Signal to be brought into a local area and that cuts out the local communities commerce. Where do you sell your chevy when you talk about chevies in los angeles and you happen to live in buffalo, new york . We think the local stations should be sported. We want people to view it and we are working with the nfl to preserve this and allow them to work it out in a market way without the Congress Taking an approach that ultimately damages local television and economies and we dont think that is good. Host and i want to close with the opinion on the aereo case and the closing lines that were we remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. Are there other cases out there . Guest i believe there is one before the 9th Circuit Court of appeals called aereo killer and i think they put a stay on that pending what the Supreme Court decided. There maybe new things coming along but this decision really reenthrones the principle of copyright as it relates to telecommunication. Host there is new technology coming. Guest all of time. If they can operate lawfully, consistent with the constitution, we are all for it. Host gordon smith, president and ceo of the National Broadcasters and monty tayloe with communication daily. Gentlemen, thank you. Our special booktv programming includes three books about soldiers running from war beginning with ron capps on seriously not allright five wars in ten years in a little more than an hour phil clay talks about his book redeployment and in two hours a panel of authors at the los angeles book festival discuss the realities of war. Hilary clinton sat down to discuss her new book hard choices. Getting to the point where you make peace isnt easy because you dont make peace with friends. You make it with advisaries and you have to get into the head of those on the other side and you have to change their calculation enough to get them to the table. Talking about iran, we had to put a lot of economic pressure to get them to the table and we will see what happens but that has to be the first step. And i write about what why did in afghanistan and pakistan trying to get the taliban to the table for a decision with the government of afghanistan. Well, in iraq today, i think, what we have to understand that is primarily a political problem that has to be addressed. The ascension of the sunni extremist and socalled isis group is taking advantage of the breakdown in political dialogue and the total lack of trust between the maliki government, the sunni leader and the kurdish leaders. More with Hilary Clinton on surveillance Transparency Act s saturday and sunday. Ron capps is the funder of the veterans writing project. He talked about his book seriously not allright five wars in ten years. This is a little more than an hour. Hi, folks. Welcome to the half king tonight. It is a pleasure to see so many of you here. We are thrilled to be welcoming ron capps here. I would like to thank Scott Manning and the shackner press for having the wisdom to publish a wonderful book. I know a lot of you know ron personally but for those of you who are not as familiar with him rons bio reads like one of the more interesting novels of all time and we are lucky to have it captured here. He served as senior military office and u. S. Observer 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 retired at a lieutenant colonel. He served in rwanda, coast, iraq, and the darfer region of sudan. He was awarded the medal of service and received awards from the American Service association. His policy writing has appeared everywhere there is to mention and he is the founder of a nonprofit that provides no cost writing workshops for veterans and their families. We are thrilled to welcome here to share his memoir seriously not allright five wars in ten years. Welcome, ron capps thank you. I cannot tell you how thrilled i am to be here. This is the hard launch of the book. The first night. Big event. Had press today and some of you, i know, heard that press and thank you for coming. Some of you i have known for too long to mention and it means much too you here. We have cspan2 and booktv is here. I will talk, tell stories, read and then we will take questions and michael and james are going to move around with the microphone. So if you have a question, just let them know r. There is two stories in the book. If you have read it, at the very beginning i tell the story of driving off in the desert with a couple beers in my truck and a pistol when i was getting ready to kill myself. Obviously something happened and i didnt get to do that. That is the Central Point of the story and where everything changes. So the first half of the story is how i got there and the second half is what happened afterwards. I think the second half of the story is more interesting for hopeful but it doesnt make sense without telling the first half of the story. What i will do is read from a couple sections. Afterwards, i served as a soldier for 25 years. Half of the time i was in the regular army and half in the army reserve. During the time in the army reserve, my 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 meme people it was dull, i never did anything interesting or got shot at. It was a peace time. Then i joined the Foreign Services and went to places where they shoot at people regularly and things got interesting. This begins in 1996 and runs through 2006. Those are the ten years i was e deploying. Starting with a story in kosovo in 2008. I worked as part of team of diplomatic observers. Our job was to drive around kosovo and stop the fighting and get the rebels to stop killing each other and civilians. We arrived in cynic a day too late. The infintry came through the day before and this is what we found. It is part of an essay i wrote that was published called yellow and now it is a chapter in the book. Let me get started with that. Yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails and feet were dirty. Six of them, all women, some lived long enough to have the wounds banned up before they died and some were killed right away. They were dead about 24 hours. We came to witness the funeral and stand a type of guard. If we were present the snipers wouldnt shoot at the family members as they buried their dead. It was the first time i saw war dead. I remember being surprised their skin was yellow. My experiences with death before that was a few funerals a. Friends older brother, my grandmother. None of them were yellow. I was surprised. This was the first time i saw what dead people looked like if no embombing was done or what makeup and a nice suit of clothes. They were just dead. Lying in a tangle of limbs under a blue u. N. Tarp on a trailer that carried food the week before. I could not see all of their faces. One had an arm resting across her forehead and one had a bangladesh ban dade on her head. We saw dogs up the trail. The agency field officer who led us to the scene said what all of us were thinking. The dogs probably got the body of the 18monthold who was m missing. The mother was resting in the house with a bullet in her upper arm, passed through her baby, through her breast and lodged in her arm. The father said the child was killed instantly. The bullet tore the child in half. A doctor from the red cross was treating the mothers wound. There were ten women and a 72yearold man in one airless room of the house. All of them had been wounded in the attack. They sat silently on the floor, backs against the walls of the room, lost in their pain and thoughts, waiting. We did this pretty much every day for two years. Driving around kosovo trying to stop fighting. Almost always arriving a day late. Just in time to conduct investigation of a war crime. A crime against humanity. Ethnic clensing and murder. I would write reports about what i saw and i would go back and sit and write dry reports about 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 and sit down and write the test of what happened. And those sessions of writing grew into this book so what i wrote about that event i sat down and typed out the words yellow, their skin was yellow and that is where we are. That day we were up in a small valley, a little draw between two ridge lines, and the infantry swept through and fired in front of them, clearing thing path and coming through with infantry. They were shooting at women, children and old men who were driven out of the town by mortars in the day prior. They moved up into this valley to be save and then the infantry came through. We drove back into the town and this is what happened. The villagers wanted to bury their dead in plain sight and we could see the snipers. The land, they said, was taken in the 1940s. They reclaimed it in the 1970s. It belonged to these people and they were going to be sure they understood that. The woman they killed spent their lives growing the fields and giving birth to their children. We parked our vehicles to stop the shooting. Certainly they would not shoot at the white and blue vehicle. But i was shaky sitting around. The ground was hard, it took time to bury the dead. The men works with shovels and picks to dig graves for the women. We stopped on the way out and used our satellite telephone to call washington and tell the state department what we saw. It seemed far away from the hill side but the officer on the other line was a friend, colleague, and classmate. Had it been somewhere else i might have been more animated in the description, but doug understood what was happening without resorting to being hysteric. Six women and one child dead. Yes, i counted them. Yes, we are sure they were dead. I verify it. We made a stop off the hill where an old man flagged us down and wanted to show us something the serbs did. I glanced through the house and saw a group of women on the floor, rocking and surrounding 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 vealed in a colorful scarf. The man said a meter exploded near her body and he held out his hand to show the distant. He was the dead womans father. Having felt safe enough to remain with husband and children rather than moving up to the draw with the others, she decided to make food up to her neighbors. She was at the base of the draw when the attack started. The mortar shells probably came in groups of three. Punk, punk, punk as the rounds left the tubes is then the breathless agonizing 56 seconds while they flew and then the final barking and echoes off the walls of the cannon as they exploded. They probably set the fuses to go off one or one and a half meters above the ground. About head high. It was an awful story and i could not wait to get away from the smell, crying and death. I felt outraged and horrified soldiers fired mortars at women and children. I focused on her scarf colors rather than the wounds. I watched the woman rocking her and looked at the womans father. I took notes about what the father said. Then we left. Eight dead. Down the hill at the intersection marking the proper a crowd of women and a few men gathered. Boys were filled with boxes filled with cigarettes, crackers and chicklets. They sat expressionless as a small crowd swarmed the vehicle. I pushed own the door and was pinned up against the vehicle. One woman pushed through the crowd and held her baby at arms length. I was face to face with the child while the mother spoke. She wants you to take your son so the serbs wont kill her. I looked at the woman and said to mimi say this, we are observers we cannot we locate you or your son. If we do we will all be ordered out of the country. I felt feckless as the words spilled out. For the first time i understood the follow of observing. A tourist among the victims. It was hot and with the son beating down on me i felt c coweredly. I thought the red cross would refuse but i wasnt able to muster the courage to tell the woman and others around me there was little hope she would get out. I found out i was wrong. Several officer s arrived and oe of them took several children. I had to tell the mother of the missing child we didnt find her baby. It would serve no purpose to tell her what we thought happened. I could not find those words anyway. That evening after returning to the office, i drafted by report that was three pages long. Just things we understood happen based on what we saw and what was reported. I said it appeared a serbian unit swept from north to south proceeded by a burage of fire and seven women and one infant were killed and 11 others wounded including a 72yearold man. Vehicles, clothes, food and other supplies were burned. No evidence of weapons or insurgeant active among the villages. I didnt mention the funerals, dogs or the woman begging me to take action to save her child. I didnt mention the look on the old mans face. I listened to what was told to us with what we saw ourselves. I made the people in the village the center of the report rather than my own actions. I let my teammates read the repo report. I had documented a war crime. The war went on for a number of months. We stayed until the Bombing Campaign began. And we went out into masdonia and spent the three months and a few days interviewing refugees and people loaded out on to trains and shipped across borders in europe at the end of the 20th century. We did go back and kosovo is now an independent nation. Some of work we did was sent to the hague and used to document the case against them and i feel good about that. There is a special place in hell for people like that. I went back to kosovo and spent another year and returned to Central Africa where i spent a couple years prior and worked in rwanda for two years during the war that was fought as an ex tension of the genocide. We documented war crimes and went through fighting with rwandan military. The United States was attack and i was called back into the regular army to go to afghanistan. I arrived in afghanistan not quite a year after the rangers jumped in. I 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 hundred people that were spread out all over the country. I was tasked to send them off to do interesting and dangerous things. I came to understand i was suffering from ptsd. I had images of the dead from rwanda and kosovo coming. I would wake up at night and see dead people standing around my cot. When this happened during the day, i understood where was in trouble. This is what that was like. In the cold predawn, i can hear generators and vehicles moving on the other side of the base. But it is quite in my tent. None of the other soldiers i share the tent with are storing. I have been awake but i stay fighting the overwhelming urge to run away. The taliban launched a couple rockets near the base so we are on edge but that is not what is keeping me up. I am trying to control my racing hard and trembling because the dead have come to talk to me. They have been coming every night pulling me from a sleep into a series of wide awake dreams. Tonight it is the dead who were burned bible black and twisted into hideous shapes. They lie in the cold rain that falls through the burned away roof. Do you remember us, they asked . Most assuredly. The night before it was the dead from a village of 45 shot in the head and left to die in a rocky ditch. 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. Night after night the murdered and mutilated come back and each time i am scared and ashamed. I know they are not real and images in my head but i fear 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 safe. They terrify me for what i represent. I can no longer stop them from taking control. I lie on my bed eyes wideo open and see the dead in front of me. The trouble begins over time and by the time i am aware of it i am having graphic violent dreams, waking shaking, heart racing, crying sometimes, always afraid to go back to sleep. I am loosing control of my brain, of my mind. In time, i start seeing these images when i am awake. During the day i am unable to focus and i sit at my desk and go to planning meeting, shaking until i have to leave and go outside. I fear i lost my mind but i am afraid to ask for help thinking i will be ridiculed. You see in the army culture asking for help is a sign of weakness. My medals and special operation units, nothing matters, asking for help is seen as breaking but with when in the middle of the day i am forced to hide, shaking and crying in a bunker, when i realize to deny this would endanger the soldiers i was asked to help. I asked for help. I told someone i was having problems, explained by symptoms, he listened, reached out, 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 you are crazy. They look at you with an m4 over your shoulder or 9millimeter on your hip and ask if you will start shooting. I said i wasnt a danger, but i knew i needed help so i went to see the psych that day and they are trying to keep the tv on so you cannot hear the stories of the people coming through the front. I brought my soldiers home. I was home for four months and then deployed until iraq. Spent time in iraq, came home and while in iraq, i got a phone call from a friend that said you are about to be mobilized again and sent to iraq which was i thought delicious irony being in iraq with the state department when the army calls. I began arguing as much as one can. And it got to the point if you volunteer to come back so you dont have to be mobilized you get your choice of assignments. And that means different things. This meant the democratic republic of congo or sudan. Well i was an africanist and i chose sudan. I had never been there. I volunteered and went there just after colin powell said it was genocide. 2. 5 million displaced and 3 million dead and i was sent in into the African Unions cease fire commission. Our job was to stop the fighting. We had about 1700 people in an area larger than iraq. The place the size of france. Among people who dont want to stop fighting. They are not tired of killing each other. I spent nine months there. Got a phone call from my wife that said your mom went into the hospital and the doctor says come home. I went home and spent a month sitting by my moms bedside while she died. That was tuesday. Wednesday i went to get a suit for her funeral, lunch at the whitehouse on thursday, and friday buried and monday back to darfur. Here is what is going on. The only think you need to know is the capital is elfascer. I was there to organize and run a Training Exercise for the African Peace Keeping staff. I was the scenario writer. The scenario were roughly like this. An emergency develops into a security crisis, deal with it. A security crisis develops into a humanitarian crisis and bad weather, deal with it. The kitchen sink was deal with all of them. The officer had a staff on the u. N. Team and helped and he gave the solutions to the colleagues on the staff but they still failed. They were uterally unprepared for this mission. I was failing, too. I was falling a part. I was deep into a bad ptsd episode, drinking myself into a stooper and having an affair with an official from the un. I had no real safety net to catch me or anything during the day to hold me together. I had few actual responsibilities since the scenario was written. I was mostly along with the ride. I was managing well until the woman who i was having an affair asked me what happens when this ends . We were having fun in hotels and dodgey guest houses and drinking and playing but noises about next step set off alarm bills and dragged me back to the fact i had a life outside the war bubble and i would have to go back. I wasnt rational. Nevertheless, i was functioning at a high level and writing scenario for a modernish fighting force and operating in a complex emergency and continuing to collect information about the forces and disposition and writing reports for the embassy about what i learned at the same time i having an elicit affair. But in my head, i was convinced my life was fucked up and all i was doing was hurting people. I failed to stop the fighting in kosovo, might writing sucks, my mom died, my marriage was a failu failure, i was a failure, every i touched got worse. The dark stuff in my head tri p triumphed. I decided to kill myself. I thought about it through the morning, scripting the steps and mentally locating the tools i would needed and thinking about the aftermath. Lunchtime i had a plan, by afternoon i acquired all of tools and late that afternoon i began work. I grabbed a couple beers from the ice box and wrapped them in a tshirt and put them on the seat of the toyota. I went into the u. S. Team house and baorrowed a pistol and he loaned it to me no questions asked because he had no reason to suspect i was anything other than a compitant career officer. I drove into the setting sun toward the reservoir. Pulled off the main road to the north side with clusters of huts. 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 know why, i was filled with a sense of failure and frustration, and a sense of conclusion. Nothing i touched had ever succeeded, nothing i had done was ever good. I went through five wars in ten years and did nothing to stop the killing. Iraq, afghanistan, kosovo, sudan, and darfur. I opened the second peer, picked up the pistol off the seat, it felt good in my hand. I pointed it out the wind shield with the magazine resting on the windshield and curled my fingers and imagined pulling the trigger there wasnt anything to shoot out and even if so i am left handed so it wouldnt have been a shot. Who else could have hurt doing this . My wife, maybe. My sister, maybe. I thought what i was going to do would leave a whole in lives. I thought about someone having to clean up the truck and thought maybe i will do is outside. But the clarity passed and i was overwhelmed with a sense of sadness. I failed to stop the wars and so many people were dead because of my failures and images were rushing in. 45 dead, raped man, and a man with red rimmed eyes and a mutilated family near cynic. I picked up the pistol, my hand were shaking, i loaded it, put down the beer and put my hand on the safe. The pistol was ready, i shifted it to my right hand and looked at it lying on high hand i took a deep breath, calmed myself, i was ready. Then the phone range. It scared the hell out of my. I jumped, startled, almost pulled the trigger which would have been ironic to shoot myself in the foot while prepare to shoot in the head. I saw it was my wife calling from washington, d. C. What was this . Karma . Luck . Uncanny timing . With my thumb i put the pistol back on safe and laid it on the seat while i talked to her for a few minutes. I watched the sun setting over the rocky desert, the ringing phone had broken the spell. After the crying, shaking, mor moralizing and justifying, the focus on charging the weapon and taking off the safety and preparing to put the barrel in my mouth, the ringing phone pulled be back from the brink. I took the sergeant back. I called my boss and said i need to come home. Two weeks later i was flown home to washington. And i landed and no body acted long anything happened. No mandatory medal screening. No one asked how are you feeling . A found a job in a quite office full of introverts. They say in the state department you can tell the extroverts and introverts the extroverts stair at your shoes while talking to you. I got medical care. I started. It took a long time. I am 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 ajudication of the case so i was combat disabled and this is how that went. The old guy in front of me was using a cane as he crept through the hospital door t. Was the last week of july in washington, d. C. And the temperature was 90 with in tolerable and cruel weather. He was wearing a tan jacket and i saw it zipped up to the neck. At least he had a ball cap on that said world war ii vetera d across the front. He was carrying a large brown folder. My held notes combat deployment, medical records and others. It was my first visit to the va hospital. The Washington Va Medical Center is as charmless as you can imagine. A big white box in a center of half a dozen parking lots that are overflow. It is like any other hospital filled with the sick and health care and administrative staff scurrying about and bad coffee. But it is entirely different. It is the place where combat veterans enter the system for the treatment. Walking in from the parking lot, i started to feel all of the familiar sensation. The stress rising in my gut. Breathing sort and irregular. The memories of five wars and the dead hovering off stage. Inside there was an information desk with a guy in a wheelchair behind it. He looked me up and down and made a judgment about me. I could not imagine what it might have been. A stammered explaining i came from my first appointment. My hands were shaking and i held them down. He pointed the way to the Registration Office and walking through the lobby i imagined everyone looking at me saying look at the psycho guy home from the war and damaged. What a pussy. I took a number and waited. The waiting room was part of the main lobby. I kept my head down until my number was called. Inside the office, a women looked over my paperwork, i brought papers that shows the training, awards, combat served and she started entering data in the system. He was pleasant and did a good job ignoring my symptoms until she asked if i want to go the emergency room instead of the green clinic. I was interviewed by someone knew into the system. Maybe a recent graduate with a qualified supervisor attending. I started talking about rwanda, kosovo and afghanistan and my treatment and iraq and dar darfer and i cried over the memory loss, my fear and anxiety, and my inability to control the images of the dead appearing in my head at all hours of the night and day, high weird hypervigilance issues, and getting lost in my neighborhood and going to the Grocery Store at midnight. The interviewer looked stricken. Her supervisor quickly looks down at her notes. Shame wild and my throat and eyes. My humiliation was absolute. Even the doctors were laughing at me. Welcome to the office of Veterans Affairs psycho boy. [applause] thank you thank you very much. Again, thank you so much for coming. I really honestly very, very much appreciated. We have some time for questions. Michael and james are going to circulate with the microphone. Any questions . I am happy to take them. About any part of the story, past, present, future. Boy, that first one is always the hardest, isnt it . Someone is going to ask that first question. Thank you. I say that before i hear the question. Been to your story is a very personal one, something that is much larger and yourself. So stepping back from your disempowered act of witnessing, at least you were witnessing, do you have a broader conclusion about how International Organizations can operate more effectively . I have a couple of things that i think are very important about the International Communitys work, which i dont think is going to completely answer your question, but i will take a stab at it. A few years ago there was an International Norm accepted among the nations of the International Community that is called are to become an responsibility to protect. There are some experts here in the room on that. What it means basically is that the of any nation have a responsibility to respect their citizens. And if they fail to do so in the National Community has a responsibility to step then. I am paraphrasing, of course. Almost every nation has signed on to the spirit the North Koreans are still outstanding summer. Surprise there. We are faced with this question every day in syria. We are faced with this question in ukraine, all around the world why arent we doing more . America, the United Nations command every individual among us. The answer is that we cannot week, america, the one thing cannot fix a problem. We do the best that we can. Tough thats why u. S. Policy was going to fail. Did not need to be pressured. I was at least willing to say so. The hindsight of six or eight years, that was a really, really our problem. And to put millions of dollars worth of aid was a pretty big step to solve that problem. I dont know what might have done it other than a military intervention, and that is what i argued for. We were already engaged. To the engage militarily in a third muslim nation, this one in the middle of africa in a place that made logisticians go crazy because it was hard to get to was too hard. And i was not thinking very clearly because i really felt strongly that is what we should do. Its hard to like ukraine. Why are we doing that . The answer is it is just damn hard. Giving them the money, giving them the support, giving them what they need to get then. We the government will not are cannot take on. Beyond that i do not have the answers. I felt like i was beating my head against the wall. A lot smarter people and i had to come up with a shrug. I wish i had a better answer for you. I dont. Man. [inaudible question] yes, my wife is here. It is important to know the woman who called me in darfur was marine. This affair that i was seven was just the last drop. Since before went back. [inaudible question] she did. Absolutely. She is recognized for it. We still talk pretty regularly. Any other questions . Here comes the microphone. Is this on . Since you just went to the va, have you seen what kind of progress have you seen on behalf of the va . Also, perhaps in their willingness to work with nonprofits like the writing project i no 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. Wonder if you get some small sense of hope there that this big dinosaur may be making some important changes. Thank you for the question. I do see could you guys here that . Could you hear the question . Is the kaytoo Getting Better at what they do . The supervisor was laughing at me. The answer to the question is yes. Remember, the va is not one organization. There is the benefits organization which takes care of people when they which gives people a small pension, takes care of widows and orphans, the Health Administration which is hospital and the bed center where you get ptsd treatment and the cemeteries. Then there is the over arching organization that controls it. The benefits organization is best of. There have been best of for a long time. But they are Getting Better. They had a huge backlog of 300,000 cases that were over 125 days from beginning to adjudication, and that is their target. They had 350,000 cases of something that were well beyond that. Mike case, just 400 days. I filed until they call me from my it was three under 65 days until they call me to come and. A couple of months later the adjudication. North has been halved. They are making huge progress. Some hospitals are better than others. Some offices are better than others. The joke is, if you have seen one, you have seen one. The stuff that has been going on in phoenix, seattle, that is limited to that hospital, i think. I have received Excellent Health care at the va. I use va education benefits to go back to graduate school and study writing. That is i came to fund the veterans writing friends and. Up our work for me. Getting into the system and getting our cases adjudicated which was up part of where that supervisor was laughing at me, about was health care, adjudication. And so that is Getting Better. The va had recently opened an office for complementary in alternative care looking at things like riding as therapy. I hope there will call. I would love to talk to them about it. We are working with the department of defense at walter reed teaching writing there. We are not therapists. We are riders. But therapists there are using riding is the tool in a program that i wrote. So the department of defense gets it. Im not sure that the va has yet, but hopefully they will. Any other questions . First, i would like to think you for telling your story. Recently a retired marine going through a lot of things the you have gone through every time the lead here i am not alone. So much more reassuring for me to go on the next. I would also like to thank you. I did not know that you were part of you were heading up the writing program. Definitely received a lot from that personally. Thank you. We have a thing. Its all about getting some. From the day you go to boot camp to the day that you hit the beach, you are getting some. You are trying to get that combat action which really kind of reassures you as a marine. In the eyes of your colewort it makes you, you know, the warrior that you claim to the. But i know for me there was a point where it went from some to have enough. It was a point between joining, you know, the last few seconds, all right. Over, whatever. I know as an officer, maybe things are a little different. You already have stuff. My question is, did you have that moment where it kind of switch from the glorification of being in the military and the nobility of being in the military to, oh, my goodness, i am in the military, at combat, seeing people being killed, seeing, you know, people dying. It is partially my fault. Absolutely. Thank you for raising that question. I understand get some. I was an unlisted. [silence] was an author. I was there, too. For me that moment you are talking about, that epiphanies 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, i was so proud of myself and my was an american diplomat, 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 own goes to my cousins. The did my surgeon put his arm around me, no, i can do this. I did. Was proud of him. That moment for me and, everything changed. After our went home i got back to a couple days after that i was blown out and have a couple of weeks to close out my accounts. Remember physically taking my phone less. My phone and handing it to another officer who was 20 years and then i was. And theyre really very much felt like i was passing through time to the next generation. And i was of terrifically smart and qualified officer may better choices than i did. And after his time took more traditional kind of assignment to give himself time to recover, rest. And so if i was able to not just pass on what i had learned in the fields, not just pass on the material so that he could carry on my job. I feel i have also passed on to him something and learned in the field which was, you have to take care of yourself as well. Im glad they are taking care of yourself. I no youre not alone. There are a lot of us out there and well have to stay together. Then i answer your question . Thank you very much. It almost follows that question. What i am thinking is with you are not alone. I mean, you are often the group, a small group, but it almost seemed to me as if any thinking, humanitarian person in that situation would have that response. And 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 will all kamal of your colleagues were responding in much the same way, even if they did not have the wherewithal or the presence of mind to go home after writing the report of what happened to them talk about or think about. Sure. One of the doctors that i worked with over the past few years has been a recurring theme. Posttraumatic stress disorder, the disorder is not a term that a lot of people like. One thing that they have said to me over time is that what has happened to you is a perfectly normal reaction to a long chain of abnormal life events. And i have had a number of my colleagues come to me privately and say, i am so glad that you are taking care of yourself and you have inspired me to go get some help. Will also say i tried to reach out to some of the people i served with in afghanistan. I would send them emails. For a couple of reasons. Hey, did you know that i was struggling . And also has a way of closing the loop on research because i wrote this book, and then i went back and looked all my notebooks to check dates into was actually on the call. Its always good to say, hey, what do you remember. A number of my colleagues in afghanistan have refused to be in contact with me. I dont know why. I worry that it is because they feel that maybe will ruboff. I was weak and there are embarrassed because i broke. I dont know why. The ones the people who are the most a danger to the cells of the ones who wont get help because you cannot help them if theyre one task. They too are waking up in the middle of the night. Absolutely. I guess i just want to address a comment to what you just said which is. A lot of people deal with it and maybe deal with it is not the right word. The reason i say that this my father was a marine in the Pacific Theater in world war ii. He did not talk about it to anyone for 50 years. I mean, he wrote about it maybe two years before died. That was the first time any of us knew anything about anything we did. Very typically of the world war ii generation. And they were mostly men then, very small percentage of women in the military at that time. They came home from the war and immediately we are told thank you for your service. Get back to work. By the way, now we have to fight the soviets, and we will fight them by being the best, have the best factories and the biggest cars and the fastest jets. The research i have seen shows us that it was 30 years after the war when these men were guys are starting to retire that they then started asking for help. That is when they needed it. Just one last thing. A book written by an barack veteran. A young infantryman. And his book is called killing time. It is a really terrific work, but theyre is a part in it or they come in off of a major fire fight downtown. He is sitting by the side of his vehicle. But jen sergeant walks in and says, youre right . I dont know. He describes of as happened in the firefight. A platoon sergeant says, look my dad told me when he came on from vietnam the way you get through is is is you put all this stuff in a box and deal with that later. And if there is one lesson from my book, i hope that youre going to have to do with the stuff. It is better to deal with it on your own terms than deal with it when you cant. I have assigned to my office to assess either you control the memory of a memory controls you. My road home has been getting control of those memories. Writing about them. Thank you for writing about your vulnerabilities. Aziz said, supposed to show the control. So i wanted just so you about my perspective than says, hiring in the basement, people like this in error over year and you may seem like saviors. And at no point we have seen u. S. These Vulnerable People they are talking about. See the news. Now the them thinking about it, i try to forget. People who i know, you know, the same. Something about the system that actually takes care. I know want to take too much of your time. This is so complex. Undoubtedly it would make you feel if you are of low bit sensitive it will make you feel like you have. But now after recovering your struggles to you feel that it is worth it, whenever you have done . The report, and a decision making. Thank you. I hope so. Look, about three days out of ten years that i can look back and say i got that one right. There are some made as i look back. Why didnt i work harder. Why did not try harder. Was wrong . Of village in the middle of darfur exists today because i broke the chain of command, went behind my kernels back now my colonel, my generals back kharkov washington and ask for intervention. It happened. The next day that village became a base for an African Union peacekeeping team, and that village existed. Riding a cable back to washington and saying, look, you are not doing it right. Heres what is going to happen, nothing really changed. I felt like i got it right