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Sept. 8, 2024 - Stew Peters Show
01:04:09
The Truth Behind Why Veterans Miss War
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Time Text
Is it the Bullets?
The gunfire?
Is it the adrenaline rush?
What is it?
What is it that veterans miss so much about combat?
Why do veterans miss war?
Because not every veteran served in combat, but served at a time of war.
What is it that they miss?
Today we're going to discuss it.
I think it's going to be a pretty heavy show.
Stick with us.
Go nowhere.
where we start now.
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Okay, today I think that we have a pretty heavy topic.
I want to talk about why is it possibly that veterans miss war?
Not necessarily combat.
I mean, we know that veterans who are in the military have served in combat.
But the important thing to remember is that only about 10%, 10% of the people that serve...
At a time of war will actually see combat.
And as we've discussed before on this show, it takes a whole lot of people for that one combat soldier to go out and do his job.
And so, there's got to be something.
There's something missing.
Or something that we're missing as a society.
As a big group.
Something we're missing.
And it kind of weighs heavy on my heart, folks, because this whole idea of veteran suicide is really heavy on my mind.
It's heavy on my heart.
And I really hope that there's a way for us to solve the true epidemic in our country.
And that's veteran suicide.
And so I found myself throughout the week...
Just trying to find articles and read, and I just duck-duck-goed.
Why do veterans miss war?
What is it about it?
Because I know I have went through it.
I remember how easy life was being deployed.
How easy it was to just be.
Because everything's laid out for you.
You know when you're going on mission.
You know when you're leaving.
You know what time you work.
And everything in between the times in which you're out working, doing your job, is your time.
There's a few small tasks that need to be done, of course, but...
There's not a whole lot of extra responsibility.
Now, mind you that when any particular soldier, no matter what their job is, is at their office, so to speak, It's stressful.
It's demanding.
There's not a whole lot of room to make mistakes often.
If you're not a person that doesn't learn from the mistakes you've made in any given job, then the whole mission is at risk.
And we can't have that.
We can't have the whole mission being compromised because we continue to make mistakes over and over.
And so you learn quite quickly What it is to do and what not to do.
What is going to help the whole mission succeed?
And so in my search, I came across this gentleman named Sebastian Younger.
Sebastian was a war reporter.
And he spent time at Restrepo.
I don't know if anybody's ever seen the movie Restrepo.
It's on Netflix about an outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.
And he spent, I want to say it was like a month or two months or something like that.
I don't know exactly how long he was up there, but I came across a couple TED Talks that he had done.
And one of them was titled, Why Veterans Miss War.
And he has a very interesting perspective on it.
And before we get to that, I'm going to show you throughout the show today a couple YouTube clips, because I think that they're important.
And he brings up some really good points about how us as a culture, how us as a society, view veterans and Vice versa, how we as veterans view what's going on around us.
And so I think that, you know, when we talk about missing war and missing combat, I think people automatically go to, well, it's the adrenaline.
It's the adrenaline rush.
It's got to be.
And I think that's true because, you know, I think that science has proven that adrenaline is an addictive hormone or an addictive chemical that our body produces.
And once you have been engaged in combat and once you have been in the crap, so to speak, there isn't really anything that ever compares to it.
Especially if you come out unscathed, if you survive, if you come out uninjured, there's not a whole lot that compares to being in a firefight or being in a Humvee and driving down the most deadly roadway in the whole world.
Just that in itself is quite the adrenaline rush and the mind F, if you will.
But is that really what it is?
Is that really why veterans miss being there?
And then it got me thinking about, is the fact that we as a veteran culture miss war, is that contributing to the suicide rates?
And so I was watching these TED Talks that Sebastian had put on YouTube.
One of them was filmed in 2014, the other filmed in 2016.
And I really gotta say that he brought up some points that were quite interesting.
He was talking about, in one of them, the percentage of military members who have filed with the VA for a disability.
Mostly, I think mostly he was referencing post-traumatic stress, PTSD, in that 40% of all military members who served in the forward area, whether they were in combat or not, have filed for some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Filed a claim to be compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, of that 40%, he says, only 10% of them ever were engaged in combat.
So these are your infantrymen, your mortarmen, your artillery folks, your MPs.
You know, the route clearance people, the engineers, and then there's, you know, the folks here and there that got pulled to go out on mission because the leave cycle had started, and they need bodies to fill seats, they need drivers, they need gunners, they need, you know, once you hit that point in your deployment where People are starting to go home on leave, on their 14-day leave.
Somebody's gotta fill in for them.
So folks get kinda just pulled to do that.
And so then it got me thinking that maybe, maybe there's something more to this.
Maybe the 22 veterans a day that decide to take their own lives, number one, Aren't just Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Because we really didn't identify this epidemic until the war in Iraq and then consequently in Afghanistan started.
And I gotta say I haven't done the research to see what the numbers were before the Iraq and Afghanistan war started.
But this is also veterans of Vietnam.
This is also veterans of the Gulf War.
Let us not forget about those men and women.
The Gulf War didn't go on very long, but they still had a stressful job.
They still left their families.
They still sacrificed.
They still saw some pretty gruesome things.
And we all know that the veterans who served in Vietnam were much of the same.
Is the fact that we miss war so much a direct correlation to veteran suicide?
And I think the answer to that is probably.
But why?
What is it about combat That we miss.
And so when we come back for the next segment, we're going to talk about some of these things that Sebastian is outlining in his TED talk here.
And I want you to follow along with us.
I want you to pay close attention to what he's saying because he brings up some points That I never thought of.
I was with everyone else.
I was at the same thought that, you know, maybe it is the adrenaline rush.
Because I can remember what it felt like being outside the wire, getting into a firefight, or having an IED go off close to our truck, or watching some RPGs skip across the road.
If the enemy was bad at one thing, it was shooting RPGs, at least in our experience, because none of them that they shot at us hit the target.
They either went over our heads or skipped off the road, but none of them hit our trucks or the trucks that we were escorting up and down the highway.
And so he's gonna talk about a gentleman he knew from his time up at Restrepo who was a team leader and how the only time that this man cried Was the day that he figured out he could not protect his soldiers.
Because the fighting was intense.
The fighting was fierce.
You know, he talked about how these soldiers had bullet holes in their uniforms, but these bullets never touched their bodies.
One of these gentlemen, one of the men of his team got shot in the head in the helmet, knocked him out, and he came to.
And that made him realize I can't protect these guys.
But we're all in this together.
So Sebastian talks about brotherhood.
And what brotherhood means.
And maybe that is a huge part of what we as veterans miss about being at war.
Because it makes a lot of sense.
Because I will be honest with you, there were some very good times.
Times that I'll never forget and probably never talk about on this show because it's not appropriate.
But you realize at some point that things then will never be the same.
It'll never be what it was.
So stick with us.
We'll be back for the next segment.
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Alright folks, welcome back.
Before we end the last segment, I had mentioned to you that, thank you for sticking with us by the way.
Before we end the last segment, I had mentioned to you that I found this YouTube titled, Why Veterans Miss War by Mr.
Sebastian Younger.
I'm gonna play for you like three or four minutes of it.
I urge you to find it on YouTube and watch the whole thing.
It's pretty profound.
And so stick with us here.
Check it out.
I'm going to play it for you, and then we'll discuss it after.
All right?
I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O'Byrne.
I'm still very good friends with him.
He came back to the States.
He got out of the Army.
I had a dinner party one night.
I invited him.
And he started talking with a woman, one of my friends.
And she knew how bad it had been out there.
And she said, Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war?
And he thought about it for quite a long time.
And finally said, ma'am, I miss almost all of it.
And he's one of the most traumatized people I've seen from that war.
Ma'am, I miss almost all of it.
What is he talking about?
He's not a psychopath.
He doesn't miss killing people.
He's not crazy.
He doesn't miss getting shot at, seeing his friends get killed.
What is it that he misses?
We have to answer that.
If we're going to stop war, we have to answer that question.
I think what he missed is brotherhood.
He missed, in some ways, the opposite of killing.
What he missed was connection to the other men he was with.
Now, brotherhood's different from friendship.
Friendship happens in society, obviously.
The more you like someone, the more you'd be willing to do for them.
Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person.
It's a mutual agreement.
In a group, that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own.
In effect, you're saying, I love these other people more than I love myself.
Brennan was a team leader in command of three men.
And the worst day in Afghanistan, he was almost killed so many times.
Didn't bother him.
The worst thing that happened to him in Afghanistan was one of his men was hit in the head with a bullet in the helmet, knocked him over.
They thought he was dead.
He was in the middle of a huge firefight.
No one could deal with it.
And a minute later, Kyle Steiner sat back up from the dead, as it were, because he'd come back to consciousness.
The bullet had just knocked him out and glanced off the helmet.
He remembers people saying, as he was sort of half conscious, he remembers people saying, Steiner's been hit in the head.
Steiner's dead.
And he was thinking, I'm not dead.
And he sat up.
And Brendan realized after that that he could not protect his men.
And that was the only time he cried in Afghanistan, was realizing that.
That's brotherhood.
This wasn't invented recently.
Many of you have probably read the Iliad.
Achilles surely would have risked his life or given his life to save his friend Patroclus.
In World War II, there are many stories of wounded soldiers who were wounded, who were brought to a rear base hospital, who went AWOL, crawled out of windows, slipped out of doors, went AWOL, wounded, to make their way back to the front lines to rejoin their brothers out there.
So you think about Brendan, you think about all these soldiers having an experience like that, a bond like that, in a small group, where they love 20 other people in some ways more than they love themselves.
You think about how good that would feel.
Imagine it.
And they are blessed with that experience for a year.
And then they come home, and they are just back in society like the rest of us are, not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it.
That is terrifying.
Compared to that, War psychologically in some ways is easy compared to that kind of alienation.
That's why they miss it.
And that's what we have to understand and in some ways fix in our society.
Thank you.
Okay.
Sorry for the gaff there.
This is my first time trying to do YouTube on the show.
But that's pretty powerful stuff.
And think about it.
Think about being, he mentioned soldiers in World War II. Think about being on a battlefield with 30 of your closest friends.
Being wounded, being injured, whether you're shot or whether you twist an ankle or whatever the case may be.
Being taken back to the rear.
And then told, hey man, you gotta relax.
Stay in this bed.
You need some rest.
You need to heal.
But yet you know that all the men, or women, as it were, they're still out there fighting.
And in World War II, it was cold.
I mean, the climate is not the desert, right?
And so, they're suffering, right?
They didn't have necessarily enough food to eat.
They didn't have enough cold weather gear.
They were short on ammo.
They were fighting for hours and hours on end.
And these men were laying in a cot.
And they told them, Hey man, just relax.
Just relax.
Well, I don't know if, I don't know about you, but it would be really hard for me to do that.
In fact, the night that I was, the night I earned my Purple Heart, the night that we were blown up, hit by an IED, I was CASEVAC to the nearest base.
I was evacuated to the nearest base.
And I got evaluated by these medical people and they told me, well you can't leave, you can't go and finish your mission for the evening.
But your team's gonna go.
Just so happened that we had an extra person with us that evening.
And they were able to fill my spot in my truck or they cross leveled somebody and made the extra person a driver or whatever.
It was probably one of the worst feelings I had while deployed.
Knowing that I'm going to be stuck up here in this medical facility and my team was going to continue.
They were going to continue the mission and keep going north because the trucks that we escorted From the south to the north were full of whatever supplies were in that particular convoy.
So things like food and fuel, maintenance equipment, maintenance supplies, you know, oil, filters, whatever it is.
In fact...
There were a couple times where we traveled through Baghdad escorting a convoy that had to-go plates, you know, styrofoam plates that you put your leftovers in because on any base when you go to the chow hall, you don't necessarily have to eat there.
You can put your food in the to-go plate and you take it back to your room or to your office or wherever and eat your meal there.
And sometimes, I'll be honest with you, it was a little bit of a disconcerting feeling knowing that we're going out here, potentially getting hit by IEDs, small arms fire, RPGs, whatever the case may be, and we're doing it to transport to-go plates.
And every once in a while we would go and there'd be supplies for the Pizza Hut or the Burger King or whatever.
But I guess it didn't really matter because the mission was the mission.
Your mission is to make sure that this convoy of trucks gets to its destination without being harmed, without being blown up, without being shot at or whatever.
And so my team went north that night.
I sat in the movement control center all night and listened to the radio.
They told me, you know, you should go get some sleep, you should lay down, get some rest.
You were just in a traumatic explosion.
Uh-uh, screw that.
If I'm racked out in some bunk bed and something happens to my team, I'm gonna feel even worse than I felt sitting in that building, listening to the radio, disorientated, but also pissed off.
Pissed off that my brothers and one sister We're continuing the mission and here I sat.
And so the next day they came back south.
You know, we would bring full convoys north and then we would escort empty semis back down south so they could be reloaded in Kuwait with supplies to go north.
Just a constant circle as logistics usually is.
The doctor then told me, well, you can go ahead and head south with your team Because that's where our home was at the time.
That's where we lived.
That was the FOB that we belonged to.
And he said, once you get there, make sure you go see, go to the TMC to the medical station and be evaluated.
They already know you're coming, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so then we get there and I make my way over to the TMC to see another doctor, which knew I was coming.
Only for them to tell me, well, for the next three to four weeks, there's no missions for you.
You're going to stay on the base.
You are going to...
My unit then put me on what we called Haji Watch.
So the locals, the local Iraqis would come on the base and they would do whatever needed to be done.
You know, pave the roads, you know, maintenance the generators, clean the bathrooms, cook the food, whatever.
That was our way as the United States military to try to stimulate their economy by paying them to do these things.
And they couldn't do it without an escort.
So American soldiers would spend the day with them while they were on the base working.
Which is where, if you watched our show last week, we talked about burn pits, but that was where I got to sit at the burn pit for four or five days and just sit in a chair and watch these Iraqis crawl around in all this filth and inhale all the fumes and the smoke and all the stuff coming off it anyway.
So here again, I sat on a base working every day While my team would load up, found a replacement for me, somebody in the unit would load up, and they'd go on mission.
It was hard.
So when Sebastian talks about brotherhood, I understand what he's saying.
Because at a certain point, the mission, of course, is the mission, but you're also out there to make sure...
Then everyone survives and we all go home together, alive.
And then we get home and there's a whole other tornado of events.
When we come back for the next segment, I have one more clip of Sebastian from a different TED Talk.
Stick with us.
Don't go anywhere.
Hey folks, we just have a very short break here because we're running short on time, but we just have a very short break here because we're running short on time, but I wanted to talk to you quickly
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Alright everybody, welcome back.
We spent the last segment with Sebastian Younger, his TED Talk.
And I showed you the clip where he was talking about brotherhood.
And maybe that is what veterans miss most about war.
And it makes sense to me because...
When I think back to my time in a forward area, it's what I remember the most.
The shenanigans that we pulled with each other.
You remember the crappy times.
You remember all the shitty times.
The firefights, the IEDs, the carnage in which you see On the roads and in a combat area.
But what is overwhelmingly more memorable about those things, when you really stop to think about it, was the time you had with your brothers.
You know, in the military, you can't gamble, right?
So we would play Texas Hold'em with, grab a handful of rocks, and that's what we'd use to bet.
It was all very, we had very good times together.
Rolling down the streets, or down the highways, in that truck, we would have conversations about things that were stupid.
We had a lot of laughs.
But we took our job seriously.
We put on a ton of miles onto those trucks, up and down those highways of Iraq, and we did it together.
And maybe the brotherhood is really something that is extremely Important to focus on when we talk about why veterans miss war.
And then the alienation of coming home and not knowing who you can trust.
Not knowing who you can talk to about whatever's going on in your life.
Not knowing who is going to take a few minutes out of their day.
Or an hour or two to listen.
And so I can see how those types of things...
Really get to soldiers.
And then when you get into, you know, coming home and people are losing their families, losing their wives, losing their ability to see their kids, there's chemical addiction, alcohol addiction, there's all kinds of issues that come along with all of this.
And maybe If we came home to a society that was a little more clan-like, I suppose.
Maybe that would help things a little bit.
But I want to get to this next clip.
I think that this one is super important.
It's only a few minutes long.
So let's listen to Sebastian here.
After 9-11, The murder rate in New York City went down by 40%.
The suicide rate went down.
The violent crime rate in New York went down after 9-11.
Even combat veterans of previous wars who suffered from PTSD said that their symptoms went down after 9-11 happened.
The reason is that if you traumatize an entire society, We don't fall apart and turn on one another.
We come together.
We unify.
Basically, we tribalize.
And that process of unifying feels so good and is so good for us that it even helps people who are struggling with mental health issues.
During the Blitz in London, admissions to psychiatric wards went down during the bombings.
For a while, that was the kind of country that American soldiers came back to.
A unified country.
We were sticking together.
We were trying to understand the threat against us.
We were trying to help us.
Trying to help ourselves and the world.
But that's changed.
Now, American soldiers, American veterans are coming back to a country that is so bitterly divided That the two political parties are literally accusing each other of treason, of being an enemy of the state, of trying to undermine the security and the welfare of their own country.
The gap between rich and poor is the biggest it's ever been.
It's just getting worse.
Race relations are terrible.
There are demonstrations and even riots in the streets because of racial injustice.
And veterans know That any tribe that treated itself that way, in fact, any platoon that treated itself that way, would never survive.
We've gotten used to it.
Veterans have gone away and are coming back and seeing their own country with fresh eyes, and they see what's going on.
This is the country they fought for.
No wonder they're depressed.
No wonder they're scared.
Sometimes we ask ourselves if we can save the vets.
I think the real question is if we can save ourselves.
If we can, I think the vets are going to be fine.
It's time for this country to unite.
If only to help the men and women who fought to protect us.
Thank you very much.
Whoa.
How about that for a perspective?
How about that for an idea about why things are the way they are for veterans?
I mean, think about it.
Everything we were ever taught growing up was togetherness.
The Pledge of Allegiance, since we grew up, has now been taken out of schools.
The things that our children are taught in history classes have been altered.
And some would say that some of the things that even we were taught as children when we were coming up and before, weren't accurate.
So now, As teenagers or young adults in our early 20s, most of us, we go and we raise our hand, put one hand on a Bible, and we swear an oath to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And it's not even ever clear anymore to me What a domestic enemy is.
Because if you ask me, there's probably domestic enemies all over the place.
I mean, just look around us.
You know, this TED Talk was filmed in 2016.
And he was talking about two political parties labeling the other as enemies of the state.
Trying to undermine the government.
Trying to undermine the institution that this country was founded on.
So I agree with you, Sebastian.
I agree with you that it's scary.
I agree with you that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense sometimes.
What did we go for?
Why did we send our young men and women, put them in a uniform, give them a rifle, and tell them, go fight this war and defend this country?
Why?
We're doing a pretty good job, if you ask me, nowadays in this country.
We're doing an amazing job at fighting each other.
This country is so divided that it's not even clear to our soldiers, and this is my opinion, maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm way out in left field, But I think that it's not very clear to our young soldiers, even our old soldiers, why it is that we do what we do.
The idea of going away for a year or two and then coming home to a society and to a country that cheers for its soldiers is, We do that now.
We learned that lesson at the end of Vietnam.
Well, we didn't learn it at the end of Vietnam.
We learned it after the end of Vietnam, looking back at how horrible we treated our military members that came home from Vietnam.
But you go there, and you fight, and you watch your buddies die.
You watch your buddies get injured.
You're fighting.
Bullets are everywhere.
And then for those of us who didn't see combat, the sacrifice still remains.
Everyone leaves their family.
They leave everything that they know and they love behind.
And they go and they participate in this mission.
That we're told, in theory, is supposed to be To defend a democracy.
To defend our home.
But then we come home and you step off a plane and you turn on a TV and you watch the news and you see the things going on around you in your community.
And you ask yourself, what in the hell was I doing?
Why?
Why did I go risk everything?
Only to come home to chaos.
And so he talked about how crime rates in New York City went down after 9-11.
November 12th, 2001, I think was probably the one time in this country that our people, us as a culture, could not have been more together.
We all felt violated, right?
No matter where you were, no matter what you were doing, we all felt violated.
And so, when we had this idea that we were gonna go take the fight to the people that brought it to us, it was a good feeling.
It was a reason why a lot of us joined the military.
This will not stand.
This is the United States of America and you're not gonna come here and cause all these problems and not have to answer for it.
We're not gonna lay down for you.
But yet, 20 years later, we can't even get along ourselves.
All this crap.
Watching these TED Talks really made me think that he's right.
Sebastian, I think you're right.
I think that coming home to complete and utter chaos and all this bullshit It really makes me question the way we left Afghanistan.
The great Joe Biden, his exit plan.
It was absolutely atrocious.
Why did we do it?
Don't go away.
Uh, we'll be right back for the last segment.
Hey everybody.
Welcome back here for the last segment of this week's show.
Um, I'm going to be right back for the last segment.
Man, I'm real heavy right now.
I'm really feeling some type of way.
I think that all these things that Sebastian brought up, Are something that I think we should have seen before.
And you know, there's these men and these women that make careers out of the military, right?
They spend 30, 35 years in a uniform.
They deploy 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 times.
And people can then look at them and say, well, why?
Are you addicted?
Are you a war junkie?
What is it about deployment and being away from home that's so attractive to you?
And now it makes sense to me.
Now it makes sense to me because I think that why people do it is exactly what he talked about.
You get addicted maybe in a way to, yes, the adrenaline and the action.
I think that that's addicting as well.
But I think what people really attach themselves to is this idea that I have this family.
I have this family that no matter what, we can have our ups, we can have our downs.
But at the end of the day...
We're all here for each other.
And that's brotherhood.
That's family.
And so I wonder, what is it that we as a country, as a civilization, as a population of people in the United States, what can we do to come together?
Is it going to take another terrorist attack from outside of our borders?
Some would say we are being attacked by terrorists at our southern border.
And I think that that is a travesty to our way of life.
To the folks that come to this country and do it the right way.
The things going on at our southern border are an absolute disaster.
But I don't want to get super political on this show, and maybe I already have, but what is it going to take?
And it all started, if you ask me, it all started...
The day that Donald Trump came down that escalator to announce that he was running for president.
One man...
Are we expected to believe that one man divided this country in such a way that we have what you see going on around you now?
Are we that weak of a people?
I don't know.
I guess I don't know what the answer is.
But I certainly agree that if we were more tribalistic, as Sebastian says, that we certainly would not be in the predicament that we're in.
And I'll be honest with you folks.
My family and my friends probably would disagree with me.
But if I had the ability to be deployed over and over and over again, I would have taken it.
But there's just some things in a person's life that doesn't let you do that.
The first time I deployed, my son was six months old.
I came home and he was two.
And then I went again.
I believe he was like five.
Came home and he was seven.
Or six.
I don't remember exactly how old he was, but...
I owed it to him.
If nobody else, I owed it to my boy to be here.
Whether I'm a great dad or not.
I owed it to him to be here.
You know, and I always told people when they...
So I volunteered to go to Afghanistan a couple times and my request was denied for whatever reason.
That's not important.
And people ask me...
Well, you have a...
Mainly my mother.
You have a family.
You have a boy to raise.
You have people here that love you.
You have responsibilities and obligations.
Why would you choose?
Why would you choose to go back there?
Knowing what the risk is.
Knowing that your job is to fight.
I was an infantryman.
My job is to shoot, move, communicate, and destroy the enemy.
Given all the tools of war that we had at our disposal.
My answer to that was, I made a commitment to this country long before I had children.
Long before I had a stable career.
And maybe that's the wrong answer, but that was my answer.
You see, it's not just...
I mean, soldiers don't become soldiers for the paycheck.
I mean, there's certainly a lot more things that one can do to earn a great living.
And then once you're in it, like Sebastian said, you have this bond.
You have this group of guys and maybe gals or whatever, depending on your job.
And the idea, like I said before, that the experiences and the things that you share with that group of people will never, ever, ever be the same.
And maybe it's kind of like a heroin junkie or a meth head.
You know, they're always searching for that next high, but that next high is never, ever, ever as good as the first one.
So they say.
And so maybe soldiers get addicted to that because they're searching for the feeling and the togetherness and the camaraderie that they had that first time.
And maybe for some of us, your second, third, or fourth time was the better of the deployments that you had.
But I would go out on a limb and say that every time you chose to go or had to go, You're searching for what it was like last time, because you don't know if it's gonna be better.
And then it's all over, right?
You come back, and for National Guardsmen and Reservists, you go right back into the everyday shuffle.
Active duty soldiers, they have a little bit more time to stay together and things like that, The National Guard soldiers and the reservists, they come home and you get off that bus and everyone goes their separate ways to their families.
Eventually back to a job or back to school.
And then you see each other once a month for a couple days.
And is that really enough?
And so maybe because of all that, now...
We miss it.
It's completely plausible to me that it's not the adrenaline as much as it is the brotherhood.
It's not the chaos.
It's not the blowing things up and the things that men and boys find exhilarating.
Maybe it's not as much that as it is the brotherhood.
I mean, also think about those of you who were or are athletes.
We don't just play sports because we love the sport.
I mean, that's a huge part of it, I'm sure.
But for anybody who's had any success in a sporting career, whether it be high school or college or even on to the pros, it's the same thing.
Same concept, right?
The team concept.
I know that when I played football, our coaches always got us all revved up by talking about this is a field of battle.
And these people across the line from you are trying to destroy you and everything you hold dear.
And are you going to let it happen?
Well, of course not.
We're not going to let it happen.
We're going to fight our butts off.
And so then the question comes, is this really contributing to the suicide rate?
And I don't see how it can't be.
But Sebastian talks about, in parts of the TED Talks that we didn't see on the show today, about how do we fix it?
What's the answer?
And that's the real conundrum.
Because how do you take a country so divided and bring it together?
How do you bring it together in a way that the men and women that go to far reaches of this earth to defend what we call home, how do you bring it together for them to feel like it wasn't a waste of their time?
And all the soldiers really have is each other at that point.
So screw the mission, is probably what they think.
We're here together.
So if you ask me, my opinion is that veterans miss war, soldiers miss war, Because two things.
The brotherhood, the family, the team, the bond that grows, the idea that nothing is going to happen to you today.
I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure nothing is going to happen to you today.
And vice versa, they say that to you.
It's much like Stu Peters and I roaming the streets of Minneapolis looking for felony fugitives, violent offenders, rapists, drug addicts, drug dealers.
Bro, nothing's gonna happen to you.
Not on my watch.
If we die, we die together.
And then lastly, coming home to a country divided.
Why do we do it?
If we're gonna come home to all this crap, why defend it?
Well, I think that part of the answer to that is that even though we have a big load of crap here, it's still better than many other places in the world.
But for how long is the question?
So folks, in closing, we got about 20 seconds.
If you know a veteran or know somebody who knows a veteran, send them the message to thank them and be a family.
Thank you for joining us.
Come back next week.
We'll see you then.
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