Excellent literature that a sort of came from this first generation of contemporary war memoirs and reporters and just started to have this sense of the activities that war actually consists of are often, often bare of strange, of stranger or sort of i cant find the word. They often dont relate in any sort of direct way to the things that we tend to talk about war as being about. So, that was the spirit in which i did this on and its something that i still find myself thinking about a lot but thanks for the question. I hear that question mark especially since i have a military background. And i mentioned before reading some articles and being interested in trying to understand that and its also around the time in the newspapers starting to release reports about the suicide epidemic among soldiers. A kid killed himself not far from where i was living so i felt strangely complicit and yet having no power to understand what was going on, you know for the people that were Walking Around me so not able to understand their background or their pain or why this was happening. And i guess i would define if i have to categorize as we so often do, i would say this is a book like sa. When i say that i just mean going back to the word to try. A series of attempts to emphasize his life is different though my own and i think one thing that frustrates me in the world generally generally is when we are dismissive of other peoples realities and our ow own but her own experience and reality on a pedestal and i thought you know what reality is so easy to dismiss but what if we try to take it to heart and try to understand what are the operations and embodiments of what they are representing. Theres no way to really say it. Im not moving from one hallucination to another throughout my whole life where reality is necessarily the wrong one. I think we can also kind of see that disparity happening when we look at soldiers corpses. People get angry but if we really look at the complicated world that existed prior to that moment most likely youd be able to. A moment of empathy in the chaos and lack of sleep. All of that can contribute to moments where the morals we apply to our world and the world over there i think is very complicated and too easily categorized as understood in a way that is blackandwhite. So i wanted to get a really nuanced look at a mind that was experiencing, and interiority. One thing i say in my book is once we label ptsd its sort of gives us permission to dismiss it because we feel like we are the understand it. Oh heres a label. We love nice boxes. Really the experiences are so varied that im not sure everyone fits in those neat categories all the time. And so trying to break up that box and leave room for experiences and push away some of the language thats out there that might be actually limiting our understanding of human beings that have gone through difficult experiences in war. When i came home from iraq, i felt invisible as a woman that. We would go out, groups of us would go out to get beers and somebody would buy the guys around the free beers because they had just gotten back from the poor and they literally meant the guys. They assumed that the women who showed up were just wives or girlfriends or hangers on. People dont look at me and think combat veteran. So i wrote my first book to try to show a little bit more port it means to be a woman in todays military. I did not want Jessica Lynch and libby england to be the only women that most people could think up when i heard about a woman soldier and i wanted to give more nuance and depth to it. But i had written terrible poetry when i was in high school and i didnt quite understand that writing a book in letting it be published would mean id have to talk about in public with people with journalists saying whats it like to watch someone bleed to death on live television. I was not emotionally prepared for that and that was a challenging experience for me. And so when i reached the point where i knew that i wanted to tell my husband story and our family story of that journey from war trauma to healing i knew i had to wait. So i had processed processed what id been through instead of trying to process it by writing it in the middle of it. I wanted to be able to pull back and see the arc of his recovery and put things in a bigger context. So i waited a lot longer to write the second book compared to when the first one came out and im glad that i did. The other thing i think its interesting you both touched on that gap between what civilians understand in and what they dont and still who is on a panel of ripe for this one, he wrote an essay and i think the New York Times that really struck me about the failure of imagination that relates to what we think of as the Civil Military divide. It really struck me to read that because so many people have said to me i just cant imagine what you went through. I just cant imagine going to war. I cant imagine that and im like you and i we go see the movie avatar. We imagine blue aliens. We are willing to emotionally put ourselves there. We are willing to watch cartoo cartoons, we are willing to imagine that but we arent willing to imagine what its like to be a soldier and go to war anymore. Why is that . As servicemembers and is veteran somehow we expect that. We let people say i can imagine what thats like and where like nope, you cant. You have to have been there and thats a failure on our part too. I think im trying to do my part to say here is what it was like and i would like civilians to take it and to try to put themselves there and have the willingness to imagine. Yeah you will touched on something i felt so fascinating is very rarely just bubbles of empathy and thats what able to find briefly in the smallest amount of time. Its just that its fascinating to me like you said veterans as a culture we are our own worst enemy. Like you said you can imagine. We keep everyone at arms distance and when they start coming, no, no you were not there and yet we dont understand why people dont understand us. So it tends to go around and around and around. But also to say that the circumstances you talk about with a good friend of mine, robert and its just that you are not just joe the family guy over there and thats the disconnect trying to understand where the rubber meets the road but when you pull the veil back you have to understand that its really messed up and its unjustifiable. So i guess one of the questions i would like to ask people is what do you feel, if you describe it i have my own definition of that. People say its like the Scarlet Letter and its a badge of honor. Its a true sense of enlightenment because i know what it takes to be able to live in the worst and best side of humanity and im very blessed by it. If you could define it from what you have seen with families and soldiers and stuff but would you put onto it . I will start my answer with a philosophical qualification which is that so theres this philosopher of science who writes about the history of Mental Illness and one of the things, so he has this great wine hes writing about the different disorder about multiple personality disorder where he says you know people ask if this diagnosis is real or if this condition is real and when people ask is a thing real, one of the important followup questions is well a real what . Real according to holmes, real for home, real in what ways . So in that sense like i would never, i would never argue that ptsd is not real. It is a name. Its a diagnosis thats encoded in dsm dsm. Something described by a set of experiences. It is a label that a lot of people use to understand their experiences. Its a label that a lot of Health Care Providers use to understand the experiences of their patients as a label that families used to understand the experiences of their loved one. Its a diagnosis thats because of its peculiar history if you get it gives you access to certain kinds of treatment and benefits that you would not have access to if you are diagnosed with a similar disorder that is not as easily linked to military service or exposure to violence. So all of those things, all of those things make ptsd real and very particular kinds of ways. And so one of the ways that it was originally described in the third edition of dsm which was the first time it was formalized as a psychiatric diagnosis and early 1980s was to sort of paraphrase the wording in the diagnosis as a normal reaction to extreme circumstances. And i think theres a tremendous amount of value in describing dramatic posttraumatic stress in that way. There is a lot of language of normalcy that people invoke when they i talk about posttraumatic stress to be able to say that yes, to feel these particular ways after going through difficult experiences as normal. At the same time that can help people. It can be very reassuring. It can normalize their experiences and they can remove the from their experiences but at the same time the meat not seem normal to people around you and so just to sort of label something normal or not normal its easy to forget that demands a whole lot of other work that has to follow very much along the lines of what kayla was describing a moment ago. And so, and i guess one last thing i will say about it is that because of how we tend to think about Mental Illness diagnoses in the contemporary u. S. There are sort of this notion that either you have something or you dont and especially with Something Like ptsd which is posttraumatic stress which in many ways and for many folks is regarded as a normal response to extreme circumstances but a response that many people may not suffer. Ptsd is a disorder version of that normal stress and the threshold at which it becomes disordered has been changed multiple times over the last 30 years. People dont look whether it changes with the people around them. And so theres this way of being attentive, of being attentive and imaginative and apathetic to peoples experience as the dynamism and complexity of that experience i think is also, thats actually maybe an invitation that ptsd gives us that we may not realize that we are receiving. Because it sounds straightforward. It sounds transparent and it sounds authority of medicine and it could potentially be an opportunity to constitute an explanation in itself. And so one of the things that i think when you look at folks actually experiences what you find is the opposite of that, but that label is the middle of something or the beginning of something rather than the end of something. So i will stop my answer. That was perfect. He said something about a ptsd space. What exactly did you mean by that . It has to do with this idea of giving a space to imagine and empathize with soldiers coming home with ptsd but also more literally space. After homecoming there is just sort of, i was doing a little bit of research into other cultures and how they respond to the soldiers and quite a few have not for example in mozambique they have soldiers go away from the village for many weeks and if they killed someone or did something that has been bothering them and giving them flashbacks or nightmares they have to reenact that a event over and over again. They are not separate from now. They are in dialogue with it and interacting with the soldiers experience. So it doesnt seem like americans of allow for that kind of transition or even want to really have it. Its more of a lets go back back to the sum public celebration of heroism that we sent you off with when you get home. So i dont think theres space space for mourning in this culture at all. I think we have a problem with being said and i think its ok okay. I really clung to this definition that ken was talking about that is a very normal Life Experience to an abnormal extraordinary event. Unfortunately we could say war is always happening so as part of our, certainly part of my entire adult life now and you know its a foreign war. So somehow im going to have to take that step to engage more thoroughly but yeah ptsd is whatever the dsm wanted to be on a more technical level. Health insurance you know cultural taboos play a part in the definition. Jonathan shea has a new definition, moral injury which i could talk about a little more which is sort of looking at it as an intrusion into civilian life based on actions that would be considered immoral on the ground here. So yeah its a question of if you decided definition they could break apart and you would have to go to another definition so its slippery. Yeah, he talked about the caregiver caregivers in the narrow sense of feeling that its just for the guys and is quite liberal but i always say my job was simple. It really was. I just walked around in a circle in afghanistan. I didnt bin laden are anything but no one ever trained were told were taught how to wait for three months for a phonecall or giving birth to two children were all the while thinking she may be a widow. And if its a character trait of pure honest trade of love and caring is the fact that there are so many people who are able to love people like me who dont love themselves anymore and its hard. I dont understand. At any given point i would have been upset. As someone who has been through that, i felt it was just a real hidden part of the military culture, spouses and kids and everyone. Yeah. So military women who are married, half are married to other servicemembers. Its a shockingly High Percentage and so for me i had my transition, my reintegration from iraq, i went from a war zone to america which was weird and then i got out of the army and went from being a sergeant to being a civilian and went from being a soldier to being a spouse and that was weird. The first time i went to the pf with my salmon i. D. Card instead of my white cat i felt this obligation to tell the people checking i. D. S that i was at that. I was in the army before, like they care. Like the ridiculous sibling would care that i was in the army. I remember that time of transition and it took me a long time to find my way as a military self. I never felt connected to the military community and that was tough for me. Didnt feel like i had anything in common with them because i have been to war. When i got home and i saw these stickers on cars at the commissary parking lot that said army wife, toughest job in the army, i wanted to keep their cars. Nobodys shooting at you. It cant be that hard. I was not empathetic at all. You have Free Health Insurance compared to how many other americans and if you have a Family Readiness group thats here just for you i had known that before them at all until way down the road until probably have my own kids. My husband had become a volunteer firefighter getting back to the community and he gave gone from 6 00 a. M. To 6 00 p. M. Im here with two kids under age two and there are women who do this for a year or 15 months. Okay, yeah im developing empathy for them. It took time for that for me to develop that. I also, i wonder sometimes about whether my own military service helped or hurt us as a couple. In some ways i think having been in the army part of the reason i stayed during the worst parts the worst part of brians recovery was because of the warrior ethos and that ingrained in you message of leave no fallen comrade behind. If he had been wanted on the battlefield just because we were on the homefront i felt i cant leave him in the death of his injury but at the same time i was imbued with that message of theres plenty of time when you are dead. I didnt ask for help when i should have because i was so full of that mentality myself and i wonder if i have been a civilian what i have broken sooner and said please help us we cannot do this on our own which complicates it as well. But it wasnt actually until calm and this is so weird and embarrassing to admit but it wasnt until i had been home from the war for probably eight years, then married, had two children and when i was in iraq i lived with just the constant daytoday knowledge that i could die at any moment and i didnt care. It did not bother me. Everybody dies. What are you so upset about especially if you believe in heaven. Shouldnt you be actively excited about this . I did not understand. Its death, we all die, deal with it. When my kids, they are 18 months apart so one time my son was two and my daughter was six months old. They were playing with each other and they were being really sweet. He was tickling her and she was laughing and it hit me, ill calm by god when i die and never get to see that megan and i freaked out. It wasnt until that moment eight years after i came home but i suddenly realized that i dont want to die. That was a shocking realization that it took you eight years before i was open to that level of feeling and that level of empathy and that level of connection to my spouse, to a man that i chose to marry but i still wouldnt have that all the way. So i feel like i still dont fully understand what its like to be a Military Spouse who has never served and never goes through that closing off point who is always that open and use for somebody who comes home close to. I think thats got to be incredibly difficult challenge. Thank you so much for that. That was amazing. So i just want to ask another question. We are also going to have a signing afterwards. If you could say and this is for all of you, if you could, what was the one thing that you gained the most from this in the sense that just giving someone a the time of day just to be heard. Its also another problem that we have feeling marginalized as a whole and its tough to be able to find a way to stand out in the crowd and to be an individual and not just a voice for others. Thats a tough one but i guess your comment makes me think that one of the things that was the most rewarding and incredible to me about doing this project was what peoples willingness to share their experiences and sometimes in the really intense ways and sometimes with minimal preamble, to sit down with someone with a tape recorder and my list of questions and say okay well the first question i really like to ask is tell me about your service in iraq and that is where just about everyone i was talking to have been. They would Start Talking and wouldnt stop talking for two hours. And to know that, to know that i was, to know that i was being trusted with stories that people felt like were worth sharing and that was something that thinking about all these problems of apathy and communication and representation, like you know it takes, it seems like it takes a lot of trust. It takes a lot of showing up. It takes a lot of willingness just to sort of you know, to open your mouth and tell a really difficult or complicated or intense or violent or awful story that means something to you but that you may not know what its going to look like or sound like to the other person on the other end. So actually thats a big part of where my original sentiments tha