Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal presents his "On Character" formula at the 2026 New Orleans Book Festival, arguing that convictions multiplied by discipline define character, yet these traits can enable both heroism and atrocities like Hitler's. He rejects binary moral judgments, citing complex figures like Robert E. Lee and Byron de la Beckwith to illustrate how individuals must pressure-test values while society enforces shared norms. Drawing on military experiences ranging from the 2005 Iraq deployment to officer club "jackassery," McChrystal calls for mandatory voting and travel fund restrictions to demand integrity, urging a national focus on adding value rather than seeking fame to prevent societal division. [Automatically generated summary]
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And now retired General Stanley McChrystal discusses his book On Character, exploring the ways personal character and values intersect with leadership.
This discussion was part of the opening event at the 2026 New Orleans Book Festival.
Well, thank you all.
General McCrystal and I are pleasantly surprised to see so many people here.
We're glad that you've been able to join us for what I hope will be an entertaining and informative discussion.
And you're going to hear very little from me, I hope, and an awful lot from the author.
So obviously the book is on character, choices that define a life.
General Stanley McChrystal, over three decades of service to our country at absolutely the highest levels in the United States Army.
And being an Army veteran myself, I want to start by thanking you for your service to our country.
And he wrote a book that's obviously about character, and he did it in a very interesting way.
He reduced his definition of character to a formula.
And so I assume that he was a mathematician at West Point.
He assures me he was not.
But we all know that mass times velocity equals force.
Well, he's teaching us a different formula for character.
And it's convictions times discipline equals character.
And that is also the way he organized the book.
And so, again, I'm thinking he's thinking like an engineer or mathematician.
So if you would, just start by explaining how you came to write the book and actually derive that formula.
Well, thanks, Governor for being up here with me.
And thanks, everybody, for the opportunity.
I think before I do that, I need to sort of center everybody on what you're looking at.
We look like two old guys sitting up here.
And we are.
And we look like two West Pointers sitting up here.
And we are.
But actually, the similarity stops there.
I was in Company B1, 1st Regiment at West Point.
That was the hard regiment.
That was the professional regiment.
The governor was in Company F4.
That was not only in the 4th Regiment, that was at the far end of the 4th Regiment.
And then when we were both paratroopers at the same time, I was in the 1st Brigade, Strikehold, and he was in the 3rd Brigade.
And they were in order of precedence and professionalism.
But then, of course, since leaving the service, he's done okay.
So I'll sort of shut up there and thanks so much for being here, Dave.
Thank you, Dennis.
Then, if I could, I'm going to do two things.
I'm going to first tell you how the book came to be and then tell you what that formula is.
The book came to be because I had written four books before this and I was done.
But you know, you're not done thinking or talking.
So I would sit in our living room.
We have this living room in Alexandria, Virginia, with two chairs where we like to read.
Annie and I will both read and we'll mind our own business and whatnot.
Then, about every 20 minutes, I would have a good idea.
And I would go, Annie, you know, this is how the world ought to be run.
And she would smile and she'd kind of do this and thank you.
And then after a while, I was doing it one day and she says, stop it.
Just write them down.
And I said, nobody wants this.
She says, nah, they might.
Write them down.
So I started writing a series of essays.
And the original topic or title of the book was going to be, What I Think About the Things I Think About.
And I thought it was a brilliant thing.
And he didn't think so.
The publisher didn't think so.
But what we did find is all of the reflections, as we call them, essays, intersect on character.
Because that's what I'm thinking about.
And that's what I've been thinking about increasingly in the last parts of my life.
And I think many of us get to that point.
And so what I did was I didn't come up with any answers, but I identified a lot of useful questions that were for me.
And I found that if I wrestled with those questions, I thought maybe people could wrestle with them for themselves, come up with their own answers.
But having been forced to be an engineer, when John and I went to West Point, you had to be an engineer.
I tell people, I'm an engineer.
Yeah, I had no choice.
And so we had to take math and thermodynamics and mechanics and all that stuff that was never of any value to me in life.
But I came up with a formula for what I think character is.
And it is convictions times discipline equals character.
And what I mean by that is, convictions are the things we believe.
And they're not the things we believe casually that somebody tells us and we accept.
They're the things we've thought about, the things we've pressure-tested, the things that we are willing to live to or maybe die for.
But those aren't enough because you could have great convictions, but if you don't have the discipline and the courage to live to them, they mean nothing.
Because anything times zero is zero.
And so the point I try to make through my life, what I learned is it is important to think and develop the thoughts and ideas and values, but maybe even more important is to find in ourselves the discipline individually to live to them.
And it's hard, but then as a society, to demand them of ourselves and each other.
And what do you think the biggest misconception is?
You know, so for example, when I started reading the book, I was wondering whether the premise of the book was going to be either you're a person of good character or you're not, and there's not much that you can do about that.
That is very much not the book.
But what do you believe the biggest misconception is?
Yeah, I think that may be at the heart of it.
I think there is no definition of good character.
In fact, we step back and say, well, what are we talking about?
Heraclitus said, character is our fate.
Tom Paine during the Revolution said, reputation is what men think of us.
Character is what gods and angels know of us.
It's the essence of who we are.
It's reflected in what we do, not in what we say or what we write or what we put on our sweatshirt.
It's what we actually do.
And in many cases, we can be surprised and disappointed.
We can see someone of What we think is a certain character, and then their behavior is incongruent with that.
Sometimes we see it in ourselves.
And that's when I think we have to give deep thought to it.
I think also the idea that there is a good character or a bad character is incorrect.
If we talk about strong convictions and strong discipline, we're talking Adolf Hitler.
We're talking other leaders who have done horrific things but had the extraordinary ability to hold certain ideas and to follow them rigorously.
And of course, that can be as bad as good character can be good.
So I think what I consider character is it's individual for each of us.
We have to decide what we think our convictions are.
We need to pressure test those with society.
And I think society needs to decide what our shared beliefs and values are, what our norms are, and we need to demand those.
And so I think character becomes something that becomes an objective for each of us.
None of us, in my view, I'm 71 now, and my character is still significantly lacking in what I'd like it to be.
But I think one of the best things about this point in my life is I know that.
Every time I'm not that, I know that.
And I have this nagging feeling, uh-uh, don't do that.
And I think that pushes me in the right direction.
I think that's true of all of us if we think about it.
I think the worst thing is if you put your character off to the side, say, for this period of my life, I've got to ignore character because I'm accomplishing X. I'm making this money or I'm doing this or doing Y. If character's not intertwined in what we do, what we do is not going to come out the way we hope it will.
And, you know, listening to General Crystal just now, thinking back to our alma mater, we are taught from the very first day there to choose the harder right instead of easier wrong and to especially do it when nobody's watching.
And I think that gets discussed in your book several times.
He has a great and interesting way of organizing the book and having small snippets all the way through.
And of course, he's got three parts.
And they range from everything from his wife, his child, his grandchildren, Gettysburg, Afghanistan.
I mean, whatever you can imagine.
Jackassery, I had never used that terminology before, but I like it.
I think I'm going to bring that home with me.
Military Doctrine in Iraq00:15:34
But just talk about the way that you chose to do that.
And I know you mentioned this briefly, but how that worked and evolved into a book on character, because that's not what it started out to be.
It started out to be a series of reflections or essays because Annie wouldn't listen to me anymore.
And which, you know, talks about her character.
But it was fun because what it allowed me to do was not try to be stuck to a set thesis.
I could just write about anything and then see if it fit, see if it really connected.
And in many cases, what I found was I would, if you asked me what I thought about issue X or idea Y, I would say this is what it is.
But then when I sat down to write it, I'm making an argument to myself.
And I found often that wasn't what I thought.
What I thought was actually far more complex than that.
And what seemed like easy reflections, in fact, took months to pour over.
And some of them had been rewritten 30 times, not because of the prose, but because my actual thinking started to clarify, started to come into better focus.
Some that I thought that I just thought I'd get off my chest, like the one that the governor mentioned, it was on officers' clubs.
And when we got into the Army, the officers' clubs were a big deal.
And they were designed for military installations, usually when there wasn't much off-post.
Fort Bragg, a great big place, had 13 officers' clubs, a whole bunch of sergeants or NCO clubs, and a whole bunch more soldiers' clubs.
And they were places to gather, and alcohol was less expensive and all these things.
So as you can imagine, a lot of weird stuff happened.
At the officers' club on Sunday morning brunch, there would be the Dowagers and distinguished retirees would go to brunch and they'd be all dressed up and it'd look great.
But then Friday and Saturday night in Willie's, which was the bar, it was absolute pandemonium.
And so that's where I brought the term jackassery out because that was the only good description for it.
And you say, well, ah, that's just terrible.
I mean, one night we're at the club and I go to the restroom and Annie's an attractive young girl and another officer comes up to her and goes, well, hey, good to meet you.
And she just naturally friendly, hey, good to meet you.
Finally comes out and she says, well, I'm married.
And he goes, is he here?
And so it was that kind of stuff on steroids.
And in some ways it was wrong and stupid.
And in some ways it wasn't.
In some ways conversations got had, relationships got made between people.
A major would talk to a first lieutenant in a way they might not do in the unit.
They would tell a story and they'd, you know, after two beers, they'd suddenly say, hey, I went through that.
Shut up and listen.
And those kinds of things, you sanded off the hard edges of a military hierarchy and you created an organization that had a tighter bond.
Now, do I think you have to drink to have a great army?
No.
But I think that when you have something like that, it had a contribution to the value of the culture of the organization.
It needed to be correctly controlled.
But I think often we talk about something in binary terms.
This is good, this is bad.
And in the cases of officers' clubs, it was both.
There was some really bad stuff, and there was some value in it.
And so whenever we throw out the baby with the bathwater, we got to know we've done that.
So I was engaged in a little jackassery a few times at the officers' club.
And sometimes the next time you see the soldier that you were talking to and developing a relationship with may be in the middle of a training exercise at Fort Polk at JRTC whenever you bump into that individual.
And it helps.
Just like in ordinary life, relationships matter.
So General Crystal has commanded at the highest levels and in the most demanding circumstances.
And I want to talk about character development and but do it in those really intense high-pressure moments when you've got a mission and it may be to find Zarkowi, who was leading al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That was his job.
That was his job.
He commanded the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC.
And he had the best soldiers, the best SEAL teams.
He had the best aviators.
I say Task Force 160, but it's something else.
The Nightstalkers.
Yeah, the Nightstalkers.
But so it's the most important, but it also might be the hardest time.
And I'm asking this question, I'm not positing a theory.
It might be the hardest time to be true to your character is in those really intensely pressure-filled moments like that.
And I just want to ask you to comment on it.
Sure.
There are, of course, a lot of pressures that come on your character.
I'll describe one of them.
You know, the military, particularly in a peacetime environment, rewards people who do what doctrine says.
Doctrine is sort of the way of doing things, and it's based on history and what's worked before.
And so if a military commander follows doctrine, they sort of can't be criticized if they do it reasonably effectively.
The problem is sometimes doctrine isn't what wins.
And in the 1980s, the U.S. military created this training center called the National Training Center, and then we created a Joint Readiness Training Center.
They're the most realistic training environments ever crafted.
They use laser technology and tracking so that they could watch units perform and they could evaluate you and improve through that.
And of course it revolutionized training and improved the U.S. military extraordinarily.
But it had a negative side effect that wasn't really understood.
When you went into the after-action review, where they dissected your operation, particularly the commander's performance, they didn't look at closely whether you won or lost.
They looked whether you had followed established doctrine.
So we got this situation where if you followed all the things and did it right, but your unit lost, the evaluators would go, well, you know, the opposing force is really good.
They've got an advantage because they train here all the time.
You did all the right stuff, so good job.
And what it did was it created an entire generation of leaders who were shaped to do that.
Then we went into Afghanistan and Iraq.
And certainly the first part of the invasion against what was there of Saddam Hussein's army, it sort of applied, but after about the first week, none of it applied.
Everything had to be based upon the very unique situations on the ground and the constantly evolving situation.
So we ran into a percentage of our leaders who were unable to make that change.
They did what they had been rewarded for.
They were tall, they were well-spoken, their teeth were straight, so they looked like good commanders.
But they weren't effective in combat.
And yet we as an organization had a tough time with that.
Because here they're doing everything that looks and feels and smells right.
They ought to be winning, but they're not.
And so you start to get in a question of there is, okay, what do you do about that?
Because you are now taking a detour from what the culture of the military and the habit and all of that stuff is, and you've got to push against that.
And that became one of the things that I found one of the biggest challenges.
It wasn't a hard decision to make because once I said, you got to do what it takes to win.
We're going to do whatever that is, regardless of whatever tradition or doctrine says.
But you're pushing against an organization that doesn't necessarily embody that.
We hit one part in the war.
It was the late spring of 2005.
And for those of you in the timeline, we invaded in the spring of 2003.
At first it was going to be easy.
We were just going to turn over the government to a new government and drive out.
And that was, of course, ridiculous.
By the fall of 2003, Iraq was circling the drain.
And not only was there a rising insurrection on the part of the people, inside it there were some really good terrorist groups.
One emerged, known as later as Al-Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was really good, and they were able to pull in real support.
And so they became the existential threat to the mission and the future of Iraq.
And so starting in early 2004, that became the thing that was going to kill us if we don't defeat that.
All of 2004 was a train wreck.
There was the fight in Fallujah.
There was that we had stood up the Iraqi army, it fell apart.
Second fight in Fallujah.
Then we got into 2005 and the violence kept going up.
Iranian involvement was helping the insurgents at that point.
By the late spring of 2005, it really looks bad.
In fact, al-Qaeda in Iraq had seized terrain, which terrorist groups normally can't do.
But they had seized terrain from along the Syrian border, a place called Al-Khaim, and they had seized it down the Euphrates River Valley that goes down to Baghdad.
And so they control a big swath of Iraq.
And the Commanding General, the four-star, I'm commanding the Joint Special Operations Command, counter-terrorist forces, theoretically going after al-Qaeda and Iraq's leaders.
He says, we need you to become the main effort, and we need you to go out to fight vicinity al-Kaim.
And I said, hey, General Casey, we're not an organization to be the main effort.
We're not designed for that.
He says, I need you to do that.
I don't have other forces to do that.
I need you to do that.
So, of course, what he needed, I was going to do.
We had one-third of our force in the fight already.
And when I say that, the SEAL Team 6 has three squadrons, Delta Force has three squadrons, the Rangers have three battalions, and we rotated them, one back in the United States on alert for other things around the world, one in training and preparation, and one in the fight.
And when they're in the fight, typically for 90 days, they fight every night, every single night.
And so it's this incredibly compressed and intensive period.
But he says, I need you to do that.
And so I made the decision to deploy two-thirds of the force into the fight.
Now, that was unsustainable over time.
You go six to nine months like that, the force just falls apart.
These are people at the pace that you're doing.
And yet, I made the decision to deploy two-thirds of the force because I thought if we didn't pull this off, we were going to lose anyway.
But I was Gambling with things that were not mine to gamble, really.
It was the nation's counterterrorist force.
And I theoretically could have broken it completely.
And the thing about the counterterrorist force is it's not like another military unit.
It takes about 10 years to build an operator.
And so when you take casualties, it's not like you go get another private and move them into the squad.
It's this incredible effect.
And so it's the spring, and I make the decision to go to two-thirds, and there's some skepticism in the force.
One of my guys named it Operation Snake Eyes, you know, to get my attention.
But we immediately took casualties.
We started taking casualties.
And again, as I tell you, when we take casualties in there, it's not numbers, it's names.
You know them all.
And so we started taking casualties right there in May 2005.
And so the whole thing is: all right, do we stick with this?
And I got some incredible support from a couple of subordinate commanders who were more supportive than normally a subordinate would be because they could see it, they could feel the pressure.
And they would come up and they'd say, okay, boss, this is it, stick with it.
We got it.
We'll do it.
And I'm sure they had all the doubts I did.
But those are the times when it would have been easy to do one-third, one-third, and stick with that because nobody could criticize me for that.
That's our doctrine, that's what we do.
But I don't think we'd have had the outcome that we had to have.
After about six months, we did get the outcome we needed, but it was not at all sure.
And so those moments are the times when you're testing your judgment, you're testing your courage, you're testing your relationships with people.
And we all go through them in life, but sometimes they just crystallize in a way that sticks with you.
So he, well, that has application for all of us at some point, and maybe at many points, several points in our lives.
I'm listening to him talk about that, and all I can think about was March of 2020 when COVID started.
And I'm the governor, and there is no field manual in my desk that says a word about COVID.
So some similar dynamics.
Real quickly, you taught me something in the book that I didn't know, and I consider myself a student of history: how one person can be a hero and also a villain.
Robert E. Lee as Hero00:03:57
And would you talk about De La Beckwith there?
Because I did not know that about him.
Yeah.
In 1942, a young man from not that far from here enlisted in the U.S. Marines and he went to Guadalcanal and he served bravely.
And then he went to Tarawa and he was shot.
He survived and came out and he left the service a hero.
And if we go with the idea of the greatest generation, he was absolutely reflective of the greatest generation.
Young man went and served when needed, did it admirably.
20 years later, he took a bolt-action rifle, the same model that Sergeant Alvin York had used to win a Medal of Honor, and he shot Med Gerevers in his front yard.
Same man, Byron de la Beckwith.
Now, I bring that up because the duality of it.
Is he no longer a hero?
No, I think he is a hero.
I mean, he did something that classified himself as a hero.
Is he also a murderer?
Yep, he's a murderer.
And for us to be able to, now he's a very extreme example of it.
But for us to be able to hold those conflicting realities at the same time, I think is critical.
I've done some writing in another book on Robert E. Lee.
I live about 75 meters from his boyhood home in Alexandria, Virginia.
I went to Washington Lee High School.
I went to the same college as Robert E. Lee.
I lived in Lee Barracks.
And when we were at West Point, there were other statues to Eisenhower, Patton, and others, but Lee was different.
You could try to be those guys.
You couldn't be Robert E. Lee.
He was in another category.
And the reality was we held him on that pedestal, and then someone would say, well, you know, he is the enemy general who has killed the most American soldiers in combat in the American Army.
You sort of recoil from that.
And then you go, he tried to split the nation that his forebears had done so much to help craft.
And you go back on that.
And so you try to hold those competing ideas.
And where I come down is Robert E. Lee is not a villain.
He's a human being.
I think he made some bad decisions.
But I think we all do.
And so I think when we look at people, I think the ability, I think it was Frederick Douglass who was talking about the Scottish poet Robert Burns.
He says we have to learn to take the good and ignore the bad, or we're going to miss too much good in our society.
And so we've got to be able to look at people and do that.
You know, one of the themes of the book is to think, and very appropriate since this is a book festival, to read and to ponder and decide which beliefs you want to commit yourselves to.
And you were just talking about Robert E. Lee.
There's another book, Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Saudiel, that I'm just going to recommend to anybody who, like me, was raised in the South in the 70s, and you kind of had this one idea about that.
Maintaining Relationships00:03:59
You really need to expand your horizons and figure out a little bit more.
Another interesting thing that you talked about is how relationships, and particularly your marriage to Annie, require maintenance.
Well, in the Army, we talk about preventive maintenance checks and services, PMCS.
I'm actually, Donna and I are going to go away for the weekend, and I'm going to tell her we're going to do a little maintenance.
But you have a way of presenting things that are unique to you, but really speak to everybody who reads the book.
And I just want to commend you for it and ask you to explain that just a bit.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, everybody's life is real.
It's kind of quirky.
And sometimes we try to put up this external veneer that says this is where life is.
Our marriage is perfect.
Our kids all go to Ivy League schools and all this kind of stuff.
And that's not by average accurate.
And, you know, even our relationships, Annie and I met when we were, I don't know, 19 or so.
We've been married 49 years.
And I tell people, you know, you meet, you fall in love, you get married, you live happily ever after.
That's absolutely incorrect.
You meet, you fall in love, you get married, you work on it every day, or you're not going to live happily ever after.
Now, she takes a lot of maintenance.
I mean, I got to keep tuning her up to do it in the right way.
But it is so important to recognize that having somebody who also does the same for you, because after every time I talk or we do anything, she will tell me what I did right and wrong.
And she will do it in very clear terms.
And sometimes it irritates the life out of me.
But it's always right, and it's always helpful.
And then we live next door to our three granddaughters.
My son lives next door to us with my daughter-in-law.
And so I got these three granddaughters, 11, 9, and 6, three little blonde-haired girls, Emmy, Lou, Elsie, and Daisy.
And they're kind of the center of our lives.
They're absolutely wild, you know, heathen.
They're all completely different.
But they just give us something to focus on.
I mean, I've got my business and we've got all these other things.
But the reality is the center of that family of my son, my daughter-in-law, Annie, and I revolves around those three girls.
Part of it's logistics to get them to all the stuff that they do.
Part of it is listening and dealing with them.
And part of it is reminding us what the point of this all is.
You know, because my granddaughters, they ask me when I'm going to die.
And they're not shy to do that.
You know, every Disney movie, no grandfather's ever survived a Disney movie.
So they are well aware that, and my second oldest was in our townhouse, and she goes, Granddaddy, what are you going to do with your house when you die?
This is Elsie, and I said, well, I thought I'd give it to you.
She goes, that'll work.
So, I mean, there are things about life that are your character at the end of the day.
Yeah.
And one of the most important things in the book, I think, is your call for at present.
And I happen to, you know, I think every generation thinks that things are worse than or, you know, whatever.
Politicians and False Positions00:04:03
But it just seems to me, especially right now in our country, that the time is right for a national conversation about character and what it means and what it doesn't mean.
And how an amoral person can't really have conviction.
But you call for a national conversation, and I don't want to editorialize.
I want you to explain what you mean by that and why is now the right time.
Well, you've said exactly what's in my mind.
I feel badly being a baby boomer in that we are leaving the world with this particular condition right now, our country particularly, because it is badly divided and we've got some really negative habits.
And this is where I get very, very serious.
I think that we have stopped using character as a required metric.
You know, how many times have you watched some, I'm going to pick on politicians, but because they do it most, but it's true of others, watched a politician on TV looking at a camera saying something that you know is untrue.
And you know they know it's untrue.
And you know they know you know it's untrue.
And there's the damnedest thing.
We have this agreement that because they're a politician and they've got to support a certain thing, that that's okay.
And we say, well, he just, or she just lied.
Well, yeah, but that's what politicians do.
No, stop it.
That's not what anybody does.
And if we look at what people do, they'll have a position and they will hold that position for a long time and then the wind will blow or a new leader will come in and suddenly they will flip-flop on that position and they will act as though nothing ever happened.
Now if new information comes, conditions change, we all should change our views.
But the reality is that's not what's happening.
We have people who are arguing for or justifying or excusing things we know are dead wrong because they think it serves greater interests.
And I just have zero tolerance for that.
And I think it is a very, very bad habit.
If we say, well, we are going to elect Vito Corleone to be our leader because, yeah, he's got a dark side, but he gets stuff done, then that's what we get.
And it's our responsibility.
And our young people are watching it and they're disgusted.
And what they're doing is they're dropping out of it.
They're saying system doesn't work.
Too much money.
Too much stupid stuff.
I put in the, I couldn't help myself, I put one reflection in the book that talks about things you could do to change our politics just kind of top of my head.
One of them was mandatory voting.
Make everybody vote.
You can go in and vote for nobody.
You have a box for that.
But you don't get to not vote.
And therefore, you take away voter ID, you take away turnout, you take away all that stuff.
You probably take away the need for a huge percentage of the money.
You do things like rank choice voting.
You do things in Congress like making them stay in D.C. There are a lot of ways.
Joe Manchin's a friend of mine.
Five-Minute Democracy Moments00:06:45
Yeah.
Joe Manchin's a friend.
He said just take away their travel funds.
That's one.
Another is to do a meeting at noon on every Saturday for five minutes just to make them.
But whatever I'm saying is, if you can't, we're trying to run the government on three days a week.
Most of them arrive Tuesday and leave Thursday.
I don't know how many of you run businesses, but three days a week wouldn't run mine.
And so I think there are a number of things that are practical that we can do, and they loop back to the idea of character.
Because I don't think character is just this lofty idea we should sit at book festivals and say, wouldn't it be nice if we had more character?
No.
We'll have more character when we demand it.
This is a supply and demand issue.
If we demand it, we'll get it.
If we don't, we'll get what we've got.
So we're getting down to about the five-minute mark.
There were several other things that I wanted to talk about.
And we will for a minute or two.
Explain your connection, fascination, attraction to Gettysburg.
Yeah.
I go up to the battlefield of Gettysburg fairly regularly and taken the football team at Yale that I work with every year for about the last decade and not to teach them military history, but to teach them to a place where they can reflect on something maybe slightly different.
The thing that's magic about Gettysburg is the ground speaks to you.
It's one of those battlefields where you can stand on it and what happened is pretty apparent.
And for people with a military background, it's very apparent because it's trained, but for almost anybody.
Then there are all the monuments that are put.
Most of the monuments are not put by one side.
It's not like Saddam Hussein's victory monument that he put up in Baghdad that had all these helmets from killed Iranian soldiers that was victory.
The monuments at Gettysburg never claim that.
They typically say, this is by this unit, this is where we were, this is the casualties we suffered.
All they're asking to do is to be remembered for having done their duty.
And so when you look at the place, on the one hand, it's a monument to people doing what they were asked to do.
Most of the soldiers by that point weren't draftees.
Most of them were volunteers.
And yet, about 160,000 soldiers showed up there.
Tremendous number of casualties because they thought it was important and they thought it was their duty.
So on the one hand, it's soaring.
You take people, take people, young people.
This is what we should live to.
This is representative of one of the great characteristics we want of our society.
But you have to flip the other side too.
We tried to commit national suicide.
Those two armies tried to destroy each other.
They tried to kill as many of the others as they could.
And I think what we need to understand is that was not a one-off thing that happened because the planets aligned in a strange way.
It happened because the society got divided.
People got passionate.
And people started thinking that what they wanted was more important than the big idea.
And if we think it couldn't happen again, I think we are mistaken.
Look around the world.
It happens all the time.
If we think we are that special that it couldn't happen again, we need to read more history.
So I think Gettysburg does the two things simultaneously.
And I think it's important we focus on it to remember that.
So we've got an audience here.
We've got people who've read the book, people going to read the book.
If there was one takeaway from the book that you would want people to at least consider incorporating into their daily lives, what would that be?
Yeah, I think it's the centrality of character.
I mean, I was taught character by my parents who were great role models.
West Point tried to hammer it into us, and to a degree we're successful, but it takes a while.
I think as I get later in life, and the last few chapters, I talk about that.
I talk about getting old, I talk about...
Talk about dying.
Yeah, talk about dying.
And I think the centrality of character, you know, whatever money we make or rank we attain or fame we briefly have, all of that, as Marcus Aurelius reminded us, is going away.
Even the people that admire us when we're alive, they're going to die too.
And so the reality is we should be what we should be for one reason only.
because it's the right thing.
And we should think of it that way, but we also think about everything else we do is dwarfed by the value of that.
If you think about how you want to be remembered, I want to be remembered as someone who would, when I was there, had added value.
It was better when I was there than when I wasn't.
And if all of us find some metric like that, then I think we suddenly can put a lot of other things into perspective.
Thank you, General Crystal, and thank all of you all for being here.
I was super nervous.
I got out of the Army as a captain, and the idea of moderating a discussion with a four-star general just, I've been nervous for weeks.
But we've got five seconds left.
I think you did a wonderful job, and I thank you so much for your service.
God bless you, Omar.
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