred to me that the town hall is the center of every community in this nation, right? Small towns, big cities. The town hall is the center of civic life. And it's not open for business, for ordinary business on Veterans Day.

It's Veterans Day, right? which means it can be used for something else. And so the Vets Town Hall idea is this, that any veteran of any war has the right to speak for 10 minutes about what it was like for them to serve this country. And if you like to say that you support the vets, which was a very popular phrase about 10 or 15 years ago, and now you hear it less now.

But if that's how you think of yourself, that just means showing up for a couple of hours at your town hall and hearing what local veterans have to say about what they did for you, right? And, you know, some veterans are going to shock the liberals in the crowd by saying that was the best fighting that war was the thing I'm most proud of. It's the best thing that ever happened to me, right? And some conservatives might be made uncomfortable by a veteran saying, you know what? I hate that this country sent me to fight that war.

God damn you. Like, how could you do that to us? And, you know, some people, many people will be still grieving the loss of their brothers or sisters and crying too hard to even really speak coherently. And so when we did this, it was, it started, um, uh, almost 10 years ago. And, um, so there were veterans from World War II on, right? Korea, Vietnam, first goal. War, Afghanistan, Iraq, absolutely extraordinary.

And the emotion in the room, I mean, the sort of beautiful thing about it is that it's speaking to a group is cathartic in a way that talking to a shrink one-on-one might not be. You're talking to your people about what you did for them and what it cost you and what it gave you, right? A very profound thing that also allows or forces the group to participate emotionally and morally in the war. Like, this isn't the soldiers war, right? They didn't choose this. They did it. They pulled the trigger, but we all sent them, right? We paid for the guns. We paid for the planes. We made the decision. It's our war. It's not their war. Right. And what the Vestown Hall

experience does is it allows civilians, even civilians who were against the war, to understand really sort of viscerally, wow, this is all of us. Like, this is this whole country doing this. And I could say I was against the war, but I'm still, I still need to be engaged in the consequences of it, and the fallout of it, because I'm a member of this nation and I care about it. And I want it, I want us to be the best nation we possibly can be. And that, you know, that experience utterly rejects the kind of partisan politics that is now, you know, and current in government and in the country right now. It really asked people to be a human being and an American citizen, first and foremost, and a Democrat or Republican, way, way at the

back of the list. Like, that's not even relevant in these rooms. For the events that you have been able to conduct, what's the impact that you've seen? I mean, listen, tears are a good sign. There's a lot of tears. And I mean, people start talking about stuff and they really, the emotion just comes out. And, you know, when emotion comes out, you are somewhat freed of it. And the emotion comes out in the people as well, in the, in the audience. And you will, you are guaranteed to have your sort of favorite ideas about war and politics violated, right? I mean, whether you're liberal or conservative or straight or gay or whatever, or anything. It does not matter. People stand up and they say things that really challenge your

assumptions about how the world works and how this country works and who we all are. And in beautiful, in amazing ways, right? And I mean, for example, like the first one was in a kind of conservative community in Massachusetts. And this one sort of older lady stood up. He was like in her 70s, right? And this was in 2015. She was in her 70s. I was like, what's, who, what she, you know, I couldn't, didn't quite get it, right? And she, she stood up and really blew people's minds by saying, I served in Vietnam as a man. And then I came home and got a sex change. Damn.

It was amazing, right? I was like, right on, this is a crazy country. Like, look at this. Like, absolutely extraordinary. And, and, you know, whatever you, whatever you think about sex change, I don't care. Like, this person got, they stood up and they did. did it. And they served their country and they came back and they figured out a solution for themselves. And God bless them. You know what I mean? Like it was that feeling in the room. And you know what?

We all need a bit of that. Whatever our preconceptions and biases are. We all need to be shocked by by that a little bit. And you know, it's because veterans are America, right? They, whatever is America is veterans. You know, it's the same thing. And, and, and, you know, I just love that. And there's, I mean, every kind of person, right? I mean, people, people who fought bravely and with great pride and are incredibly anti-war, right? And people like real, like Patriots, they're totally pro-war and then came back, I think, a little bit like yourself, maybe, like, wow, that shit was more complicated than I realized.

I got to do, I got to think about this right now. You know, this is not a simple thing, right? And I, and you know, when civilians get killed, it's particularly burdensome, right? It's particularly painful. And I'm a journalist. I never held a gun, right? I never pulled the trigger on somebody, right? But even just being in the presence of civilian casualties, which I have been many times,

just witnessing that brings on a crushing sense of guilt. And so I can't imagine as a soldier, right? And, you know, that's an enormous and dangerous burden as well. And even for someone like me as a journalist. And one of the things the Vets Town Hall allows people to do is confess, right? confess the things that they feel ashamed of or that they are worried about morally or what's God is, you know, one veteran said, what's God going to say when I get up there? You know, like, what's God going to say about me killing people? Like, you're not supposed to. And what's he going to say,

right? And so that comes out. And it's, you know, again, this is not, this is what I'm saying is not a comment for or against any of our wars. I'm agnostic about all of it, right? But there are, there is emotional fallout that has to be dealt with in real terms that can't tiptoe around the details. And a lot of people come back from wars feeling enormously guilty. You got to deal with that. That's not a political statement. It's a human statement. Yeah, the way I describe war to people is that if you touch war, it touches you back. And the only thing that is variable is the depth of the impression of the fingerprint. It's not matter of whether or not it's going to be on you. It's it's how deeply imprinted you are going to be and then what you can what you can if you're capable

to uh capable of and if you can find the tools to do so what you can do with those experiences it's one of my least favorite narratives and it often comes up around veterans day is the broken toy narrative where veterans they go to war and war has to break you and speaking only personally um the the combat i experienced was very different than the type of combat that you are around specifically with the units at Restrepo. I was never tasked with holding terrain and building infrastructure like that and and patrolling through the local areas and being ambushed. It was a very, we did find fix finish. You know, the whole, the actual acronym is three FEEA. Find fixed finish exploit and analyze. We, we focused on the fix and finish. We would fly in.

We would offset. We would take our actions on the target. And then we would leave. And it's different and it can impact you in different ways. And I've spent a good amount of time talking with psychologists and psychiatrists about it because I was fascinated. Why could six people be in a room and have six different experiences and impact on their life? What is going on here? And why does an individual that maybe saw less combat? Why are their eggs substantially more scrambled than somebody who was seeing combat on the daily level, especially in between different units? And there's a lot of variables, obviously, but one of the ones that was a repeating theme was it was the locus of control, meaning that when I went on target, I was expecting violence and 99 times out of 100.

When I encountered violence, I initiated it. And the difference in what that does and your ability to, maybe not necessarily process, but the experience for you is so different than living in an environment where you don't have any control. And you constantly have this state of dread. And most of the time when you encounter violence, it's on somebody else's terms and what that can absolutely do to you. And they're very different. But I hate this repeating narrative of if you saw a war, you were a broken toy. Because I personally believe that in my own experiences, which again were very different than the people that you were around. I actually think theirs were far more, probably far more deep because of the length of the exposure, the common nature of the exposure.

and the fact that they couldn't escape where they where they were experiencing it. It's I still feel like I'm better because of the experiences that I had. I do think, you know, it's not that I'm proud of fighting war, but I'm proud of the person that I was when I was in that environment. I feel like I had my most accurately calibrated moral compass that I've ever had in my life. I felt my most sense of purpose, my clear. sense of direction. My ability to make decisions was not perfect, but far more pristine that it is when I'm in daily life now, 10 years removed away from my military time and bombarded by, let's just

be honest, we're mostly bombarded by bullshit. That is all voluntary and I choose to pick up my anxiety rectangle like everybody else and participate in this ecosystem of psychosis. But those experiences, I was the best version of myself there. And I, and I'll be the first to me. I spent a lot of time talking to counselors. I went through a divorce a few years ago. And I'm very vocal about seeking out mental health and working through any issues that you may have. So you can arrive at the other end of that journey, a better version of yourself because of your experiences, because you put the work into it. And it seems like, unfortunately, that narrative gets a little bit out of control.

And there are people, a lot of veterans don't want to talk about it, but there are people who game the system. And I think for the vast majority of people, there actually are better because of it. And I hope that somehow maybe through events like you're putting on the Vets Town Hall where people can sit and they can listen and hear the stories. And I can tell you right now, it'll be cathartic for the people that are up there speaking. Even when you talked about, you know, the confessional nature of it or just explaining to people the cost of what we ask of our soldiers. I think it's so incredibly powerful. And my main hope would be that that broken toy narrative is at least it's quieted a little bit. I think right now I feel I personally, and this is my own personal opinion, I feel like it's at an eight.

I'd love to see it at like a two because it's not that it's not true, but it doesn't apply equally to everybody. And I actually think it's very damaging to the veteran community. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can be harmed and damaged and not broken. And, you know, I think there's an unfortunate, a bureaucratic incentive to see yourself and have yourself be diagnosed as broken because then the state will kind of help take care of you. And I, you know, I'm sorry to put it so boldly,

but we all know what we're talking about here, right? And that's true with workplace disability, workplace accidents, all kinds of stuff. I mean, people game the system constantly and with the federal government and, you know, vets are people too, right? They have to say problems everyone else has. So, you know, but I think there's there's a real danger here. that if you want to create a depressed alcoholic, whether it's from a workplace accident or combat, a psychological injury in combat or physical injury, anything, you know, give that person just enough money to survive, just enough money to get by in their parents' basement, and give them a smartphone and a television and a case of beer. You got a depressed person

right there. And the societies where... the individual is needed constantly, I think probably suffered lower levels of PTSD. I mean, apparently, the statistic that I saw is that the lower the level of affluence in a country, the lower the rates of PTSD. And I think the reason is sort of a profoundly human reason, if you feel not needed by your community, people get depressed very quickly when they feel like they're no longer needed. That's why suicide goes up after people retire. Depression goes up after people retire.

And there's this sense like if I, you know, we only survive because we're part of a group. Humans do not survive alone in nature. They die almost immediately. We survive. We thrive in groups. And if you don't feel like you're a contributing member to a group, you're actually in danger, right? And so I think one of the problems where you take people who had an intense group experience and you bring them home and say, don't worry.

about we don't need you anymore. We'll just basically warehouse you for 3,300 bucks a month tax free. Don't worry about it. We got this. On some, on a sort of evolutionary level, they're basically saying to the vet, you know what? You're not safe. You're no longer part of this group. We'll take care of you, but you're not really part of this group. We don't need you. You're not essential anymore. And that's terrifying to people. And so I, you know, I don't know how to, it's complicated to address the very, very real cases of psychological and physical need in the veteran community, but also protect other veterans from basically incapacitating themselves by saying, look, I'm broken. I need to be taken care of. You know, you need, there should be, they should be job training for anyone on PTSD disability.

Right. That should be a requirement of you want to, you want to do that with welfare? Well, let's do it with PTSD disability as well. You know, work fair, right? Like what the diagnosis, PTSD is not a lifelong, is generally not a lifelong diagnosis. It's most intense initially after the trauma and it drops off gradually and often resolves within some years to a manageable level, right? That's the sort of human norm for trauma. If that weren't true, if trauma was incapacitated, for a lifetime, the human race wouldn't exist, right? Like how we wouldn't be here? Like, I mean, how would that possibly work? One lion attack into the camp and everyone, you know, everyone's incapacitated for the rest of their life. Like, goodbye human race, right? So I feel like there should be periodic re-evaluations of the diagnosis and really an encouragement to like take a deep breath and head back out the door and do something.

Yeah, the problem is, you know, specifically when you talk about particular ratings using post-traumatic stress disorder as one of them, man, if your paycheck on the, well, actually, disability only on the first, but if your paycheck is threatened by going down, if you show improvement because that's the infrastructure that's been created, you're probably not going to get a lot of people who are saying, hey, I'm feeling substantially better. Yeah. And by the way, I would like for you to pay me less, especially in difficult economic times. It's a structure that is actually going to be antagonistic towards itself.

Oh, yeah. Well, one thing you could do is have a built-in system that drops the payments every year unless you petition otherwise, right? So the default now is you stay where you are. And if you actually want to get off this PTSD disability, it's very hard to do. I have a friend who tried to do it. He was like, I'm good. I don't need this. I can.

And there actually isn't a form to fill out. There's no form to fill out to say, I don't want your mom. money anymore. Like, you can't do it. It just, so, you know, one thing you could do, and I'm not a bureaucrat. I don't know how this works, but I imagine one thing you could do is have the default be, you know, every year for 10 years, you're going to get 10% less until you're getting zero, unless you circle back and demonstrate real need. And, you know, you'd have to make them proactive to keep the level up, which might, it might, and combine that with job training and psych counseling, and that might change the dynamic a bit.

I like that a lot, actually. How of your own experiences in war changed you throughout your exposure? I mean, as you mentioned, you know, you were never there from the perspective of carrying a rifle or pulling the trigger, but exposure to that environment is exposure to that environment. And, you know, some of the people that we're talking about who have crippling issues for their, for their time and war are also people who may have been carrying a rifle but never pulled the trigger. It was just exposure to that trauma that had such an impact. Yeah, or guilt that they never pulled the trigger, right? I mean, there's plenty of, plenty of vets who were like,

feel guilty that they didn't serve, that they served but didn't actually, we're not in actual combat, right? They weren't the real deal, right? And I think that's actually crippling, you know, the idea that you didn't serve your group sufficiently is a terrifying human idea, right? Because it means you're expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it means you're not needed. You're not wanting, you like get out of here you're a freeloader you know i mean that's a in human evolutionary human terms that's a very very dangerous thing to think about yourself and uh so um well so personally i mean when i started covering wars it was in the 90s and no one knew the term PTSD and i'd never heard of it and i had no understanding of trauma and every time i was in a situation that was

traumatic, either because it was horrifying or because it was frightening or both, I'd come back and I'd be just so puzzled because I'd be so weird for a while, right? I mean, I'd have nightmares and I'd be having like, I'm not an angry person. I have zero temper. I'm not an angry person. It's just not in me. And all of a sudden I'd be angry. And I'd be super anxious, right?

And I was like, damn, what's what's up? man. And I never connected it to combat, right? And why would I? Like, I mean, I came back from Afghanistan in 2000 and I couldn't take the New York City subway because there was too crowded and too loud and too dense and too everything. And I would just, I would just have panic attacks in the subway. I never connected that to Afghanistan because there aren't any subways in Afghanistan. Now, like, why would it even cross my mind that this had to do with combat? You know, and the truth was, we saw some horrific things. We got shelled for an hour. hour with Katusha rockets and, you know, our horses were killed and we saw victims of a, of a,

of a mass infantry assault through a minefield. You know, these guys without legs that had been dragged, you know, dragged back out of the minefield. We were in the middle of all of it, right? And I came home and I was a mess and I got really depressed and I didn't understand why. But what happens is gradually you recover. And so after some months, you know, I would sort of get better. I didn't have the government for a, you know, for a disability check. I didn't have a VA to go consult with a shrink. I just thought I was going crazy for some reason. And then I was glad to find out a few months later that I actually wasn't going crazy. And I had no idea it had to do with combat. Like none. I just like, oh, I'm 38. I'm finally losing it. Wow. Wow. What a bummer.

You know. And then as it went on, one of the really profound, profoundly distressing things after I was at Restrepo with that platoon was the loss of brotherhood of comradeship with those guys. That was a real loss. Like that was a real, I wasn't even a soldier, right? And there was a rear tore my heart out, right? I mean, afterwards I was like,

then what's the fucking point of living? Like if you're not part of a group like that, what's the point? Right? An absurd thing to say, but that's what it felt like. And, and then the other, you know, the danger I'd been in occasionally was a

That I healed from very, very easily, very quickly. I still jump at certain noises, but no big deal, right? And the thing that endured was the loss of comradeship. That was extremely hard. It made life look kind of bleak and uninteresting. And then my buddy Tim was killed in Libya. And the guilt from that that he had gotten killed in combat and I wasn't there to help him was absolutely devastating.

It actually made me, it actually put me into a dangerous depression. Like I had bad thoughts about myself and like what's the point of any of this, right? That eventually got better. I never saw talk to anybody about it. That eventually got better. One of the things that that has never entirely disappeared was the trauma of seeing dead and wounded civilians, dead and wounded children. Like that in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, that heartache for me has never really gone away. And if I talk about it, I try not to talk about it in detail because I will feel the emotions rising up and threatening to come out of me and nobody likes to cry in public or on a podcast, right?

So I'm very aware of it and it doesn't go away. And you know what, nor should it. I mean, come on, right? Like, these are the most serious things. Like, I feel like it's actually important to keep them inside you. And such things should never happen to children. And yet they do. And you don't, it's not, you're maybe not best served by getting rid of them out of your minds.

And then finally, you know, what I would say is that I, I'll just mention this briefly, but the closest I ever really came to dying was at home, I had an undiagnosed aneurism in my pancreatic artery, which is this little artery that no one has any reason to think about. And an aneurism is like a weak spot that sort of forms a balloon that can rupture. And it ruptured. and I bled out into my own abdomen. Abdominal hemorrhage is incredibly dangerous. Like it's a real widow maker.

And I lost, by the time they got me to the ER, I was 60 over 40. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. And I needed 10 units of blood to keep me alive. Oh, wow, you were close. I was really close. I was really, really close. And I'm an atheist. I'm not religious.

I'm not a mystic. In fact, I could say I'm an anti-mystic. My dad was a physicist. I'm a rationalist. Blah, blah, blah. And as I was dying, my dead father appeared above me to welcome me. And I was still conversant. I was still talking to the doctors.

I was like, and I had no idea I was dying. But I knew something bad was happening. And my dead father was there. He was like, it's okay. You can come with me. I was horrified. I was like, I'm not going with you. You're dead.

I'm alive. What are you, dad? What are you doing here? Right? And I said to the doctor, my dad was here above. me and I was in the trauma bay and I had they were putting a line into my neck into my juggler to transfuse me and and I said to the doctor you're you got to hurry I'm I'm leaving right now I'm going you're losing me and so after that all the all of the combat trauma that I hadn't dealt

with came back I was in I was I was a mess for about a year I was incredibly traumatized by almost dying, you know, basically in my own home. And I finally actually went to get psychological help. I mean, that, like, finally broke me. But it, when it, in some ways, it's good to be broken because then you fix everything, right? And you have a chance to fix everything rather than ignore everything. And so I, you know, I did some very intense therapy, not just about my terror that I could die at any moment, which is a hard fear to get rid of once you have it. But, but all the, all the, the past stuff. And so now, you know, medically I had no reason to worry I could die. But once that idea is in your mind, it's hard to get rid of. I'm completely healthy now. They fix the aneurysm.

I'm totally good. It's like it never happened. It's a random freak thing. Nothing to do with my state of health or anything like that. But it triggered a lifetime of stuff I hadn't dealt with. Well, I'm sorry that you had to go through what you just described, which sounds utterly horrendous. but I'm glad that it got you to the place that you are at now. And the reason for me asking you that question was I think one of the gaps between veterans and those who haven't served in the traditional sense when it comes to a uniform is this, like I mentioned, this feeling, well, they don't understand me. They don't have my experiences.

And you're a man who kind of navigated in between both of those worlds. And it's not that it's just that that experience and that expose. it leaves that mark that I have talked about. And you don't have to wear a uniform to be impacted by that mark. And another thing I would say is to bridge it even more into the civilian side, not all trauma is the same, but I think not a doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist, to throw that out there as a disclaimer. But I think all trauma leaves an impression like that.

And people need to be really careful not dealing with the things that are behind that curtain that may come up, you know, when you're exposed to having a chat with your dead father, which sounds utterly terrifying. But I guess my whole point in saying all of that is is that for people listening to this, whether you were military or civilian or everything in between, it's a powerful thing to turn and face those things

that might be just underneath the surface. And your life will be better for it. I guess it was my point in that whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. I bring out what's inside you and it will save you. And don't bring it out. It will destroy you. And it's a very profound sentiment.

I wrote a book about, I'm writing a book about what happened to me called In My Time of Dying that comes out in May. So if people are interested in what I just said about my own experience, I have a book coming out about that in May. And, you know, one thing I would add is that trauma reaction is very well predicted by past trauma. So if you were traumatized as a child, you were at a much higher vulnerability to PTSD in combat or in anything as an adult than everybody else. And because it's a volunteer army, military, a disproportionate number of people join up to get out of toxic family situations when they're like 17, right, or 18. So you have a disproven. You have, during the draft, the level of child abuse of any sort in the military was identical to the level of child abuse in the civilian population because it was a draft military. And so it's sort of like apples to apples.

In a volunteer military disproportionately people who might have suffered as children get out of their situation by joining a new family, right? By the military. You're like, oh, okay, this is my new family. I'm going to get out. It'll take care of me. Those people are disproportionately vulnerable to combat trauma. And people who are not traumatized as children withstand that trauma much, much better. So what you have is a military population that's sort of disproportionately set up to be vulnerable to trauma as adults,

which is a sort of an irony of all this. I would also say that sexual trauma in the military, which, as we all know, is a sort of growing problem, and a really important concern, you can just imagine what that does to someone who went into the military to get away from sexual trauma. I mean, you just imagine how unbelievably devastating that would be. Yeah, agreed. How can people best support Vets Town Hall?

Where can they go to find out more information? And what's the best mechanism for them to support this? Yeah, thank you. So Vets Town Hall is a national organization. we do not organize the events, you do, right? Whatever community you live in, it's up to you to organize this. We can't possibly do it. It's meant to be locally run, locally organized,

but you go to our website, vetsetownhall.org. Vetsetownhall.org. And there are very, very simple best practices and instructions for how to do this. It costs absolutely nothing, right? It's the ultimate free lunch. And we want these all over the country every year. We want 10 in every state, 100 in every state, a thousand in every state. It could really change not only the veteran population, but the country itself,

because this is a community experience, and there are precious few of those in modern life. So go to vetsdownhall.org. And additionally, we need financially, we need very, very little. We need just enough money to pay the wonderful woman, Kristen, who, sort of runs this with me. I obviously don't take a paycheck, but she needs something for her time in order to keep doing this. So we need to raise like a little bit of money, like not a lot. Like if everyone contributes a dime, we'll be good, you know, that kind of thing. So if you could, if you could consider contributing even a hundred bucks, that's great. That will go a long, long way

towards keeping Kristen in her job, organizing this nationally for us all. Is the video that you sent me, is that live anywhere? Are you guys planning to release that in the near future? We are releasing it this Veterans Day and it will live on Facebook and Twitter and all these and Instagram and all and on our website. So we'll very, very soon be accessible. We're literally, you know, like hours, days, hours away from being able to release that. Well, the reason I ask is I'm going to be a little bit ahead of you guys because this comes out tomorrow, Friday. Would you be against me inserting that video at the tail end so people can get a little bit of a, what would it be, pre-screening of the video that will live live live live the next day?

You know, I would say yes, except that we promised it, we're almost another organization that sort of like on- Damn it. But listen, as soon as that goes live, please put it on, I mean, please add it to your website. I mean, in the context of this interview, that would be amazing. I can't just give it to you because we already promised it to someone. Fair enough. I mean, you know, maybe I'll just do it on my own. I won't.

I'm just joking. But I'll give you the final words. I want to be respectful of your time. How would you like to close it out, Mr. Younger? Well, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. These are issues that are very, very important to me. I can tell they're important to you. They're important to many Americans.

Whenever someone interviews me, it's very clear in my mind, the interview is not about me, right? Like, I'm the voice, I'm the voice for things that are actually very, very important, but it's not about me personally. And I hope that's, that was clear in our conversation. I mean, these, I've devoted a fair amount of my life to, trying to, in my own way, make things better for people in this country. And as obviously you are and many people are. And it's a noble endeavor for all of us to be engaged in. And we all do it in our different ways and taking together. It will work. It does work. So thank you for allowing me to do my part in that. Of course. And, you know, honestly, not to steal your closing words, I think the role that you have filled in educating people and showing them the realities on the ground, I don't have the vocabulary for describing how essential that is.

I think as a nation, war should be a measure of absolute last resort. And it seems to me, personal opinion here, that it's far too easy for people to talk about it in a cavalier manner or try to commit manpower to it who have never seen it, touched it, or been exposed. to it and absent the lens that you provide you and others like you who are in that space, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And oftentimes those making the decisions aren't the ones who pay the consequences for it anyway. So I deeply appreciate what you have done. And I think it has immense and essential value in our society. So thank you. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you.