Street journal publisher karen elliot house talking about saudi arabia from our College Series at pepperdine university. Former u. S. Representative james rogan discusses his newest book, and actor danny be glover is part of a panel on the black power movement. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors on cspan2. Booktv, television for serious readers. Ron capps, a combat veteran and founder of the veterans writing project, talks about his experiences in several different war zones and the damaging effect war has had on him. This is about an hour and ten minutes. [inaudible conversations] hi, folks. Welcome to the half king tonight. It is a to see so many of you all here a pleasure to see so many of you all here. We are absolutely thrilled to be welcoming mr. Ron capps here tonight. He has written just an incredible memoir, and id like to start by thanking Scott Manning of manning and associates, and the shatner press for having the wisdom to publish a wonderful and meaningful book. I think a lott of you a lot of you personally know ron, but for those of you who arent as familiar with him, rons bio reads like one of the more interesting novels of all time, and we are really lucky to have it captured here in this memoir. He has served as both a senior military Intelligence Officer in the army and an observer for the u. S. Department of state, and he is a combat veteran of afghanistan serve anything the army and army serving in the army and army reserve for 25 years where he retired as a i lieutenant colonel. As a soldier diplomat, capps served in rwanda, kosovo, afghanistan, iraq and the darfur region of sudan. He received the william r. Rivkin award from the American Foreign service association. His policy writing has appeared almost everywhere there is to mention, and he is the founder and director of the veterans writing project, a Nonprofit Program that provides nocost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, Service Members and their family members. He is a truly amazing fellow and a wonderful writer to boot, so we are thrilled to welcome him here to share his memoir, seriously not all right. 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. Its the first night, big event. Had some press today, and some of you, i know, heard that rest, and thank you for coming. It really, really means a lot to me to see you here. Some of you ive known for too long to mention, and it means as much to have you here. I should mention we have cspan, booktv of is here, so im going to talk and tell stories and read for a while, and then were going to take questions, and michael and james are going to move around with the microphone. So if you have a question, just let them know. Theres two stories in this book, and if you have a chance to if youve read it, at the very beginning i tell the story of 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 thats the Central Point of the story. Thats 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 i think for most of us the more interesting story and certainly the more hopeful story, but it 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 they shoot at people regularly, and things got much more interesting. So this begins in about 1996 and runs through 2006. Those are the ten years that i was deploying. Im going to start with a story that takes lace in kosovo place in kosovo, and its 2008. I worked in kosovo as part of a team of american diplomatic observers. Half of our team were Foreign Service officers and half were military officers, and our job was to drive around the province 06 kosovo and and of kosovo and stop the fighting. We arrived in the village 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 now that essays become a chapter in the book, so let me get started with that. Yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails, ask their feet were dirty. There were six of them, all women, under the tarpaulin. Some of them had lived long enough to have their wounds bandaged before they died, some of them were killed more or less instantly as shrapnel or 7. 62 millimeter rounds had 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 serb snipers would not shoot at the family members as they buried their dead. It was the first time id ever seen war dead. I remember being surprised that their skin was yellow. My experiences with death before that had been limited to a few funerals, a friends older brother, my grandmother. None of them were yellow. So i was surprised. This was the first time id ever seen what dead people looked like if no em walling was done embalming was done, what they looked like without 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 only a week before had carried peppers and corn to the market, only parts of their body were visible. Be i couldnt see all of their faces. One had an armresting across her forehead, one had a bandage covering host of her head. Most of her head. One of the dead was missing, an 18monthold child. Wed seen some dogs on the way up the trail. The dauntless u. S. Refugee field officer, whod led us to the scene, said what all of us were hiking. The dogs probably got thinking. The dogs probably got the body. She was right, of course, but none of us wanted to be the one to sea to say it. Wed just seen the mother resting a couple miles away. She had a bullet in her upper arm. The father said the baby was killed instantly. The bullet tore the child in half, he said. He had 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 the house. All of them had been 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 arriving a day late, too late to stop the fighting, just in time to conduct an investigation of a war crime, a 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 they were wherever we were staying at the time and sit down and write the rest of what happened. And those sessions of writing grew into this book. So what i wrote about that event, i sat down one night and typed out the words yellow, their skin was yellow. And so thats where we are. That day we were up in a little draw between two ridge lines, 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 a couple of kilometers away by mortars just the day prior. Theyd moved up 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 plain sight of the ridge line where we could still see the serbian snipers. The land, they said, had been taken from them this the 1940s, and theyd reclaimed it in the 1970s. It belonged to these people, and they were going to be sure that the serbs understood that. The women they were burying were born in this valley and had spent their lives raising crops in its fields and giving birth to their children this the small houses that made up the Hard Scrabble town. We parked our vehicles in plain view as a deterrent to further shooting. Certainly, the serbs wont shoot at e. U. Or u. S. Observers or the white and blue u. N. Hcr vehicle. Nonetheless, i admit i was shaky. The ground was hard, and it took some time to bury the dead. The men worked with shovels and picks for about an hour to dig graves for the women. Afterwards, we stopped on the way out of the draw and used our satellite telephone to call washington and tell the state department what wed 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 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 reporting to histrionics. Eleven 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 head one more stop on the way off the hill. An old man flagged us down as we were leafing the draw for the village leaving the draw and told our interpreter he wanted to show us something the serbs had done. I 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 mortar round had exploded within a meter of her head. He held his hands out to demonstrate the distance. The sitting women wailed as he said this. He was the dead womans father. And amid the crying and the shells and the flies, we 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 mortar shells probably came in groups of three; plunk, plunk, plunk as the rounds left the tube cans and then the breathless, agonizing five or six second wait and finally the writ l karumph barking and echoing off the walls of the canyon as they exploded. The gunners 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. I couldnt wait to get out of there, away from the smell and the crying and the death. I felt outraged and horrified that soldiers would fire mortars at women and children. I had to look away. 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, rob, photographed her body. I took notes about what her father said. Then we left. Eight dead. Finish down the hill at the intersection marking the city proper, a crowd of women and a few men had gathered. Some boys were sitting at the some boys were sitting at the edge of the road with acwlfxj my translator echoed staccato pleas for help. One woman pushed through the crowd and held her baby at arms length in front of me. I was face to face with the child while the mother spoke deliberately by calmly. She wants you to take her son out of her so the serbs wont kill him, my translator said. I looked at the woman and said make sure she knows we cant do this. Say this were on 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 felt feckless and impotent as the words spilled out. For the first time, i understood the folly of being in a war only to observe, a tourist among the victims. It was hot and with the sun beating down on me, i felt coe wardly. 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 i was unable to muster the courage to tell the woman there was little hope she would get out that day. I found out later id been wrong. Several u. N. Hcr officers arrived late in the day, and one of them took it upon herself to evacuate some of the children to a safer village. Before we left, i went back to the house where the wounded were being treated. I had to tell the mother of the missing child we didnt find her baby. It would have served no purpose to tell her what we thought happened. I couldnt have found those words anyway. That evening, after we returned to our office, 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. Be i said it appeared that a serbian infantry unit had swept through the valley from north to south, reseeded by a barrage of mortar fire. During the subsequent infantry sweep, seven women and one infant had been killed and 11 others wounded. Vehicles, clothes and other food and sprsupplies were burned in the sweep. I didnt mention the funeral, i didnt mention the dogs, i didnt mention the woman begging me to take some action to save her child. I didnt mention the look on the old mans face. I carefully caveated what was told to us versus what we saw ourselves 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 insure we all agreed with it, and then i turned it over to our reports officer, our editor. Id written a crisp, dry account, 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 and a few days of the Bombing Campaign interviewing refugees, people that had been driven out of kosovo loaded onto 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, put our hands on our hip and said were back, and then flew back out to macedonia where it was going to be safe for a couple of days. We did go back. Kosovo is now an independent nation. Some of the work that we did was sent to the hague and was used to document the case against mills slip. I milosevic. I feel good about that. Theres a special place in hell for people like him. I went back to montreal, packed up my house and went back to kosovo and spent another year there and then returned to Central Africa where id spent a couple of years prior and worked in rwanda for two years during the end of the war which was fought just as an extension of the genocide. We documented war crimes in con duo, zaire con duo, 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. I was called back into the regular army in order to go to afghanistan and and arrived in afghanistan in not quite a year after the rangers jumped into kandahar. I was sent there to augment a regular army unit, an airborne unit, and to show up as a reservist not really knowing what to expect. They didnt know me, and i didnt know them. I was in charge of a couple of hundred people, we were spread out all over the country, and i was tasked to send them off into very interesting, dangerous places. Over a period of time, i came to understand that i was suffering from ptsd. I had images of the dead from rwanda, from kosovo coming back to visit me at night. I would wake up in the middle of the night and see dead people standing around my cot. I would when this began to happen during the day, i understood that i was really in trouble. And this is sort of what that was like. In the cold redawn, i can hear generators running and vehicles moving on the other side of the base, but its quiet inside my tent. None of the other soldiers i share the tent with is even snoring. Ive been awake for a few hours, but i stay in my sleeping bag. The taliban have launched a couple of rockets towards the base during the week, so were all a little on edge, but thats not whats keeping me up. Im wind led into my be bundled into my sleeping bag trying to control my racing heart and trembling because the dead have come to talk to me. Theyve been coming every night for a couple of weeks, the ted from kosovo or rwanda, beckoning to me, pulling me from a warm, comforting sleep into a series of wretched, tormenting, wide awake dreams. Tonight the dead from a farm burned bible black and twisted into hideous, contorted shapes. Do you remember us, they ask . Most assuredly. The night before it was the dead from a village, 45 of them shot in the back of the head and left to die in that rocky ditch on a frozen january morning in 1999. Theyve dropped by for a chat. Why didnt you do more to save us, they ask . Why, indeed . Night after night they appear on the big screen of my mind, in oversaturated technicolor, height after night the murdered and mutilated come back. Each time i am scared and ashamed. I know they arent real, i know theyre only images in my head, but i fear them no less for knowing this. 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 there 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 these dreams in a panic, shaking, heart racing, crying sometimes, always afraid to 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 sit at my desk or go to planning meetings for operations shaking until i have to leave the tent and go outside and get control of myself. I fear ive lost my mind, but im afraid to ask is for help. I fear ill be ridiculed, considered weak and cowardly. You see, an army culture, especially in this elite unit where i serve, 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 seep as breaking. 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 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 ask for help. So that day i stopped the Division Surgeon for the 82nd airborne who was a friend of mine, and i said, you know what . Im having some problems. Im, you know, and i explained to him my symptoms. And he listened very intently and reached out and hut his hand on put his hand on his 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 your shoulder or a. 9 mm 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 at that time i was a danger to myself. 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 theyre telling, tsd stories ptsd stories from coming up to the front. So theres this big tv up on the shelf, and larry king is on. Of course, cnn, and they were showing nothing but larry king at the time. And hes interviewing some faded ingenue, and larrys telling us how important she was, and i have no idea who she was. Folded on the shelf underneath the television are a bunch of straitjackets, so im convinced ive completely gone around the bend, and theyre going to come out and put me in a straitjacket and take me away. So i just start cry, and im rocking back and forth and trying to get control of myself, and 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. Spent some time in iraq, came home, i was home while i was in iraq, i got a phone call from a friend or an email that said, hey, youre about to be mobilized again and sent to iraq which i thought was delicious ireny being irony being in iraq with the state department when the army calls and says were going to send you to iraq. So i began arguing and got to the point where they said, okay, if youll volunteer to come back so we dont have to mobilize you, well give you your choice of assignments, and your choice of awe signments means Different Things to different people. To this guy it meant mauritania, zaire or democratic republic of congo or sudan as opposed to iraq. Well, i was an africanist, i was a foreign officer for subsaharan officer, so i chose sudan. Id never been there. I knew what zaire was like. I volunteered, i went to sudan, and i was sent there just after colin powell announced that what was happening in darfur was genocide. There were 300,000 dead, there were 2. 5 million displaced, and i was sent in as the United States representative to the African Unions ceasefire be commission. Our job was to stop the fighting. We had about 1700 people in an area larger than iraq, twice the size of france. 1700 people to try and stop fighting. Among people who dont want to stop fighting. Theyre not tired of killing each other yet. So i spent about nine months there and got a phone call from my wife said your moms 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 wednesday finish that was a tuesday. Wednesday i drove home to get a suit to wear to her funeral. Thursday i went to lunch after the white house. At the white house. Friday we buried my mom. Monday i went back to work at the state department and was ordered back to darfur. I got back to darfur, i was working on a United Nations mission, and heres whats going on. The capital of the only thing you need to know is the town were living in is the capital of darfur. I was in the capital in support of a United Nations mission to organize and run a Training Exercise for the African Union peacekeeping staff. I was the scenario writer. The scenarios id written were roughly like this a humanitarian emergency develops into a security crisis. Deal with it. A security crisis includes significant press interest and bad weather. Deal wit. With it. The kitchen sink of problems arrives, sequentially deal with all of them. Things get harder as you go along. The African Union staff had a writer who helped us with the details, we had all the plots and knew the solutions. He gave those to his colleagues on the staff, and they still failed. They were utterly unprepared for this mission. Personally, i was failing too. I was falling apart. In some ways worse than i had in afghanistan. I was deep into a bad ptsd episode, i was drinking myself into a stuporftatpevery night e Islamic Republic where alcohol was banned, and i was carrying on a clandestine fair with a u. N. Official affair with the u. N. Official. What i saw around me was 300,000 dead and 2. 5 million displaced. I had no real safety net to catch me, nor anything during the day to hold me together. I had very few actual responsibilities since the scenarios were already written. I was mostly along for the ride. Desite this, i was managing pretty well until one very bad day. The woman with whom id been having an affair asked me what would happen after our Work Together ended. Wed been at it first in nairobi, then in add dis, now in darfur, having fun in nice hotels in kenya and dodgy guesthouses in sue sudan. Drinking and playing, but when sheed making noises about whats next, that set off alarm bells in my head. Soon i would have to go back to hi life and a reckoning. I obviously wasnt rational. Nevertheless, i was functioning at a pretty high level, writing intry candidate scenarios, operating in the midst of an emergency, continuing to collect information about the status of rebel forces disposition, the government of sudans response to the insurgency and writing reports for the embassy about what id learned at the same time i was carrying on an illicit affair. But in my head i was convinced that my life was fucked up. All i was doing was hurting other people. Id failed to stop the fighting in darfur just as id failed to do in kosovo and zaire. My writing sucked, my mom had just died, my marriage was a tail your, i was a failure. I wasnt getting better, i was getting worse. The dark stuff in my head triumphed over the rational, workaday reality, so i decided to kill myself. I did so quite rationally, i thought. I thought about it through the morning, scripting the steps and timing, mentally locating the tools i would need and sorting out their acquisition, thinking about the aftermath, both immediate and longer term. By lunchtime i had a plan. By afternoon id acquired all the tools. Late that afternoon i began work. I grabbed a couple of beers out of the icebox, wrapped them in a tshirt, put them on the seat of the toyota. Earlier this the afternoon id 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 he had no we had worked together for six months or so previously, and he had no reason to suspect than i was anything other a competent, professional career officer. I drove out of town to the west somewhat dramatically, i 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 id done was ever good. Id been through five wars in ten years and done nothing to stop the killing; rwanda, kosovo, ask, iraq, darfur. I felt as though id reached 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 deft with it. I pointed it out the windshield with the magazine resting on the Steering Wheel and curled my finger around the trigger. I managed imagined pulling the trigger. There wasnt anything to shoot at out there, so i would have just blown out the windshield, but even if there was, i was holding the pistol in my right hand. Im lefthanded, so i probably wouldnt have hit it. I put the pistol back on the seat. E remember a momentary clash of clarity. Flash of clarity. Who else could i hurt . My wife, certainly. Anyone else . My sister. I thought what i was getting ready to do would leave a hole in some lives. I even thought about someone having to clean up the truck afterwards. Maybe ill do it outside, ill leave less of a mess. But the clarity passed, and i was overwhelmed with a sense of futility and sadness. Id failed to stop the wars, so many people were dead because of my failures. Imhajjs were rushing at me images were rushing at me, a raped nun, the man with the redrimmed eyes and the mutilated family. I picked up the pistol. I charged it, 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 o to the spheres, to no one. The pistol was ready, i shifted it to my left hand. I 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 would have been highly ironic to shoot myself in the toot while preparing to shoot myself in the head. I looked at the phone and saw it was my wife, maureen, calling from washington d. C. What was this, serendipity . Karma . Luck . Uncanny timing . 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 sunsetting 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 hi boss. My whos. 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 thinking had happened. It was never sort of any mandatory medical screening. No one thought of anything to ask me, how you feeling . No. I found a job in a quiet office full of introverts. They say that in the state department you can tell the introverts from the extroverts. The extroverts will stare at your shoes while theyre talking to you. [laughter] but i got medical care. I started anyway. It took a long time. Im still on the road home. Writing is whats doing it for me. As a part of the medical care, i went to the department of Veterans Affairs and asked for help. I received medical care there, but i also asked for an adjudication of my case, that i was actually combat disabled. And this is how that went. The old guy in front of me was using one of those canes with the four rubber tips at the base as he crept towards the hospital door. It was the last week of july in washington d. C. The temperature was at least 90 degrees with just intolerablely 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 just to look at it. At least he had a wall cap on. This one 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, some Service Documentation like orders and award certificates, notes from combat deployments. It was my first visit to the v. A. Hospital. The washington v. A. Medical center is as charm rest a building as charmless a building as you can imagine in the center of a half dozen parking lots that are constantly in overflow. In many ways its like any other hospital; filled with the sick and infirm, health care 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 focus narrowed, breathing short and irregular, the memories of five wars and images of the dead hovering just off stage. Inside the door there was an information desk with a guy in a wheelchair behind it wearing a dav pisscutter. He looked me up and down, no doubt head some sort of judgment about me. I stammered a bit, explaining id come for my first appointment. My hands were shaking, so i held them down below the edge of the counter. He quietly pointed the way. Walking through the lobby, i imagined everyone was looking at me thinking look at the psycho boy, home from the war and broken. What a pussy. I felt like it was my first day of high school, and i was dressed in a wright pink, tutu. I took a number ask waited. The waiting room was actually part of the haven lob by, so there was main lobby, so it was noisy and lots of people walking past. Inside the office a woman looked over my paperwork. Id brought some of my dd214s, shows training awards, decorations, combat time served, etc. Then she started something the data into the system. She was perfectly pleasant, and she 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. At my psychological screening upstairs in the Mental Health wing away from the general medical patients, i was interviewed by a recent ph. D. Graduate with a more qualified, i assumed, supervisor attending. I had to detail all of my problems in full. I started at the beginning 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, wringing my hands, i quietly described the memory loss, my unbridled fear and anxiety, my inability to control the images of the dead appear anything my head at all hours of the night and day, my weird hypervigilance issues. I even included the wholly rational things like getting lost in my own neighborhood, going to the Grocery Store at midnight because no one else would be there. What is it about lexus drivers anyway . What theyre going to do and why the hell doesnt anyone use turn signals anymore . Or why dont they return their shopping cart toss the front of the store instead of leaving it in the middle of the god damn parking lot . At this point the supervisor snickered. There was an ugly silence in the room for a few seconds with the only sounds being the aircondition blowing through the grate in the wall 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 my eyes. My humiliation was absolute. Even the doctors were laughing at me. Welcome to the v. A. , psycho boy. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. Again, thank you so much for coming. I really, honestly, very, very much appreciate it. We have some 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 ones always the hardest, isnt it . Shall bes going to ask that first question finish somebodys going to ask that first question. Thank you. I say that before i hear the question. Its hard to have just one, but your story is a very personal lens on something thats much larger than yourself. So stepping back from your disempowered act of witnessing, but at least you were witnessing, do you have a broader conclusion about how International Organizations can operate more effectively . Be um, 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 im going to take a stab at it. A few years ago there was a, an International Norm accepted among the nations of the International Community called r2p, the responsibility to protect. We actually have some experts in the room on that. We may call on them very soon. What 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, of course. And almost every nation has signed on to this. I think the North Koreans are still outstanding somewhere, but surprise there. Were faced with this question every day in syria, were faced with this question in ukraine, were faced with this question all around the world why arent we doing more. We who . We, america, the United Nations, we. Every individual among us. That the answee cant, we america, for one thing cant fix every problem. We do the best we can. I wrote a cable back from darfur explaining just why u. S. Policy there was going to fail, and you did not need to be prescient to see that it was going to fail. But i was at least willing to say so. With the hindsight of now six or eight year, that was a really, really hard problem. 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 mace that made lodge stickses go crazy because it was so hard to get to was too hard. And i wasnt thinking very clearly, but i really felt strongly thats what we should do. And its hard to look at syria, ukraine and say why arent we doing that . And the answer is, its just damn hard, and 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 in 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. Sorry. Maam. Is your wife here . Yes. My wife, carol, is here. Its important to note that the woman who called me in darfur was maureen. When i went home, the affair that i was having was kind of the 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 s and shes recognized for it. We still talk pretty regularly. Any other questions . Sir. Tom. Here comes the microphone, so ron, it is this on . Its just for the tv. Okay. In the years since you first went to the v. A. , have you seen what kind of progress have you seen on the, on behalf of the v. A. 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 v. A. 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. I do see [inaudible] could you repeat could you guys hear the question . Tom was asking is the v. A. Getting better at what they do. Can i paraphrase and say that . Since my first day when the supervisor was laughing at me. The answer to the question is, yes. Remember the v. A. Is not one organization, the benefits organization which takes care of people when which gives people a small pension, takes care of widows and orphans. Theres the Health Administration which is the hospital and the vet center where you get ptsd treatment, and then theres the cemeteries. And then theres the overarching organization 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 the adjudication. Thats their target is, you know, so four and a half months. They had 35 be 0,000 cases 350,000 cases or something that were well beyond that. My case took 400 days from i feeled until they call me filed until they called me for it was 365 days until they called me to come in, and then a couple months later they made the adjudication. That 50,000 350,000 numbers been halved, so theyre may making huge progress. Some hospitals are better than others, some v. A. Offices are better than others. The joke is if youve seen one v. A. Hospital, youve seen one Vice President a. Hospital. So the stuff thats been going on in phoenix and seattle, thats limited to that hospital, i think. I have received Excellent Health care at the v. A. I used v. A. 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 getting better. The v. A. 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 d. Of defense at the department of defense at walter reed teaching writing there and 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 the can dod gets it, the d. Of defense gets it. V. A. , im not sure theyve gotten it yet, but hopefully they will. Any other questions . Yep. 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 to 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 headaches you, you know 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 was 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, ask its partial 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. 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, all my cousins were in the military, they were all enlisted guys, and the day my sergeant put 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 got home from darfur. I got back to a couple days after that incident i was flown back to khartoum, and i had a couple of weeks to close out my accounts. I remember physically taking my phone lists and my tone and handing it 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 what on the to the next generation. It was a really terrifically smart, qualified officer who made better choices than i did. And after his time in darfur, took a more traditional kind of awe sign toment to give himself time assignment to give himself time to recover and 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 that 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 many 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 been a recurring theme is 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 whats happened 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 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 things like that, and thats how i did a lot of my research. But 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 seeing those people. Sure. 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 be theater in world war ii 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 anything that he did. As and started asking for a pope because that is when they needed it. One last thing, derek is all book written by an iraq veteran, a young infantryman in iraq and his book is called killing time my war in iraq. It is a terrific book but part of it where they come out of a major firefight downtown. He is sitting by the side of his vehicle and his platoon sergeant says are you all right . He says i dont know. He describes what happened in this fire fight. He says my dad told me the way you get through this is put all this stuff in a box and deal with it later. If theres one lesson from my book i hope it is that you are going to have to deal with this stuff and it is better to deal with it on your own terms, deal with it when you can. I have a sign in my office that says you control the memory or the memory controls you. My rode home has been getting control of those memories by writing about them. Are we ok on time . One or two more questions. It is only for the camera. I want to congratulate you, for writing a book about your vulnerabilities, you were supposed to shows that you are in control. I am from kosovo. And people like this young guy, at no point have we seen these Vulnerable People you were talking about. My father would say what was going to happen, you see the news that americans are coming. Now that i think about it, i try to forget about we never i have never been treated people who i know have never been treated for p t s d. We have gone through the same as you have, but it is something to be said about this system that takes care of its soldiers. That was my comment. Dont want to take too much of your time but international diplomacy, it is so complex that undoubtedly would make you feel a little sensitive and human it would make you but now after overcoming your struggles do you feel it was worth it, whatever you have done, have you done some good with your reports and any decisionmaking . I hope so. There are three days out of ten years that i can look back and say i got that one right and so many days i look back and say why didnt i work harder or try harder . What was wrong . There is a village that exists because i broke the chain of command behind my colonels back, called washington and asked for an intervention. The next day that the. Became a base for an African Union peacekeeping team, riding the cable back to washington, you are not doing it right, here is what is going to happen. Nothing change but i felt like i got it right. The fact that i know the reporting that i collected went into the case against Slobodan Milosevic i will always be proud of that. But i wasnt. Do we have is there one more . Robbing a microphone. Thank you very much for your contribution and for being very open and sharing the story. I am from kosovo as well. And this kind this part of the story. And definitely true that we saw anybody that helped albanians in the struggles being our friends. It was a very Welcome Change for our country. I did have one question pertaining to your career, your work unravels, do you think it has anything to do with the wrong decisions or lack of success that International Officials for a while seemed to feel very in vincible and allpowerful. We witnessed on the other side of the glorify and particularly in kosovo, later ron we were critical of the mission. We are partnering with political and leads that were more harmful to the wrong people than beneficial. Would you consider this a misjudgment of International Officials in the system . I will try to stay away from characterizing the senior leaders. In my political career, my diplomatic career, my job was to drive holbrook around, i was a driver. To be around holbrooke, i learned a lot if they have self doubts i dont know, i wasnt party to that. I would say it would be very hard not to have that kind of doubt but among people like dick holbrooke, he may not have had those doubts. He was so much more senior than i will ever be and it was his job to stop the war. I still feel like i failed because they didnt stop to fight him. I dont know what he felt. I never got a straight answer out of him. It is humbling to fail, devoe some more like kosovo, to go somewhere like the eastern condo 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. It is very humbling and it does change the way you view the world. I am a different person than i was in kosovo. I dont know if i am more hopeful but i am more empathetic as far as how the kosovo people view the americans that were there at the time. One of my good friends does back to teach at the american university. Some of these stories have been translated into albanian and published in kosovo, where we are working to get this book published in kosovo. Maybe you know yeta, working to get the book translated and we hope to get its into kosovo. I think that is it. I thank you so much for coming. [applause]