American Culture and Military Culture

hello everyone out there in zoom land my name is steve swain talking to you from cuichi vermont where hurricane isaiah says jester tropical stormy saiyas has just reached us if there is a power outage we'll come back with some more news but right now everything is stable so we're so glad to see the almost 100 of you who have joined us for this broadcast and live question and answer as a part of conversations with phil cly montgomery fellows program 2020 summer fellow our 257th fellow of the montgomery fellows program the conversation itself is pre-recorded but the question and answer is going to be live as the conversation goes on you'll notice within your own zoom window there is a q a section below on the right side of the bottom feel free as the conversation is going on to populate the q a with your questions as you hear what phil and and jim are having to say to one another and we will get back to that the conversation will last about until seven o'clock and then we'll have the live q a for approximately 15 minutes we're aiming to finish around 7 15 to 7 20. again welcome to this conversation between phil cly and jim wright talking about american culture and military culture and in order to introduce them who they are i've asked the provost of dartmouth college joe helbley to provide that introduction you steve and thank you all for joining us we are gathering during an exceptional period for higher education for dartmouth and for the montgomery fellows program we're faced with a pandemic that has altered most aspects of our daily lives but dartmouth is resilient and i have never been so impressed with our community as we constantly find ways to adapt to enrich and to connect in meaningful in new ways finding a way to engage our community through the montgomery fellows program in these extraordinary times thanks to the vision of director steve swain is a perfect example and it's why i'm proud to be introducing the first ever virtual montgomery fellow residency we welcome phil clay as this summer's montgomery fellows program resident fellow and thank him for being willing to participate in this experiment this first ever virtual mfp residency phil is a member of the dartmouth class of 2005 graduating just a few months before i joined the dartmouth community and a veteran of the u.s marine corps he served in iraq's anbar province from january 2007 to february 2008 as a public affairs officer and after being discharged he received an mfa from hunter college of the city university of new york phil clay's new york times best-selling short story collection redeployment won the national book award for fiction in 2014 and phil's writing has appeared in the new york times the washington post the wall street journal newsweek and the brookings institution's brookings essay series joining phil for this extraordinary conversation is james wright a fellow marine veteran and the president emeritus of dartmouth college jim first joined dartmouth as a member of the history department in 1969 and served ultimately as the dean of the faculty the provost and our 16th president during his 40 years at the college in fact jim is the president who hired me back in 2005 to be the dean of the thayer school of engineering and so i cannot introduce jim without offering a personal anecdote that to me speaks so strongly of who he is as a leader and who he is as a person from my very first meeting with jim wright the interview in his office in which he extended the offer to me to join the dartmouth administration i remember a piece of galena oar that he kept on his desk as president i was immediately curious as a chemical engineer who had done some work with mineral matter as to why he had a piece of ore on his desk and he very calmly explained that it was a reminder of his roots of his days working in zinc mines in illinois and wisconsin as a young man as a way to never forget where he had come from and how education had profoundly shaped and altered his life jim would be true to his roots returning to his roots in the military to make trips to visit wounded soldiers at the walter reed army medical center in his unassuming way he would slowly encourage them to consider continuing their education at the country's most competitive academic institutions suddenly planting seeds of dartmouth for some of them and knowing that we at dartmouth would benefit even more than they by their presence on our campus watching those actions and what they did for this community made me extraordinarily proud to work at an institution that jim wright led it is my pleasure to introduce this conversation between these two men who have had extraordinary careers since their time in the military enjoy the discussion between the two of them as they engage in a wide-ranging conversation which will be followed by a time of question and answer without further ado the floor belongs to phil clay and jim wright thank you so much joe uh for that really wonderful and kind introduction and thanks to to dartmouth and the dartmouth community for uh uh for coming with me on this this this virtual residency and especially thank you to president wright uh really thrilling to be able to talk to you uh especially because you know you were my president when i was at dartmouth i think one of my my wife and i uh who she's a oh six our favorite stories from that time about you is a friend of my wife was getting off the dartmouth coach and uh she had just like tons of heavy bags like an absurd amount of heavy bags she steps off the coaches looking at this pile of stuff and uh sees you across the ground hey president wright and the next thing anybody knows you're helping her lug all of her luggage back to her dorm room um which uh which made sense to me when i found out about uh your marine pass into a large part of being a marine is is uh lugging heavy things far distances so so the trip across the green wasn't so bad i'm pleased to be here with you phil and uh it's just uh we've been so honored i think by all that you've done you're just such an exceptional writer i've always enjoyed redeployment and you're a tremendous nonfiction writer as well i really admire some of what you've written now i i do remember uh you're commissioning in the marine corps uh on i think uh june 11 2005 in rollins you were there i came i came there for the commissioning ceremony there are three of you and you have a thousand classmates why what led you to the marine corps in 2005. sure you know i think if if you'd asked me in high school if i was going to join the marine corps i i never i never would have thought that the answer would have been yes um but i had been raised to take the idea of service very very seriously um uh my father had been in the peace corps my mother spent a large part of her career in international medical aid my grandfather was a career diplomat and so you know i was always uh and also you know went to a jesuit school where we're told we've had an obligation to be men for others so the idea of service of doing something to be of service to my country was important to me and i went to dartmouth i started at dartmouth in september of 2001. and i was actually on the appalachian trail at the dimensions of dartmouth trip uh when 911 happened we got the news from other hikers who we first thought were pulling our leg telling us some absurd story about what had happened in manhattan um and so very soon america was in one war and then it was gearing up for another and it seemed to me that this was the big thing that my country was doing that the the way to um insert myself into this and and to try and be of service was to join the military um and uh you know the marines have the best uniforms uh my older one of my older brothers had joined the marine corps i was attracted by the rigor of it the the the military ethos just a lot of things that were appealing to me about the idea of joining the marines and so that was that was why i joined uh what what led you into the core well i i was that age in an altogether different era i joined in 1957 i was 17 i hadn't yet turned 18 just out of high school and four friends and i joined the marine corps we had 25 boys in my high school graduating class and five of us joined the marines another half dozen joined other branches of service and it was a a time when going into the service as it was described was was a part of life my dad had served in world war ii uh almost everyone i knew had a father older brother who had served during the war i had like you gone to catholic schools and i was uh have been have been taught to be careful of communism although i don't think that anything ideological uh came into my thinking and i just wanted to join the marines because the marines were considered uh back in my hometown this all mining town the branch of service that you should join and and i went in at an interesting time uh nobody uh ever fired a shot at me and i was never asked to fire a shot at anyone else uh but i i managed to move from my small mining town and see a good bit of the world and uh i more more importantly perhaps i decided to go to college i hadn't thought about going to school before that nobody in my family had but when i got out of the marines i was 20 nearly 21 years old i thought maybe i'll try this and i haven't stopped going to school since then i'm still learning you're a historian uh so you know as you look at the present moment and you see the ways in which the sort of iconography of the military is being used is this an issue that you're particularly concerned about how do you feel we stand relative to other periods yeah i i am concerned about it you know uh 60 of of the men my age are veterans uh something like what two percent of of your age are veterans uh and it's clear which way those demographics are gonna flow and i'm not sure what this means but i i find it troubling i do think that that having more people who served in the military uh demystifies uh the military and yet i'm not suggesting that we suddenly ask another several million kids a year to join the military that's that's not but but people don't understand that and and i think it's becoming something that that's even more mystifying to the american public my generation understood those who served as those who went into battle moved from normandy to paris or moved to clear the island of iwo jima or okinawa and warfare is different today i think we there's too much of a sense of it being drones and and a video game war uh there are no great stories of of places that have been occupied and a flag raising on top of a hill those days are over so we thank you for your service but as one vietnam veteran said to me people thanking me for my service now 40 50 years later is almost like after i sneeze they say god bless you they more no more intend god to bless me for sneezing then they really want to thank you uh for your service and i don't think we know what it is uh that you do or what it is that you've done i visited vietnam and i wrote my book about the vietnam war and and i didn't quite think about it until afterwards after i'd written the book but i wanted to visit i was visiting sites where battles have been fought of kids that i was writing about and uh there were four places i visited in a single day in an area the marines called dodge city southwest of janang uh where four people i was interested and were killed a number more were killed in the same battles ireland two of them were dartmouth men by the way uh duncan slay and billy schmoyer but i realized later that these four men were killed these four marines were killed about 10 mark 10 months apart in an area that was roughly 15 square miles and their war in vietnam was much like the war that you experienced in iraq you send out patrols day after day you're not occupying a place and uh yeah you're basically uh encouraging the enemy uh to assault you so that you can hit back with greater firepower uh there 60 of the medals of honor awarded world war ii were awarded uh to people who were involved in offensive operations uh i i think in in your war it's maybe a handful uh medals of honor are awarded for defensive activities often for putting your life at risk or absolutely losing your life to save somebody that you're with it's a different type of warfare so we don't understand it we thank you for your service you come home uh when when during the vietnam war in the 70s about 75 or 80 percent of the members of of congress had served in the military uh today i think it's about 18 and and i think it's important to have a military voice there not just as a saber rattler we don't need more saber rattlers and not sort of as looking after the va conditions of employment although we do need more of that but it's more to have that voice and that experience when we talk about uh the world around us it's best to know what's involved it's best to know that putting quote boots on the ground is not some metaphor for a bunch of dancing booties out there it's we're asking our sons and daughters to go and some of them will not come back and i think we have to understand that better your writing uh has helped us to do that and i really applaud you for it thank you you know one of the things um about uh you know veterans in congress i think there's 96 somewhere around there yeah um uh the so you know veterans in congress tend to you know their party affiliation is more likely to tell you what they're going to vote on than um than the fact that they served uh uh overseas uh but one thing that you i have seen you know some bipartisan work on from uh from veterans across the aisles on things like the authorization of military force um you know because you mentioned the fact that we don't understand the war that we're fighting and partly i think that's because the nature of the wars that we're fighting are as you said very complicated and difficult to understand they're sort of they're murky they involve training up uh local forces in other countries and supporting them and doing sort of kill capture rates i mean doing kill capture rates tends to be the most popular thing that we do in terms of pop culture you know we love hearing stories of navy seals going on raids um uh but um you know the the relationship of you know a bunch of highly trained commandos killing somebody uh in a country and sort of broader strategic goals is i think not just extremely murky to the american public it's often extremely murky to the the veterans themselves um and uh so that's partly i think why it's so difficult i think the other part is is frankly by design right so you know in in in iraq uh initially you know sort of president obama had been elected with a mandate to pull back from iraq and he did that but then during the rise of isis began introducing troops again wasn't a politically popular thing to do or something that he wanted to explain extend much political capital on you know you mentioned the phrase boots on the ground they were sort of slowly increasing the number of special operators while claiming that they weren't boots on the ground that's that i know started joking that special operators must wear slippers um combat slippers um they would sort of do these tap dances where a special operator would end up in a combat situation but they would say they weren't you know we're not sending troops into combat just troops sometimes end up in combat situations uh there was frankly a lot of bs um a lot of line uh i saw that happen personally i remember being in an event um where susan rice introduced me and a couple of the folks uh it was an audience with a lot of active duty military generals admirals and about a dozen severely injured troops guys whose you know faces have been burned severely guys were missing limbs and she said this is in 2015 uh uh in the middle of her introduction one of our proudest accomplishments in the obama administration is uh ending the wars in iraq and afghanistan right and somebody in the audience went right and it wasn't clear to me in the audience whether she was lying to us or lying to herself and so i think that that sort of thing where the the mood of the american public seems to be that they don't want to commit to the wars because they think they're a disaster right um but at the same time they don't like it when we withdraw from a place and uh and things go haywire which is what tends to happen i was in iraq in december and i met with some syrian refugees in in northern iraq uh who had uh had to flee after the sort of semi pull out that president trump sort of impulsively did and then walked back on uh and you know i remember sitting in a in a you know un tent uh with a man with several pins in his leg his pregnant wife his two children um uh syrian kurd who was just you know livid about the fact that the kurds had fought with the united states helping the united states in their mission and then they were abandoned um and so you know people don't like that um and there's good reasons not to like that but they don't like the wars either and so what we slowly uh have seemed to have settled on is a situation where we're not debating the wars we have the same authorization of military force that we've always had so there's not any uh there's there's no political necessity for a member of congress to actually debate our policy debate whether we're achieving strategic goals debate whether there even are strategic goals that are being coherently pursued and then whether we're resourcing the mission adequately and then vote on it we don't do that anymore um and and you know no member of congress wants that responsibility who wants to be sort of you know hillary clinton having made a vote that was popular at the time but unpopular later and so instead we have a lot of emphasis on special operations troops on drones on things that can sort of be done on the cheap um and we have special operations troops and special forces that are you know run incredibly thin several years ago uh assistant uh secretary in the department of defense uh said that in order to maintain the pace of operations the special operations community has had to uh mortgage its future and eat our young and so there's kind of a steady state of these missions which require the least expenditure of political capital humanly possible which i frankly don't think is an acceptable way to um to run military policy um and in that regard there's actually you know despite the stylistic differences which are extreme between the current president and the last one president trump's policy is in some ways a continuation of the obama policy in that regard i remember one of the one of the previous times that we saw each other president wright was at the um the intrepid during the 2016 presidential campaign when i had the opportunity to ask then candidate trump a question mr trump over the past 15 years a lot of u.s troops have bled and died securing towns and provinces from iraq to afghanistan only to have insurgent groups like isis spring back the moment we leave now you've claimed to have a secret plan to defeat isis but you're hardly the first politician to promise a quick victory in a speedy homecoming so assuming we do defeat isis what next what is your plan for the region to ensure that a group like them doesn't just come back and he gave a sort of long rambling answer where he said that um we should have taken the oil which was not um it's not the best answer i would say um to put it mildly uh and so my expectation was okay so things are gonna continue without real leadership right um and you know you have a highly professional military um so a lot of the individual actions are gonna be done very well um but there's going to be no overarching strategy uh to to justify or make sense of the expenditure of human lives and capital and i think that's part of why uh why it's so confusing why it's so difficult when civilians try to engage with the wars to even know where to begin um i think it's not just the difficulty of the wars but i think it's the failure of our political leadership yes and it's also trying to understand the the purpose of a war before it begins and and i don't think i mean let's face it things are not as crisp today as they were during world war ii and so i'm not suggesting we've gotta engage in and trying to find a a similar uh similar purpose but uh i recall writing an op-ed uh it must have been in 2013 a number of years ago it was on the the 10th year anniversary of president george w bush landing on the abraham lincoln with the big mission accomplished banner behind him on the ship which proved to be some embarrassment to him and to others and and i said that ironically uh in military terms the mission was accomplished by then it's just that nobody knew what to do with it nobody had really thought what to do with it and and i i do remember uh being at that forum with you in 2016 and you're asking candidate trump uh that question and he he didn't want to reveal what he would do next he said you can't negotiate if the other side knows what you want to do which is not unlike uh richard nixon never really said he had a secret plan in 1968 to end the war in vietnam but people around him that did and he was uh he was very careful not to suggest what he was going to do to end the war in vietnam but but secret plans are troubling and acknowledging that when you're a negotiation you can't tip off all of your endpoints and uh your bottom lines but uh i think secret plans are better than a democracy what are we trying to do what what if we'd sent troops to syria to what end what do we want to accomplish there and i think that's that's what we've been dealing with in iraq and afghanistan and i think that you wrote something a year or so ago about immigration maybe in the last year about the people who've supported american troops and are left behind in these places and i think that was part of the of of the concern when president trump said let's pull out of syria i'm not sure that most people would have disputed pulling out of syria but we've got a lot of friends who put their lives on the line for us there what are we going to do about it i think it comes back to the absence of a plan and i'm not sure anyone has had a good plan uh for the last uh 16 18 years we knew kind of what we want to do in afghanistan but that was accomplished within a matter of several weeks and then we didn't quite know what to do next and we're still there trying to determine what to do next it seems that um you know discussion about the wars is not really impacting the public conversation the way uh sort of to my mind very disturbing turn that uh discussion about our military has taken is in recent in the recent month and particularly during the protests the there's been a kind of continual attempt to enlist uh i think the military in cultural or in uh sort of uh a particular type of discomfort with the protest that you see from the right so you know there was uh during the you know sometimes this is reaches almost comical extremes i remember the the white house press secretary uh saying that we can't change the name of military bases uh that have been named after confederate generals because it would somehow be an insult to the uh the troops who died who left from those bases um uh as a buddy of mine uh matt gallagher i think responded to that absolutely on twitter he said you know if the last thoughts of of any of my dead friends uh was of the freaking base that they left from i'll eat kevlar um or in sort of a more sinister register i think something like what happened with lafayette square where you have peaceful protesters who are tear gassed you've got the national guard there you have uh general milly in you know battle dress as if he's walking out onto a battlefield uh you know something that that he later apologized for because i think sort of within the the uh institution of the military i think there's a real sense of the extreme danger of american troops being enlisted in um uh against uh protesters right and and in what is ultimately a a domestic uh political dispute um but it is you know it is something that i watch with uh certain degree of real concern about how that's happening how do you uh how do you write about war and and i i know you have written a piece on that that i found very very good very very interesting and let me let me preface that a bit uh my book on the vietnam war is really about the the grunts on the ground the marines uh the soldiers the paratroopers on the ground and uh what the combat experience was like in vietnam and this is just a smaller percentage of those who actually serve there i interviewed about 160 people for this i read everything i get my hands on i was always aware of the fact that here i was writing about an experience uh and people could say to me wait a minute you you've not been there uh you can't uh you can't write about that unless you've uh been there and uh i think you wrote about the participants the the troops on the ground as well as the poets uh who try to tell the story of war and and and uh i i do think having some personal knowledge if not is absolutely crucial but what would you say about that do you do you have to have better grunt on the ground to be able to write about that ground no i certainly hope not but i don't write about my own personal experiences in fiction um and there are plenty of great war novels that that's the case you know there's a very funny scene in in uh vaseline grossman's either in stalingrad or life and fate where um uh there's this general who's talking about war and peace and he's like tulsa i knew because he was there and vasa grossman is trying to explain to him that tulsa was not actually in the napoleonic wars and the guy just refuses to believe um and of course you know uh famously civil war veterans couldn't believe that stephen crane had not been in the civil war um i think that we there's a sort of odd way in which you know and it really becomes present in the 20th century uh and 20th century literature this idea that war is somehow incommunicable right um and you know sort of only those who have been to war can can talk about it only those who you know have have seen the beast know what it really is and it sounds in some ways like a compliment you're paying to veterans right um but what you are actually doing is sort of putting them in a box and saying that this sort of vital thing that you experience um is is forever incommunicable you will you will always be alone right um i remember my friend elliot ackerman uh who served multiple deployments as a silver star as a wonderful fiction writer as well talking about how you know if you say you can't understand what i've been through that means my children will never understand that means i can never come home and so i need you to try to understand what i've been through so i can come home right um i don't think that just because you've been through an experience you're the ultimate ultimate arbiter of what that experience means i think that especially when you're dealing with intense and terrifying and confusing experiences that are central to who you are and that you have pride and that provoke love and and and and fear and rage uh and all the other strong emotions that come with anything intense whether it's war or not um it's difficult to know what that that means you you you don't experience it and then understand it because the experience is is as multi-layered as anything um what you do is over time you sort of uh come to an understanding of who you are in relationship to that and how do you come to that understanding you come to that through oftentimes talking it over with other people getting other perspectives uh finding points of commonality i i remember being in a conversation with a woman who had read a piece uh i think the first piece that i wrote for the new york times was about this experience of watching a marine die in a military hospital and having a sort of sense of shocked numbness right and shocked numbness was something that she understood well because she was a victim of uh childhood abuse right and so she starts telling me about how i had described feelings that she felt she understood and then in the middle of the conversation said not that i'm you know comparing what what i've been through to what you've been through i could never imagine what you've been through oh i was a public affairs officer my deployment was not that hard she was talking about things that had happened to her as a child that were horrible right and yet she didn't say you can't understand me she said you wrote a thing that made me feel something resonant that there was something that we could actually communicate about regarding an experience that is deeply difficult and painful to talk about and that is the beauty of of writing and art and that is you know one of the most profound things that it is capable of of serving as a bridge between two people if i didn't think if i didn't think the experience could be communicated i wouldn't write and if the experience can can be communicated that means that other people can write about it and think about it and think about it in productive ways that uh that might not occur to me because i'm inside the experience right i mean i think one of the best novels written about iraq is ben fountain's uh billy lynn's long halftime walk um he didn't serve he did his he did his homework right he didn't he didn't just um you know regurgitate stereotypes on the page he learned about the military he he thought very deeply about it and he created real vivid characters who are expressing something true about the experience especially the experience of homecoming so that is something that i very much reject i also part of the reason that i reject it is because you know you mentioned this you know so few people serve right and i don't want in a democracy there to be some sort of idea that only vets can talk about war because if only vets can talk about war then there's not a lot of people who are going to be talking about war and we need to be discussing it more this is a issue of vital importance if you are an american citizen you have a lot to do with these wars because war is a lot of what we do as a country and it is not good enough to say uh i'm gonna listen to the vets no i want you thinking critically about the wars i want you thinking critically about what vets are telling you i want you engaging i want you telling me when i'm full of bs right and other vets when they're full of bs because trust me veterans are as full of bs as the rest of the american public right and we are a country that is very good at bsing which is why we need to be able to have rich critical conversations not pretend that because i was in in the military 10 years ago that somehow i am an unimpeachable authority on all things war i'm not and neither is any veteran i know a lot of us i know have very interesting things to say in life experiences that can be very useful to engage with and talk about and i think it's very useful and and we should be reading more vets and thinking more about some of the things that veterans have to say but civilians should be doing that work too at your commencement the day after you're commissioning the ceremony i talked about your class starting at dartmouth uh right after 9 11. and i talked about a a a night on the green when uh on on on september 12th when i spoke to an assembled group out there we're trying to figure out what to do and how to make sense of any of this and i quoted from a dartmouth person robert frost frost wrote in birches i'd like to get away from earth a while and then come back to it and begin over and i said that while many of us would have been forgiven then for thinking that such a withdrawal from the world might have been a fine option you your class never took that route you know how much you can do you have no limits i simply want to know that that you have learned about service to others because you we have observed the good works that you have done and you did come out with a sense of enthusiasm and obligation and responsibility how much of that does your millennial generation uh still have what what what what what would you think now if somebody quoted to you about robert frost and about the need to make a difference you're going to say now we tried that i mean i don't know about my difficult to speak for my whole generation i i still feel optimistic you know as as um you know and as much as as i i am concerned by some of the the tendencies in the culture i think that you know you look at history you think we've been through worse things we've gotten past worse things i think that you know public attitudes are changing uh constantly i do think people are available to persuasion uh i still believe in service i i you know still remain deeply proud of my time as as a marine i do think that there are a lot of lessons that that that we have learned over the past you know two decades that um you know we i think we need to change our institutions i need to think we need to uh change some of the ways we approach things i think there's a lot of work to be done but that that that sense of optimism um is is still there my idealism with which i joined the military is certainly bruised in some respects right i think it's it was you know i i desperately desperately wanted to believe that the kind of security gains that had happened in ambar province when i was there i was there during the surge and violence went down radically desperately wanted to believe that that was going to last right um that you know the the people who i met uh we would not face more horror and um i cannot tell you um what what folks have been through over there is so unbelievably horrific um you know when i when i was in in iraq uh i met a man in the center of mosul uh and his you know the the center of that city i mean it looked like a you know i'd never seen anything like it except maybe in photos of bombed out world war ii uh cities and uh he had been in sort of isis's last holdout as uh you know sort of troops were moving in to to take back the city of mosul and his children his children hadn't been to school for a year uh because um you know he was horrified by the sort of things that isis was teaching them you know everything was you know violent the math math problems would be like you know bomb plus bomb equals two bombs right that kind of thing um and towards the end they they had no food he said we were eating cats we're eating rats to get water they had to go to the river but people would shoot at them so it was a risky proposition there were constantly bombs uh air strikes around the city that were killing tons of civilians and he said his his children were crying because they were hungry and he just wanted to protect them and that experience magnified by thousands upon thousands upon thousands is um is the legacy of these wars right things that happened and those are things that just happened long after i got out of the military um so uh my idealism is bruised and i think that's a good thing but i i at the same time uh do not throw my hands up with pure cynicism i don't think everything is broken i think that most uh americans are very good most of the service members that i worked with you know um we're tremendous people um and i think also sort of just beyond the military because i think that oftentimes when we talk about service to country we uh we we hold up the military and forget how important those other aspects of service to country are um you know we sort of sanctify the the veteran as a kind of priest of the american religion when when really um you know there's tremendously important to consider the the hard work of nation building here at home and so yes i think a retreat to pure cynicism would be in some ways easier it would be the lazier route [Music] but but that idealism in that sense that um you know if you you join your shoulders to the wheel with other people um and and try and in some ways make them make you know your world and your country a little bit better than it was before that the genuine things are possible right um and so i think it's a few years ago you wrote uh a piece and then uh i think it goes to jesuit publication yes uh that that were where you were you you were you're concerned you you acknowledged that you've begun to question your commitment your faith and who you were you worked through that in that essay and i gather you're still have worked through that are you are you feeling more comfortable now that you know uh who you are what you can hope to accomplish who who really knows who they are i think that's a lifelong process right uh you know is it august yeah yeah uh you know uh augustine you know souls doesn't find rest until it finds its rest in god uh you might have in your catholic school education encountered that one um uh so no it's it's something that i'm still trying to work my way through still trying to write about i think that i you know i i do feel a real moral imperative to try and talk to people about these things and and and try and open up a conversation about them in in a broader way because their issues of life and death um uh uh but i'm not hopeless if i was hopeless i wouldn't write i wouldn't bother i i hope i hope you never become hopeless and i surely hope you never thought but i i wrote something uh not too long ago or where i do have confidence in this younger generation uh stepping up and making a difference and uh i have uh we have six uh grandchildren a couple of them are still in school but none of them have become marines but three of them are or have been teachers and that's very important to me and i'm talking about teaching yeah inner city i'm talking about uh teaching and and trying to make a difference and i do have great confidence in in this generation that they're they're going to make a difference but they need a little more of a boost from us and and we have to find a way to do that to encourage them it's always difficult when there's this sort of mistakes of the issue that you're you're looking at the the distance from the goal right um uh that more perfect union uh and the difficulty of achieving it but um i have you know i have been inspired and i think you know even during this pandemic right the the sort of kind of there's the quietly heroic steady work of first responders and and essential workers throughout the country um uh there's the efforts of the you know the protests right um where unbelievable number of people came together to try and improve their country right to to to to push the country towards more justice um i think that that is you know there are there all sorts of reasons to hope even as there are kind of sort of plenty of of not just sort of difficult attitudes and ideas but structures that need to be i think changed or dismantled yeah i i want to return to service which you had talked about and yeah i do think we need to i i am concerned i i share your your concern that that the military is becoming more of a family business that generations join i applaud them for it i don't mean to be critical but we shouldn't depend upon them to do that uh and most parts of this country uh people didn't really know anyone who was in iraq and afghanistan and if you never have to worry about that knock on the door at night uh you don't think so much about uh about the war that's being fought in your name and these wars are the first wars in american history where we haven't had a special tax to uh to pay for them uh and so your generation that bought there uh is going to pay off the debt from the wars that you fought and i remember during the korean war uh people in congress said we cannot at all accept the idea of these young men going off to fight this war and then coming back to pay for it we have to pay for it ourselves now but as we talk about more people serving uh and one of the the slippery slopes of of aging is that you think of practical reasons why things shouldn't be tried or done either either because we tried that unsuccessfully in 1972 or something else but i often hear people talk about some sort of mandatory service yeah and i i i look up periodically i did recently uh and last year i think there was something like four million uh americans turned age 18 which would be the year where you would think about uh they start to think about serving and in my generation that's when you you went on the draft list potentially of those four million probably the figures are maybe 30 percent of them could pass a test to get into the military either because of physical problems issues with weight education it's a statistic that troubles me greatly uh looking at that figure but you've got maybe 1.2 million who could serve in the military right now the military needs about 150 000 new bodies a year uh men and women who should they be uh is the question and some people suggest a lottery and uh that might work but i've talked to people who train and uh based and my only knowledge of the vietnam experience i'd much rather have some young man that said i want to join the marines where somebody say i was supposed to be starting school this this fall of the university of new hampshire what the hell am i doing here at paris island and uh it's a difficult thing and so you've got to figure out which ones are going to serve but then the broader question of what about other forms of public service which you mentioned and i think that there's so much more public service than the military the military's but a small fraction of it i think we have to find ways to encourage that maybe to enable it maybe even to reward people for doing it uh i don't think we're prepared at all to mandate it we have trouble uh already monitoring things could you imagine if we have four million kids and somebody's gotta monitor whether or not they have really performed public service and how will they serve them what would you do if they didn't do it very well or didn't do it at all we just don't want to go there but i think that we have to find a way in this uh in this country to return to something that that john kennedy said that's not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country and i would expand that for more than country your world uh your fellow citizens on this world what can you do uh for them and and i do think that there is a sense of idealism uh in this generation a desire perhaps to serve and make a difference but they need some guidance on how to do that i i absolutely agree and like you i'm i'm skeptical of the idea of a military draft i'm not sure what would do with all those people if we did draft them uh within the military and certainly um you know in the military you you do want people who want to be there um you have enough trouble trouble with the occasional knucklehead uh who joined up of their own free will um but i think that there should be a strong cultural bias in favor of service and also a stronger respect for types of service that are not military um and uh a sense that you know if you you know if you go out and you become a teacher or you know i you know i i know one veteran who who who told me he didn't feel like he'd actually come home until uh he spent some time in the parks uh parks department you know literally digging trails right um uh and one of the things about uh about the idea of uh more opportunities and routes to public service for for young people which i think i think you know whether we could mandate or not i think we should we could certainly create uh more structures that could take people in and and and um uh and put them to use uh uh you know for some period um uh i think that there's something important about and broadening about sort of being thrown together with a bunch of people from different walks of life um all sort of together working towards a common goal and that was one of the tremendously valuable things about the military that had in some ways nothing to do with war so much as you know the marine corps was one of the places that i really met america right people from all walks of life and and and totally different attitudes and perspectives and um and yet all bound together by a sense of common purpose right um and that was a tremendously broadening thing um uh it gave me a better sense of of my country and appreciation people within it um it prevents me from being as cynical about my countrymen as sometimes the news or social media sites would encourage you to be um because i know a lot of the people on the other side of the aisle in much greater depth than you get um and uh so i i think it would be a tremendously good thing yeah to to the very least have have opened up more opportunities for people to do public service to have more public recognition of the idea that public service is um is something important and patriotic and and worthy of respect um even if it's not military service i think that would be tremendously healthy it would be wonderful if thank you for your service could become an expression uh that would uh cover all forms of service and not simply the military i will always be among the first to thank those who have served in the military for their service because i recognize what they have done and what they are doing and they are volunteering and they are trying to make a difference and i have a tremendous respect for them but there are other forms of service that we need to thank people for as well i have to say when when i talk about uh thanking people for their service and a service that's more than military service although surely for that uh i really want to thank you uh phil cly for for your service as a marine as somebody who served in iraq uh somebody who's a teacher somebody who is encouraging us to think again about some basic things about which we need to think again i know ken and harold montgomery would be delighted to know that you're a montgomery fellow this summer and uh i'm just pleased to have had an opportunity to have this conversation with you thank you so much i am really thrilled uh to do the conversation with you as well and and i'll i'll return that thank you also for your service as a marine and for your service to the dartmouth community for the work that you've done for veterans and veterans in the dartmouth community um and and also for your writing uh it's it's it's been an honor uh to talk with you and to be montgomery fellow doing the virtual montgomery fellowship this has been delightful and yeah thank you thank you and thank you both uh jim and uh phil for going on this journey with us making sure that everybody can hear me and we're going to be bringing in in a little bit people uh jim and phil for the live q a by way of reminder within this system what you need to do is you need to submit your questions in the q a part of our webinar i see that some of the participants have raised hands we're not going to be calling on people uh who have raised their hands so just go ahead and submit your question in the q a um as the moderator of this conversation i'm going to take the prerogative of asking the first question and um when we think of the military engaged in american culture right now beyond the fact that we're not really talking about what's going on in iraq or afghanistan much right now i guess we're looking at germany and and standing down troops but obviously we've been talking about the military as it relates to domestic issues so um a question that's simple to ask but probably a lot more difficult to answer what's wrong with having the military engaged in domestic strife what do you gentlemen have to say about that do you want me to kick that one off uh please president right um well you know this is we are a country um that from the very beginning uh we're very skeptical of out of town troops coming and um uh and getting involved uh in in local municipalities against the will of those of the citizens there right that's in the bill of rights um so one of the you know there is a there's a big difference between local law enforcement responding to issues at home right and the federal government coming in uh and responding against the will of the citizenry there um and so that is i think a concerning thing that normally the military really doesn't like to do that one of the points that risa brooks is an excellent scholar at marquette on civil relations will point out that even in authoritarian uh states uh oftentimes the institutional military does not like to get involved in domestic repression so i think that's one of the things that you saw when you know sort of donald trump uh had a uh sort of had this bizarre spectacle at lafayette square um and you had millie sort of striding out and camouflage as though he was um you know walking onto a battlefield uh after uh peaceful protesters had been teargassed to clear the square so that the president could sort of uh handle a bible with the grace with which my mother-in-law would handle a live lobster um and take a photo and the um uh and then afterwards you know merely apologized um it it provoked a response from a whole slate of uh sort of former military people famously sort of jim mattis responded very forcefully and then what we had was sort of the federal government realizing i think that there would be a lot of pushback within the institutional military and then using in portland uh other federal uh federal forces um in a way that seemed almost designed to further inflame uh inflamed tensions and i think you know part of this is about the norms of a democratic government right which are which go as i said right back to our founding um that if a local government wants to handle things does not want coercive violent federal forces involved there needs to be an incredibly high bar for us using them because that starts you know that strikes the at the core of the basic norms of our democracy jim you want to take the question uh sure and and i agree uh totally with phil it was a good history lesson uh phil uh go back to the to the boston massacre go back to jefferson and the declaration of independence and uh you'll know how this country was founded on on the concern the principle that the military not be used uh in domestic surface uh uh i think that uh there are circumstances perhaps will be necessary uh but these are unusual circumstances and and in many ways the military is best uh not used in that way for a very practical reason uh they are not trained uh to maintain uh order on the streets with the exception perhaps of some military police and other smaller units within the military they're not trained for that it's a lethal force it's the most professional killing force in the world today and uh they are not comfortable on the streets they're not comfortable confronting fellow americans uh 43 percent of the military today uh are are minority persons uh they don't want to go out and uh and to play this role they'll do what they're told to do as long as it doesn't uh run counter to their own moral principles as they should but this is not a place for the military and i find it unfortunate and it's not really a place for paramilitary units either uh actually the the military has been used uh not as often as other federal troops uh who who are more posing as military they're wearing camouflage gear now it's not clear to me if if i were designing uniforms i'm not sure that the jungle or desert camouflage would be the sort of thing that i put on people to hide them in the streets of portland it's really meant to be intimidating and i think it's most unfortunate well it seems to it seems to be designed to inflame tensions i mean if if you wanted to to handle protests you wouldn't send the kind of units uh that were there right i mean things have gotten worse uh in portland since those troops were sent um which is why the sort of argument um that you'll sometimes see in defense of the president's actions don't really make any sense you know if um if it's really important that these things sort of tie down are calmed down don't send uh units not trained to deal with that situation that will inevitably make things worse um and the suspicion i think for a lot of people is that uh things getting worse was is is kind of what what the president wanted um because uh he you know he wants the spectacle to fight uh rather than actual order well okay good i have a question to follow up on that but i'm looking at the questions that have already been submitted and again invite people to do that i i want to shift a little bit and one question came in to ask about writing and when you gentlemen write about war to what degree is there an emotional investment in what you're writing and into what degree is there an emotional detachment and how do you play off those uh two things uh when when when is it important to get emotionally involved in what you're riding and when is it appropriate to step back and and try and be 30 000 feet above it all jim why don't you start with that one yeah again i i i did not experience war uh i have written about it and uh uh it does have an emotional impact uh uh i interviewed uh people in vietnam and i really sought out those who would serve with those who were killed i wanted to find about the experience in the ground and i interviewed family members and oftentimes i would come home at the end of the day after an interview or after some writing and susan would ask how did it go today and my best answer uh was it was it was okay i did not want again to talk about uh talking to this uh young man who who was weeping as he told me about picking up the body parts of his friend and uh and what that meant to him uh there are parts of my book uh that i still get emotional uh reading and uh i'm i'm i'm not writing to uh to to to elicit emotion i guess on the other hand if war and and the true nature of war what really happens in war does not elicit emotions uh we're in big trouble as a republic i think so um i um i often i i don't know necessarily how to answer that question because they don't necessarily disentangle themselves for me so perfectly um i am deeply passionate about the things that i'm writing about um you need to have a certain kind of aggressive analytic approach sometimes you need to be savage with yourself but it's it's it does it's it's not a instead of going back and analyzing um a piece of writing in terms of the mechanics of it on the one hand there's there's what uh nathan engler used to talk about uh the terminator screen sort of sort of pops up where you sort of uh analyzing every different aspect of the text but the the the thing that is spurring me to uh to put in the work uh is is the kind of deep sort of passion and oftentimes rage that i have about these things um that that kind of pushes me to to find new forms and new methods of trying to reach out and talk about these issues um and so the end product for me fiction uh particularly feels like i'm being very raw and very exposed um it's this sort of strange time because i have a book coming out in october and uh you know it feels like you're about to to expose a raw nerve to the world and that's certainly how my first book felt and about your your next book missionaries i want to tell people that we'll have clips about uh missionaries and talked about that a question came in about multiple deployments and i want to frame it this way how does being deployed change who you are and how does being multiply deployed change the nature of the people who have to experience that phil would you like to try that well it depends on the deployment right um you know some people have very different relationship to it and and and also different types of missions can can get um uh people to feel very differently uh about it you know i remember talking to one special forces veteran who talked about the difference between deploying to uh iraq and afghanistan you've been in iraq in sort of a later period of the war where when they were doing a raid they'd actually get like a warrant from an iraqi judge and so he said you know even though in the popular conscience consciousness at that point iraq was the uh the bad war in afghanistan was the good war um it felt more you know it felt more just what he was doing or sort of more directly related to a purpose that he could really uh believe in whereas in afghanistan he said like we were going out to the same valleys every year we weren't building roads or schools and stuff we didn't have money for that um we weren't even doing that much training we were just doing interdiction mission after interdiction mission getting into these gnarly fire fights where the taliban was sending these kids really to just get slaughtered by us and you know i sort of thought why did they keep doing this until i realized oh they're doing because they can and he said the experience of that got very sort of um the kind of culture shifted in a way that became uh not necessarily nihilistic but sort of more of a warrior culture right that felt disconnected from the types of aims and goals that theoretically the war was supposed to be about and that really shifted the nature of people's experience and how they how they processed it so you know where you are what type of deployment you are what type of unit you're in is going to have a huge difference in terms of how you process those things over time and if over time you're being continually sent out on missions where the sort of theoretical reason that you're abroad does not in any way match up with the day-to-day experience of what you're actually doing and what you're seeing on the ground that's going to you know people like to talk about sort of war trauma but beyond that just sort of almost like sort of philosophically how do you square that with who you are what your purpose is what your mission is it gets it can get very very strange uh and so you know that is is i think very different from sort of somebody going on one deployment versus somebody going as part of a career uh where they have to you know continually grapple with these things so let me start with that i mean so and kind of picking up on a theme that came through the the conversation about service and different kinds of service and continual service uh jim i'd like to give you this question um it says do current events the pandemic the economy unemployment issues of equity in our society society does that make the idea of universal service or possible and i'd like to stitch on to that the whole notion of and maybe multiple deployments in different kinds of service jim why don't you start with that question yeah i'm not sure that all of these uh uh crises and problems we're facing today should make uh military service uh more more acceptable or more of a of a choice it's not a practical choice it's not uh it shouldn't be something well i i want to get away from all this i think i'll i'll join although oftentimes people have joined for that reason uh i do think that uh multiple deployments um in in my experience with in writing about and understanding vietnam of course vietnam had some multiple deployments but very few and generally there were professional life service people who wanted to go back again uh iraq and afghanistan are quite different we we have really tried to fight these wars in many ways on the chief we've tried to keep the size of the force uh smaller that means that we're sending more people over there i think like something like 70 of those who have served in the military over the last 15 years have been deployed to a combat zone or even a world war ii it was probably only 40 40 some percent uh we're needing to keep sending them over and it does come at a real cost i remember uh talking to to one young man who had done the seals and uh had been deployed six or seven times and there were shorter deployments but they were filled with a lot of emotion and terror and fear and anger and he said he would just come you know flying back home and then he told me uh that he was walking through a walmart store one day and suddenly realized what he'd been doing 48 hours before that and he just started weeping and put his left his cart there and walked out of the store i think it comes at a tremendous cost when i went to the military hospitals and i went down 30 sometimes over the years to visit uh the young men and women in the military hospital but i'd always ask them about i would go to bed to bed and ask about their experience and i learned a lot about iraq and if you understand through their top conversations i was struck though by how many people said i'd like to go back even if they're sitting there missing limbs and there was no way they were likely ever to go back they want to go and my my reaction when i first encountered this with boy they they really have have have bought into the mission accomplished idea but that had nothing to do with it they want to go back because their friends were there again and they wanted to be with their friends i think there's a tremendous loyalty for friends and and when you see friends die uh it comes at a tremendous uh cost and and i don't think we've begun to truly measure uh the costs that we've inflicted on phil and his generation who have served there it's a cost not just of casualties in the field but it's a cost that some of them are going to endure for a lifetime well with that comment i think phil you get the last word i think we're running out of time but why don't you answer that what is the cost your generation is paying and how do you how do you calculate it i think it's so there's a cost in terms of the percentage of americans who serve who are bearing the burden of going over and over again but i think there's a broader societal cost i think it is damaging to our democracy when um when we have such a degree of disengagement um when uh you have these sort of sprawling overseas commitments that happen sort of outside of real public perfume um and i think that there is there are a variety of ways in which i think it is extremely important as we're seeing um you know we talked earlier about sort of fears about certain types of democratic norms falling falling away and having a sort of separate warrior cast that is another sort of troublesome uh troublesome thing for a democracy and so i think that as one of the things that my generation and younger generations i think that the task that is before us is to find new ways of reinvigorating our sense of service and public life not necessarily just in the military because i don't think we're going to have universal service i don't think we would know to do with all these people if we had universal military service so i do think we could radically expand opportunities um for public service more generally um i think uh i i wouldn't mind a a broad program of hiring young people to uh uh to take my kids out of the house and uh and care for them as a father of three young kids that would be uh high on my priority list of but no i think i think that there there there are a number of ways in which i think it's it is it's extremely important we would sort of uh build build back up the norms of our democracy and the institutions of our democracy and our sense of ownership of those and the i think that our utter disengagement from war are extensive overseas uh deployments and the sort of fraction of the people who serve that is one example of various ways in which we could we become alienated from the functions of our own government and i think that that is just one of several areas in which i think we civic renewal well jim and phil both of you thank you for being a part of this conversation phil thank you again for being our montgomery fellow thank you uh this summer by way of reminder to all of you who are attending this conversation as well as other conversations will be posted on the montgomery website uh you can go and see phil's handsome face there and click on it and find out more about other conversations uh they'll be rolling out over the next uh 10 days or so and we'll be concluding this entire fellowsh uh this entire virtual residency with a round table with phil in a number of vets and so again phil thank you for being a part of this jim thank you for kicking off phil's virtual residency and all of you who have attended thank you for joining us this evening thank you it's an honor to be here likewise thank you bye now you

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Length: 78min 44sec (4724 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020