Transcripts For CSPAN Iraq Afghanistan Vietnam War Veterans

Enduring war. Presupposition based on comments from civilian policymakers and senior military that we were in an era of enduring war and had to undertake a study of the relationship between war and society. Moreover, it seemed few could argue war hadnt made an indelible impact on our National Character on who we are as americans. So the program we built started from the mission that we would examine the social, moral, and cultural aspects of how societies go to war, how they experience war, and perhaps most importantly how they deal with wars consequences. We also believe our program had global applications. In understanding the implications of war, by examining conflicts that have transpired as human phenomenon. We wanted to take a serious approach to the problems posed by war. Was for Chapman University to become a National Resource for practitioners, a Program Designed with the ultimate aim of understanding the role and the costs of war around the globe. That vision is on full view this evening. As we examine three american the anon, afghanistan, and iraq, from those who have fought in them. Thought long and hard about their experiences and written honest and important works about what it is like to serve in wars that have defined our nation, our politics, and our culture. It is my distinct honor to introduce you tonight to our veteran authors. First, a graduate from Yale University and Rhodes Scholar at oxford university. He served as a marine in vietnam, where he was awarded the navy cross, the bronze star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, and medals for valor. Author of matterhorn, which won numerous prizes. The 2011 indys choice award for adult debut book of the year, and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation james webb award for distinguished fiction. He is also author of the highly acclaimed fiction book, what it is like to go to war. Please as well as the new novel deep river, which was released in july. Please welcome him. [applause] Marjorie K Eastman is the awardwinning water author of the frontline generation, of how we serve post 9 11. She served 10 years as an Intelligence Officer and commander. Started out as enlisted before being awarded a direct commission within her first two years in uniform. Artery deplored deployed twice and is the recipient of the combat badge. She has her ba in Political Science from the university of california san diego. Mbaa from the graduate school of vanderbilt university. In 2018, she was selected as one of the nations top 25 theuencers supporting military community, known as the mighty 25 and was named one of the 2019 10 Outstanding Young americans by the Junior Chamber international usa. Please join me in welcoming marjorie. [applause] and finally, scott is a retired u. S. Army oh my god. [laughter] pushups, now. [laughter] a retired u. S. Marine. 20 years of Honorable Service as an enlisted and commission officer. Tended deployments to 60 countries worldwide. Bestselling book is a story of echo companys second battalion marines in scott has 2006. Written articles, editorials and scholarly pieces for usa today, fox news channel, and the marine corps gazette, military times, townhall, and daily signal. He is the executive director of a certified nonprofit that connects veterans to outreach programs and a nonprofit that helps veterans and activeduty marines. Please join me in welcoming marine scott. [applause] im going to join our panelists. I will start off and ask a specific question to each of our panelists as sort of a warmup, then we will move into general questions for the panel to discuss, then ultimately we will have a dialogue with you all and the audience will have a chance to participate with their own questions. West point, was that a Preparatory School . [laughter] id like to start with you, if i can. Metal sincewanted a i looked at my fathers medals from world war ii. It wasnt enough to do heroic things, i had to be recognized for them. Can you help us understand this as a young man. I hope i can. It is hard for me to understand it myself. First of all, my father, i think all young men we got some bad feedback here. Is this going to get fixed . My father was in world war ii and he had medals, and he never would talk about it, so there was a lot of mystery to the medals. I was sort of like, i wonder if i could do that. It was sort of like, i wonder how i would be and the medal is sort of a symbol of that. I was 15, and my father, it was christmas time, and my dad was saying, they were fighting the battle of the bulge at that time and he looks up and he says, yeah, i was in that. It was the first time i knew. If i sneak in and see his medals, he would not show them or anything. First of all, it is sons and fathers. I think it is almost genetic. It is like, am i as good as my father . Can i do it . The wanting to see it part, i thought about that. It is sort of a combination, i think of societal genetics and that is all mixed up, but you think about kids in high school. The girls do not want to be in the right group, they want people to know they are in the right group. I have three daughters and they would spend an hour getting ready for school and it would not look like anything happened to me. [laughter] it was very clear to them that they were in this group, and they wanted people to know it. And the boys, it is sort of the same thing. I got a lettermans jacket. What is that all about . It is about status. It is about being recognized as a member of the group, and it is about being an alpha female and an alpha male. Which i think is genetic, but society takes over and we have different ways of doing it, we just do not go beat somebody up. We wear jeans with holes in them so that we can show that we are this kind of kid, and i think it is the same sort of thing from medals. Could id lit, but if i did do it, would people see that i did it . We all know, those of you in the military, you have it all right here and believe me, people check it out. So youike, hmm. Immediately can sort of put somebody in a place, and i think that showing you have done it is part of it but it is part of saying, i am of this special group, look up to me, and that is about status. I talk about the fact that it is too bad that we all have to do that because if we just realize how special we are from childhood, but somehow, our society does tend to beat that out of us. By the time you get a college, you are not special at all, and you want to be special. I think it is just genetic drive, i do not know any other way to explain it. Unless you are a saint but i dont think we are born saints. Did that appeal change as you got older . Did what did that attraction, did that change at all as you got older . Well, no. When i was in combat, every once in a while i thought, it would be nice to get a medal. I wrote about that in matterhorn, the main character wants to get a medal and the issue is, why do you want to get . Part of the medal growing up is, if you are doing it for the right reasons, that is to save somebody in your unit to get yourself out of trouble. And usually people understand of if a medal is being given up given out, somebody messed up and things are not going well, or you are really unlucky. I talk about it and what it is like to go to war, and i did when i was the young man, and i a guy was trapped underneath a machine gun and i didnt have to go get him. I thought, if i go get him, maybe somebody would write me up for a medal. I literally thought that. It is no secret, when i turned to my platoon sergeant, and i said if i go get him, are you going to write me up for a medal . He said yeah, posthumously. [laughter] but i went anyway. It turned out quite tragic because i had to keep the machine gun from shooting at me as i was going up the hill. The kid had gone up and cut the and the fields of fire, he got nervous and i pointed it out to him and they shot his legs out from under him. I was firing to keep the machine guns head down. I got him, we rolled down the hill and i realized there was a bullet hole in his head. It was not until later that night, he cried out, how could he have cried out with a bullet hole in his head . Maybe i put the bullet hole in his head. The whole thing about trying to get the medal, it turned to sort of ashes because it was for the wrong motivation. It was a very tough lesson for me. To this day, i dont know. The second medal, the navy cross, it was with the opposite because i had already learned that lesson. The thing about that medal, we had been on an assault and it bogged down and it happened. It happens in the marine corps, it is bogged down and they were hitting us with mortars and they had machine guns up in front of us, and the marines do not look backwards. It was either stay there and get slaughtered all grow up the hill so i had to figure out something. I had to figure out something to get us out of the pickle. So i stood up and started running up the hill, and it was almost like an out of body experience. I talk about in the book. What was amazing to me is that i was probably running up the hill for a machine gun bunker for maybe five or eight seconds and i caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and i rolled to shoot what i would assume was an enemy soldier and it was one of my squad leaders and the whole company was coming up behind him. The whole company was coming up behind him. We got out of the pickle. That was the right way to get a medal and unfortunately, they do not come cheap. It is a hard lesson. In the frontline generation, marjorie, you share a slightly different route is in reason for joining the military. One was your parents were decidedly unhappy about. What drew you to the uniform and what was it like to have proud parents who nonetheless work skeptical about you serving . You are referring to the line i think where my mom says, you have a college degree, you should not have to go. She was from the vietnam generation. You know a little bit about that, right . My mom and my dad were born and raised in part of big, midwest farm families. At one point in time, my mom had four of her brothers serving in vietnam. It was very difficult for her and my father. My father who was unable to go to vietnam because of medical disqualification, but he still has his draft card on his bedside stand to this day, because all of his brothers went. So they were decidedly unhappy, but they also knew that i was doing it for the right reasons. I joined the military after 9 11 because of 9 11. I just, i saw what happened on that day, and no one does that to our country. No one does that to our country. So i needed to do something and i did not want to sit on the bench. I knew things were going to change and president bush at the time, he said something very important. He said as americans, you have to continue on with your way of life because the terrorists want us to change our way of life. They are trying to terrorize us. He said something very important. But also, they left no call to action. We needed a call to action because we just spent the 1990s cutting the forest down and everything was about to change. His call to say continue with your regular lifestyle, go to the mall, continue to shop, he said Something Like that, and i did not just want to go shopping. I started looking at my options, and it turned out that the army was the right fit for me, and i stepped up and stepped into my generations history. You opened your book with a phone call that you had to make to a mother in your unit. Why did you start the book that booky did you start the there and what does this tell us about the responsibility that military leaders have to society . Greg is trying to get me to cry on cspan. [laughter] better have tried and failed, but i love you for having us here today and the panelists, and all of you for showing up, because without you, the stories of our nations heroes, and greg is absolutely one of them. He plays a slick professor on tv by day, but he is a warrior at heart. This is a great event for that. It is an interesting question because you have to let me leave by 9 30 so i can get to lax, so i can catch a flight to maine so annualo to the first corporal memorial run, and he was the first marine in ramadi in 2006, and i havent seen his mom and dad since 2007 when we came home. It is going to be pretty emotional, we wont have cameras there for that. His brother and i kept in touch, but starting the story off with the real personal aspects of what all of us here and every veteran and every person deals with those small pieces of trauma in life and are important to share. I have never been a writer or storyteller about events and things and chronology. That is not what i am great at. Greg is great at that, he is a historian. My skill is telling stories of people and the emotion and what it felt like to have that happen in your life, and the huge train wrecks that rolled through at times. And then how to not just talk about the bad things, but really, how they affected you, and how you move through that. Everybody has been a drunk at some point, or crash to their car, or failed in a relationship, or gotten bad grades. Great. I dont want to hear about those stories, i want to hear about how you got better through that and how you share those wins and everybody that reads your work or listens to your stories or all those problems and how you get better. I think as a society, as a veteran community, those are absolutely vital stories to share. I think three generations of war fighting and this culture that we have been immersed in, we are so very fortunate to share our stories now without having to wait four decades. Or to see Vietnam Veterans on stage at the white house getting a medal of honor five decades later. We have a responsibility to do that and when i open the book with what is probably the most gut wrenching story. I have gotten plenty of phone marines calling me from the air force saying thanks plane,ing me cry on the that is an important thing to tell. I tell them to suck it up and break out the kleenex, and move on. I think those are really the important things that we need to talk about. We should never shy away from it. Carl is a master at sharing that human emotion, although there are characters in those books, but we get it. I think those are great. I would like to open this up for all three of you now. There are elements of what we would call a command philosophy in each of your books. Marjorie notes that there is no or onele of leadership set of traits. What did your service teach you about leadership and what were the key elements in your leadership philosophy . Marjorie i like it when marines go in front of me. [laughter] i will take this one. What a gentleman. Ladies first, i love that. The chapter in my book is you see a light, you dont hear one. I think we all get what that means. It is simple and fundamental about leadership. You can say it this way as well. How you lead your own life has more influence on others and any than any command philosophy that you may one day espouse. Character matters. How you walk the walk matters, and by the way, each and every one of us has a sphere of influence. Every rank, every walk of life, and the big secret is that you do not need a title to be a leader. I saw this time and time again, every day i was in the military and my favorite example of that that i can share is one with Staff Sergeant joshua eldridge. He was dr. Eldridge as his day job as a chiropractor. He was also in the reserves. And after a battle update brief we informed the colonel that in one area of operation where i had some teams, there was an orphanage. So there might be an opportunity to do a Good Community building Relationship Building type of mission. My company was doing fullspectrum intelligence operations, so that was perfect. Any given day, it could be offensive, defensive, stability or support. So that would absolutely fall into one of those buckets that we were doing. What did the colonel say, great, make it happen, captain. At no point in training do you go through like a briefing or you have a little skills manual that says this is how you perform a mission to an orphanage. So i am walking out of the briefing thinking, how am i going to do this . Eldridge is giving me that eye, like, we have to talk. And my team, my soldiers were amazing and they looked out for me. I was so fortunate to serve with such wonderful and outstanding men and women. We get out of the briefing room, and eldridge is like, i have an idea. He says let me call my Church Back Home and we will figure out how to rally and we will get some gloves, hats, scarves, jackets because it is really cold this time of year and when the team goes up, they can deliver the humanitarian aid as a warm welcome and say, we are new to the area, we are doing operations in the area, but we want to bring this as a peaceful gesture. I am thinking, can we do that . The last thing you want is American Christian Church Giving cold weather gear to islamic blah blah. Im like, great. But i see this energy and in eldridges eyes, and i knew. One of the things about being a leader is you have to incite an initiative with those who lead with those you lead and that means you have to be uncomfortable, and you have to say yes. And you not only ask why we do it that way, but you have to say why not . Why not . I said you know what, make it happen. [laughter] marjorie i said let me go and figure out some of the paperwork process, call your church. Literally, a month and a half, we had box upon box arriving and my sergeants delivering the mail were like, thanks. Nearly 70 children benefited when my team went up to the province and we delivered that. And we built great relationships. You will hear stories throughout momentsthat talk about and opportunities about how you can lead and do it well. Remember, how you lead your own life, start there. Scott what was the question again . [laughter] scott i am like overwhelmed and inspired. Craig knows i take notes in his class. Leadership philosophy. Yeah, there are so many great examples sitting right in front of me. They train you in schools as young lieutenants and as captains and majors on how to write a leadership philosophy, but i kind of broke from the mold of that. I never wanted it to be a page long soliloquy in a urinal. Here marines are like, great im really going to read this. Because to inspire young men and women 18 to 20yearolds who are doing our nations biddi