>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. [ Pause ] >> Tom Wiener: Welcome, my name is Tom Wiener. I'm a Research Specialist with the Veterans' History Project. For those of you who are not familiar with the Veterans' History Project, we are an archive of first hand accounts of veterans who served in wartime in the uniforms of the United States Military and we've been existence for almost exactly ten years. We just celebrated our tenth anniversary about a month or so ago. We collect stories from World War I through the current conflicts and we have researchers who come in and do research in our collections including our guest today Larry Minear. I'm going to introduce Larry and then we're going to have a little conversation about his book after which we'll take some questions from the audience and then Larry will do a book signing out in the lobby area and you're welcome to buy a book and have him sign it and talk with him. We should conclude the program by 1 o'clock for those of you who are on a tight schedule. So we'll get started by telling you the name of the book is Through Veterans' Eyes and the author to my right is Larry Minear. Larry is a researcher and writer on International Humanitarian and Military Institutions in armed conflict around the world. He is the Cofounder and Director of the Humanitarianism and War Project, and since 1989, he has been associated with research groups at Brown and Tufts Universities. His publications include the United States Citizen Soldier and the Global War on Terror, The National Guard Experience, which was published in 2007, and The Humanitarian Enterprise: Dilemmas and Discoveries, which was published in 2000. Larry retired from Tufts in 2006 and now lives on Cape Cod. Now before we start our conversation I just want to get a show of hands of people here who are veterans themselves or currently serving in the military. Okay, they're all on this side of the room for some reason. >> The right side. >> Ah... the right side. We're not going to get political, we'll just say the correct side. Alright Larry, let's get started. How did you get interested in this subject? >> Larry Minear: Let me begin Tom by thanking you for the introduction and thanking people for coming today. It's a pleasure to be with you and to unpack some of the themes of the books that I've just completed. First question is how did I get into the research? This has a very personal answer going back to years of spending time in Northern New England primarily over vacations but sometimes year round the time we lived in, in rural Vermont, central Vermont, had a National Guard Armory prominently situated, small armory with a rusting World War II tank sitting in front of the armory. The gun was pointed, I thought, carelessly close to Betty's Beauty Salon, but anyway, there it was and I used to go by thinking about the guard and some of its activities. After the guard, after the contingent from Bradford, Vermont deployed to Iraq, I began to think about, you know, what the impact of service in the global war on terror would be for some of my friends and neighbors from Vermont so this led to a series of conversations and eventually to the research itself. >> Tom Wiener: Could you describe the method you used in gathering material for this book? I know that you used some of our collections, but what other collections did you use? >> Larry Minear: Right, I actually began the research close in to the neighborhood where we spent time in Vermont and one conversation led to another talking to guard members who were involved in the community whether as faculty on the high school staff, one was a school bus driver, one gentleman ran the Subway franchise for the sandwich shop in town, the editor of the local paper, these were just informal conversations initially, one conversation led to another and gradually the circle expanded to other communities in Vermont and then across the river to New Hampshire where there was an active guard contingent, which was also deployed in Iraq. The New Hampshire National Guard, interestingly, was very receptive to having somebody from the outside such as me come and talk to people. They themselves had done a study of the impact of the global war on terror on the service people from New Hampshire who had been deployed so I was really picking up on work that they already had underway. I used a questionnaire that evolved a bit over time, I basically ask people, as does the Veterans' History Project Questionnaire, where did they serve, what was their background in the military, but the key question was really how had the service in the military affected their views of their country and of the US Military and of themselves as, as citizens. >> Tom Wiener: And that's a question we suggest be asked yes. >> Larry Minear: Absolutely, this is the last one, last question in the VHP. The Veterans' History Project has a kind of protocol with a dozen or so questions so that there's some consistency in the, in the answers that come across. Eventually, while the interviews in Vermont and New Hampshire were primarily with National Guard Personnel, I was able to broaden the data set to include active duty military and the key for doing that was in fact the Veterans' History Project because many of the collections here are from Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, not the Reserve or Guard components, but the, the active duty. >> Tom Wiener: Yeah, so weren't aware of our project when you started doing this research? >> Larry Minear: No, no. >> Tom Wiener: How did you find out about us? I'm just kind of curious. >> Larry Minear: [ Laughter ] Well I was in town at one point walking down the street past the Madison building and there was a placard up there on one of those, those information signs with the Veterans' History Project explanation and so I walked into the information center and talked to, I think, Monica Mohindra or one of the staff and that sort of opened the door and then I went back and forth of course repeatedly since. >> Tom Wiener: Good, good, did you encounter, in doing your own interviews with veterans, did you encounter any problems in getting them to talk about their experiences, especially since they were very fresh and might be traumatic? >> Larry Minear: Right, well there were some initial sort of get acquainted issues, when you ask somebody to describe the impact of something like service in Afghanistan on their world view they may wonder, you know, what's, what's the agenda here, is this guy doing a hatchet job on the military and will I be quoted out of context, I sort of worked around that by explaining that this was, this was not pro-war/anti-war this is a fact finding evidence based effort to assess some of the impacts, not only on veterans themselves but on their communities. The basic ground rules that I used were to have the interviews beyond the record with the understanding that if there were, if there were items that we discussed that they were not prepared to have attributed to them, those would be protected so that everything that's in the book is there by permission of the veterans who were being interviewed, with the Veterans' History Project, collections basically every thing is on the record so that wasn't an issue there, but in my own interviews in terms of establishing credibility and confidence, those were the ground rules for proceeding. >> Tom Wiener: Okay. Now you did most of your interviews were, were one-on-one, but tell me, I think, you did focus group at one point? >> Larry Minear: Yeah that was really quite a fascinating session. This was in Bradford, Vermont, we gathered around 6 or 8 people who were either spouses of veterans serving in, in Iraq at that point or mothers or fathers and a couple of people from the community and I basically asked them, you know, what had their experience been with military service in this situation. There were a number of negatives that were expressed. One woman said that her husband had gone to Iraq as kind of a normal person, but that he came back with an attitude and she knew that something had happened there to sort of toughen him up and make it more difficult for him to relate to people. Another woman said that the deployment had put serious strains on her marriage and she was afraid that if her husband was deployed a second time, which he later was, that this would be the end of their relationship and so she concentrated on encouraging him to go with her to some marriage counseling that the defense department was sponsoring in that area. There were, there were some positives around the table as well. One woman said that her son who was 18 when he went into the National Guard and then the active duty deployment was pretty much floundering around. He didn't have any particular objectives. He wasn't a part of the neighborhood doings, but that as a result of having served in this deployment and having acquitted himself well, he had a sense of identity and well being and satisfaction so that he had taken on returning to this community a much stronger interest in civic affairs, more interested in family, family history, participated in parades and neighborhood activities, so for her that was a, that was a strong positive. It was also interesting that the people around the table in the armory where we conducted this had been together as a group for three or four years and had supported each other as the situation warranted, I mean, they were helping each other out in terms of childcare needed because of a missing parent who would normally provide it, they took turns, they took interest in each other's needs such as snow plowing or tending the goats in one case, so one had the feeling that, you know, the wars were something that had impacted not only those on the front lines but the people back home. In fact a number of the interviews both there and elsewhere say that they, the real heroes of the war are the ones who managed to cope at home and to pick up the slack when the breadwinners are elsewhere. >> Tom Wiener: You've kind of hinted at this in a couple of your answers that maybe you can elaborate on to what extent were these citizen soldiers, most of them citizen soldiers prepared for what they experienced? >> Larry Minear: The evidence that I saw was that most were unprepared for the, the extremity of what confronted them either in Afghanistan or Iraq. The Armed Forces, of course, did make an effort to orient people before they were deployed. They would give them, you know, in the rules of engagement and a plastic card that had to do with obligations for protecting civilian populations and for shooting only in self-defense and this kind of thing. There were some rudimentary lessons in Arabic or Pashtu, some do's and don't's, some basics of Islam, and you know, trying to give people the sense the culture that they would find as they were deploying; however, it seems that all the orientation was, was really unequal to the task of preparing people for what they encountered, in fact, many of the interviews comment on, on how the, the violence and the carnage that awaited people were something beyond what they'd experienced before. One fellow who was a police, a policeman said that in his life, in his professional life of 8 or 10 years as a policeman, he had seen three dead bodies and yet in his first week in Iraq he saw 2 or 3 bodies right then, and of course, the violence continued for his total deployment. There was a paramedic from nearby Maryland here, Matthew Miller, who said in his interview, at home, my job is picking up after car crashes but their body parts are still on, here there is so much blood and pieces of bone missing we have to spray our aircraft to get rid of the pieces of bone. So this was a whole, a whole new dimension that the people were not used to. One of the New Hampshire National Guard personnel said, Today was the first day that I shook a man's hand which wasn't attached to his arm and there were lots of incidents like this. Some of you may remember the, the experience of Dana Canedy who is a New York Times writer whose husband Charles King was a First Sergeant in the infantry in Iraq. He had responsibilities for a platoon there and so elected to stay with the platoon since they were under fire rather than coming home for his first child's birth, so Dana decided that she would try to capture this experience for their son Justin in a journal which she kept. Charles her husband was eventually killed in Iraq, but did manage to come home once during his deployment and so her journal says, I expected the man I met at the door to be somehow different from the one who had walked out of it all those months ago, but I had not expected his suffering to show so soon. What he had seen and done over there I could not imagine, but clearly there was no way to emerge from a world in which you are routinely involved in taking and saving lives and not be transformed. So how do you prepare people for the kind of carnage that was a day-to-day reality, it's very hard to do. The normal response of people confronting this kind of situation was to, as they would say, suck it up. If you see violence, if you're involved in violence yourself, you basically sweep it under the carpet and concentrate on the next day's chores, but eventually when you come home you have a lot of accumulated experiences to process, and at that point, it becomes, becomes really difficult to unpack some of this. There were some interesting examples in the, in the interviews of people who found ways of, of doing this, of keeping their sanity even in situations of duress. There was a Connecticut National Guard person who is an avid birder and he took his binoculars and camera along with him and so he made it his business to record, keep track of all the birds species that he saw. He posted these on a website and others in the military who were birders and this fellow's home family and community tracked his birding expeditions avidly from week to week. He ended his, his journal, which was called Birding in Babylon with a comment that he hoped that at some point he'd be able to come back to Iraq, not with a gun but only with his binoculars and camera. So a creative way of keeping your sanity in a very difficult situation, but lots of, lots of issues for which people were not prepared. >> Tom Wiener: Yeah, in general, what, what did your research identify as the positive and the negative aspects of service, and do you have a sense, did you get a sense by the end of your research of the balance between the two? >> Larry Minear: That's really a difficult question, I, thinking back to a book signing that we did on the Cape one of the women who asked me to engrave the book to her son said that she had a 17-year-old son who was seriously considering enlisting and would I think that if she gave him a copy of my book and he read it, that he would be dissuaded from doing so, I thought for a minute and then realized that the answer would be no that there are too many idiosyncrasies, too many people, you know, with their own special agendas, with their your own ways of responding to, to challenges so that, you know, there was no way of predicting how a person would weigh the various factors and risks that they need to take into account. One of the interviews from the Veterans' History Project is with the new Senator from Illinois, Senator Mark Kirk, or about to be Senator Mark Kirk, who was a Commander first in Bosnia and then later in Iraq and he has a very eloquent commentary in which he says, Putting on the uniform changes everything, you make the personal, you make the defense of your country a matter of your own personal responsibility and it changes, changes your outlook altogether, so that was definitely a positive feature. On the other hand, some people treated the uniform differently. There's a project, the Combat Paper Project in Burlington, Vermont, which holds workshops for people around the country, soldiers who are trying to process their experience and the means for doing so is to bring their uniforms, cut them up and make paper out of them and then on the paper, create works of art, put dog tags, put rules of engagement plastic cards or whatever as a way of kind of purging some of the, of the violence and carnage from their, from their lives. So a good example of how the uniform in one case can be an enormously positive thing on the other it's had its, it's something that's much more difficult than and, and problematic. In terms of the other risks and problems of serving in the military, the data that the book conveys is really quite daunting. If I were a 17-year-old reading some of the statistics of casualties, whether killed in action or wounded in action, I would think this would be a disincentive to being involved, although it's not for some. The Pentagon is now describing these two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as the longest running US Military, what would you say.... >> Tom Wiener: Operation. >> Larry Minear: Operations in history and the Pentagon adds with no, with no sign of abating, so the data is chilling 57,000 casualties including dead and wounded so far and presumably no end in sight from what they say. The reaction of people who were in the field is both positive and negative. There were three, three National Guardsmen from New Hampshire who recorded their entire year in Iraq on video tape, they had tapes up in their, some sort of a... >> Tom Wiener: Helmet cams. >> Larry Minear: Helmet cams, right, and then the tapes they gave to a filmmaker Deborah Scranton to put this into an hour-and-a-half long documentary, which was called The War Tapes and which was shown on television and circulated widely, but the three of them had had interesting comments. One of them Steve Pink said: Every once in a while when we were driving down the road or creeping along in a patrol, I would have a recurring epiphany, this is happening and it will have a lasting impact on me for the rest of my life. One of his colleagues who is Specialist Mike Moriarty, he contacted a recruiter after 9/11 and asked to be slotted into an Iraq bound unit. I'm so glad I went, he said, I hated it with God awful passion and will not go back. I've done my part and now it's someone else's turn. And the third one Zack Bazzi, who is a Lebanese-American who had the advantage of speaking Arabic, he says, you're fighting for freedom and everything that's right, it was tough because you have to do some not so nice things sometimes, the only bad thing about the Army is that you can't choose your war. So a lot of different reactions to, to the experience how you establish a balance sheet that applies across the borders is, I think, a difficult challenge. The one constant I think is captured, though by of Lieutenant Colonel Robert D'Amico who said: You change forever when you experience something like this. And so the issue was not whether you change, but how you change in what directions and how you sort of process the changes yourself. >> Tom Wiener: What, what surprised or impressed you the most about what you heard from veterans or what you got out of our collections? >> Larry Minear: Well, there were lots of learnings for me, I, I don't come from a military family, I haven't served in the military myself, and so I was kind of on a voyage of discovery in terms of a new culture and a new, a new set of responsibilities, I think what impressed me perhaps most was the, the professionalism that people brought to the task and the, the sincerity and the, sort of the reflective capacity that comes through in these interviews. These are not people who are picking a fight, they're not trigger happy folks looking for a chance to do a macho number, they are serious, they take the responsibility of their training seriously, they're obviously excesses, which we know about, but I found it quite compelling that and listening to a tape for an hour or so you'd, you'd see somebody really struggling with the questions of how important was what they had done, and you know, what was the long-term impact, so it comes across as a, as a serious undertaking with, with committed people trying to do the best in difficult circumstances. >> Tom Wiener: Tell me a little bit why you think it's important to listen to what veterans have to say about their experiences? >> Larry Minear: Well, I, I guess the main reason would be that veterans who have done their duty for the country in these various parallel situations have done so on our behalf however we may feel about the wars positive or negative, particularly negative, they've been there and they've put their lives on the line. You also see from the domestic side what this has meant in terms of inconveniences and, and stress for spouses and children so just understanding the process, understanding the parallels that they faced is very important. I think as a country we've given the veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq obviously a better reception than those coming back from Vietnam and as a number of people whom I interviewed said, we've learned to separate the warriors from the war in a way that we didn't in Vietnam so there is, there is progress there. At the same time, though the level of, of popular awareness of the issues that this group of soldiers have faced, I think is, is fairly low and we owe it to them and to ourselves to understand it a little bit better. There was a sad situation in which Mike Moriarty, one of these New Hampshire veterans went back to his job in central New Hampshire, the President of the company that he worked for decided to have a Welcome Home Mike Day and so all the workers showed up and Mike came back and complete with pictures of his deployment, which was a very rugged one for him and he started to show his pictures to his colleagues and he found that his colleagues weren't interested, and they said we just want you back but you know, don't, don't describe, don't tell us what you've been into, we're just happy to have you around again, and of course, he was rebuffed and outraged at that started cussing them up out and saying, you know, I've been there on your behalf, you could look at my goddamn pictures if you, if you want to know what I've been up to, but there is a real lack of communication, lack of interest there that, that was very problematic and, of course makes the whole reentry process much more difficult for people who have been in difficult straits. I guess, another reason would be, for listening to veterans, that out of this first experience with post cold war conflicts the global, so-called global war on terror, emerged some serious issues for the future of US Foreign Policy, US Military Policy, and interestingly the veterans comment on these, for example, as a means of getting larger ownership in the public of the wars themselves should we think about reinstating the draft? Would this be a way of increasing accountability? What is the right combination of hard power and soft power? To what extent should you, should you use your heavy weapons and to what extent should you reach out to local communities with civic action programs, hearts and mines activities, what is the proper balance there? What, for example, is the role of international institutions of international norms for fighting wars and should the US under duress respect those? Or is US survival too important to take an international norm abiding approach? Lots of questions in that area, and of course, finally, the costs of the war, the conservative estimate of the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq to date is one trillion dollars, this is on the low end of the estimates, a trillion being of course one thousand billion and a number of people among the veterans themselves are asking is this the best way to expend this kind of money, particularly in a, in a fraught economy back home. So there're lots of interesting perspectives on that. It seems to me, Tom, that in some ways the, the celebration of or commemoration of Veterans' Day this year was a little bit more probing and a little more serious than in earlier years. I had the feeling, I don't know what your experience has been that more people were engaged in Veterans' Day activities, more people are aware now than 3 or 4 years ago of what veterans are contributing and are willing to think through some of these issues. I mean, I think in a way it's, it's the PTSD, the traumatic brain injuries, some of the suicides that are keeping us on the front page, but even beyond that or as we move to some of the longer term questions, I think veterans are in a position to help us think through the alternatives. >> Tom Wiener: Okay, great, I want to throw it open to the audience for questions you may have before we go to the book signing, but before we do that, I wanted to acknowledge a special guest here today who's a former colleague of mine Alexa Potter who was very, very important in helping Larry to do his research for the Veterans' History Project and she's now going for her PhD at George Mason University so welcome back Alexa... >> Larry Minear: Thank you Alexa. Let me also Tom, say that I'd like to extend my thanks to you and your colleagues and including Alexa for the strong support on these issues, I, just a quick comment on. Two weeks ago, I happened to be in London for some meetings and I went to the counterpart of the Veterans' History Project, the Imperial War Museum and to The British Army Museum to check out some oral histories there, and I found that what they have pales by comparison with the resources here and in fact, I was distressed to learn that some of the files that I wanted to read from the British Army Museum Oral Histories comparable to what's available from the VHP were embargoed to 20,039, if you can believe that. >> Tom Wiener: So a hundred years after the start of World War I? World War II? >> Larry Minear: That's right, it would have been, and by contrast with the VHP, you know, not only are there a thousand dossiers available on Iraq and Afghanistan, but some of these are now digitized so that in the comfort of your home, office, you can call up Library of Congress VHP and then watch an interview with some of the people who are quoted in the book. >> Tom Wiener: That's right, about 10% of our collections are fully digitized overall, and we have over a thousand, as Larry said, over, I think we're approaching 1500 collections from the current conflicts. Okay, now, do we have a handheld mike for? Yeah, okay so if you just wait for the handheld mike to get to you, so because we're recording this and we want to make sure your words are on the recording. >> Wonderful program, thank you so much. For those of us, once we've maxed out on the oral history project, we've told everybody we know all about the wonderful project and how to get involved in it. Can you tell us a little bit more about soldiers and the veterans' interviews reactions and what I mean by that is I would guess that it would be good for their mental and/or emotional health and, and obviously their physical health to be talking about this so I'm just guessing what are your views on that and is there like some kind of support group that they can talk to people about it because I'm guessing this may open up some topics that maybe they're not used to talking about and is there some group that they can anonymously discuss that further with in case they need to. >> Larry Minear: Alright, maybe you could, Tom can speak for VHP overall, let me say that I found that many veterans were quite willing to talk about their experience and quite open in sharing their feelings about it. The place where they drew the line in several cases was that they did not want the violence that they themselves had been involved in to be attributed to them particularly for their own children's sake. They didn't want their children to know that they had been involved in military operations, which had killed other children and other civilians as well so there were some limits, there were some veterans though who clearly feel that talking about these experiences simply reopens the issues and doesn't get them anywhere and so, you know, that's another perspective that needs to be taken into account and, and, and respected. I found, I interviewed a number of people who were either army chaplains or social workers in vets centers and they were trying their best to provide support groups for veterans who wanted to think through these issues, I think some progress is being made there and DOD as we now know is funding a number of activities in terms of not only military counseling, I mean counseling by military officials of people in need, but also funding private institutions which are doing that as well. >> Tom Wiener: I'm not sure exactly the point of the question about VHP, but let me try to answer it and then you can correct me if I'm wrong, you know, we're an ongoing project, we don't have a time limit on this project, Congress is very supportive of us, there are thousands of veterans being created every year by the current conflicts so there's an endless supply of veterans to tell their stories. On the one hand, there are some veterans who are very eager to talk about this when they get back, on the other hand, there are many veterans who just want to put it aside or don't want to talk about it or don't want to talk about it for the record, so we're very respectful of that. We don't insist that if when somebody comes back, oh tell us the story right away, while it's still fresh in your mind, and as an example, many of my colleagues know this, we've had interviews with World War II veterans 60 years after the fact and at the end of the hour or hour-and-a-half interview, they'll admit, this is the first time I've ever talked about these experiences to anybody, my wife, my family, anybody. Sometimes it takes that well, that long to process and sometimes it's just because nobody asked. So it's every, every veteran is an individual, we don't make assumptions about whether we should get this story right away Any other questions, comments? Right there hold on for the mike to get to you. >> I have a question on the, the reactions dependent upon the where they were stationed, what type of, you know, how deep into the action they got, whether you're getting different responses for their, some are more willing to talk than others... >> Larry Minear: Right. >> Are you on a large base? Are you, you know, deployed in smaller and smaller groups, what type of activity you've done over there, whether you're seeing different reactions based on different assignments? >> Larry Minear: Right. One of the experiences of the New Hampshire National Guard was that the severity of the mental health problems with which veterans returned was a function primarily of the amount of violence that they'd witnessed. People who had been redeployed more than once had a higher chance of mental health problems than did people deployed only once. What, so there is a correlation between their experience and their situation upon returning. I guess the question would be to what extent does somebody who is more exposed to violence more willing to talk or more actively seeking help on returning. I would have to say that in the 200 or so veterans whom I quote in the book, there's no pattern really that emerges that points in one direction or another, but that would be something to keep an eye on. I think there're some people whose frontline experience makes it more difficult for them to seek help, particularly for some of them as they fear that acknowledging the need for help may affect their career status in the military. So there are a lot of factors at work here, but I'm not exactly sure what the pattern would be. >> Tom Wiener: Any other questions? Comments? Down in the front here. >> Thank you for the presentation. I wanted to pick up on the point about the physical, emotional, mental trauma and I hear and read reports of vets who are coming back and, folks who are sort of analyzing the long-term costs of the healthcare and that would be involved in caring for them, which I think, you know, we would certainly say as a country we owe to them, and in this era of increasing talk about the need to reduce the deficit and budget cutting, did you hear from vets concerns about, you know, whether they would get the medical care and so on that they need well into the future? >> Larry Minear: Hmm... hmm... one of the major issues that vets had in interview after interview was the runaround that they felt they were getting either from the Veterans Administration or from the Department of Defense, I, I think there have been some strides made, but particularly by the Department of Veterans Administration in reducing the backlog of processing claims and applications and so on moving that more quickly, so I think there has been some progress made there, there are concerns though about the capacity of the system to respond to the increased scale of need that's out there. So far, the figure is I guess is that 2.2 million Americans have served in either Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan or Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. Of those 2.2 million, many of them are now coming back and in larger numbers. I noticed that Admiral Mullen the other day said: We're going to have increasing problems and increasing costs as larger numbers are repatriated to the US after these military operations begin to wind down. So I think there is concern among veterans and also among veterans' advocates about whether or not we'll be able to, to find the wherewithal to do properly by this group. It's also true that the costs of caring for many of these people are really enormously high. People coming back without arms and legs, who need round the clock care and rehabilitation and special arrangements to become functioning members of the society again. These are, these are expensive operations and there are, of course, fiscal questions to be raised. >> Larry this sort of takes, takes our breath away and gives us greater admiration for what you do, what you've done, and I wonder if this exercise and your sharing with people like us, raises the question of what is the responsibility of civil society to make sure that unintended consequence possibilities are raised before, whether we're pro or anti-war, but is there a responsibility for those who work in Congress and work in the humanitarian community to be more aggressive in the way we talk about what the costs might be if we use hard force rather than soft force. >> Larry Minear: One of the veterans who was commenting on what he had learned personally from his experience was that the decision to declare war and then to prosecute it was an enormous and complicated, and you know, long ranging, long impact one and his, his bottom line was that policy makers before they reach, before they push the military button, should explore every other available alternative before, before going that route. I think there's quite a lot in the, in the interviews that suggests proceeding with caution, and in fact, many of the troops differentiate between the Afghanistan conflict, which they feel was legitimate and, you know, called for and the Iraq conflict, which they feel was unnecessary and particularly those who were wounded in the Iraq situation are wondering whether this could not have been avoided and their lives could have been, you know, left unshattered. One of the women who is in charge of an Army Medical Group Maria Cochran says on this point: America has to get used to seeing guys on crutches and wheelchairs and without legs. We have to rebuild the means to support these guys and get them back into society. We're going to be seeing a lot more of them. I guess the question for me is, you know, yes we need to respond to this kind of immediate need, but the longer term questions about how you, how you deal with a world in which these forces are out there and how you advance US security in the most effective way that's kind of the core question that needs to be addressed. >> Tom Wiener: I think we'll wrap it up there so that we have time for the book signing and any one-on-one conversations you want to have with Larry. I want to thank everybody for coming and I want to thank Larry for coming to the Library of Congress for this event. >> Larry Minear: Thank you Tom. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.