Veteran. The university of colorado boulder hosted this 90minute event. I now have the privilege of introducing the speaker. Wimmium adams grew up in michigan and started his College Career at Colorado College. He also nearly ended his College Career at Colorado College with a freshman year that he describes with characteristic forthrightness as disastrous. He then enlisted in the army in 1966 and did basic training at ft. Knox. The results of various standardized tested qualified him for officer candidate school and he was soon commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the artillery. He went on to the school of warfare at ft. Bragg, where he was trained in language and special weapons. In may of 1968, he was sent to vietnam as an adviser to a very small regional unit in the mecong delta. For a year, he worked with South Vietnamese combat units. In may of 1969, he returned to the United States. He went to college, first after the university of michigan and then with a return to Colorado College. He went on to get a ph. D. In philosophy at the university of california at santa cruz with the curious timing that i graduated with a b. A. In the spring of 1972 from the university of california at santa cruz and a sort of changing of the guard, to use a military metaphor, he arrived in the graduate program in the fall of 1972. Earlier in the day, i made invidious comparisons between our mascot, the banana slug, and ralphee, and im not doing that tonight, because i think the slug suffers by comparison, so sorry to admit that. We wont talk about that in santa cruz at our next reunion. Dr. Adams taught at stanford and moved to Wesleyan University in 1988 where he was the executive assistant to the president. He moved on to become president of Bucknell University and then the president of colby college. In 2014, he was appointed at the chairman of the National Endowment for the humanities where hes demonstrated originality and steadiness in making a case for the value of humanities in civil life and connecting the humanities and veterans and a dramatically less significant development, i was confirmed by the senate for the National Counsel on the humanities in the late fall 2015, so its my great honor and great pleasure to serve as a counsel member with dr. Adams as my inspiration and my leader. I did observe earlier today that following is probably not my strong suit in character. So when i for the National Audience refer to him as my leader, thats quite a thing, where somebody who usually does not well. Taking orders, thats not probably where i thrive. So but for him, i will take orders. Well, theres other people in the room. I wont call them out. I just took jacks orders on the cell phone, so theres other people i will do that. Im trivalizing my important point. It was a great privilege to serve on the counsel with dr. Adams as my leader. The people in the room whose professional life requires them to attend meetings will understand the intensity and depth of the compliment im about to pay dr. Adams. Here we go. When he is chairing a day and a half long National Counsel on the humanities meeting, the time flies by. And the counsel members are visibly sad when forced to leave dr. Adams company, stop meeting, and go home. Those of you who attend meetings, is that how you feel at the end of a day and a half meeting . No, you feel quite joyful as you scamper out, but not us. Dr. Adams is a bicyclist and fisherman and well supplied with family ties to colorado. Hes a very big fan of tom waites and he uses the word fanatic rather than fan because fan might be short for fanatic, im not sure there, and he once flew from maine to jacksonville, florida, because that was the only concert venue for which he was able to get tom waites concert tickets. He is also a credentialed fan of roy orbison, just one sign of many of his impeccable taste. Having steps down as chair in may 2017 of this year, hes now a senior fellow at the Andrew Mellon foundation and hes returning to the scholarly world and to his book on the french philosoph philosopher. I mistyped that. That didnt help at all. I knew i would have anxiety over pronouncing a french name and i did, and mistyping it didnt help. And the painter. Oh, lord. Okay. So much of it looks like ethnocentricity in the world is just anxiety about mispronunciation. I would like to make that clear since i just demonstrated. Shifting here, join me in welcoming william adams, who will be speaking tonight on comradeship, moral injury and the legacy of the vietnam war, the need for the humanities to close the gap between the veterans and their nation. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you, patty, for those very generous words, and what i love about patty is that she puts everyone immediately at ease with her wonderful sense of humor. So thank you for that. And for the introduction. I want to express thanks also to kirk for his help in getting me here. It was not easy, but he did a great job, and other members of the staff of the center, members of the boulder community, thank you for coming. And especially to veterans here tonight, im very grateful that youre here. I know you have lots of things to do. And lots of obligations, but that you would be here is very meaningful. To me. So thank you all a great deal. I was eager to come here for a couple of reasons. Pattys compelling personality, first and foremost. I have to tell you that patty was right from the beginning a spectacular member of our national council, and i want her colleagues at boulder to know how she does you proud in washington at these meetings. Shes been a wonderful member of the council and its a great honor of mine to swear her in at her First Council meeting. But in addition, i wanted to experience this program that shes built here at the center of the American West honoring, commemorating the vietnam war. I have traveled a lot of to a lot of places around the country. This is the first such University Program ive witnessed and been part of, so i was very eager to come and know more about it. This is also a time, as many of you know, of many different kinds of vietnam anniversaries. They all circulate around the number 50, which is pretty disturbing to me, having to come to terms with that number as i have participated in some of these. One of them included the congressional celebration or commemoration of the war a few years ago in washington, which i was invited to attend and did attend a very interesting event, but there are many things going on all around the country all around this 50th anniversary roughly of various parts of the war. This has also been a time of personal recollection for me. I was very pleased to be able to go to vietnam in april with a very close friend of mine who was a marine helicopter pilot. Im going to talk a little bit about that trip in just a little bit. But it is in addition to all of these official anniversaries, a time of some pretty intense personal reflection for me on the war, and last but not least, but very importantly, we at the National Endowment for the humanities put a great deal of time and energy into programs for veterans and around the legacies of wars and conflicts in American History. The standing together program for veterans and for american historical awareness and understanding of americans involved in various wars. So this occasion was a way for me to find, again, a chance to talk about the great work of neh and its wonderful to be able to have a chance to do so with you. I want to do three or four very straightforward, i hope, things tonight. I want to talk about some of the key legacies of the war and what it left to us as american citizens. I want to suggest some of the ways in which the humanities are central, important, fundamental to understanding those legacies. And i want to, as the title advertises, i want to take a brief look at comradeship as a way of making sense of war and the experience of combat. And then i hope that we can have some time for discussion and questions because i would really love to know whats on your minds and what youre thinking about this period of reflection on vietnam and other issues involving veterans and the military. The legacies of this war are many. Fundamental and terribly important. Y im going to talk about three or four in particular. The first one i want to talk about is what the war did to americans understandings of the federal government. Many of you lived through this time, and you will recall, as i do, that for the very first time at least in contemporary or recent modern American History, certainly in the 20th century, vietnam became an occasion for Many Americans to doubt in fundamental ways the veracity of the government and what it was telling them about this incredibly important episode in american life. One of the very important episodes in this was, of course, the release of the pentagon papers in the publication of those papers in the new york times. But there were many similar moments in which americans confronted for the first time in many cases, and that was certainly true for me as a young man, the fact that the United States government was not telling its citizens the truth about what was happening in vietnam. Remember, we were coming out of world war ii, a time of extraordinarily intense consensus about the government, about the state, about the military. It was a time of really profound unity in this country. And then not 15 years later after the end of the war, vietnam interrupts that fundamental sense of connection to the government. And suddenly, much of the citizenry of the country, not all, but much of the citizenry of the country develops a fundamental skepticism and the legitimacy of the state never recovers. We are still in a period of time and the last president ial election cycle i think underscores this in very profound ways. Were still in a time when we are reeling in some ways from this loss of legitimacy, this loss of trust, fundamental trust in the government of the United States. And all of the negative views of the government, which are so abundant now in this country, go back in some way to this very difficult time. Of course, one of the most important focal points for this skepticism and mistrust and the protests that flowed from that against the war was the draft. And those of you who were around remember that the draft was, of course, the principle mechanism by which americans were inducted into the military. This flowing out of world war ii and to some degree korea as well. And the focal point of the antiwar protests that erupted and were sustained throughout the rest of the war was really the draft. This was partly because young people in the United States, students especially, were exposed to the draft. But it made almost every citizen aware fundamentally of what was happening in vietnam, and it gave every citizen a stake potentially in what was happening. So the war really did focus protests, dissent on the draft itself, and it led, of course, in the longer run, shorter run and longer run, to the professionalization of the military, the end of the draft, and subsequent to the professionalization of the military, what i want to call the civilian military divide, which is with us still. We are living in a time of very deep bifurcation between and among those people in the United States who have experienced the military, who have been part of the military, who have had that experience, and the rest of us who have not had. And the numbers are really profound. Some of you, you know that only roughly 2 of the citizens of the United States, the population of the United States, had any direct exposure to the conflicts in iraq and afghanistan. Only about 8 of the entire United States citizenry has ever been exposed to military institutions. This is a really serious state of affairs. And a deeply regrettable one in many ways because the experiences of veterans are becoming more and more remote, more and more abstract for most americans. And military institutions are becoming more and more remote and more and more abstract for most americans. So we live dangerously, i think, for a democracy. In a place where and when most citizens do not have existential contact, if i can put it that way, with the risks of military involvement, or with the experience of military involvement. And so as citizens, i think were put at a tremendous disadvantage in knowing what the stakes are, what the risks are, of military conflicts and that makes, i think, our democracy profoundly weaker than it was. As we think about these legacies and these negative legacies, frankly, we should also keep in mind that not every legacy from the war was negative. And i want to talk about several that i think are hopeful and positive that stand alongside these other factors which i think put us, as i said, at some risk. For one thing, i dont think that political curiosity and political skepticism are necessarily bad things. So coming out of the Antiwar Movement, coming out of that time of protest, i think there were valuable things that the country learned about government, about the tendencies of government, and we might have become dissen chaenchanted in c ways with government, but we also probably became more realistic about how governments work. We also experienced in that war and subsequently i think in other moments of our more recent history the power of what i want to call the power of movement politics. The Antiwar Movement did demonstrate with some negative consequences but did demonstrate the power of political movements. The power of grassroot politics, and that, too, is something that has stayed with us in some, i think, positive ways that we perhaps can talk about afterwards. Third, and this is i think the most important thing that i wanted to say about the positive legacies of the war. The war in vietnam was in some sense the beginning of advances in our understanding of the effects of war on veterans. To be more specific, it was because of the vietnam war that we developed a growing and now much more fulfullsome understanding, particularly the long term spiritual effects and challenge of combat experience. Of course, one of the most powerful expressions of this was the clinical, the development of the clinical diagnosis of post Traumatic Stress disorder as a part of the now diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. That happened in 1980. Too late in some ways for some Vietnam Veterans, but nonetheless, it was a very important step in the understanding of the effect of combat on the individuals who are involved in combat. And particularly the exposure to trauma and catastrophic stress and the ways in which trauma and catastrophic stress overwhelm our adactive capacities as people, leaving strong residual effects on people who undergo that trauma. Beyond ptsd, and i think in a still more important way, more recently, we have developed an additional layer of understanding on top of this clinical diagnosis, which is now being or going by the way of the term of moral injury. Moral injury now being defined in some sense as perpetrating or failing to prevent bearing witness to or learning about acts that transcongress deeply held beliefs common among combat veterans who have violated their own moral codes when they kill or witness others killing and being killed. The discussion about moral injury is relatively recent, but i think it is one of the most important developments in National Efforts to understand the experience of veterans and their experiences in war and in combat. And it all is based upon this, i think somewhat hopeful idea that all of us live in the world with some fundamental base of a moral sensibility. I leave it to you to decide whether that moral sensibility comes from nature or nurture, an interesting conversation in itself. But the notion that all of us as human beings have a kind of moral grounding, and that the experience of combat, of violence and killingbased transgressions disrupts in a very fundamental way that moral grounding and moral foundation. Leading to very strong and difficult emotions and experiences of shame, of guilt, anger, as central components in the lives of people who have gone through this ordeal and trauma of combat. This is a very difficult subject. And i think it is a very difficult one particularly for veterans to talk about. It was very difficult for me to talk about. It still in some sense is. But i think it is an enormous advance on where we were just 15 years ago in talking about the legacy of combat in the lives of individuals. This sense of moral injury is, i think, leading us into a richer and fuller understanding of what veterans have experienced and subsequently what we need to do to support them. So where are we now in the wake of these legacies and these advances, as im calling them, in understanding veterans experiences . We of course since vietnam have had several additional wars and conflicts, depending on how you count, we have been at war for Something Like 25 years. And given what the president said the other day about the future in afghanistan, we have to presume that that is going to go on for some additional period, perhaps a prolonged period. So three land wars over the last 25 years. There are now in this country 2. 7 million iraq and afghanistan veterans. Depending on who you talk to and what sort of data youre looking at, Something Like 20 to 30 of these veterans, the 2. 7 million, are presenting symptoms of ptsd. Traumatic brain injury, and what im calling moral injury. Thats a big number. Thats something between half a million and a Million People who are having these very, very considerable challenges in their personal lives. That number, by the way, for me, the 30 number came