>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Steve Levingston: I'm Steve
Levingston, Non-Fiction Editor
of the Washington Post,
which is a charter sponsor
of the National Book Festival.
War is devastating in so many
ways, often most devastating
for the soldiers who survive it.
Returning from war,
soldiers sometime suffer
from depression, anxiety,
sleeplessness.
It's been happening since
the beginning of war
and goes by a variety of names.
In World War I, we
heard about shell shock.
World War II, soldiers came home
suffering from combat fatigue.
Vietnam vets and veterans
of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan suffer
all too frequently
from what we now call Post
Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
How our nation handles these
wounded warriors is a subject
of Yochi Dreazen's harrowing
book, The Invisible Front.
The book brings the issue into
sharp focus, through the experience
of one family that endured
the deaths of two soldiers.
The brothers Jeff and Kevin Graham.
One killed by a roadside bomb
in Iraq, the other by suicide.
As painful as death by
an enemy combatant is,
a death by suicide is deeply
troubling, and for soldiers,
the numbers are staggering.
By 2002, more American
soldiers were killing themselves
than were dying in combat.
Dreazen's target in the book is
the military's abysmal response
to this mental health crisis.
He tells the tale of Jeff and
Kevin Graham and their family
with courage, compassion
and humanity.
As the New York Times said, this
vital book is a stirring call
to action, to better
aid American soldiers
who struggle alone with depression.
Dreazen is the managing editor
of Foreign Policy Magazine,
he is also covered the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars
for the Wall Street Journal.
So please join me in
welcoming Yochi Dreazen.
[ Applause ]
>> Yochi Dreazen: Thanks.
Hi, thank you all for
coming, good afternoon.
They had warned me beforehand that
this light was somewhat blinding
and it's correct, I think my corneas
have now been sufficiently scorched.
So if you see me squinting,
you'll understand why.
But again, thank you all for
coming on this sunny day.
About 6 years ago, I flew out
to Fort Carson in Colorado,
and drove onto the
base and then drove
onto the prettiest
house on the base.
And the base with the prettiest
house in the U.S. Army.
This is a base that's
ringed by the Rockies
and is really, really magnificent.
And the house that I went to
was the house of Mark Graham.
Mark Graham at that point was the
general in command at Fort Carson,
so he had, as you'd
imagine, the nicest house.
And I knocked at the door and
this very pert, very polite,
very cheerful woman came out
and put out her hand said,
"Hi, I'm Carol, welcome."
And nothing about her would
suggest anything other
than a woman whose life had been
full of laughter and full of joy.
And she would use this phrase
herself, so I don't mean it
in a demeaning way, but
she looked a little bit
like a southern cheerleader,
sort of happy and kind of perky.
The kind of person who
would immediately want
to make you feel at home.
We'd never met, and she hugged me.
That was her way of saying hello.
And she looked at me and said,
"You remind me of my son, Kevin."
And at the time, she couldn't have
known how accurate that was in a lot
of ways, and I couldn't have known
the significance of that or why
that would resonate
for me years later.
We began to talk, and she
was telling me the story as -
ultimately did Mark, of their
two sons, of Kevin and Jeff
who Steve mentioned a moment ago.
It's an amazing story and it's kind
of a sad one that ultimately ends
in a very different
place than it starts.
But for me, it started at
that house, it started walking
into a house full of
pictures of a family
that once existed and
didn't anymore.
Framed pictures of the two boys,
of the two boys and their sister,
of this family who are beautiful.
Beautiful.
The dad looks like we'd imagine
a General from Central Casting
to look like, sort of tall
and kind of ramrod straight.
Little cleft in the chin.
And these two athletic boys and
their sister who's a swimmer.
Just a beautiful family.
Carol would later refer to the
family as a Walt Disney family,
and as a kind of a
Normal Rockwell family.
And that was accurate.
I'd flown out in 2009, to
see them for two reasons.
One was to hear their story,
and two was to try to figure
out how their story impacted
what the U.S. military
as a whole was going
through at the time.
I had lived in Iraq for three years,
and I spent another year
shuttling back and forth.
From there to the States and
then ultimately from there
to Afghanistan, and had an
enormous amount of military friends.
You know, you'd go and you'd
see the same guys basically over
and over again, and when I was
younger and had less grey hair,
they'd be much younger soldiers
and then I'd see them again
and I'd have more grey hair
and they'd be slightly
more seasoned soldiers,
but it'd be the same people.
And when they came home, we'd
talk by Facebook or over email.
We'd see each other whenever
we were in the same place.
And they began to tell me, first
kind of grudgingly and then openly,
but over time, it took a while for
them to be even willing to say it,
grudgingly; but they began to talk
about how they felt
they had changed.
How they came home and their
wives didn't recognize them.
And they would look at their kids
and their kids would
occasionally look at them with fear
in their eyes, and they'd
have trouble sleeping
and they'd have flashes of anger.
Little things would set them
off, they'd go to restaurants
and have a table they didn't like
and they'd want to punch the waiter.
They'd be playing basketball
and someone would bump them
and they'd want to punch
the person who bumped them.
And they couldn't sleep, and they'd
have vivid dreams during the day.
At night, if they heard
a sounds, they'd wake up
and not be able to
fall back to sleep.
And they would talk about how
they would look in the mirror
and they wouldn't recognize
the person staring back either.
That they would see a
person who was disfigured,
even if they had no physical wound.
And who had been changed by war.
Even if they came back
physically intact.
And some of them would tell
me that they were drinking,
and some would tell me that
they were taking drugs,
and some would tell me
that they were depressed.
Some would say they were thinking of
committing suicide and a couple did.
To me, this was devastating.
Setting aside being a journalist,
this was devastating
on a personal level.
Some of these guys were friends.
And these were people who
had served 1, 2, 3, 4 times,
come back without a
scratch, for the most part.
Come back alive and safe.
And when they came back or they
carried with them something.
And that thing ultimately
took their life.
And the idea of that, the idea of
surviving a war, then to come back
and die from that war, all
the same, was heart breaking.
And on a personal level, for
reasons I'll get to in a moment,
it also hit at something
that I was carrying to.
That at the time I
didn't realize the degree
to which I was carrying it or just
how deep down it was being carried.
But I'll come back to
that in a little bit.
2009, the year that I went to
go see Mark and Carol Graham,
was a pivotal year for the military.
The military suicide rate
had been rising every year
since the Afghan war started.
Kind of like this.
But for years, when the
military would be asked,
"You guys have an epidemic
of suicide,
what are you doing about it?"
They would say something
that was both accurate
and kind of irrelevant.
They would say, "We have a problem,
but the civilian problem is worse."
And that was true.
Even as the military rate got
higher and higher and higher,
if you compared the
demographics of the military,
which is predominantly
male, mostly 18 to about 25,
to the same demographic
in the civilian world the
military rate as actually lower.
So they were both rising,
almost in parallel.
But the military rate
was, for a long time,
lower than the civilian rate.
2009 changed.
2009 was the first year where those
lines intersected, and after 2009,
the military rate kept
rising and rising and rising.
And at a point, they could no
longer deny what they were facing.
It was an epidemic of people
who would come back with PTSD,
without their invisible wounds.
An epidemic of people who
were taking their own life.
And again, for me this was personal.
And when I was at the
Pentagon as a reporter,
I'd walk the halls every now and
then, and I would ask people,
do you guys have friends?
Do you guys - have you served with
people for whom this is an issue?
And almost everyone would say
that it was true, that they did.
And I would ask, do you know
of anybody who's doing
something interesting on this,
who's trying to change the
way the military is operating?
And they would say, Mark Graham.
And I would just hear that
name again, Mark Graham,
Mark Graham, Mark Graham.
And I was told that
this was a general,
and he had lost two
sons, as Steve indicated.
One, who was killed in Iraq
and one who killed himself.
And when I heard that
I was sort of floored.
First, generals, it's rare to meet
one who's lost a son, full stop.
But secondly the idea
of losing two children,
ignoring whether you wear
your uniform or don't,
but the idea of losing two
children still being functional,
was just stunning to me.
It floored me.
And at first I thought, that
can't actually possibly be true.
Maybe this guy lost a son
and is worth talking to,
but it can't be that he lost both.
But it was true, it was true.
And I began to look into what
he was doing at Fort Carson.
Fort Carson, when he got there,
had one of the highest
suicide rates in the military.
He changed it, and by the time
he left there, one of the lowest.
I'll talk to that in
second about what he did.
But I wanted to meet this man,
and I wanted to meet Carol.
I wanted to see what kind of
people could go through that kind
of tragedy and still get
out of bed in the morning.
Still just make their
way through a normal day,
but also try to find
a purpose in it.
Also try to find something
they can take
from the tragedy to
try to help others.
Which is what they did, and I'll
talk to that in a moment too.
Mark and Carol became
a family to me,
in the course of writing this book.
We spent probably a
hundred hours talking.
And I would ask them to relive
these painful moments again
and again, and they would.
And sometimes we would
joke together;
sometimes we would cry together,
sometimes we would go
see a movie together.
My wife and I just had a baby boy,
and the first phone call
beyond the ones to our parents
and to my wife's sister,
was to them.
They became family to me.
They're loving and
they're extraordinary.
And when we were writing the book,
Carol said to me more than once
that she worried that people would
read the book or hear their story
and think that they
had failed as parents,
that if they had paid
more attention to Kevin,
their son who killed himself,
they could have stopped it.
Or if they had interceded with
Jeff who wanted to go serve in Iraq
and didn't have to, incidentally,
and they could have kept him
from going, he'd also be alive.
And they felt, people are going
to look at this book and think,
we're the two worst
parents in the world.
I hope that, as you listen to their
story and if you read the book,
that you come to a very
different conclusion.
To my mind, the word
hero is often overused,
the term heroism's overused.
But to go through what they
went through and to find a way
to share it, and hope that someone
else is helped by their sharing
of it, that to me is heroism.
So I'd like to read you a
little bit about Jeff and Kevin.
Jeff was the older of the two
brothers, Jeff was shorter but kind
of radiated confidence, he was
the one who, in high school
and college was the one
girls gravitated to.
He was a bit of a drinker,
as he got older.
He was always the more
outgoing of the two.
He was the one who looked, in terms
of his face, exactly like his dad.
And wanted to do exactly
what his dad did.
He wanted to be a soldier; he wanted
to lead other soldiers into combat.
And that's all he ever wanted to do.
From the time he was a little kid,
he had little camouflage pajamas,
he would do little, like, mock
raids in the neighborhood,
that's all he wanted,
was to be a soldier.
Kevin, his brother, was
taller, was a bit heavier,
and Kevin was a gentler soul.
He didn't want to be a
soldier in the same way;
he wanted to be a doctor.
He was a kind of kid that -
learned about the holocaust while
he was living at a base in Germany.
He couldn't get past it.
For days he kept saying to his
mom, "Ma, how could people do that?
How could people do that?"
We'd heard about the deaths of the
Native Americans here, same thing.
He was a very sensitive gentle soul.
And they were very different.
They looked different, one
was big, one was short,
one was thin, one was fat.
They had different sense of humor,
but they were exceptionally close.
And I'd like to just
read you for a moment,
a scene that describes the
kind of closeness they have,
and the kind of relationship
they had.
Even as a child, Jeff
Graham was analytical,
self-assured and mischievous.
Traits that would grow
stronger with time.
When he was a toddler, Carol
decided to teach him the importance
of waking up early enough
to make his own bed,
something he had absolutely
no desire to do.
Instead, Jeff would
finish his nightly bath,
put on the clothes he planned
to wear the following day,
and then go to sleep in
his Star Wars sleeping bag,
leaving the sheets
and pillows untouched.
Next morning, he'd jump
out of bed already dressed,
zip up the sleeping bag,
be ready for school,
and that bought him an
extra hour every day.
He'd also be stubborn.
At breakfast, he insisted
on only eating Cheerios,
and only if he could
pour the milk himself.
When Carol would complain they never
listened, he would grin and say,
"Ma, I always listened, but
then I make up my own mind."
Kevin was born in November of
1981, at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
The first place Mark
served after Germany.
Carol wanted to surprise her
sisters and hadn't told them
that she was even pregnant
with Kevin, and when it came,
he was sort of the perfect son.
He was late, like Jeff,
so Carol drank castor oil,
she would walk steps, she
would jump up and down to try
to get him to come and he wouldn't.
But from the start, from
the time he was born,
he was the one who would listen.
So whenever Carol would
make breakfast,
he would eat whatever she made.
Whatever cereal she put on the
table, he would happily eat.
Whenever there was talk about
going out for ice cream,
Jeff would say, "Me
first, me first."
Kevin would say, "Me last, me last."
He was a gentle child, eager
to please both his parents
and his grandparents.
When he was 3, he had a
small handmade blanket
and he would suck his thumb
as he fell asleep each night.
During a family visit to Kentucky,
his grandfather, Carl, told him,
big boys don't suck their thumbs,
and promised he'd give him a big
boy trophy if he dropped the habit.
Kevin told Carol that he wants his
grandfather to be proud of him,
but needed one more night
to hold onto the blanket.
Next morning, she was making
pancakes when he marched
into the kitchen, climbed
onto a chair,
and handed her the
neatly folded blanket.
He never held onto the afghan
or sucked his thumb again.
True to his word, Carl
shipped Kevin a trophy
that the young boy immediately
and proudly put on his dresser.
Jeff, for his part, felt the
whole thing was ridiculous.
He slept with a stuffed
racoon and sucked his thumb
until he was 6 years old.
When he made up his
mind about something,
Jeff Graham didn't care
what other people thought.
This family was exceptionally
close, they were a military family,
which meant that they were moving
from base to base, inside the U.S.,
to Germany, to Korea, and as
many military families do,
the siblings became
their best friends,
because whenever they'd have one
group of friends, they'd move.
And whenever they'd have a new
group of friends, they'd move again.
So they were each other's
best friends.
Kevin and Jeff, and their
baby sister, Melanie,
who's the youngest of the three.
And wherever they'd go, they would
begin to talk about the future.
And again, for Jeff, it was
always about the Army, always.
For Kevin it was about
medical school,
maybe going to get a
degree in Philosophy.
It was never the sin [phonetic].
As they got older,
he began to gravitate
like his brother towards ROTC.
But his friends would later
think that he was trying
to set aside his own
dreams to live his parents'.
That he was doing what he
assumed they had wanted him to do,
not what he knew he
wanted himself to do.
Years later, incidentally, that's
one of the things that Mark
and Carol would be most haunted by.
This feeling that, if they
had hinted differently
or acted differently, maybe he
wouldn't have joined the military
at all.
So Mark's career kept going.
He served in Kuwait,
during the first Gulf War;
he served in Germany, he moved
from major to lieutenant colonel,
lieutenant colonel to colonel.
Up to general.
And the family would move with him.
And by the time they were back
in the states, just as Mark was
about to be promoted to a one-star
general, both Jeff and Kevin were
at the University of Kentucky.
Both of them doing ROTC.
Kevin had always been the one whose
grades were the better of the two.
He had always been the one
who really focused more
on school, Jeff was the party boy.
Jeff was the one who would go
drinking, Jeff was the one who,
in Mardi Gras, would
bring University
of Kentucky stuff and
hang it everywhere.
During the NCAA tournament
he would take a black marker
and write the full bracket on a
wall of his house, as his landlord,
as you might imagine, didn't like.
But Kevin was the gentle soul.
And what his family didn't
realize until much too late,
was that he was wearing a mask.
And that the Kevin that they
saw wasn't actually the Kevin
that Kevin felt himself to be.
And his grades began to suffer, he
began to drink, he was diagnosed
with depression and put on Prozac.
Now at the time this was happening,
Jeff, who was a year older,
was about to be commissioned
into the Army.
It was a moment of true
happiness for the family.
Kevin felt correctly that if the
military, running the ROTC program,
found out he was on Prozac,
that he'd be kicked out,
and he was right, by
the way to fear that.
and he thought, my career's
going to end before it starts,
I'm going to embarrass my family,
I'm going to embarrass my brother,
and so he stopped taking it.
And for anybody who's
taken medication,
if you take it off cold
turkey, if you're in a spiral,
you start spiralling down faster.
Whatever bad place you were
in, you go back to that place
and then you find an
even worse place.
And that's what happened with Kevin.
He didn't tell anybody he had
taken Prozac in the first place,
because he was embarrassed.
He didn't tell anybody
he stopped taking it.
And the mask was still there, people
didn't see it, but he was changing.
And again, that spiral
was spiralling
down faster and faster and faster.
After his suicide, his siblings
found a little to-do list
in his dorm room at the
University of Kentucky.
To give you a sense of
how close they were,
the three siblings lived together,
which kind of blows my mind,
the idea of having my
sister next door to me
in college would be
incomprehensible.
But there was a little to-do list,
and the first few things were kind
of banal, pick up laundry, buy
new books, buy new notepads.
And then the last one was,
take toaster into the bathtub.
But they didn't find this out until
it was much, much, much too late.
Jeff and Kevin, the thing they would
always do, their hobby was golf.
Kevin was a little bit fat, Jeff was
a little bit short, they figured,
playing golf, it didn't matter.
That was the one place where neither
height nor fatness impacted them
at all.
Jeff was commissioned, he
was getting ready to leave
for advanced training and
ultimately perhaps to Iraq,
and they made plans to play golf.
One last time before Jeff left.
And Jeff went to the golf course and
waited, and Kevin didn't show up.
And he called his cell phone, no
answer, called the home phone,
it was 2003, so there were
still home phones, no answer.
Called Melanie, their
sister, and said,
"Can you find out where Kevin is?
He was supposed to be here an
hour ago, he hasn't showed up."
Melanie walked to Kevin's door,
and she knocked once,
and there was no answer.
She knocked a second time
and there was no answer.
She knocked a third
time, she turned the nob,
and her brother was
hanging from a fan.
And for a second, for one second,
and she'd remember this years later,
she thought it was a prank, it
was just some weird, sick prank,
because they would do that kind of
stuff to their sister all the time,
they thought, hmm,
maybe this isn't real.
But that lasted a second, and then
she immediately realized after that
that it was real, that this
nightmare was happening
in front of her.
And Kevin had killed himself.
Now, for the family, it
was a religious family,
religious Christian family.
And members of the family said to
Mark and Carol, no Christian burial.
He took his own life, he's
a sin, he doesn't deserve
to be given a church service or
buried in a Christian cemetery.
To Mark and Carol, this is insulting
and absurd, their son died,
they loved their son, they
would give their son the funeral
he deserved.
But part of it would
haunt them later,
and I'll come to that in a moment.
The way that Kevin was treated,
the way that his death was treated.
Kevin dies.
Jeff at this point is
getting ready to go.
He has the choice of
whether to continue serving
or to stop continue serving,
to leave the military.
Mark has the same choice.
Mark by this point had
served his 20 years,
he can retire, and he wanted to.
He thought, how can I possibly wear
this uniform if my son was training
to put on this uniform, that
may have been what stressed him
out to the point he
took his own life.
How could I possibly
wear this uniform?
And he was getting ready to retire.
He had his paperwork drawn up.
Carol one morning saw
him, and said to him,
"This can either be a chapter
in the book of our lives,
or this can be the whole book."
A phrase that really
stuck with me ever since.
And so Mark decided to stay in.
Now Jeff had a decision to make too.
The decision Jeff had to make
was, should he go to Iraq?
He didn't need to.
Mark had friends throughout
the military,
he could have made one
call, pulled one string
and Jeff wouldn't have gone.
And Mark and Carol agonized about
whether they should try to do that.
But then they felt that
that'd be unfair to Jeff.
Jeff had spent his whole
life training for this,
it's all he wanted to do, and
to stand in the way of it,
they felt would be dashing
his dream, it would be unfair,
and so they didn't make that call
and they didn't pull that string.
And so Jeff deployed to Iraq.
He deployed to Fallujah.
And the place he deployed
to, the specific place,
was a place I was in,
at almost the same time.
I didn't know Jeff, obviously at the
time, the later when I was trying
to recreate what happened
to him, I could visualize it
because I had been there.
Jeff showed up at a unit that
had lost its previous lieutenant.
They were in one of the bloodiest
parts of Iraq then and now,
for anybody, obviously
who's following the news
of the Islamic state
taking Fallujah.
Fallujah has been soaked by
blood for more than a decade now.
And while they were there was one
of the bloodiest periods
of the whole war.
But it was where Jeff wanted to be.
He wanted to be in that place,
he wanted to be doing
what his men were doing.
When he showed up, they
called him the Oompa Loompa,
because he was about 5' 6".
Most officers would not take kindly
to being called an Oompa Loompa.
Jeff thought it was hysterically
funny, he had no problem with it.
That's the way he bonded with
his guys, he had a sense of humor
and he didn't take
himself too seriously.
One day, they were given
a mission that everyone
in the unit was a little
bit worried about.
They had trained to go in heavy
armor, they hadn't been trained
as infantry guys, they hadn't
been trained to walk for patrols.
But they had been converted
into that kind of unit,
because the military needed guys who
could be infantry, and so suddenly,
poof, unit that was trained to
not be infantry, you're infantry.
And they would be walking
foot patrols in
and around Fallujah, every day.
For safety, they would
try to vary the route.
They would try to go
different times of day.
They would try to not be carrying
on any kind of routine for fear
that insurgents would
see that routine
and then have a way
of attacking them.
Know when and know how.
But this day they were told
to take the same route
they had taken before.
And to do it during the day.
And the whole unit, there was
like a sense of foreboding,
there was a sense that
something was wrong.
Jeff wasn't supposed to go that day.
He was supposed to stay back.
One of the things that Mark
and Carol gave me for the book,
for the research of
it, was Jeff's diary.
Jeff's fiancé didn't
know it existed.
It was a difficult thing for them
to share, because all of his hopes,
all of his dreams,
were in this one book.
Every page of the diary, every
day, the last entry would be,
something to his brother.
It'd be, "Kevin, help me get my
guys home safely, Kevin I miss you."
But literally every page.
And for me, writing the
book, it was invaluable,
because I could recreate sort of,
how he was feeling at a given time,
where he was, what he was doing.
The day that I'm talking
about was supposed to be kind
of a routine day, the mission
itself would be routine.
And in his diary, he
describes it as routine,
and he cuts it off mid page,
and says I'll pick this
up when I get back.
And to me, visually, that
was always very moving.
To see this page just stop.
So now we're back in Fallujah.
And Jeff's leading
his men on patrol.
He always, when he was out with
his guys, led them from the front.
And they got to a bridge, they
had to get to the other side
of the bridge, and he sent
out two guys ahead of them.
And the two guys saw something
on one of the guard rails,
but it didn't look all that
suspicious and they kind
of brushed the sand off,
it looked just like a piece
of metal so they kept going.
Then it was Jeff's turn.
It was him, a radioman named Roger
Ling, and an Iraqi policemen,
so three of them, and the
unit was right behind them.
Maybe 20 feet, 20 feet, 25 feet.
And so Jeff, as he was walking,
saw something, that same glimmer,
and for him, something else,
a synapse fired, he
saw it differently.
He turned to tell the guys
behind him, stay back.
And as he turned, it detonated.
And what the other guys had missed,
and what he saw was a
buried bomb, an IED.
The other soldier, Roger Ling, he
was 22, he was killed immediately,
the Iraqi policeman
was killed immediately.
Jeff lingered on for a very
short time, but also died.
And when Mark and Carol were
told this, they were later told
that in Jeff's pocket was
Kevin's driver's license.
That he had taken with him to
Iraq and they took a little bit
of comfort that their boys,
their brothers had lived together
and ultimately at that last moment,
they'd had been together again.
Now, the military has
a very sophisticated
and very elaborate system for
telling families about a death.
Because they don't want
to have something happen,
is for a family to
find out by rumor.
They have to have the people,
we've all seen the movies,
of the guys in uniform
show up at the door.
That's the way it's supposed to be.
Mark, because he was
in the military,
at this point he was high
ranking in the military,
found out through the grapevine,
but he couldn't tell Carol.
And so the hardest part of
Mark's life was this stretch
of about 6 hours where
he knew and Carol didn't.
And he had to figure out
ultimately how could he tell her,
how would he tell her
their other son was gone.
And he ultimately did.
Devastated both of them.
To use the word devastate,
understates it.
Carol thought about suicide.
She thought, I don't deserve
to live, I failed my sons.
She thought about it,
but didn't carry it out.
And Mark again, thought,
I can't serve, I can't.
Now it's taken my second
son, I'm out.
Then he got word he
was being promoted up,
and he wavered a little
bit, and then, again,
Carol said "No, you should stay.
You should stay.
Again, this should be a chapter,
this shouldn't be the whole book."
Mark became a two-star general.
And the command he was
given was Fort Carson.
Fort Carson, again, is one of the
most physically beautiful bases
in the entire military,
it's really stunning.
But when Mark got there, there
was this cancer within the base,
that he didn't know was there.
There was a cancer of murder,
there was a unit whose unit
nickname was the lethal warriors,
which was ultimately a
terribly ironic name,
because this unit came back
and started killing people.
It killed people in Fort Carson who
were civilian, killed other troops.
The military had not ever
seen anything quite like it.
One unit killing this many people.
And Fort Carson had suicide rate
that was astronomically high.
And Fort Carson had
something called stigma,
which is a phrase that's
clinical and cold,
but I want to talk
to you for a moment.
It had a culture of stigma, where
people who thought they needed help
or wanted to go get help, were made
to feel like they were cowards.
They were made to feel weak.
They were pushed out of the
unit if they could be either
in a physical sense or to
made to stand separately.
Or in a literal sense,
actually kicked
out of the military all together.
And stigma is sort of a clinical
term, in what it manifest
as is not clinical at
all, it's very human.
So here are two examples of what
stigma was like at Fort Carson.
A soldier tried to kill himself,
and scrawled using black marker,
a suicide note on the barracks
room that he was living in.
He survived, thankfully he
was given help and survived.
But they arrested him, and
they were going to charge him
with defacing government property.
So his mom drove up and said,
"If I paint it, if I repaint it,
will you leave my son out?
You know, he's troubled,
he can't deal with this.
Can I repaint it?"
And they said, "Yeah,
you can repaint it."
So a mother of a suicidal soldier
spent a Saturday repainting the
wall, and they charged him anyway.
There was a soldier who was
troubled and a bit of a drinker,
and the sergeant in his unit
said, kill yourself already
and save me the paperwork.
That's the kind of
place Mark went to.
It was the kind of place where
a unit that was getting ready
to deploy had a sign out
sheet next to where you'd sign
out to go see a doctor, they
had a fake sign out sheet,
if you were going to see a
psychologist or a psychiatrist.
Forgive the language for
a second, but it had,
"I'm going to see a
therapist for..."
and it was choices.
One, I'm a coward.
Two, I'm a pussy.
Three, I'm a weak bitch.
Four, all of the above.
So again, forgive the
language, but that's the kind
of thing that people were facing.
People wanted to get help
were being made to feel
that they were the
weakest of the weak.
They didn't belong in the U.S. Army,
that they should be drummed out.
And this is where Mark
found himself.
Mark who had lost two sons.
This is where he found
himself in command.
What he did with Carol's
help, was begin to talk openly
about his two sons, and he
would cry every time he did.
For people who in this
audience may have friends
in the military may have served,
you don't usually see generals cry.
And it's kind of jarring,
and a lot of people
at the base thought,
this guy's soft.
This is the guy who's
leading us to war?
This guy who's up there crying?
But he didn't - there
was a point to it.
And he was trying to
tell people it was okay.
That to show emotion was okay.
To feel emotion was okay.
And in his case, he'd
gone through this tragedy,
but it hadn't broken him.
And that if they sought help,
it wouldn't break them either.
That was the first way he
tried to change the culture.
The second way, and this is
something that ultimately,
they replicated across the
Army, was, he turned Fort Carson
into a lab, where basically
if anybody had an idea
that seemed remotely promising, his
thought was, well, if it's not going
to do any harm, let's use it.
Let's try it.
So one guy said, how 'bout we do
yoga for the troops, and it was kind
of mocked, but Mark said sure,
let's do yoga for the troops,
and became hugely popular.
It's called Joe-ga.
You know, Joe, like GI Joe.
But it's now offered at pretty
much every base in the country,
and when you go, it's kind
of surreal to see guys
with shaved heads, you
know, shorter than this,
doing downward dog, but it's done.
You know, deep breathing,
meditation, also done.
But the bigger things were systemic.
The bigger things were trying to
figure out, how do you make it
such that a person who wants to
get help and who needs to get help,
can feel safe in getting help.
That they can feel like
they won't be kicked out,
and they won't be mocked.
And so Mark did a couple of things.
One of them, the part that
would be replicated ultimately,
the most widely, and I think saved
the most lives, was to create,
I won't give you the military
acronym, because it's horrible,
like all military acronyms,
but the idea of it was called
embedded behavioral health team.
Again, like most military phrases,
kind of overly complicated.
The idea was, you would
take a specific therapist,
or two, or three.
And you'd assign them to a unit.
So that the guys in that
unit, the women in that unit,
they knew that person
before they deployed.
They knew them while they deployed.
They knew them when they came back.
So that the person that they had a
relationship with wasn't a stranger.
They felt comfortable
talking to the therapist,
the therapist could tell
something was off with them.
That was ultimately replicated
across the entire U.S. military.
Almost every brigade now
has something like that.
He also was willing to go to
bat for individual soldiers.
Soldiers who had been,
in one case, drummed out,
because his commander
didn't believe he had PTSD.
Mark did a very rare thing of
reaching down from above and pulling
that soldier back in, overruling
the colonel who kicked him out.
This was not popular.
It's not popular for
a colonel who feels
like this is my unit,
these are my guys.
To have a general come in and say,
"Ehh, wrong," and overturn it.
But Mark did that.
Because he felt that
it was important.
That's become the mission
of their lives.
Mark and Carol spent the
end of their military career
at Fort Carson, by
the time they left,
it had one of the lowest
suicide rates in the country.
I wish that that was the happy
ending of Fort Carson, it's not.
Some of the stuff they did was
undone by the next commander
and the rate went back
up a little bit.
Mark retired, he didn't
get his third star.
If you ask him, he'll say it has
nothing to do with how open he was
about talking about suicide
or criticizing the military.
I spent some years with him
now and I'm firmly convinced
that that's why he
didn't get his third star.
If he had been sort of
quieter and not call attention
to the stuff he did call attention
to, he'd have been promoted up.
When he retired, he had the option
many generals have of cash out.
Go join a corporate
board, join a company,
make a lot of money, and he didn't.
And instead he moved to New Jersey.
Set up a veteran support
program called Vets for Warriors.
And that's what he
spends his life doing.
Is setting up ways for
veterans to speak to veterans.
Feeling that somebody who's
served is most comfortable talking
to someone else who's served.
And Carol travels the country
and she tells her story,
again and again.
And I've known them now for
six years, and I've been there
and listened to them talk.
The word closure to my mind is
insulting, it's kind of revolting,
the idea that you can suffer
this loss and somehow,
at some later date it's gone.
And every time they tell the
story, they cry, every time.
It hasn't faded, and it won't
ever fade, and it shouldn't fade.
This to them is what keeps
them going, this sort of belief
that maybe if they speak to
a room of a hundred people,
one person in that room who
might not have got help,
who might have thought
of themselves as weak
because they thought they needed
help, would hear their story
and decide, no it's okay,
I'm going to do go do that,
I'm going to seek help,
my life may change.
To them, that's worth the
pain of reliving things.
I'd like to - before I take
questions, close with a little bit
about Mark, a little bit about
what they're doing today.
Mark is part of - works with an
organization called Give an Hour,
which is a wonderful
organization incidentally.
It is a network of therapists
across the country, civilians,
who volunteer to donate an hour
a week pro bono for veterans
or families who need help.
On a rainy day in the summer
of 2013, Mark Graham sat
down behind a table, in a windowless
auditorium at Columbia University,
for a panel discussion on
the military suicide rate,
which began to attract widespread
media and congressional attention.
More than 120 soldiers
had killed themselves
in the first 5 months of the year.
And military officials knew 2013
would set another grim record.
Mark had flown there to spend
the day with a room full
of mental health professionals,
who might one day confront the kind
of demons that had claimed his son.
We learned about the
impact of mental health,
in the worst way possible,
he said, choking up.
We truly wish we knew
then what we know now.
We truly wish we had known that
we were part of this stigma,
that we didn't hear what our
son was trying to tell us,
but nothing we do will
ever bring him back.
Mark continued with his story of one
of Jeff's last night's
in the United States.
Shortly before deploying to Iraq, a
young soldier knocked on Jeff's door
and quietly asked if
he was the soldier
who lost a brother to suicide.
The soldier told Jeff his
father had killed himself,
and he was having the same
dark thoughts, but didn't want
to tell anyone in his unit
for fear of being kicked out.
Jeff told him to get
help immediately.
Nothing, he said, was more
important than that soldier's life.
And there'd be other ways
of serving the country
if he did have to leave
the military.
In the fall of 2003, with U.S.
troops already fighting and dying
in Iraq, Jeff called Mark and said
he wouldn't have known what to say
that night if his brother
hadn't have committed suicide.
Kevin's death, he told his
father, had given him the knowledge
to help save that other
young soldier's life.
That's one reason my wife and
I do what I do, Mark concluded.
Before he died, Jeff
told us to promise
that we wouldn't stop
doing what we're doing.
He told us there were too
many other Kevin's out there.
So here we are, we won't stop.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
I think we have time for questions,
and I think there are
microphones set up on both sides.
>> Thanks very much, I was very
fortunate to receive your book
as a gift and was riveted by it.
And I have to say,
after I finished it,
I actually felt a little
bit helpless,
and I felt like the situation
was a little bit helpless,
because despite all of
what this family has done,
there are so many stigmas
and obstacles in their way.
I'm wondering, in your own
reflection on what you've heard
and listened, what do
you see - what causes you
to be optimistic, I guess?
>> Yochi Dreazen: First
of all, thank you.
It's a hard thing sometimes
to find, frankly, optimism.
Because in this issue,
there is no silver bullet,
and Nick used that phrase
before about silver buckshot.
The military is like a giant ship,
and when it turns, it takes a while,
but then once it turns it
steams full speed ahead.
So the amount of money being spent
now on research into suicide,
into depression and
PTSD is staggering.
And they're beginning to find
things that'll be helpful,
not just in the military, but
in the civilian world too.
So one reason for optimism
is that the money is there.
The money - depression
is not a sexy topic.
Neither is suicide.
But because the military's
spending money, there's resources
that were never there before.
A quick side note, the
scarier statistic I found
in researching this book, was that
since the creation of the car,
auto accidents killed more
people than anything other
than illness and gun violence.
In 2012, that changed.
2012, suicide killed more people
than car crashes, and since then,
those numbers have again,
car crashes like this,
suicide like that, so just bear in
mind if you're watching local news
or you see in the paper,
there's a car crash
and it's a horrible tragedy
and some number of people died.
That same day, more
people killed themselves.
So it's an issue for
the whole country,
it's not an issue just
in the military.
We like to think sometimes the
military's different, and distinct.
But we're the military
and the military's us,
the one reflects the other.
And so the problem that faces
the one, faces the other.
But the fact that there's
more resources now
than before is a good thing.
Not just in the military,
but for the civilian world.
One last thing, it was a
very, very good question.
There are groups like Give
an Hour, which I mentioned,
which are wonderful organizations.
They - money that goes to them
goes straight to organization work,
it doesn't go to salaries.
They do great work.
There's an organization called
TAPS, which supports the families
of soldiers who have died,
again does great work.
But the best think I think
and it's a simple one,
is if you see someone who's
served, don't just say thank you
for your service and walk off, and
kind of feel good about yourself
that - hey, I thanked them and
now I've done my work for the day.
But actually ask them,
how their day was.
Just actually try to
talk and engage.
The military is so
separate from us right now.
I mean, people in this room
may know someone who's served,
but walking the streets
of Washington or Chicago
where I'm from, New York, probably
no one you see will have served.
Probably no one you see will
have known someone who's served.
And so even just doing that
question of asking how are you,
where are you from, just the basic
conversation, to a lot of guys,
they don't have a chance to
express it, and it goes a long way.
>> Thank you.
I came in a little bit
later, so I apologize
if I'm asking something
you've already answered.
The therapists that you
mentioned who are - I guess,
imbedded with deployments.
Who looks after the therapists?
And that's maybe a small question,
the second question I have is,
is there any evidence that
you found that the intention
to mental health issue in
the military is helped -
add mental health care services
to the Affordable Care Act?
That was a fairly significant part
of that act, I'm just wondering,
did that help the military
or the military help that,
or is there no relationship
whatsoever between those?
>> Yochi Dreazen: So, to
take the first question,
first, which is a great one.
Unfortunately, no one really.
The military doesn't have
enough resources, frankly,
to look after the soldiers that
are - and marines and airmen,
whatever service, that
are the first people going
to the therapist themselves.
So there's definitely not enough
therapists unfortunately to look
after the other therapists
who are trying
to help - that largely the people.
Frankly, the way the military deals
with a lot of issues it's dealing
with now is through medication,
and it's a terrifying,
terrifying problem.
I was imbedded once in a base in
eastern Afghanistan that was -
the military's brilliance
at the time.
It was at the foot of the mountain,
and the Taliban had control
of the top, and they
were just shelling.
Day by day by day.
It was literally like World
War I, you'd put on your armor
and you'd sort of go
between sand bags,
try to get from place to place.
While I was there, there was a guy
from the public health service,
who was doing basically a survey
of how many people there were
on prescription medication.
There were 50 guys there, all 50.
And when he asked them what they
were taking, they were taking Xanax,
Ambien, pretty much any kind of
sleep medication or anti-depressant.
And they were taking them in
dosages that were just insane.
You know, so Xanax,
you're supposed to take 3,
maybe 4 a day, they would take 9.
Ambien, maybe 1 or 2 a
day, they would take 5.
And so these guys, there
was just no control over it.
They would trade drugs that
one guy had a prescription,
the other guy didn't, so they'd
swap, and they'd come back and one
of two things would happen.
They'd have to go cold turkey,
because they didn't have a
prescription in the first place,
which is very dangerous,
or they'd have to wind
down to what actual people
take, also very dangerous.
But that's the way the
military and now is still,
is dealing with a lot of this.
It's medicate, medicate, medicate.
Now for some of the therapists too.
Some of the therapists themselves
are also taking medication.
>> Yes, hi, I was just wondering,
you told us about these, you know,
these horrible deaths and how
the parents are dealing with it.
What happened to Melanie?
She lost her brothers,
she was so close to them.
>> Yochi Dreazen: I'm
really glad you asked.
Thank you for asking, I should
have mentioned that before,
I'm really glad that
you bring it up.
Melanie is an amazing woman.
Melanie lives in New
York, her husband, Joe,
was a Special Forces veteran.
He had worked for Mark,
and met Melanie,
because he was working for Mark.
So having the balls to ask
out your boss's daughter
when your boss is a general
this is a - it's a brave man.
Fortunately it worked, if it
didn't, Jeff would be - sorry,
Joe would be deployed
somewhere horrible doing very,
very boring work.
Joe had lost his brother on 9/11,
and so he, himself is no stranger,
unfortunately, to tragedy.
And they've built a
beautiful marriage.
And my wife and I are very
close with them, actually,
we had dinner with
them two nights ago.
They occasionally talk about
how they feel guilty sometimes,
because they laugh, and
they have joy in their lives
and there are times that they feel
bad that they do, but they do.
And when you meet them,
you would never
in a million years guess what
either of them had gone through.
Melanie is a nurse in New
York City in Manhattan,
she's fashionable,
she's really funny.
Joe is a, kind of, Irish catholic
who could, if he were here,
the whole room would be
laughing uproariously.
And you would never guess
either of them had lost someone.
And they built a beautiful life.
>> These are very moving
stories, and very disturbing,
and I think indicative of much
bigger problems in our society.
The military draws from
our broader society,
and in the news today is this
pillow fight at West Point,
and how that relates to
how the military is run.
These are our future
leaders in the military.
>> Yochi Dreazen: Yeah, what she's
referencing is a pillow fight
at West Point that -
was once a pillow fight,
this year guys put helmets into
the pillows and so you had like,
2 dozen people go to the
hospital, one guy had a broken leg.
But the first point I
agree with completely.
You know, we have a luxury, many
of us who live in big cities
or who didn't feel the need
to serve, may not have come
from military families,
of being able to think
of the military as
this other object.
And to a degree it is,
it has its own language,
it speaks different acronyms.
People come and know how to spend
their day, they wear the same thing.
So to a degree, it is its
own world, but it's also us.
And when we try to think of suicide
as a military suicide problem,
if we put that first word before
the second, we do a disservice,
because it's a suicide
problem for our country,
so I'm glad you brought that up.
>> How are you?
I was just wondering,
the statistic you used
about suicide surpassing car deaths,
you could say the same thing -
you could say also gun wounds
are surpassing car deaths,
and I was wondering, in
addition to mental health,
if the military is
looking at access to guns.
I know Israel's done
some stuff with guns
and there's been some studies
on that, I didn't know.
>> Yochi Dreazen: They are.
There's a thing called
means restriction,
the idea is that you might be
suicidal for quite some time,
but then there's one
moment that happens
where you decide now
I'm going to do it.
And that if you can keep that
person from in that moment acting
on it, you might save a life.
So the notion is, let's say you put
a trigger guard on the hand gun,
so the guy, he wants to kill
himself, the moment arrived,
he picks up the gun, but then he
can't actually pull the trigger,
and he has to find the key, and
maybe in that moment that takes him
to find the key, the impulse passes.
The military has experimented
with trying to make it harder
for guys to have guns at home.
The NRA has blocked it.
There was, for a while, the NRA
managed to sneak a provision
into a military authorization bill
that literally made it illegal
for a commanding officer to ask
his guys if they had guns at home.
It was illegal.
That was stripped away,
but they snuck it in.
But short answer is yes, there
is an attempt to do that,
for the reason that, you build
in that one extra minute,
maybe you can save a life.
I think we're going to have time I
think, I think we have one question.
>> You've spoken about the
Grahams and their pain and Melanie
and you also spoke about being
in Iraq and being imbedded.
What about you?
How does it affect you?
I know you're a reporter,
but you're also a person.
How do you deal with the
depression and the sadness
that just comes from your job?
>> Yochi Dreazen: When I
came back, it took me years
to accept that I had PTSD too.
And I thought to myself, that I
was the kind of journalist who went
to war zones, I was a tough
guy, and if I came back
and I was feeling sad, I could
just think my way through it.
But I couldn't.
Ultimately, in researching the
book, I spoke the language they did,
because I had gone through
the same things they did.
So the PTSD they felt, I felt too.
It made it - some would say more
painful, but also a bit easier,
because I knew what they were -
where these guys were coming from,
and I knew I would talk to them in a
language that they would understand.
But anybody who goes,
comes back different.
Journalists, aid worker,
diplomat, soldier.
That's one thing, as a country,
we should remember next
time there's a war.
Everyone who goes and is touched
by it comes back different
than when they left.
Without exception.
Thank you guys, thank you all.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.