For having the with tom to publish a really wonderful and meaningful book. I think a lot of you know ron personally, looks like, good, friendly audience. For those who arent as familiar with him, rons bioreads like one of the more interesting novels of all time and were lucky to have it here in this memoir. He was both a senior military Intelligence Officer in the army and observer for the u. S. Department of state, and he is a combat veteran of afghanistan, serving in the army and army reserve for 25 years, entered as a private and retying an lieutenant colonel. As a soldiers and diplomat serving in a want day, kosovo, afghanistan, and iraq, and sudan, and received awards. His policy writing has appeared almost everything there is mention and he is the founder and the director of the veterans writing project, a Nonprofit Program that provides nocost writing seminars for veterans Ad Service Members and their family. A truly amazing fellow and a wonderful writer so we are thrilled to welcome him here to share his memoir, seriously not all right five wars in ten years. Welcome ron capps. [applause] thank you. As thrilled as clay is that youre here, i cant tell you how thrilled i am. Its really this is the hard launch of the book. The first night, big event, had some press today and some of you i know heard that press and thank you for coming, and i really really means a lot to me to see you here. Some of you ive known for too long to mention and means as much to have you here. I should mention we have cspan, booktv is here so i will iraq and tell stories and then well take questions, and michael and james are going to move around with the microphones, so if you have a question, let them know. Theres two stories in this book. And if you have a chance to if you have read it, at the beginning i tell the story about driving off into the desert with a couple of beers in my truck and a pistol when i was getting ready to kill myself, and obviously something happened, and i didnt get to do that. So, that is the Central Point of the story. That is the point where everything changes. So, the first half of the story is how i got there. And the second half of the story is what happened afterwards. And i think the second half of the story is probably for most of us the more interesting story and certainly the more hopeful story, but doesnt make sense without telling the first half of the story. So what i will do is read a little bit from a couple of sections, and well talk afterwards. I served as a soldier for 25 years. Half of that time i was in the regular army, and half of that time i was in the army reserve. During the time i was in the army reserve my civilian job because you have a civilian job was as a Foreign Service officer for the department of state. I was a political officer, and got sent to a lot of interesting places. The first half of my career, i tell people all the time, was very dull. I didnt do anything very interesting. I never got shot at. It was just a Peacetime Army job. Then i joined the Foreign Service and i started going to places where รท they shoot at people regularly and things got much more interesting. So this begins in about 1996, and runs through 2006, so this is ten years i was deploying. Ll start witha story that take place in kosovo, and its 2008. I worked on in kosovo as part of a team of american diplomatic observers. Half of the team were Foreign Service officers and half were military officers, and our job was to drive around the province of kosovo and stop the fighting, to get the serbian military and the albanian rebels to stop killing each other and killing civilians. We arrived in the village of senec, a day too late. The serbian infantry had come through the day before and this is the story of what we found. Its part of an essay i wrote that was published called, yellow. And it has now become a chapter in the book. So yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails and feet were dirty. There were six of them, all women, under the tarp, some of them lived long enough to have their wounds bandaged before they died. Some of them were killed more or less instantly as shrapnel or 7. 62millimeter rounds entered their bodies. Theyd been dead for about 24 hours. We knew this because we had come to witness their funeral. To witness and to stand a type of guard if we were present the serbs snipers would not shoot at the family members as they buried their dead. The first time id ever seen war so i was surprised. This was the first time id ever seen what dead people looked like if no embalming was done what they looked like without makeup and nice suit of clothes. They were just dead. Lying in a tangle of limbs under a blueyqn u. N. Tarp on the trair that only a week before carried peppers and corn to the market, only parts of their body were visible. I cooperate see all of their faces. One had an armresting across her forehead. One had a bandage covering most of her head. One of the dead was missing, an 18monthold child. We had seen some dogs on the way up the trail. Morgan morris, the dauntless u. S. Refugee agency field officer, who had led us to the scene, said what all of us were thinking. The dogs probably got the body. She was right, but none of us wants to be the one to say it. We had just seen the mother resting in a house in the village a couple of kill almostmers away. A bullet in her upper arm. The bullet passed through her baby, then through her breast, before lodging in her arm. The father said the baby was killed instantly, the bullet tore the child in half. He dragged the mother away to safety. A doctor from the red cross was treating her wounds in a small house in the village. There were ten women and a 72yearold man in one stifling airless room of a house, all wounded in the attack. They sat silently on the floor, their backs against the walls of the room, lost in their pain, and their thoughts. Waiting. We did this pretty much every day for two years. Driving around kosovo, trying to stop fighting, almost always the driving a day late, too late to stop the fighting. Just in time to conduct an investigation of a war crime, crime against humanity, ethnic cleansing, murder. And i would write reports about what we saw. I would go back to our office in the afternoon and sit at the computer and write crisp, dry reports about messy horrible acts of cruelty. But i knew this wasnt enough. I knew i needed to document more. I would go home then to my room or to my tent, wherever we were staying at the time, and sit down and write the rest of what had happened. 8m and those sessions of writing grew into this book. So what i wrote about that event, sat down one night and type out the words yellow. Their skin was yellow. So thats where we are. That day we were up in a small valley, a little draw between two ridgelines, and the infantry, the serbian infantry had swept through, firing mortars directly in front of themselves to clear the path, and then coming through with infantry. What they were shooting at were women and children and old men who had been driven out of the town of senec a couple of kilometers away by more tars the day prior. They moved into this little valley, this draw to try and be safe, and then the serbian infantry came through. We drove back down into the town, and this is what happened. The villagers wanted to bury their dead in sight of the ridgeline where we could see the serbian sunshiners. The land they said had been taken from them in the 1940s and they reclaimed it in the 1970s. It belong these people and they were going to be sure the serbs understood that. The women they were burying were born in the valley and spent their lives raising crops and giving births to the houses in the town. We parked our vehicles in plain view as a deter rent to further shooting. Certainly the serbs wouldnt shoot at eu or u. S. Observers or the white and blue unhcr vehicle. Nonetheless i was shaky standing around. The ground was hard and took some time to bury the dead. The men worked with shovels and picks for an hour to dig graves for the women. Afterwardses we stopped on the way out of the draw and used our satellite telephone to call washington and tell the state department what we had seen. It seemed very far away from that hillside. But the officer on the other end of the line was a friend, a colleague, a c5 classmate. Had it been someone else i might have been more animated in my description of the scene, but doug understood what was happening without my resorting to historianics. 11 dead. Ten women and one 72yearold man, seven dead, six women and one child. Yes, i counted them myself. Yes, were sure they were dead. I verified it personally. I left out the part about the dogs. We made one more stone on the way off the hill. An old man flagged us down as we were leaving the draw for the village, and told our interpreter he wanted to to the us something the serbs had done. I glanced through the window 0 of his house and saw a group of women sitting on the floor, rocking slowly, comforting each other. They surrounded the body of another woman. She was laid out, on her back, and wrapped in a blanket. Part of her face and head were missing. And what remained was veiled in a colorful scarf. The man said a more tar round exploded within a meter of her head. He held his hands out in front of his body to demonstrate the distance. The sitting women wailed in unison as he said this. He was the dead womans father, and amid the crying and the smells and the flies west listened to his story. Having felt safe enough in her house to remain there with her husband and children, rather than moving up into the draw with the others, she decided to take some food up to her neighbors. She was at the base of the draw when the attack started. The more tar shell probably came in groups of three. Punk, punk, punk. As the rounds left the tubes. And then the breathless, agonizing five or sixsecond wait while they flew and finally the brutal, crump, crump, crump, barking and echoing off the walls of the canyon. The gunners probably set the fuses to go off one or one and a half meters before the ground, about headhigh. It was an awful story. I couldnt wait to get out of there, away from the smell and the crying and the death. Soldiers would fire mortars at women and chilled. I concentrated on the colors in the womans scarf rather than her wounds. I watched the other women rocking slowly. I looked at the womans father. My partner photographed her body. I took notes what her father said. Then we left. Eight dead. Down the hill at the intersection, a crowd of women and a few men had gathered. Some boys were sitting at the edge of the road with a wooden box filled with cigarettes, crackers and chicklets, entrepreneurs. They sat expressless as a small crowd swarmed our vehicle. I pushed open the door and stood pinned against the truck by the crowd as my translator echoed pleas for help. One woman pushed through the shroud held her baby at arms length in front of me. I was facetoface with the child while the mother spoke deliberately but calmly. She wants you take her son out of here so the serbs wont kill him, my translator said. I looked at the woman and said to my my, make sure she knows we cant do this. Say this. Were observers. We cant relocate you or your son. If we do, the government in belgrade will order all of us out of the country. I get feckless and impotent as the words spilled out. For the first time i in other words the folly of being in a war only to observe, tourist among the victims. It was hot and with the sun beating down on me i felt cowardly. Yellow. Hiding behind my sunglasses. I waved my notebook at the red cross truck and said that was the vehicle that would take them to safety. I thought the red cross would probably refuse but was unable to muffer the courage to tell them there was little hope they would get out that day. I founds out later id been wrong. Several unhcr officers arrived and one took it upon herself to evacuate some children before a safer village. Before i left i went back to the house and had to tell the mother of the missing child we didnt find her baby. It would have served no purpose to tell r her what we thought happened. I couldnt have found those words anyway. That evening, after we return to our office, after we washed our truck, i drafted my report. It was about three pages long no speculation, just the things we understood to have happened based on what we saw, and what was reported to us. I said, it appears that a valley from north to south, preceded bay barrage of mortar fire. Temperature the would branch and sweeps seven women and an infinity killed and 11 wounded, including a 72 year man. Vehicle and clothes were burn in the sweep. I said weed seen no evidence of weapons or insurgent activities in the village or among the villagers. Did not mention the funeral or the dogs or the woman begging flow take some action to save her child. I didnt mention the look on the old mans face. I carefully told what was told to us versus what we saw ourself with qualifiers like reportedly and allegedly. I carefully made the people and the events in the village the center of the report rather than my own actions or feelings, never star in your own report. I let my teammates read the report to ensure we all agreed with and it then turned it over to our reports officer, our editor. Id written a crisp, dry account of a messy horrible act of cruelty, and in doing so, i had documented a war crime. So the war in kosovo went on for a number of months. We stayed until the Bombing Campaign began. And then we went out of kosovo into macedonia, and spent the three months in and a few days of the Bombing Campaign, interviewing refugees, people driven out of kosovo, loaded on to trains, and shipped across borders. In europe, at the end of the 20th century. When the Bombing Campaign ended we went back in. I was in one of the first aircraft to fly back into kosovo. We walked in, planted a flag,in flew back out to macedonia where it would be safe for a couple of days. We did go back. Kosovo is now an independent nation. Some of the work we did was sent to the hague and was used to document the case against milosevic. I feel good about that. Theres a special place in hell for people like him. I went back to montreal, packed out my house and went back to kosovo and spent another year there and then returned to Central Africa where i spent a couple of years prior, and worked in rwanda for two years, during the end of the war fought just as an extension of the genocide. We documented war crimes in congo, zaire, went through a lot of fighting with the rwandan military. While i was there the United States was attacked on september 11th and i was ordered back to military duty, called back into the regular army request ordered to afghanistan, and arrived in afghanistan not quite a year after the rangers jumped into kandahar and i was sent there to augment an Airborne Unit and showed up as a reservist, not knowing what to expect. They didnt know me and i didnt know them. I was in charge of a couple of hundred people spread out all over the count, and i was tasked to send them off into very interesting, dangerous things. Over a period of time i came to understand that i was suffering from ptsd. I had images of the dead from a want darks from kosovo, come can bag to visit me in the middle of the night. Id wake up in the middle of the night and see dead people standing around. When this happened during the day i in other words i was really the trouble during the day i in other words i was really in trouble, and this is what that was like. In the cold predawn i can hear generators running and vehicles moving on the other side ofu]qe base. But its quiet inside my tent. None of the soldiers i share the tent with is even snoring. Id been awake for a few hours but stay any sleeping bag, fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to run away. The taliban have launched a couple of rockets at the base during the week, and were on edge but thats not what is keeping me up. Im trying to control my racing heart and trembling because the dead have come to talk to me. Theyve been come everything night for a couple of weeks, the dead from kosovo or rwanda, beckoning to me, pulling me from a warm, comforting sleep, into a series of wretched, tormenting, wide awake dreams. Tonight its the death on a farm, burned bible, black and twisted into hideous contorted shapes, lying in cold rain that falls through the burnsaway roofs and pools on the dirty floor. Do you remember us, they ask . Most assuredly. The night before was the dead from the village, 45 of them shot the back of the head and left to die in the rocky ditch on a frozen january morning in 1999. They dropped by for a chat. Why didnt you do more to save us . They asked. Why indeed. Night after night they appear on the big screen of my mind, and oversaturated technicolor rising and imploring night after night the murdered and mutilated comb back, each time im scared and ashamed. I know they arent real. I know theyre only images in my head. But irfear them no less for knowing this. They terrify me for what they remind me of. The fighting i didnt stop and the lives i didnt save. They terrify me for what they represent. I can no longer stop them from taking control of my mind. I lie on my bed, eyes wide open and still see the dead in front of me. Trouble begins slowly developing over time, and by the time im fully aware of it im having graphic, violent dreams nightly. I wake from the dreams in a panic, shaking, heart racing, crying sometimes, always afraid 3akz go back to sleep. Im losing control of my brain, of my mind. In time i start seeing these images when im awake. During the day im unable to concentrate. I set at my desk or go to planning meetings, shaking until i have to leave the tent and go outside and get control of myself. I fear ive lost my mine, but im afraid to ask for help. I fear ill be ridiculed. Considered weak and counterly. You see, an army culture, especially this elite unit filled with rangers and paratroopers, asking for help is a sign of weakness. My two bronze star medals, my tours in airborne and special operations units, nothing will matter. To ask for help will be seen as breaking. But when i can no longer control the images in my head, when in the middle of the day im forced to hide, shaking and crying in a concrete bunker, railing against the noise and the images, when i realize that to continue to deny this would be to endanger the soldiers i was sent to afghanistan to lead. I finally asked for help. So that day, i stopped the Division Surgeon for the 82nd 82nd airborne, a friend of mine, and i said, you know what . Im having some problems. I explained my symptoms, and he listened very intently and reached out and put his hand on my arm and said, are you a danger to yourself or others . Which is a question you get asked a lot when people think youre crazy. They look at you with an m4 over youre shoulder or mine millimeter on your hip and think, is this guy going to start shooting . I was not a danger to anyone else, and i said that. I didnt think i was a danger to myself at that time. That came later. So i said, no, but i knew i needed help, so i went down to see the psychiatrist that day, and i walk in, and i sit down, and theyve got this big tv on because theyre trying to keep the noise from the back of people crying as their telling ptsd stories from coming up to the front. So theres this big tv on the shelf, and larry king iskwf on,f course. Its cnn and theyre showing nothing but larry king, and he is interviewing some girl and i have no idea who this person was. I looked down and just folded under the television were a bunch of strait jackets so im convinced i have gone around the bend and this where is i will end up. Theyll put in the a straightjacket and take me away, so i start crying some rocking back and forth and trying to get control of myself. Thats when the psychiatrist walks out. So im sure i made his day with that. Hes thinking, great. Heres a field grade officer, broken and crying and shaking on the floor. But i got the treatment i needed, at least enough to get me home. I brought my soldiers home. I was home for about four months and then i deployed to iraq. Since the time in iraq, came home, i was home while i was in iraq i got a phone call from a frequented email from a friend who said youre about to be mobilized again, and sent to iraq. Which i thought was delicious irony, being in iraq with the state department when the army calls and says were going too send you to iraq. So i argue as much as one can, and got to point they said if youll von to come back so we dont have to mobilize you, well give youor choice of assignments. And your choice of assignments means Different Things to different people. Your choice of assignments to this guy meant mauritania, zaire, or congo, or sudan. As opposed to iraq. Well, i was an africanist, foreign officer so i chose suddennan, i had never been there i knew what zaire was like. So i volunteered, went to sudan and was sent there just after colin powell announced what was happening in darfur was genocide. There were 300,000 dead, 2. 5 million displaced and i was sent in as the United States representative to the african0;o union0s crease fire commission. Our job was to stop the fighting. We had about 1700 people in an area larger than iraq. A place the size of france. 1700 people to try to stop the fighting. Among people who dont want to stop fighting. Theyre not tired of killing each other yet. So i spent nine months there. And got a phone call from my wife, said your mom has gone into hospital. The doctor says come home. I went home and spent a month sitting by my moms bedside while she died. That was a tuesday. Wednesday i drove them home to a suit to wear to the funeral. That i went to lunch at the white house. Friday we buried my mom. Monday i went back to the state department and was ordered back to darfur. So i was work only United Nations mission, and heres what is going on. The capital of the capital of the town were living in is elfasnruthe capital of dar fewer. Is was there in support of the uted Nations Mission to organize and run a training for the Peace Keeping staff way. The see narrow writer. The humanitarian develops into a security crisis. Deal with. A security crisis develops into a humanitarian catastrophe and includes press interest and bad weather. Deal with. The kitchen sink of problems arrive. Sequentially deal with all of them. Things get harder. The African Union staff had an officer on the u. N. Team who helped us with the details. He had the plots and knew the solutions and gave those to the colleagues on the staff and they still failed. They were utterly unprepared for this mission. I was failing, too. I was falling apart. In some ways worse than in afghanistan. I was deep into a bad ptsd episode, drinking myself into a stupor every night in an Islamic Republic where liquor was banned. The outside videos videos genocide was diminishing but i saw 3line thousand dead. I had nothing to hold me together. Very few actual responsibilities since the scenarios were already written. I was mostly along for the ride with the u. N. Team. Despite this i was managing pretty well until one very bad day. The woman with whom id been having an affair for a couple of months what would happen after our Work Together ended. We were at nit nairobi, then atis, darfur, having fun in nice hotels in kenya and ethiopia and dodgy guest houses in suddennan. Drinking and playing. But when she started making noises about next steps that set off alarm bells, dragging me back to the realization i had a life outside the war bubble and soon i would have to go back to that life and a reckoning. I wasnt rational. But was functioning at a high level, writing ski anywhere youres, operating in the midst of a complex emergency. Collecting the status of rebel forces disposition. The government of suddennans response to the insurgent si and writing reports for the embassy about what i learned at the same time i was carrying on an illicit affair. In my mind i want convince mits life was fuck ed up. Failed to stop the fighting in darfur just as i failed to do in kosovo, and in zaire, my writing sucked. My mom just died. My marriage was failure. I was a failure. Offering i touched brought pain to others. I wasnt Getting Better. I was getting worse. The dark stuff any head triumphed over the remarksam work a day reality so i decided to kill myself. I did so quite rationally issue thought. I thought about it through the morning, scripting the steps and timing, mentally locating the tools i would need in sorting out their acquisition, thinking about the aftermight, both immediate and longer term. By lunchtime i had a plan. By afternoon i id acquired all the tools. Late that afternoon i began work. I grabbed a couple of beers out of the ice book, wrapped them in a rq tshirt, put them on the st of the toyota. I had gone to the u. S. Team house and borrowed a pistol from the special forces team sergeant. He loaned it to me no questions asked because we had worked together for six months or so previously and he had no reason to suspect i would anything other than a competent professional career officer. I drove out of town to the west, somewhat dramatically, realized, into the setting sun, towards the reservoir. Pulled off the main road, to the north side, towards some small villages, just clusters of huts, really. And stopped the truck on a low rise just high enough to see the sun falling towards the desert. I opened one of the beers. I started crying but i dont really know why. I was filled with a sense of failure and frustration, a sense of conclusion. Nothing i touched had ever succeeded. Nothing i had done was ever good. Id been through five wars in ten years and done nothing to stop the killing. Rwanda, kosovo, afghanistan, iraq. I felt i was in a logical place in my life to end it. I opened the second beer. I picked the pistol up off the seat. It felt good in my hand. I felt surprisingly defendant with it. I pointed it out the windshield with the magazine resting on the Steering Wheel and curled my finger around the trigger. I imagined pulling the trigger and the pull the weapon would make as the round fired. There was nothing to shoot but if there was something to shoot at i was holing the pistol in my right hand, is am lefthanded so probably wouldnt hit it. I put the pistol become on the seat. I remember a momentary clash of clarity. Who else could i hurt . My wife. Anyone else . My sister maybe. I thought what i was getting ready to do would leave a hole in some lives and i thought about somebody having to clean up the truck war afterwardses. Maybe ill do it outside and live less mess. I but the clarity passed and i had failed to stop the wars so many people were dead because of my failures, images were rushing the 45 dade, a raped nun, the man with the red dye and the mutilated family. I picked up the pistol. I charged at loading a bullet into the firing chamber. My hands were shaking. I put the beer down and took the pistol off of safe. I was sobbing. I was talking to myself, to the fears, to no one. The pistol was ready. I shifted it to my left hand. Looked at it in my hand, lying partly on my lap, pointed down a bit, i took a deep breath to calm myself. I was ready. Then the phone rang. Scared the hell out of me. And i jumped. Startled. I almost pulled the trigger. Which we have been highly ironic to shoot myself in the foot while preparing to shoot myself in the head. I looked at the phone and saw it was my wife, maureen, calling from washington, dc. What was thats, serendipity . Karma, and luck . With my thumb i put the pistol back on safe and laid it on the seat while i talked to maureen for a few minutes. I stared out through the windshield and watched the sun setting over the rocky brown desert of darfur. The ringing phone had broken the spell. After the crying and the shaking, the moralizing and justifying, the calming of hands and nerves, the intense focus on the immediate act of charging the weapon, and then taking off the safety and preparing to put the barrel in my mouth, the ringing phone had pulled me back from the brink. I took the pistol back to the sergeant id borrowed it from. I called my boss. I said i need to come home. Two weeks later i was flown home to washington. And i landed and sort of nobody acted like anything happened. Never any sort of maintainedder to medical screening, no one thought anything to ask me, how are you feeling . No. I found a job in a quiet office full of introverts. They say in the state department you can tell the]2 . Introverts m the stro verts. The stro verts stare at your shoes while theyre talking to you. But i got medical care. I started, anyway. It took a long time. Im still on the road home. Writing is what is doing it for me. As part of the medical care i went to the department of Veterans Affairs and asked for help. I received medical care there but also asked for an adjudication of my case, that i was actually combat disabled. And this is how that went. c the old guy in front of me was using one of those carolina with the four runner tips rubber tips at the base. The last week of july in washington, dc. The temperature was at least 90 degrees with just intolerable y cruel humidity. He was wearing a tan golf jacket that as i passed him i saw was zipped up to the neck. Made me feel even hotter. At least he had a ball cap on, some said world war~ii veteran stitched across the front. That should keep the sun off his head anyway. Like me, he was carrying a large brown folder. Mine held my medical records, service documentation, like orders and award certificates, notes from combat deployments, it was my first visit to the va hospital. The Washington Va Medical Center is as charmless a building as you can imagine. A big white box in the center of a half dozen parking lots constantly in overflow. In many way is suppose its like any other hospital, filled with the sick and infirm, healthcare and administrative staff scurrying about. Bad coffee. But in one very important way it is entirely different. It is the place where combat veterans enter the system for treatment of wounds both physical and psychological. Walking in from the parking lot i started to feel all the familiar sensations. The stress rising in my gut. Vision focused narrowed. Breathing short and irregular. The memories of five wars and images of thewso dead hovering t off stage. Inside the door there was an information desk with a guy in a wheelchair behind it wearing a dav he looked me up and down no doubt made some sort of judgment about me. I couldnt imagine what it might have been. I stammered a bit, explaining id come for my first appointment my hands were shaking so i held them below the emof the counter. He quietly told me where the Registration Office was, walking through the lobby, i imagined everyone was looking at me thinking, look at the psychoboy. Home from the war and broken. What a pusy. Pussy. I felt like it was my first day of high school and i was dressed in a bright pink tutu. I took a number and waited. The waiting room is part of the main lobby so it was noisy and lots of people walking past. I kept my head down until any number was called. Inside the office a woman looked over my paperwork, i brog some of my dd214, the document that details the military service, shows training, awards, derek racings, combat time served, et cetera. Then she started entering my datas into the system. She was perfect live mess tenant and did pleasant and did a good job of ignoring my symptoms until she asked if i wanted to go to the emergency room instead of the green clinic. Ed a my psychological screening upstairs in the enemy health wing, away from the general medical patients i was introduced maybe a recent ph. D graduate. If the more qualified supervisor takenning ahead. To dehail my problems in full. I started in rwanda, then to kosovo, then to afghanistan, and my treatment there for ptsd. Then iraq and darfur and my failed suicide attempt. And on and on through the drive to the hospital that morning. Staring at the floor, ringing my hands, i quietly described the memory loss, my unbridled fear and anxiety, my inability to control the images of the dead appearing in my head at all hours of the night and day. My weird hyper vigilance issues. I even included the irrational things like getting lost in my own neighborhood, going to the Grocery Store at midnighto6 because no one else would be there. My anxiety while driving because i cant control what the lunatic in the lexus what is it about lexus drivers why the hell doesnt anyone use turn signals anymore . Or why dont the return their shopping carts to the front of the store instead of leaving them in the goddamn parking lot. At this point the supervisor snickered. It was an ugly silence the room for a few seconds with the only sound being the air conditioning glasgow the greats and the walls and someones heels clicking down the hallway outside the closed door. I looked up. The interviewer looked stricken. Her supervisor quickly looked down at her notes, shame welled in my throat and eyes. My humiliation was absolute. Even the doctors were laughing at me. Welcome to the va, psycho boy. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. Again, thank you so much for coming. I honestly very much appreciate it. We have time for questions. Michael and james are going to circulate with the microphone. Any questions . Im happy to take them about any part of the story, past, present, future. Boy, that first one is always the hardest, isnt it . Somebody is going to ask the first question. Thank you. I say that before i hear the question. Its hard to have just your story is a very personal lens on something thats much larger than yourself. So, stepping back from your disempowered act of witnessing, another least what you were witnessing, do you have a broader conclusion about how international organizationsoperate more effectively . I think are very important about the intercommunitys work which i dont International Communitys work which i dont think will completely answer your question. A few years ago there was an International Norm accepted mook the nations that is called r2p, the responsibility to protect. Actually have and experts here in the room on that and may call on them very soon. It means basically is that the leadership of any nation have a responsibility to protect their citizens, and if the leadership fails to do so, then the International Community has a responsibility to step in. Im paraphrasing and almost every nation has signed off. I think the North Koreans are still outstanding, but surprise there. Were faced with this question every day. In syria, were faced with this question in ukraine, all around the world. And to put millions of dollars worth of aid on the ground to keep people alive was a pretty big step. To solve that problem, i dont know what might have done it other than a military intervention. And thats what i argued for. We were already engaged in iraq, we were already engaged in afghanistan. To engage militarily in a third muslim nation, this one in the middle of africa in a place that was so hard to get to, was too hard. And i wasnt thinking very clearly, but i i really felt strongly that thats what we should do. And its hard to look at syria, its hard to look at ukraine and say why arent we doing that, and the answer is its just damn hard. We cant do everything. We can support the United Nations fully. We can support nongovernmental organizations in their work by giving them the money, giving them the support, giving them what they need to get this and do the work that we as a government wont or cant take on. Beyond that, i do not have the answers. Its something that i felt like i was beating my head against the wall on for ten years, and a lot smarter people than i am have come up with a shrug. What more can we do . I wish i had a better answer for you, i just dont. Im sorry. Maam . Is your wife here . Yes. My wife, carol, is here. Its important to note that the woman who called me this darfur was maureen. When i went home, the affair that i was having was kind of a last straw between us. Someone told me in an interview the other day, you werent exactly husband of the year. We were married, maureen and i were married for 20 years. We split up just before i went back to darfur. And i met carol a few years later, and weve been married for six years now. Did she save your life . She did, absolutely. And shes recognized for it. We still talk pretty regularly. Any other questions . Sir. Tom. Here comes the microphone, so ron, is this on . Its just for the tv. Okay. In the years since you first went to the va, have you seen what kind of progress have you seen on behalf of the va, and also perhaps in their willingness to work with nonprofits like your veterans writing project . I know there are signs of change across the country and new funding coming out of the va for nonprofits through Supportive Services programs and things like that and wonder if you do get some small sense of hope there that this big dinosaur may be making some important changes. Thank you for the question. ek i do see im sorry . Could you repeat could you guys hear that . Could you hear the question . Toms asking is the va Getting Better at what they do. Can i paraphrase that and say it that way . The answer to the question is, yes. Remember, the va is not one organization, theres the benefits organization which takes care of people when theyre which gives people a shawl pension, takes small pension, takes care of widows and orphans. Theres the hospital and the vet center where you get ptsd treatment and then theres the cemeteries, and then theres the overarching administration that controls it. The benefits organization is messed up. Theyve been messed up for a long time. They had a but they are Getting Better. They had a huge backload of 300,000 cases that were over 125 days from beginning to adjudication. Thats their target is, you know, four and a half months. They had 350,000 cases or something that were well beyond that. My case took 400 days from, i filed until they call me for my it was 365 days this they called me to come in, and then a couple months later they made the adjudication. That 350,000 numbers been halved, so theyre making huge progress. Some hospitals are better than others, some va offices are better than others. The joke is that if youve seen one va hospital, youve seen one va hospital. And so the stuff thats been going on in focus, the stuff thats been going on in seattle, thats limited to that hospital, i think. I have received Excellent Health care at the va. I used va education benefits to go back to graduate school and study writing. And thats how i came to found the veterans writing project. So that part of it worked for me. Getting into the system and getting my case adjudicated, which was a part of where the supervisor was laughing at me, that wasnt health care, that was adjudication. And so that is get5 ng were bet. The va has recently opened an office for complimentary and alternative care, so theyre looking at things like writing as therapy. I hope theyll call. Id love to talk to them about it. Were working with the department of defense at Walter Walter reed teaching writing there. Were not therapists, were writers in the writing project, but the therapists there are using writing as a tool and a program that i wrote. So so the dod gets it, the department of defense gets it. Va, im not sure theyve gotten it yet, but hopefully they will. Any other questions . Yeah. First, id like to thank you for telling your story. As a recentlyretired marine who has gone through a lot of things that youve gone through, every time that i hear that im not alone, its so much more reassuring for me to go on for the next day. Id also like to thank you, i didnt know that you were part of, you were heading up the writing program over at walter reed. Ive definitely, definitely received a lot from that personally, so thank you there. As a retired marine, we have a saying called get some. Its all about getting some. From the day you go to boot camp to the day that you hit the beach, its youre getting some. Youre trying to get that combat action which really kind of reassures you as a marine. In the eyes of your cohort, it makes you, you know, the warrior that you claim to be. But i know for me there was a point where it went from getting some to had enough. Yeah. And it was a point between, between joining and, you know, the last few seconds where i wag like, all right, this is lets go to the psych ward or whatever. I know as an officer maybe things are a little different. You guys dont get some, you already have stuff. [laughter] but my question is did you have that moment where it kind of switched from the glorification of being in the military and the nobility of being in the military to, oh, my goodness, im in the military, im at combat, i am seeing people being killed, im seeing, you know, people dying, and its partially my fault . Absolutely. And thank you for raising that question. I understand get some. I was an enlisted guy before i became an officer, so i was there too. In combat arms. And so for me, that moment that youre talking about, that epiphany that this is what i do came very, very late in my career. Because i went back and forth between the military and the Foreign Service, you know, i was so proud of myself. I was an american diplomat. I was so proud of myself, i was the first member of my family to get a commission. My father was in the military, both my grandfathers were in the military, all my uncles were in the military, all my cousins, theyre all enlisted guys. And the day that my sergeant puts his arm around me and said youve got to go get a commission, i thought, no, i cant do this. But i did, and i was proud of it. But that moment for me that everything changed was after i went home from daughter you are the if darfur. I got back to, a couple days after that incident i was flown out back to khartoum, and i had a couple of weeks to close out my accounts. I remember physically taking my phone lists and my phone and handing it to another officer who was 20 years younger than i was. And it really very much felt like i was passing a baton to the next generation. And that was a really terrifically smart, qualified officer who made better choices i did. And after his time in darfur, took a more traditional kind of assignment to give himself time to recover and give himself time to rest. And so if i was able to not just pass on what id learned in the field, not just pass on the material so that he could carry on my job when i had to go, i feel like i also passed on to him something i learned in the field which was you have to take care of yourself as well. And, you know, im glad that youre taking care of yourself. And, no, you are not alone. There are a lot of us out there. We all have to stay together. Im sorry, did i answer your question . Oh, it did. Thank you very much. Cheers. It almost follows that question. What im thinking is with the other you were not alone. I mean, you were often in a group, a small group. But it almost seems to me as if any thinking, humanitarian person in that situation would have that response. And how much i mean, even if it was not the military way to discuss that with your colleagues, do you really think that, do you not think that they were all, all of your colleagues were responding in much the same way even if they didnt have the wherewithal or the presence of mind to go home after writing the dry report of what happened to then talk about yellow skin . Or think about yellow skin . Sure. I think that one of the things that the doctors that ive worked with over the past few years has beenc a recurring theme. Its that posttraumatic stress disorder, the disorders not a term that a lot of people like. And one thing that theyve said to me over time is that whats happek ] to you is a perfectly normal reaction to a long chain of abnormal life events. And ive had a number of my colleagues come to me privately and say, man, im so glad that youre taking care of yourself, and youve inspired me to go get help. But i will also say that ive had i tried to reach out to some of the people that i served with in afghanistan, and i would send them emails for a couple of reasons. One, i would say, hey, did you know that i was struggling . And also as a way of closing the loop on research, because i would, i wrote this book, and then i went back and looked at all my notebooks to check dates and who was actually in the car with me, and thats how i did a lot of my research. Its always good to say, hey, what do you remember . But a number of my colleagues from afghanistan have just refused to be in contact with me, and i dont know why. I worry that its because they feel that, you know, ooh, maybe itll rub off, you know . Or i was weak, and theyre embarrassed because i broke. I dont know why. But the ones, the people who are the most a danger to themselves are the ones who wont get help. Because you cant help them if they wont ask. [inaudible] wont even tap into the fact that they are, they too are waking up in the middle of the night sure. Seeing those people. Yes, absolutely. Maam. I guess i just want to address a comment to what you just said which is that [inaudible] i think that, i mean, when you say you dont know why, i think a lot of people only deal with it and maybe deal with it is not the right word by never talking about it. And the reason i say that is that my father was a marine in the Pacific Theater in world war ii, and he didnt talk about it to anyone for, you know, 50 years. Right. I mean, he wrote about it maybe two years before he died. And that was the first time any of us knewuzc anything about anything that he did. Yeah. I think thats very typical of the world war ii generation, you know . These and they were mostly men then, a very small percentage of women in the military at that time. These men came home from the war and immediately were told thanks for your service, get back to work. Oh, by the way, now weve got to fight the soviets, and were going the fight them by being the best, you know . Were going to have the best factories and the biggest cars and the fastest jets, and so get to work. And what the research ive seen shows is that it was 30 years after the war when these guys were starting to retire that they then started asking for help. Because thats when they needed it. Just one last thing, theres a book written by an afghanistan im sorry, an iraq veteran named colby bazell. Colby was a young infantryman in iraq, and his book is called killing time my war in iraq. Its a really terrific book, but theres a part in it where they come in off of a major fire fight downtown, and hes sitting by the side of his vehicle, and his platoon sergeant walks up and says, hey, are you all right . And he says, i dont know, because he describes whats happened, and his platoon sergeant says, look, my dad told me when he came home from vietnam the way you get through this is you put all this stuff in a box, and you deal with it later. And if theres one lesson from my book i hope is that youre gonna have to deal with this stuff, and its better the deal with it on your own terms than, you know, and deal with it when you can. And ive got a sign in my office that says either you control the memory, or the memory controls you. And my road home has been getting control of those memories. By writing about them. We okay on time . Okay. I think one or two more questions. Go ahead. I dont know if this is working. Its on. Its only for the camera. Oh, okay. Okay. First, i wanted to congratulate you for writing about your vulnerabilities. Thank you. Being in such a high position, its very, as you said, you were supposed to show that youre tough8x and youren control. So its really important to show the human side of high officials. I am from kosovo, and so i want to just tell you about my perspective then when i was hiding in the basement. People like this young guy over here and like you, they were seen like our saviors. And in no point we have seen you as these Vulnerable People that youre talking about. I remember my father would say when i was scared what was going to happen, he would say, dont worry. You see the news . The americans are coming. Actually, thats very touching now that im thinking about it, because i tried to forget about. And, yeah, the ptsd, weve never, ive never been treated. People who i know have never been treated for ptsd which is, you know, the same. Weve gone through that as you have. Absolutely. No question. But its something to be said also about the system that actually takes care of its soldiers. I guess that was my comment. I dont want to take too much of your time, but also another question is that the field of conflict resolution in internationality proposal city so intricate, its just so complex that undoubtedly it would make you feel if youre a little bit sensitive and human, it would make you feel like you have felt. But now after overcoming your struggles, do you feel that it was worth it, whatever youve done . Have you done some good with your report and with any Decision Making . Thank you. I hope so. You know . There are about three days out of ten years that i can rook back and say look back and say i got that one right. And there are so many days that i look back and i say, man, why didnt i work harder, why didnt i try harder . What was wrong . Theres a village in the middle of darfur that exists today because i broke the chaine3p of command when i went behind my colonels not my colonels, my generals back, called washington and asked for an intervention, and it happened. And the next day that village became a base for an African Union peacekeeping team. And that village existed. Writing a cable back to washington and saying, look, youre not doing can it right, heres whats going to happen. Nothing really changed, but i felt like i got it right. The fact that i know that reporting that i did, reporting that i collected went into the case against mills slip, i will always milosevic, i will always be proud of that. I wish i could have been more successful more often, but i wasnt. Im sorry. Do we have time for one more . Or is there one more . [inaudible conversations] sure. Already robbing the microphone. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for your contribution and for being thank you. Very open and sharing your story. I am from kosovo as well, and its very interesting and very revealing to hear this kind of, this kind of story, this part of the story. I was also there in 99 during the war, i was very little, and definitely true we saw anybody that helped albanians in that time during those struggles as being our friends. So its, it was a very Welcome Change for our country. I did have one question pertaining to your career and the way sort of your work unraveled. Do you think it has anything to do with maybe the wrong decisions or the lack of success if you may rate it that way, the sense that International Officials seemed to for a while at least seemed to feel very invincible and allpowerful . We witnessed on the other side of our glorifying the International Administration later on have been very critical of their mission or lack of successful reforms or maybe partnering too closely with political elites that were more harmful to their own people than beneficial. Would you consider this as sort of a misjudgment of individual International Officials or more of weaknesses of the system . I think i maybe try and stay away from characterizing the senior leaders. I came to kosovo very early in my political career, my dip 40matic career diplomatic career as a political officer. I mean, my job for a couple of days was to drive holbrooke around, you know . I was a driver. And to be hand holbrooke, chris hill, the guys who were fighting every day to try and stop that war, i learned a lot. What they said among themselves if they had the selfdoubts, i dont know. I wasnt party of that. Party to that. I would say it would be very, very hard not to have that kind of doubt, but i think that among people like dick holbrooke, you know, youve got he may not have had those doubts. He was, you know, so much, so much more senior than i will ever be, than i ever reached and, you know, it was his job to stop the war. It was my job to drive the truck, you know . But i still feel like i failed because i didnt stop the fighting. I dont know what he felt. I asked him once, and we had a chance to talk, and i never really got a straight answer out of him. It is it is humbling to fail, to go somewhere like kosovo, to go somewhere like the eastern congo, to go somewhere like darfur and be told your job is to stop the fighting and to fail over and over again and to see the lives of the civilian population disrupted the way we have. Its very humbling. And1รท it does change the way you view the world. I am a much different person than i was 15 years ago in kosovo. I dont know if im more hopeful, but im certainly more empathetic. As far as how the kosovo people view the more thans that were there at the the americans that were there at the time and the brits that were there at the time, one of my good friends goes back every summer to teach at the American University there. Some of these stories in here have been translated into albanian and published in kosovo, were working to get this book published this kosovo right now. The guy that was my translator there and his sister, maybe you know yeda, shes a yeah. Val is working to get the book translated, and we hope to be able to get it into the hands of a lot of cose veries so theyll know, you know, what happened to some of us that were still there. And i think thats it. I thank you so much for coming. [applause] thank you, ron. And thank you, all of you, for your thoughtful questions and your insights and a lot of your commentary. We are thrilled to have had you here tonight, and weve got some copies of the book on sale. There is so much more to the to the to be experienced in the book, and i hope youll grab a copy. Otherwise please come see us again. We have readings here every monday night, and anyway, thanks again. Have a good night. [applause] [inaudible conversations] cspan2, providing live coverage of the u. S. Senate floor proceedings and key Public Policy events. And every weekend, booktv. Now for 15 years the only Television Network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a Public Service by your local cable or satellite2รท2k uju qq . Wateus in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter