Paul Rieckhoff, author of “Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America,” and founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, joins Dr. Oz for an intimate interview about his experience in the military, and details the problems returning service members face.Paul himself worked on Wall Street before being deployed to Iraq, and he shares advice on how to combat the rippling effects of mental illness that 1 in 3 vets struggle with. To Paul, this issue is where we can all unite - in caring for each other and building community, regardless of politics. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
9-11 started and I kind of got yanked out of my fancy, happy, comfortable life on Wall Street, and the world had been turned upside down.
And then I'd go to Iraq and try to put myself back in my boots again so people could understand what was it like to walk through the streets, what was it like to be in a Humvee worried about those roadside bombs.
And then when I came home, it was in a rough shift, and I was in Baghdad one week and in Brooklyn the next.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Our guest today, Paul Rykoff, has written a wonderful book called Chasing Ghosts, a soldier's fight for America from Baghdad to Washington.
And he, as he walked in the room, introduced himself as the Iraq guy.
which I think comes up by default, because he's been interviewed a lot and appeared on many of the nation's top programs.
He was also voted America's Best and Brightest of 2004 by Esquire magazine.
And I know that is a real one.
That's an award given to the top leaders, the top future leaders of this country.
So it's a predictor of who's doing the best.
And it's reserved, I thought, for people under the age of 40, isn't it?
I think that's right, yeah.
Because I won it when I was 40 or 39, it was a while back.
But it's a very thoughtful process.
So they actually looked at you and they decided, okay, what about this guy, Paul?
He's so cool, so interesting, so different, and offers this nation so much that makes him worthy of this award.
And they picked you, which is reflective of the work that you've done.
You're Executive Director and Founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Which is the first and largest organization of veterans of the war on terror.
And I think it's wonderful to have your voice heard because you articulate, without putting a partisan spin on things, what the plight is of folks serving the station, what their needs are, and how we can make their lives back again, what they were, if they've been hurt, and if not, take advantage of what you've learned.
Thanks for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
So why'd you go into the military?
I mean, you really could have gone a day and you walk away.
Amherst is one of the top schools in the country, you know, impossible to get into.
It turns out, folks, you can do just about anything.
I really wanted to give something back to my country.
I know it seems kind of trite.
Now folks hear it a lot, but I really had a culture of service in my family.
My father had been drafted during Vietnam.
My grandfather did three years during World War II in the South Pacific, and they had done their part, and I felt like Despite the fact that I had gone to a good school and I had these tremendous opportunities, because I didn't have to serve didn't mean that I shouldn't serve.
So I wanted to give something back.
And coming out of a place like Amherst, where they act like the sun shines out of every orifice, I wanted to go somewhere really hard.
I wanted to challenge myself and looked at the prospect of jumping out of airplanes and blowing stuff up.
And I think like a lot of young guys in this culture...
It was appealing to me.
So I really wanted to try something different.
And this was kind of the extreme of all extreme sports, I guess.
I don't mean to downplay it, but it's a tremendous challenge.
And really, I wanted to give something back.
This was pre-9-11.
This was 1998. So folks were looking at me even more strangely than I think if I left Amherst now and went into the military.
But I figured I could go to the corporate world.
I could go to law school.
I could do all that stuff later.
But while my body had still held up, that was the time to do it.
In 98, did you think you'd actually see combat, though?
I didn't.
You know, I didn't at all.
To be honest with you, I kind of worried that I wouldn't.
I worried that our generation would be a peacetime army and the farthest I would go would be Georgia.
And then when I came out of basic training, Bosnia and Kosovo were starting to kick off and that was a prospect and we didn't know if we'd end up going there.
But I never thought I'd go to Iraq.
I never thought I'd go to the Middle East.
It wasn't on my horizon by any means.
In retrospect, I know this is a difficult question to answer, was it a mistake to go into the military?
No, not at all.
I mean, despite the Iraq War, and despite my concerns about it, and despite where we are now, I'm really proud of my service, and I'm glad I went into the military.
I learned a lot about myself.
I definitely learned a lot about leadership, and I met some amazing people.
And I think, you know, you don't choose your war.
You get to sign up for the military, and the public policy, and leadership, and the American people ultimately choose where to send you.
But I got a lot out of the military, and I think it's going to serve me for the rest of my life.
So you just actually, before I get to the organization that you created, walk us through the tours of duty and when and why.
How does that sort of work?
Because I think for a lot of Americans, they don't understand how the military really works.
And this whole concept of re-upping and folks getting re-enlisted is not something that's self-evident.
It happened in Vietnam and obviously in past wars as well, but in your case it's specific.
So 98 you enlist.
Right, 98 I enlist and I spent about a year on active duty going to different training schools.
And then I came back to the civilian world and transferred over to the National Guard.
I started a job working on Wall Street and from 99 to 2001 would work a day job as a Wall Street guy.
And on weekends and during the summer for a few weeks I'd go train in the woods with the military.
And then I quit my job about four days before September 11th.
I figured I was never coming back downtown to the financial world and I was going to go back to school or do something else entirely and then 9-11 happened and my National Guard unit got activated to go downtown to ground zero.
So from 9-11 on I was kind of on and off active duty and I got the call to go to Iraq in January of 2003. We left a few months later and I spent about a year in central Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division and 1st Armored Division.
So for me It was close to average, about a three- to four-month train-up here in the States, and then we did about a year on the ground in Iraq.
Now they've got it to be a little bit more standardized, where you do about six months here if you're a National Guardsman or a Reservist for train-up, and then you do 12 to 15 months in-country.
The active duty generally gets a little bit less time home in between deployments, but it's started to get a little more standardized now.
And you didn't re-enlist a third time.
No, I'm still officially in the National Guard.
I'm an officer, so unless you resign your commission, theoretically they can call you back until you're 55 or 60 years old.
So that call could always come, especially because I'm an infantry officer.
So specialized folks, infantry, medical doctors, other folks that have specialized, it's been tougher to get out because those folks are in high demand right now.
I just have a question, and you probably know the answer, but it's very confusing to me why National Guard is over in Iraq.
Aren't they supposed to be the ones in little boats making sure that drugs aren't getting into the country?
They are.
That's a Coast Guard.
Well, National Guard are domestic, I thought.
For the most part, it's been that way until now.
So why isn't the Army over there?
Why is the National Guard there?
Well, I think the bottom line is they don't have enough.
The active duty military wasn't big enough to handle the demands on the force that they're asking now.
So about 25% of our combat forces that are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been National Guard.
When I left in 2004, about half of our force in Iraq at that time, just because of the way the rotation schedule was going, was National Guard and Reserve.
Really?
Yeah, so they're bearing a huge part of this load.
And I think for them, it's especially tough.
You know, you're leaving your civilian job, whether you're a bus driver or a teacher or a doctor, and you drop everything for 18 months.
And you leave your family behind, you leave your job behind, and you really shift gears in a pretty abrupt way.
Like I'll tell you, for physicians, it's really a challenge.
Our chief resident, Mac Baketa, who's just a wonderful surgeon, finished his training, normally would have engaged in practice, and he had to take off.
Half a year.
Which, if you're in the middle of a young practice, kills the practice.
Absolutely.
People aren't going to wait around for you to come back for your National Guard deployment.
That's right.
And that's not that they don't care about you, but they need surgery.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's true, especially in small businesses, it's the same sort of struggle if you're a student in school, you know, getting pulled out mid-semester and coming back a year and a half later.
I used to work in finance.
You know, being out of the market for a year and a half, you're really behind the curve when you get back.
So it's a tremendous challenge for those folks.
You go to tours.
The second one in central Baghdad.
And you come back.
What stimulated you both to write the book, but I guess more importantly, create the organization Veterans of the Wars on Terror?
It was really, I think, just part of my processing the entire experience.
When I was in Iraq, I was writing letters to my girlfriend about once a week.
And I'd asked her to turn them into emails and blast them out to all our friends because I just couldn't write letters to everyone.
I just didn't have enough time in the day.
We were working 20, 22 hours a day and just constantly out on patrol and doing operations.
So I'd send her a letter and say, you know, turn this into an email, let everybody know I'm alive.
And every week or so she'd send it out to a list, and the list got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And by the time I got home from Iraq in 2004, there were a few hundred people on the list.
And these little stories, vignettes that I started to tell about what I saw in Baghdad or what happened on a day started to kind of proliferate around this community.
And when I got back, folks said, you know, you should put these all into a book.
And I didn't really, I wasn't interested in throwing my dirty laundry out onto a book and having folks, you know, understand all the inner workings of our unit.
But it was at a point in 2006 where I really wanted people to understand what was happening.
I felt like they heard a lot from the politicians and they heard a lot from the talk show hosts, but they hadn't heard from the Joes on the ground.
And these young folks who are really in the mix every day, I think, really haven't had a voice in the national discussion.
And when I also got home, it was also a struggle to see my guys dealing with these issues.
They were coming home and dealing with being deployed as National Guardsmen, struggling to regain their jobs, trying to stay in school, dealing with mental health issues.
We had one soldier We've got some more questions after the break.
So let's drive into this a little bit, because that's really why we want to share on the show more than any other reason.
We've been thinking a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder, about the physical and mental ills that folks who have risked their lives for this country bring back to this country.
And again, I want to be really clear with all the listeners about this.
This is not about whether the war is good or bad.
Yeah.
As a physician and a healer, that's a secondary issue for me.
Absolutely.
And we can have that discussion offline.
But the fundamental opportunity, I think, in this program is to talk a little bit about what we can do to help folks who have risked their lives for us.
So when you created the organization and started writing Chasing Ghosts, Paul, you started thinking through, I guess, some of the challenges that we all have if we've done things that are way outside the mainstream of life and have to reengage the mainstream of life.
Give us a couple of vignettes, perhaps the ones that you shared through your girlfriend, with friends on the web, or even in the book, that exemplify what it was like to risk your life in Iraq or Afghanistan and then come back to this country.
Sure.
One story that I always go back to is a time when we were operating in central Baghdad, and I guess it's fitting...
Given that you're here, it was in Medical City.
We were in the largest medical complex in all of Iraq and in all of Baghdad.
It was where the emergency room was.
There was a dental hospital there.
And our unit, our platoon, was responsible for the security for that entire hospital complex.
And one day we had an ambulance come in, and this was at a time in 2003, 2004, ambulances were coming in every day.
There were civilian casualties, Iraqi police casualties, some from American bullets, some from the sectarian violence that started to emerge, some from the criminal elements.
And a local iman, a local religious leader, came in with a gunshot wound to his head.
And there were busloads.
His entire, basically, congregation came to the hospital, and we had almost a riot on our hands because they were so concerned about this leader.
And we watched him literally struggle on the edge of life and death while this medical complex, filled with doctors who were underpaid and under fear of personal risk themselves, Terrible working conditions, not a great level of sanitation or anything else.
And we're stuck in the middle of this point, trying to regulate this crowd, trying to protect the doctors, trying to make sure mortars don't fall in the middle of the surgery.
And I think for me and my soldiers, I told this story about this I recall the story, I watched a holy man die tonight.
And my soldiers and I were stuck in this middle spot trying to provide security and literally watching this influential guy die in front of his community.
And we felt like we had a real window into their medical process, into their grieving process, into the violence that started to erupt.
And it showed how we could have an opportunity to try to help folks, to try to keep this medical complex running.
But at the same time, it showed how difficult it was for us, how handcuffed we were.
We didn't have magic wands in our rucksacks.
We couldn't fix all the problems with the electricity and with the religious differences that started to emerge.
So stories like that, I think, helped me kind of show how complex it is and how difficult it is for those soldiers on the ground.
Dr. Oz, you made a great point.
It's not about how you feel about this war.
Whether you're for this war or against this war, Republican or Democrat, what our organization, IAVA, is focused on is trying to give people a way to take care of those who've served.
It doesn't matter.
We all have a moral obligation to take care of those folks.
Whether it's post-traumatic stress disorder or job training or educational benefits, it's the one area that I think this country can unite around, especially in this time when we're so polarized.
Taking care of the folks after the war is the one issue that we can get together on and we can create real solutions for.
The challenge for a lot of folks listening right now is to engage this problem and know what to do about it.
So, you know, we've had, what, one and a half million people now deployed?
Yeah, that's right.
I think it's about 1.7 million have been through Iraq and Afghanistan since 9-11.
A lot of young boys and girls who have been over there and come back.
The average person listening probably doesn't know, and I certainly don't, what I would do to make life easier for the folks who have returned.
Do you engage them in conversation?
What happened?
Do you not bring it up because it might be problematic if they've got post-traumatic stress disorder?
I mean, how do you get folks to re-engage in the average American life when they've been so un-average for so long?
Well, that's the core of why we started the organization.
IAVA was designed to bridge the civil-military divide, this gap that exists between the American population and the service member.
Because you've got, you know, 1.6 million sounds like a lot, but it's less than one half of 1% of the population.
And World War II is about 12%.
So during World War II, everybody had somebody in their family or at their job or at their school that they knew personally.
So a big part of our job, and what I'd ask most Americans to do, is understand them on a human level, on a personal level.
And our website is a great resource, but even in your local community, you can go to your National Guardian.
What's your website?
It's IAVA.org.
But you can go to your local VA hospital, you can go to the local National Guard Center, you can reach out to local veterans groups, ours or others, and just get to know these vets.
I think that's an important first step to generate the awareness that's necessary, because we're not all robots, we're not all caught up in the political discussion, we're still your sons and daughters.
And we reflect the population.
You know, you brought up one key point.
This generation is different.
15% are women.
And a lot of folks in this society still think we're old guys with gray hair and funny hats on.
I was in a bar a few weeks ago with two female friends that just got back from Iraq.
And we had two civilian guy friends with us, five of us in a bar.
And they had just come home from Iraq.
I went up to the bartender and said, hey, my buddies just got back from Iraq.
Can we get a round of drinks?
She said, sure, would love to.
It's on the house.
Great.
She comes walking over and she puts the drinks in front of the two guys and says, welcome home.
And the guys say, no, no, no, not us, them.
They just got back.
The two women got back.
And she almost fell backwards.
It just totally changed her total understanding of who's fighting in this war.
So, you know, that personal connection is a key part of it.
But then you just have to get involved in their lives, create a community in this country that welcomes them home, like we did after World War II. And I think that starts with understanding.
It can start with holding politicians accountable.
You can donate to your local charity.
You can support medical resources for these people coming home.
I think the bottom line is everybody can do something.
And the Internet's made it easier than ever before.
Even if you donate a couple bucks or watch a video or read a story from a veteran, Making that personal connection is critical to creating a better level of understanding for all of us.
And that helps us make better policy.
It helps us be more supportive in our churches or faith-based groups.
And it helps veterans tremendously of all generations, not just us, but also the Vietnam vets and World War II vets who are still struggling with the issues associated with their service.
Absolutely.
And I see a lot of folks trying to focus on wounded veterans, for example.
Sure.
And the physical horrors that some have endured are obvious because you can see them quite obviously, but they're emotional issues also that challenge a lot of the veterans that return.
And post-traumatic stress disorder is something that's been overlooked, I think, certainly in past wars, was not focused on much until way after the event.
In this war, we're getting a lot more attention on it.
Do you see that as a big problem for the returning vets?
It is.
I think mental health problems are probably...
The top or one of the top few issues that they face coming home.
Of that 1.6, 1.7 million, about one in three are going to come home with some sort of mental health issue, post-traumatic stress disorder, severe depression, and that's a real challenge.
Not everyone comes home missing a limb.
Not everyone comes home with a head wound or even post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody comes home unchanged.
So I think creating that supportive environment and creating a level of awareness just to what these folks and their families are dealing with is critical.
But mental health issues Are important also because if left untreated, they're going to manifest themselves in other ways.
We saw after Vietnam homelessness, high levels of crime, divorce rates, even child abuse.
There's kind of a predictable ripple effect that will result if we don't take care of these folks when they come home in those initial few months and years.
Most of the vets...
I don't think so.
We're launching a major initiative this summer with the Ad Council, just to try to make them aware of what the warning signs are of mental health issues and to let them know there are resources out there.
We'd love to see more resources, but there are Resources available at the local VA hospitals, and we've come a long way from Vietnam.
Folks like Max Cleland, who headed the Vietnam generation and headed the VA after their war, really did a lot to create more local resources and to remove the stigma and encourage people to deal with mental health issues.
We look at it just like you would a shrapnel injury or some other kind of injury.
You've been in combat.
This is a part of being in combat.
Getting a mental health issue or mental health injury is just like getting a shrapnel wound, and you've got to deal with it, you've got to treat it, and you can recover from it.
And another issue that I want to bring up, too, is it's especially tough for folks who are still in the National Guard and Reserve.
It's not like Vietnam, where you came home, you got out, you were done with the military.
For many of these folks, they're going back for a second, even a third, even a fourth tour.
So taking care of your mental health is as important as taking care of your ankle injury or anything else that you've got associated with your service.
Well, if you're in the National Guard and you've served two tours of duty, can you go back for a third against your will?
You could, yeah.
I mean, if you're still in a contract with the military and if you don't have some kind of debilitating injury that's been documented by the VA or by the military, sure.
There are about 20,000 people who have gone five times.
Five times?
Five times, yeah.
So the churn or the operational tempo that we're experiencing now is also unprecedented.
We talked about the National Guard and Reserve and how that's really never been involved to this extent.
But the repeated deployments is totally new.
And every time you redeploy, you're about 50% more likely to have a mental health injury.
So when you don't have the rest time, you don't have the time home with your family, you don't have the time to get mental health care, those problems can be compounded.
What's the most effective mental health care for, in your opinion, for medically I can speak to it, but for post-traumatic stress disorders?
You've seen horrors that you'd never wish on anyone.
You've seen your buddies lost in battle.
You feel an ambulance perhaps because you come home and people don't seem to be all behind you like you think they should be.
What are the things that seem to really work?
The best thing, the single best thing is community.
Being around other veterans, being around Vietnam veterans, being among people who understand your situation.
When we deal with veterans who come to our office who are struggling with mental health problems or maybe dealing with an alcohol problem or homelessness, the first thing they ask is where are the veterans?
Are you guys veterans?
Because they feel very isolated, especially in this culture where it can feel like an invisible war.
Those veterans want to be around their own.
And that's a big part of our organization, is creating that sense of community, whether it's online, on Facebook, or in a local coffee shop.
And that helps us loop them into VA resources, loop them into the veterans groups that are doing good work, provide family support.
But it really does start with that level of understanding and that commonality of the experience.
There's lots more when we come back.
If you've got post-traumatic stress disorder and you have an awareness of it because it's been pointed out to you, you finally had the epiphany that things weren't the way they used to be, how good are the services that are available?
I don't think they're good enough.
So what would you do differently to change them?
I ask this question because from a political and policy perspective, it's the real question because obviously everyone wants to help.
Yeah.
There have been some wonderful papers actually published by military officers talking about trauma to the brain and how that can cause post-traumatic stress disorder.
Pretty insightful pieces of work looking at the problems that armed forces face when they return.
I'm just curious, at an operational level, what really needs to be done to make it better?
It needs to be easier.
It needs to be smoother.
Easier to get into?
Easier to get into, easier to get care.
There needs to be a more proactive approach on the part of the VA. The VA is a very passive system.
So for many of the vets, they've got to go to the local VA. First, they've got to find their local VA. And if they're in a rural area, they could be hundreds of miles away from a local VA facility.
And then they've got to go and kind of navigate this bureaucracy of paperwork and red tape.
And there's a saying among our vets that if you don't have PTSD before you get to the VA, you'll have it by the time you leave.
And that's a very real problem.
That's very funny.
It is, it is.
So I think that we need a VA that reaches out to them in the same way, and a program that reaches out to them in the same way it did in the military.
When I had 38 guys under my command, I knew when they were eating, I knew who had bounced a check, I knew how their marital problems were going, and I could reach out to them and say, hey, the Army has a resource for this, or you can go to talk to the chaplain about this.
When they come home, it's kind of like they drop off the edge of a table.
They're so isolated.
If they don't seek out that help and they don't continue to be advocates for themselves, they can also often kind of fall away.
So I think, fundamentally, I think we need to revamp the system to be more proactive.
We've got to remove the backlog right now.
There's a backlog at the VA of about 400,000 claims.
The average wait time on a disability claim is about 182 days.
So these folks are kind of caught waiting for the system to catch up.
So I think in many ways the VA and the back end of this war I want to emphasize that we can turn this around.
We don't have to have a replay of Vietnam.
We can take care of these folks, give them the resources that they deserve and that we should give them, and help them rebound in an important way to contribute to society.
When you were leading that platoon of 38 men, how would you find out all the stuff about bounce checks and unfaithful lovers?
It's like a family.
I mean, you know everything.
You know who's got a blister on their foot.
You know who's got diarrhea.
You know everything.
I mean, you live together.
But how did you create a culture where that happened?
You know, I wish I could take credit for it, but I think the Army does a good job of it.
We're so intertwined on a personal level.
We live together, we eat together, we train together, that it's part of having a fully functioning military unit.
You've got to know who's having a problem so that everybody else can pick up the slack.
And, you know, that's another element for me that was especially tough.
When I came home, you don't have that sense of community anymore.
You don't have everybody looking out for you.
You're at Starbucks, and the lady next to you is frustrated because her latte is not hot enough.
You know, or you're, you know...
You deal with these kind of trivial things, but in the military, you deal with these enormously important things, life and death situations, and everybody was looking out for each other.
So when I came back to, I was living in Brooklyn at the time, it was pretty tough.
It was in a rough shift, and I was in Baghdad one week and in Brooklyn the next.
So, you know, I go back to that community piece, and knowing each other and being together really helps foster that level of understanding and care.
Tell us a little bit about chasing ghosts.
Tell us how you sort of organized the story.
I understand that it's based on letters you were sending home that were subsequently sent out to several hundred people over the web.
But how did you sort of craft the story in Chasing Ghosts?
I never thought I was going to write a book.
It wasn't in my realm of possibility.
It wasn't something I wanted to do.
But it really, at its core, it's my journey.
Starting with 9-11, really.
9-11 started and I kind of got yanked out of my life, my fancy, happy, comfortable life on Wall Street.
And the world had been turned upside down.
And then I go to Georgia to train for a few months, go to Iraq, and try to put myself...
Back in my boots again so people could understand what was it like to walk through the streets?
What was it like to deal with the Iraqi people?
What was it like to be in a Humvee worried about those roadside bombs that caused traumatic brain injury and so much other stuff?
And then when I came home, this was a piece that I really wanted to focus on.
What's it like to walk through the streets of New York City?
What's it like to be in LA as a veteran?
You know, at this time it was 2004, 2005. And how do you feel about the culture?
How do you feel about this disconnected society?
And the title, Chasing Ghosts, is a reference to two things.
The first is fighting the insurgency, which my guys used to say was like chasing ghosts.
You're trying to fight these people that melt back into society.
You can't tell civilians from combatants.
And then when I came home, I felt like we were chasing kind of the ghosts of Vietnam.
Folks were still looking at us through these Vietnam goggles, and they hadn't updated to understand what we looked like, what we were dealing with, what our issues were.
So in many ways, I think we're kind of chasing the ghosts of Vietnam.
And that's the core of the book, is about trying to understand what this new generation of veterans has experienced and what we can do going forward to take care of these issues like traumatic brain injury, mental health problems, educational benefits, and really kind of setting a platform for a new generation of veterans advocates.
Is it your perception that the conflict in both the political world but also even in people's own homes about the war Hurts the ability of GIs to re-engage our society.
How does a country like America, which has always based its unique ability to be a leader in the world, on its democracy, on its ability to have open discourse and to openly voice concerns when you're doing things that you don't think you should be doing, like fighting in a war.
And yet when you've got folks coming back from having enlisted and risked their lives, that must take a toll.
On their ability to re-engage your life.
It does.
I think you come back to what seems like a very polarized society of Republicans and Democrats and pro and anti.
And as a veteran coming home, you're kind of caught in the middle.
You know, a lot of us have similar feelings about the war just like the rest of the population, but we were also there, and we understand that it's not You know, a 30-second commercial.
It can't be condensed into a four-minute piece on CNN or Fox.
It has so much complexity and so much depth.
When people say to me, you know, what was Iraq like?
It's part of why I wrote the book because I had to get 400 pages to talk about all the things.
It's like saying, how was your childhood?
Where do you start?
Yes, exactly.
When you come home to that really polarized environment, and I worry it's only going to be compounded this year with the presidential elections, we'll likely have two candidates that are on the opposite sides of the war, veterans do withdraw, and they feel like when they talk about their experience that they're automatically going to become a talking point for someone's pro- or anti-war message.
So what I encourage folks to do is just stop and listen.
You know, you don't know all you should about Iraq, and these people have that first-person understanding.
Even if they just explain to you what the weather's like, You're going to get a greater degree of depth and understanding, and I think that nuance and that complexity is really what's missing right now in the entire conversation about Iraq and also about veterans.
Hallelujah.
Listen, Paul, thank you for joining us very much.
Your book, Chasing Ghosts, a wonderful survey of what it's really like.
