Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/14/24 Matthew Hoh on Obama’s Folly in Afghanistan and Recourses for Managing and Dealing with PTSD

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

Scott interviews Matthew Hoh about his experience trying to steer the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy away from the edge and his experience helping both himself and others confront PTSD. Hoh starts by recounting his Afghanistan experience. He and Scott then discuss the war more broadly. At the end, Hoh described his experience with PTSD, explained the scope of the problem facing veterans of the terror wars and offered up some resources for listeners who may be struggling themselves.  Discussed on the show: Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan “Deserted: The U.S. Military's Sexual Assault Crisis as a Cost of War” (Cost of War Project) r/VeteransBenefits Matthew Hoh is associate director at the Eisenhower Media Network and formerly worked for the U.S. State Department. Hoh received the Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling in 2010. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter @MatthewPHoh  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And thanks, y'all. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute. editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003,

almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line. I've got Matthew Ho. Of course, he used to be Marine, and then he is in the State Department, and then became the great whistleblower of 2009. He really did everything he could to try to stop the Afghan surge,

the tripling of the Afghan war under Barack Obama. Hey, you know what? I'm sorry. I know we've beaten this subject to death a million times, but let's talk about this for a minute. Welcome back to the show, Matt. How are you doing? Good, Scott.

Thanks for having me with you. Look, I'm so happy to have you here and to talk about this, Because, you know, there are so many people, you know, there's an endless cycle of people in and out listening and young people just starting to pay attention for the first time. People of all age is just starting to pay attention for the first time. People may not really know this story. And I was talking about you with our friend Tommy last night on the phone. And like, I think he didn't. No, he knew the story.

He knew the story. But I guess I just thought he didn't. So I started telling him to him. But just the, it got me thinking, though, like people don't really know this. I like, okay, so it's Obama's first year in office. And there's this group called the Coindinistas. And they're led by David Petraeus, the general that Obama put in charge, like pretty much right away. He gives them, I think, 40,000 troops right away.

And then Petraeus and his general, oh, he's had a central command. His guy, McChrystal, is going to be a charge of the war. And then you got Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gates, the Secretary of Defense, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State. And you got all of the John Nagel and Michelle Flournoy and all of the Coinedinistas on this massive public relations campaign. It's really comparable to like get your COVID shot or whatever, fly your Ukraine flag. It was this massive thing to get everyone on board on the belief that, look, we cannot just cut and run and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat here. and and ruin a perfectly good war.

We've got to triple it and sew this thing up. And they push hard as hell all spring and summer until was it August or September of 2009. You spoke out. Right. Right. It was actually I resigned. So I was in Afghanistan.

I was a political officer with the State Department. I had been in Iraq twice before. I was a Marine Corps officer. I also had served on a State Department team. in Iraq. And that's how I end up in Afghanistan, the State Department, as a, as a political officer first in the east and down the south. And I was there only five months before I resigned. You know, the, when I first resigned and people asked me about to explain the differences, you know, and the similarities between Afghanistan and Iraq, I fell into that trap. And I'd be like, well,

you know, Afghanistan's this and the Iraqis are that. And, you know, but then eventually it just came to me that there's no, the only thing that matters. The only thing that matters is the American occupation. That's it. You can talk all day long about whatever, but all that matters is the American occupation. And that's what occurred when I got there in Afghanistan, the spring of 2009, I realized this is no different than Iraq. You could dress it up. You could talk about it differently.

You could point all these things out. And the reality is that this is about occupation, first and foremost, setting up and, you know, Afghanistan was different because we jumped into the middle of an ongoing civil war. a civil war that we had caused, essentially, in the late 1970s, to give the Soviet Union some credit for that as well, too. But, you know, so what I saw was that this is a war that is not worth fighting. It's a war that we cannot win. And it's a war that is being waged for the political benefit of the White House, just as the Iraq war, for all the different reasons for the Iraq war, you got to go back to Carl Rove's reasoning for the Iraq war, right? That wartime presidents get reelected.

And this was certainly Barack Obama, as much as he wins, he beats Hillary Clinton, that he beats the war hero John McCain as an anti-war candidate, right? He was against the Iraq war. Well, you can't be soft when you're the president. You got to be, and you're a black Democrat, they're going to eat you up. And so we know this. We know that as soon as the president comes into all. office, he's got Rahm Emanuel and David Apsarad telling him that you need to do drone strikes

to look tough. And that was the same thing with Afghanistan, that this is our way to show that we are better warfighters. We have spent decades under this idea that Democrats are wimps and we're the reasons why we lost the Vietnam War. So what it becomes is this great political effort to win Afghanistan. And that breaks apart in the smaller pieces as well. It was either Alyssa Miller or Alyssa Rubin, I can never, I always mistake the two of them, but wrote a long piece for the New York Times and New York Times magazine published in in early 2010. And I met with her and she told me, she didn't write this in her piece, but she told me what she came away with after spending weeks with Bob Gates, you know, the Secretary of Defense, was that Gates's only real reason to her that

seemed to be for supporting the escalation of the war of Afghanistan was because he felt he had to do everything he could to give the Pentagon, to give the military a chance to redeem themselves from Iraq, to get them a win, right? I mean, so whatever level you're on here, it was political. That's that, you know, I mean, so you're exactly right. Barack Obama is campaigning on this idea of, I'm going to get us out of the wrong war. Iraq was the wrong war. I'm going to, and I'm going to win the right war. And Afghanistan being the war we always should have been in. And, you know, but during the campaign, he's talking about increasing U.S. forces by two brigades, which is five to six thousand troops. He puts in 70,000, you know, a plus a lot of NATO forces

and a lot of contractors. And just, just to, I guess, put the details out if people are not familiar with it, as Scott said, when Barack Obama comes in office, there's about 30,000 U.S. troops there. There is a little more than that in terms of American contractors. And then there's about 15,000 or so NATO forces, maybe 20,000. Within a year and a half, there's 100,000 American troops, 100,000 American contractors, and 40,000 NATO troops. So by summer of 2011, you have a quarter million man Western Army in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. And every month, the Taliban do better. get so bad that the Department of Defense used to have to send these quarterly reports to Congress, you know, detailing how they warn Afghanistan is going.

And literally every report they would have taken something else out of that was in previous reports because it just showed how poor the war was going. And it couldn't keep up with their lie that we were making progress. And then, of course, we have our friend Danny Davis, who comes out in early of 2012, goes to the Congress with classified information and says, look, look, this is the truth. This is what's happening in Afghanistan. Your generals are lying about this war and all of about six or seven members of Congress actually pay attention to what Danny's saying. Danny, of course, proven right. But for me, proven right by time and what occurs. For me, though,

yeah, I'm there's five months. I'm in both the east and the south of Afghanistan. I see there's no difference between with Iraq. In some ways, it's even worse, you know, the nature of the government that we put and kept in power there. It was all warlords and drug lords. You know, and you could see the lies that just came out of all of us, this idea that the Taliban controlled the drug trade. We had to be there because the Taliban were narco terrorists and Afghanistan would fall into a narco state, just like our buddies down in Colombia, I guess, you know, but it already was a narco state, you know, and those of us who have been saying this have been vindicated and invalidated in the last years because the UN office on drugs and crime has come out and said, yeah, you know what, actually

Taliban really weren't involved in the drug trade at all because it was all the government, the military, who controlled it all. That's, that's, you know, I mean, so it's just, that's one example of many. But certainly I got to the point where I also, too, have been taking part in the wars in Iraq, the war in Iraq twice, been involved in D.C. policy with these wars. man, I was intellectually and morally broken. Like, I was just, you know, and so I get to the point where the only thing I can do is resign. I can't continue to go on with this. So in September 2009, yeah, I quit.

And then in October 2009, in a series of Farr's Gump-like episodes, I end up on the front page of the Washington Post. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, it's so important. And you must have known at the time, too, that. And please refresh my memory. I believe you got the ambassador, Eikenberry, who had been the former general in charge of the war, your boss, on your side, not the Secretary of State, but still pretty damn good, the ambassador to the country and the former general in charge of the war who then just switched agencies to go be a civilian in charge of the war. And you got him on your side, too. and the important point here was

you were protecting Barack Obama's flank this was a maneuver you were telling the president you don't have to do this hide behind me hide behind Ikenberry invoke us the experts

just back are telling us this can't work and I know you're skeptical of this whole guy but I can Barry the boss agrees with him and Ikenberry was the general in charge just a couple of years ago. And so, and I wrote this in Fool's Aaron as well,

that it was just one year after he defeated John McCain that he gave his speech announcing the escalation of the war. It was a year in two weeks, three weeks when he gave his West Point speech. And all he had to say was, listen, I whoop John McCain's ass fair and square. That's why you call me

President Obama and him, Senator McCain. and because the people of the country wanted me to call these shots, not him. So pound sand, Senator, and general, if you don't like it, you can resign. I got plenty of generals. We're not going to fight this war.

I talked with Matthew Ho when I invited him to the White House to give me his briefing, and I understand what he's saying. The more we escalate, the worst we make it. It can't work, it won't work, and I'm not going to kill innocent people,

and I'm not going to have innocent, or not so much innocent, of their combatants, but I'm not going to have American GIs get killed over a lost cause. This is completely stupid. A win after Iraq. Hell, look, Matt, Iraq is the good victory compared to this. They left with their tail between their legs in the middle of the night, but they didn't have a suicide bombing at the fall of Saigon airport situation going on like Biden had in Kabul, flee in Afghanistan. Great job, Bob Gates, tripling a war, killing hundreds of thousands of thousands of.

people, a couple at least, for a stunt. I mean, I can tell you, I'll tell you some more things, Scott, that'll make people even more sick. But wait, no, wait, wait, wait, the point is, and I'm sorry, because I ramble on and I babble too much, Matt, but the point is, the point is, hey man, I've known you for 15 years. If I didn't like that you, that you rambled, I would have stopped coming on this show a long time ago. I forgot where I was going with it, but now I'm back.

Where I was going with this was, I'm just repeating myself still again, but it's important that he did not have to do this. You didn't just try. You did protect his flank. You did have his back. You did come out and object. And as you just said, end up on the front page of the Washington Post. And it was a big deal.

State Department expert, Marine Corps officer veteran, says, this is stupid, dude. It ain't going to work. And Michelle Flournoy ain't know what she's talking about, man. And all Barack Obama had to do was bring. you and I can bury to the Oval Office and say, okay, tell me your case. And it's the same kind of thing he did in Syria, where he went and walked around the Rose Garden with Donnellan and then decided not to bomb Syria. Right.

Right. That's all he had to do was decide not to. And he didn't. And we had public opinion was heading in that direction already. I mean, like the first seven, eight years of the war, first couple of years of the war, public opinion is in favor of the U.S. presence there. By the time the Iraq war, it's really starting to wane. By a time 0809 comes, the country is roughly split. By 2010, it's over. The Afghan war is unpopular. It becomes the most unpopular war in American history as ever

surveyed more than Vietnam and Iraq. In 2013, Gallup or Pew has it as 80 percent of Americans believe the Afghan war was a mistake, not worth fighting. But, yeah, I could, I mean, Hey, it wasn't just me, Scott, though. I mean, it wasn't just Ikemberg. I had to go to Kabul and Lichenberry's like, I'm not going to let you resign. You know, you're staying here. You're going to, you know, and then he said, when Ikenberry says to me, and then when you leave, I will write the foreword to your resignation letter.

That's how much you agree with it. So if I said, no, I'm out of here. I go back. I've got to go meet with Holbrook, Ambassador Richard Holbrook, who has been put in as the special representative for Afghan and Pakistan. And I've got to go up to the Waldorf in New York because the UN General Assembly is meeting, and that's where he's at. So I go up to New York.

I go into his suite in the Waldorf. I run into his counterpart, the British representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a guy named Sherrod Koper Kohl's, who's known this region for a long time. He's been in Afghanistan for years. He gets introduced me. He says, oh, yeah, I read your letter. Absolutely spot on. I agree with it all, right?

You know, and then I go into Holbrook's bed. It's a surreal thing. Here I am, this like 36-year-old, you know, officer of the empire. And Dick Holbrook is like laying on his bed and Waldorf drinking a purple gatorie with his shoes off. You know, it's like one of those, what the hell happened to me moments. And anyway, Holbrook says, I agree with 95% of what you're saying. The other 5% doesn't matter. I want you to be on my staff because I want you writing stuff like this that I can give to the president every day. He had the president had the president had, the president had, had, the president had. read my letter, Secretary of State Clinton had read my letter. I mean, but it wasn't just on this side, on the diplomatic side. It was on the military side. A guy, a friend I had the time, guy named Jack, who had been the State Department's political advisor to NATO. He said when General McChrystal's plan went around Brussels, no one, General McChrystal's plan to escalate to one in Afghanistan, no one agreed with it. No one would sign on. No would say it gave a thumbs up to it. But sure enough, when it came time to initial it, you know, initial that inner office mail and send it on, they all did. And when I asked Karen DeYoung, the Washington Post reporter

who wrote this huge store about me, like this profile, like it was like an extension of Jack Kennedy's profiles and courage. It was ridiculous, you know, like huge piece in the post. Karen, why did you do this? You know, why did you exert this capital on me? And she said because and Karen DeYoung, a lot of time in D.C., a big associate editor at the Washington Post. Karen says, well, because, you know, when I went and I spoke to people about this at state, at the NSA, at the CIA, at the Pentagon, they all agree with what you were saying. That's why I wrote it.

And that was the case. Everyone knew this war wasn't going to work. And so the thing is, what you have to understand, though, is the politics. It comes back to domestic politics. So what Obama was concerned about was his re-election chances in 2012, understanding that the Iraq war was what defeated the Republicans. He didn't want the Afghan war to be that way, but also, too, he couldn't be seen as being soft, being weak. So, you know, you go back, I tell people to read Bob Woodward's Obama's wars a lot of time. It's so instructive.

But one of the most instructive things in that, Scott, is what's not present. There's nothing in there. There's no reporting of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod going to Barack Obama and saying, Mr. President, if you pull out of Afghanistan and someone blows up a, you know, a fuel tank in Times Square, they are going to hang you for it. There's nothing in there. And I can also tell you a story of what I saw personally along those lines was so John Murtha, a former Marine in Congress, you know, led the defense appropriations subcommittee, a big deal.

And Murtha was one of the first Democrats who had supported the Iraq War to really come against the war. Anyway, I can introduce to him. That's a whole other story, how that happens. But he takes me and he has me address the entire House Democratic caucus. This is in November of 2009. So I'm down in the basement of the Capitol building, the 200, more than 2,000. 200 members of the Democratic Party in the House are sitting there in folding chairs. They made sandwiches for themselves.

I mean, again, it's a surreal thing. They're sitting there with, like, paper plates with, like, sandwiches on their laps, you know? And I've got a debate, Ikeleton, who at that time is a chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and Jessica Matthews, who's daughter of, unless Jessica Matthews, who's a daughter of Barbara Tuckman, who, of course, wrote, you know, the classic Guns of August and everything. And she's at Carnegie or New America or one of those think tanks that takes millions and millions of weapons contractor and Pentagon and CIA money and everything. It's like I debate them.

And by and Murtha joins me. And so by the time we're done though, I mean, the Democrats are stacked up behind microphones. This is another Vietnam. This is another Iraq. We can't go along with it. I mean, it was amazing to witness this. I mean, and finally a hand pops up. this Pelosi pops up in the middle of the whole crowd there, and she quiets everyone down.

She says, I understand what you're talking about here. I know what you're saying, essentially saying this war can't be won. This is worthless. We're sending our young men and women to die for nothing, right? But what had happened just the week before was the House had passed the House portion of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. That was the President's priority. And that's what she said. She said the president's priority is the Affordable Care Act.

We cannot put him in a corner on Afghanistan. We don't have a political space to do that. We have to remain loyal to the White House. I'm paraphrasing. And that was it. That shut down. And then what you saw happened, though, which was where it's interesting because I have no proof of this other than what actually occurs.

I keep going on MSNBC, which we know is controlled by the White House, because people who work the MSC, like Jank Yugar and Dylan Radigan, Crystal Ball, people who used to be anchors there have said we were controlled by the White House. They keep having me on. I'm on MSNESE so often that the makeup ladies keep my mixture of makeup ready for me

because I'm in there a couple times a week, you know? And why do they keep having this guy come on arguing to get out of Afghanistan? Well, it's because Barack Obama couldn't be seen as weak or soft, but he also knew that he could lose your reelection because Afghanistan was another Iraq. So we're going to surge in Afghanistan. And then what happens, Scott, right? We're going to start pulling out in summer of 2011. And if you also see politically what happens with the Democrats, you know, when I first start doing this and I get drawn into

the congressional stuff, like almost right away through some great groups like Women Without War, you know, and through offices like Ron Paul's office and the great Walter Jones, God bless him. You know, the number of Democrats and Republicans who were agreeing with us behind closed doors was staggering, but they wouldn't put their name on letters. They wouldn't go on television or radio and say this. But then steadily, as we got closer to the drawdown beginning in the summer of 2011, it was like the dial was open and these people were released.

right? I mean, so that by the time of, by the time of August or September, I think it was September or October of 2011, we actually had a voice vote in the Senate that said, we need to get out of Afghanistan. Overwhelming majority of senators say, we need to get out of Afghanistan. You know, I mean, so it was like that, that politics in all this are what's so important, you know, and I think if, like I said, we were supposed to, we were going to talk about Ukraine and everything. But this is like what I said about would say, too, about people to ask me, hey, What books should I read to understand Iraq and Afghanistan? And I would say read David Halberstam, the best and the brightest, and Neil Shaheen's a bright shining line, books about Vietnam. And if you read those books and you understand those books, then you will understand Iraq and Afghanistan. And if you understand the Afghan war, particularly it's escalation, the politics involved, then you have a better chance of understanding what the hell is going on with this

proxy war in Ukraine. Yeah, true. Also, Fool's Aaron by me is good. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm just kidding. I'm sorry. Which I should say it is. I mean, like there's not a better detailed book than yours in terms of blow by blow, what happened, why it happened, and here's the consequence. It really is. Actually, I'm not just blowing smoke now because you're my friend or because I'm on the air or whatever. You put Halberstam in my blur. People should read that. You put Halberstam in my blurb, or when you blurred my book, you compared it to Sheehan and

Halberstam. So I take that as a very high compliment because I agree with you about those books, you know, which one of these days I'm going to do a Vietnam month or something and really dive into those and interview Gareth Porter about them or something. My shells aren't as organized as yours are. So there's no way I'll find it in the next 10 minutes or so. But if I wrote something like that as a blurb where I actually put some thought into it in detail, right, as opposed to like,

this is a must read, you know, et cetera, et cetera. No, you get me very nice. It shows how I really felt about it. Yeah, no, that's true. Yeah, no, you wrote very nice things about both of them. Well, there's great books. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce

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and it's something that you know is obviously related to the story of the Vietnam War as well as the terror wars and Lord knows the consequences of of what's happening in Ukraine right now over the long term but I was telling Tommy I saw this thing

boy that Matt the YouTube shorts they got me good dude that algorithm it just got a whole map of my brain and they just like oh well first we'll show them a guy do a kickflip down some stairs and then we'll show him some like construction guys and we'll show him some war stories and then we'll show him some this and some that and i saw this guy interviewing this other guy and he says so do you have PTSD and the guy's like no not really like i'm fine in every way like i don't really have any problems that said that i wake up five to seven

times every night grab my gun and clear my house because i wake up five to seven times a night just knowing that there's somebody broke into my house and yeah he's got he's got the he's got the he's got the normal amount of PTSD. Yeah. Yeah. So he, and he says, I think this must be because I spent years over there grabbing guys out of their beds in the middle of the night. That was my job.

And so now it's like their ghosts are coming after me or something, you know, something like that. Yeah. And I'm thinking, man, you know, what am I a warrior? I'm not an army type guy, but I am a boy, you know, and I was, like, raised in this country and, like, when I watched football with my dad when I was at. a kid, every commercial break, get an edge on life, be all that you can be in the U.S. Army. This is for, I don't know, a large segment, but for a very important segment of the American

population, this is not just foreign policy tools and this and that. This is how a boy becomes a man. This is what it means to serve your country and protect your kin and your freedom and this and that. Many of the reasons, I'm sure, that played into your decision to join the Marine Corps when you were young, just like so many other people do, you know? But then the whole idea is, this is really the best thing that you can do, Matt, right? Don't become an engineer, dude, become a warrior, because it's going to be good for you. But then, and I remember learning this with my own eyes as a

young kid, all of the homeless people all had army jackets on. All of them were Vietnam veterans when I was a boy in the 80s. You know, I was born in 76, right? So I'm like, I was raised in the shadow of Vietnam. And that was who were seemingly full-grown, able-bodied men out there standing on the road going, hey, man, somebody buy me a cheeseburger because I'm going to make it. So, oh, and then the other thing is, as you know, there are a lot of veterans listen to this show, too. And I know that you're a real expert on the topic of PTSD and what can be done about it and all that. So I thought, again, maybe I give you a chance to talk about that here at the end

and especially like maybe guys having trouble what they could do. Yeah, yeah. And I wasn't being glib when I said about the normal amount of PTSD. Like that's actually the reality. Like PTSD, as they say, is a normal reaction to abnormal events, particularly for combat veterans who more than likely suffer from what's called complex PTSD, which is essentially you've got an onion that once you deal with one of the causes of the PTSD, you've got another cause to deal with.

And the best way to understand that is that if you were deployed for seven months, nine months, 12 months, 15 months, however long, and you spent your days going out hunting other people while other people hunting you, well, your survival system, which essentially we evolved with because of when the saber-toothed tiger would come into the cave, it's not supposed to be on 24-7 for months or more than a year on end. And your survival system gets stuck open. And your body is continuing to produce all these survival chemicals, you know, adrenaline, cortisol, et cetera.

And so you're always in that survival mode, right? I don't like to use fight, flight, or freeze, because there's more nuance to it than that. I mean, it's essentially true, but like a lot of guys will say, well, that's not the case. That's not how it's not because you're not. And then because those chemicals are coursing through your bodies 365 days a year,

and you're not in a hostile environment. A dissonance starts to occur in your brain that causes all these other secondary issues, right? The anger, the mood issues, the depression. You know, and that leads, of course, to substance. abuse and relationship problems and I mean one of the one of the biggest things that that doesn't get talked about is the sexual dysfunction that comes from PTSD right because if you're in in a relationship but you're it's the same thing too I remember I had a friend of mine years ago she she wanted to get her eggs harvested right she was getting older and everything and she was playing

tennis like every day of the week every day of the week and she went to get her eggs harvested and the doctor said, you know, I can't get any. You know, your body's really not kind of producing them. I can't get them. And I'm sure I'm mangling the medical aspect of this really well, so please forgive me. But essentially what the doctor, they figured out in the doctor said, stop playing tennis. And she did, and then they were able to get eggs. And really what it was essentially was the body because she was playing tennis like that every day

was under the impression that there was a threat, there was a danger, because she was moving so much. that. So the body, when it's in the survival state, shuts down non-essential things. One of those things is if you're in a relationship, and this is why veterans you're able to, and I'll talk from my experience, able to have one-night stands, hook up with people, meaningless accounters, you know, in that, you know, but then with the person you're in a relationship with, you can't have sex with them. And it's because your body in that PTSD state, and also, too, you have to account that we also suffer from traumatic brain injury as well as moral injury and those all overlap.

You know, it shuts down any of the non-essentials that you need to survive. And having sex with your long-term girlfriend or wife is one of those things. And so you put that in there, right? And then, okay, now you're starting to have all these tertiary effects of PTSD. And that's just one example. You can imagine how these other things play out in workplaces. and schools, family dynamics with neighbors. I mean, I got, I mean, I was at one point, like, I'm so embarrassed about how I was

with my neighbors at one point because I was just, I luckily that guy walked away, or otherwise I would have thrown him down a flight of stairs, you know, because he had left his trash out too long, and I couldn't handle that, right? You know, I mean, like, so it gets, it gets to a point where it's so disruptive, your mind has become so captured to the survival chemicals that are going through you. And then there's the other psychological aspects of all this is where the moral injury comes into play. You're dealing with shame. You're dealing with feelings of betrayal, you know, guilt, shame, regret, you know.

And it's whether it's something you did or something you witnessed or the fact that you were sent over to take part in these wars that were built upon lies, demolishing the whole foundation of who you are. We were all brought up to believe that, you know, I was 11 years old when the film Red Dawn came out, right? I mean, that movie was so, so impactful for our generation. And guess what? Turns out, we're not the Wolverines. We're the Soviets. You know, I mean, to have to deconstruct yourself with that, to have that an axe taking to the foundations of who you think you are,

that you don't have a white hat on, man. You're wearing a black hat. You're the occupier. Or the fact that your government, which you signed up to give your life to, that's saying, I wrote a blank check to the U.S. government with my name in it, and they can cash it from my life. life or however that saying goes, oh, these guys betrayed you in a heartbeat, man. You know, I mean, so to deal with that and then the traumatic brain injuries as well,

of which the last time the VA published numbers, which was like 10 years ago, we knew of at least a quarter million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, at least, who had traumatic brain injury. And that was 10 years ago. And the VA in its true fashion, just like it puts out like these suicide reports that tell you hardly anything to keep the cost down, to keep the idea of what's really going on down, same thing occurs. How come the VA hasn't updated its TBI numbers in 10 years, you know? Well, because there's a latency with these TBIs, like the TBI deal with explosive blast related

TBI. Similar, it's not the same to like what the football players go through, right? Where their brain injury develops over time and then it's, then it might be five, 10, 15 years later where symptoms start to manifest and show. Well, I mean, you've got a lot of guys walking around with, like, these problems. They can't get their head straight. They're dealing. They're in agony. They can't think, you know, all kinds of other issues.

You put that all together and you have this, you know, trifecta of invisible wounds that are signature wounds of these wars that, yeah, the PTSD and the moral injury, that existed before. The TBI is new because, man, we took hits that in any previous war would have killed us. So we're the first generation to be going through with this type of TBI, you know, because of our body armor, our vehicle armor, medical care. We survive things that we should not have survived, would not have suffered. We survived things that we wouldn't have survived a year or two before in the war, let alone going back to, say, Vietnam or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, you put all that together and there is just just massive, massive cost to veterans.

It compares to nothing to what the Afghans and the Iraqis went through, of course. And then And there's, I mean, nothing. That's nothing is what the Afghans in Iraq. At least we had, say, our body armor and our vehicle army. The Iraqi people didn't have that. So their suffering is just immense, you know, but you know, and then you throw in other things too. I mean, it's just to continue going down this road for a moment or two longer, you know, cost of war project up at Brown University does great work. They just put out a study today about sexual assault in the military, not sure if you saw that. One in four women who were in the U.S. military get sexual assaulted. M4, you know, and the numbers of men who are sexually assaulted while percentage-wise are

small or much smaller, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of men who go through the U.S. military who get sexually assaulted, you know, not annually, but over the course of time. I mean, so that's essentially when you get back to this idea of like what we were brought up with, what we were told it was going to be like, and then alone, you get these ideas that we were sent over for what purposes, why were we doing this? We're not defending our country. You know, we're defending the politics of the White House. We're defending George Bush's reelection chances. We're defending Barack Obama's image as a better wartime commander-in-chief than his predecessor, right?

Or we're defending the profits of, you know, the banks, the oil companies, the weapons companies, so forth. You know, I mean, so it really is. It's a sickening thing. And, you know, this is, you know, my hat's off. to you all, people like you, Scott and others, who understood this. I had to learn it the hard way, right? I had to learn it the hard way. But to folks like yourself and those listening who get this,

who understand it, who are open to accepting that this is the reality, not believing that Red Dawn was the reality, but understanding what the true reality was and not having to, you know, put yourself through this like this. But I'll also say, too, that I get, yeah, let me just leave it at that. Okay, well, listen, so for people like, where do they go to get help? The VA, because you always hear nothing but nightmares about the VA and how they would rather, I think you just kind of refer to how

sort of obliqually is like, they might prefer that you're dead anyway. You're less of a hassle with them, you know? It's a government program. But then, you know what, is this true? Trump claimed in his speech to the Libertarian Party, which I witnessed. I'm pretty sure that was where I heard him. say this, that he passed a thing where essentially it's like a blank check for veterans to go get health care wherever they want, here's the card or whatever you can go and get private

care, something like that? Is there any real change like that? Or tell me, look, if my cousin just got out of the Army and actually he's still really a mess from Iraq War II, what do I tell him to do? Well, he's got to go to the VA. He's got to go to the VA first, get into that system. the VA, and there are some other good programs out there. There's like the Cohen's Veterans Network that has since, my understanding, is turning away from veterans and moving more towards active duty because they can get TRICARE and that supplants that that provides their revenue. You know what I mean? So there are organizations out there, Wounded Warrior program, give an hour Semper Phi Fund. But truly, if your issues come from,

If your health issues come from your time in the military, in combat or not in combat, deployed, non-deployed, you need to go to the VA. The VA's reason for existence is because as veterans, we have issues and problems that you do not see in the greater community. So if we didn't have a VA, we would not know about Gulf War syndrome, right? If we had the VA, Agent Orange would just still be this kind of mysterious thing that's happening these guys who are going through, right? I mean, like, you need that collective body to deal with the psychological aspects. You go into a private therapist and say, hey, I'm really fucked up because, you know,

I killed three guys. You know, that therapist doesn't know how to handle that, let alone unpackage it with it. And the problem is, is that I feel like I'm a murderer. And every time I go to the fucking Carolina Hurricanes game, I got to stand up and be a applauded for everyone thanking me for being a hero. Meanwhile, I'm thinking I'm just a murderer. You know, I'm like, people, guys who are running through that in their head, you're telling them they go to whatever therapist they find, you know,

on a Google search. You know what I mean? So you got to go to the VA to get that specific help. I'm dealing with this right now. I've got explosive blast related TBI. And one of the things that's happened is the VA has been under-resourced, under-resourced, even though it's getting $350 billion. a year. It's still under-resourced. And what happened was my neurology department, my neurologist

left, they don't have anyone. They're not getting anyone. So they had to send me out to Duke healthcare. And terrific neurologist I'm working with right now. But I go out to Duke health care and neurologist, I say this is what I got going on. Neurologist says, I've never heard of that before. I've never heard of explosive blast related TBI. Right? Exactly. You know, and people can see Scott's reaction to that. Yeah. And why should you? Because you're a neurologist taking care of the general community. You mean, how many explosive blast related traumatic brain injuries are there going out there? What do you? I mean, these people don't read anti-war.com all day. God dang. You know, exactly. I mean, like, maybe if you know some guy from a SWAT team or somebody who was

blasting a coal mine open or something like that, you know, but other than that, how many are out there? Meanwhile, it's, it's epidemic, you know, in the, in the VA. And there's just been an under-resourcing. And there is a report that came out just a week or two ago that shows that the under-resourcing has not been minimal. It's been severe shortages of doctors and nurses across every VA in the country for more than 10 years now. And I'll get political for a moment right now because Democrats are beating their chest about Tim Walts being the chair of the Veterans Committee in the House when he was there. That happened under Waltz's watch that there is the severe shortages of doctors and nurses at the VA. The issue we have right now at the VA is the VA is a

cash cow. Half of the Pentagon's budget, right, goes to the weapons contractors. People want to do the same thing with the VA. The VA, that $350 billion, roughly half of it is through benefits, you know, disabilities paying, you know, people like me, you know, compensation and pension, as we call it, you know, and then the other half is health care. And both of those things can be assumed by contractors and done, right? So that has been the main purpose, in my opinion, in this drive, to get community health care, as they call it, is to allow people to feed at the troth of the federal government, right? And so I have no objection to this idea of me getting a VA card and using it like Medicare or using it like tricare. And I've got, uh, I've got planner fasciitis and I

need to go to a podiatrist. Do I really need to go drive to Durham, which is 25 miles from me to go see a podiatrist, right? Do I need to go do that? Or can I see someone here on Wake Forest, right? But this idea of like, hey, this explosive blast related traumatic brain injury, the fact that you're dealing with a moral injury that makes you want to stick a gun in your mouth, like maybe you should be going on the people who actually are specializing this and specializing this with the community with the community that is being impacted by it. But, you know, this idea that the VA doesn't want to take on this for political reasons is entirely the case. So one of the things that drives me crazy is it wasn't until 2015 or 2016. The VA actually did a study examining whether or not

killing has an effect on people, right? And it wasn't until only a few years ago. that the folks out in the San Francisco, the Bay Area VA, who are some of the best ones, the Bay Area VA starts actually a program called Effects on Killing. Because you would go through these PTSD programs, you know, as well as, too, they've really embraced moral injury of the VA. But, you know, 10 years ago, they were still real shy of that because they were afraid of their bosses going up to Congress and having to explain to Congress, well, you know, these veterans are killing themselves because, you know, it's the guilt, the shame, the

their great, the betrayal that is causing this combat-related veteran suicide. And if anyone doubts that, contact me, there are dozens of studies that have shown that relationship of guilt, combat, and suicide. There's no, there should be no argument at this point about it. But it's a political thing because that means, oh, my God, these wars they took part in, they did something bad over there. These wars were about freedom and liberty. You know, they were going over there to protect Americans to keep us safe. They're fighting bad guys. They can't feel any guilt, shame, regret, betrayal about that. But that's war. It's got nothing to do with anything else. I mean, the thing I'll cite to show that is that World War II veterans, the state of

California in 2010 does a study or World War II veterans. It finds that then, so these guys are what, in their 80s at that point, World War II veterans in 2010 are killing themselves at a rate four times higher than their peers are, right? So decades, seven decades after the war, these guys are still killing themselves at epidemic levels. And that was the good war, man. They were the greatest generation. They saved the world from the world from the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Why, what do those guys have to feel bad about? That's war, though, because you're taking part in organized murder. And there's no nation that's absent from it. You talk to people in Vietnam, the same thing, too, with their guys. the French. They fought the Japanese. They fought the French again. And then they fought the Americans

and they won their freedom. And their veterans are still killing themselves. Right. I mean, so it's a political thing to admit that. But yeah, I mean, it is. It's the idea, though, is that needs to be fully resourced. But that I probably scared people off from contact in the VA. But it is your first entry point. You have to get in there. Talk to someone. There's going to be delays. you need to do, and this is why I tell guys, what you need to do is you need to enlist your wife, your mother, your girlfriend, your sister. Because, you know, men in general and then veterans in particular, we don't want to take help. We don't want to be a burden to the team. We don't want to seem weak. What does ever mean? I could stand in front of my Marines and I did and told them,

hey, you're feeling bad. You need to go see the doc. You need to go see the psychologist. And you go see the chaplain, whatever. When it came to myself, though, I ain't, I ain't doing that. No way. You know, and it took me years and basically the point of killing myself that I finally did. And it was only because a woman in my life forced me to do it. And so might not be the most, right? So that's why to tell people, like, you got to, it's the women in our lives who very often are the ones who force us to do these things. And God bless them and thank you for it. Because, you know, men in general, and veterans in combat veterans in particular, we're really loath to do it.

But you have to do it. You have to deal with the bullshit. you got to deal with the weight and everything else yeah and so but and if people want to uh talk to me about it always happy to talk always happy to help you can contact me through my substack uh through twitter uh facebook whatever you can find me cool that's great contact scott he'll put you in touch with me yeah in fact i think one of the few footnotes in enough already because i just skipped them i just tried to make it easy but one of the few footnotes in there is a quote from you from a previous interview where you had listed a bunch of different organizations

of different groups besides the VA but you know veterans groups and I guess peer groups and whatever I don't know if you remember but that's in the books if anybody has the books on the shelf if you just flip through enough already and in fact the footnote is in both books in enough already and fools Aaron but it's like the only footnote in enough already so it's pretty easy to find in there yeah and let me give a couple other other things as well there are some states that have really excellent state-level veterans programs and county-level veterans programs. We had that here in North Carolina, a guy up in Franklin County helped me out and a friend so much. Virginia, I felt, was really pretty good. Some states, hey, each state's

different. The other thing, too, is when you're going through your benefits process, and these are benefits that don't are meant to help you. They're they're right by law to have them and it's because something was taken away from you. Uh, these are things that will help. And a lot of us don't, I took me years to apply because I felt like I wasn't worthy. I didn't deserve it or I didn't want to be a leach or take from the government, all those kinds of things, right? So get past that. And when you do your benefits, go to disabled American veterans, go to the American legions, the American Legion, go to the Marine Corps League, wherever, and get help from those guys because they know what they're doing.

The VA benefit system, honest to God, not sure it's still the case, but back in the days when you submit your benefit claims on paper, which wasn't that long ago, you submit your benefit claims on paper, they would have two stacks in the office, one for those who submitted their claims through the veteran advocates, right, through what's called VSOs, veteran service officers. They have a stack where if it came in from the American Legion, disabled American veterans, it goes in this stack. They had another stack for those who submit their claims individually. So these guys who are doing on their own, we're going to put them here. And if you don't think those two stacks were dealt with differently, I don't know what to tell you. So

those are something you can do. And then one outlier, if you have a specific issue or a general question, particularly about benefits, about the VA at all, healthcare or benefits. I urge people to go to Reddit and get on the Veterans Benefit subpage for Reddit. It's an incredible resource. It's incredibly professional. The moderators are amazing. And if you put in your problem, your question, I guarantee you, within the day, you will have 10 or 12 excellent answers from people who know what they're talking about, as well as people who've gone through it. So that's That's something, yeah, I really push because it's been helpful to me, the helpful for a lot of people I know, the Veterans Benefits Subreddit on Reddit, check that out. Okay, cool.

Is there a place where you write regularly or do your own video or podcast or any kind of thing? Well, hey, I guess I should mention, I'm the associate director of the Eisenhower Media Network so you can look that up. I'm so sorry, man. I should have a real bio here. I mean, I just, I've been talking to you for. To me, you're just the hero. I don't know. Matt Ho, the hero, everybody.

But I'm sorry, so the Eisenhower Media Network, and I'm sorry, I really got to go, but the Eisenhower Media Network and say what now? Oh, and I've got a substack. It's Matthew Ho dot substack or something like that. And on Twitter on Matthew P-H-P-H-P-As-Mpatrick and the last name spelled H-O-H. Okay. But anyway, I appreciate Scott. Thanks, everyone for listening. Yeah.

I will let me say if people haven't seen that clip of Stephen Colbert saying that CNN is objective news and his audience bursting out and laughter, go and check that out. And what I want to say that for is because it's people like Scott, anti-war news, Libertarian Institute, and hey, I'm a lefty, right? You know, and so it's not like, you know, I've got a benefit in it and plugging these guys. They're the reasons why people understand that there is no. objectivity in the corporate press, that the mainstream media is a part of the elites of this empire, and they are not going to do anything for you that doesn't benefit their own position within the empire. And the reason why people laughed at Stephen Colbert when he said CNN was objective is because you got folks like Scott and his guys at anti-war.com telling you the truth.

Thank you very much for that, man. I like to think that's true. It is true. Yeah. Well, and thank you, man for everything you're great all right thank you scott the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scothorton dot org and libertarian institute dot org