thank you so much regretful to all of you for coming and to wear it to town hall for hosting this event reshape it so i thought just by way of introduction these are some of my ancestors were in the m great great grand father edwin good edwin good smith soul who is in the union army my harold my uncle great uncle harold bryant i didn't meet him i certainly heard about him my grandmother's brother he went on to become a western painter world war one and then my own father who served for two years peacetime army volunteered excuse me he was required service back then but he had a great time during his military service in germany and the stories i grew up with were a lot about breaking the rules and having a lot of fun in europe i did not go into the military there are some reasons for that but i am in good company i'm one of the ninety nine percent who do wear uniform any more civil war ten percent of the entire population were a uniform green or the blue one of the ninety nine percent this has been my life for the last twenty years is where mentioned here just up the hill at seattle central college so i took this a little bit ago the students aren't always smiling this much they kind of smiled for the camera i actually have a veteran in this in this photo and he's standing sitting right up front there clay he's got the coffee there you can see some tatoos and his cup of coffee he did not recognize as a veteran right away he's very  and then they made him fix trucks for the rest of his his tour so most of my veterans would have photos like this is part of their history here this one taken in in afghanistan and quite often you can tell who they are they sometimes self identify sometimes they don't course i'm teaching writing classes so i have the advantage of  getting to read some of their stories one student comes to mind jason hall who has worked with the newspaper over several years and first mage a sin and he stood very stiffly he called me sir  his jaw was very tight and he perspired rudy who was in my english class one hundred one sat in the very back row dark bags under his eyes really didn't say much until literally the very last class he got up and he he told a story which which was an i e d strike there's reasons why they sit in the back of the class and the reasons why rudy had bags und advisement i've kind of learned that over the last year adam was in a creative class i had prepared a course book with a bright orange cover on it and he came to class and it had a purple cover on it i said adam did they give you the wrong cover and he came to my office he said i i was an interrogator for fifteen months and the interrogator the prisoners the detainees were bright orange jumpsuits and that color now i can't tolerate the color makes me very upset when i see the color the man says to the right in this photo on top of the stryker vehicle was a guy named tony meeting tony was in my glitch one on one class for the first assignment he wrote his story and it was with tony story that i found it so compelling and i i thought this was a story that other people should get to read that it resonated very deeply it begins with him walking off the back of a c one thirty just fresh in country laden with about one hundred pounds or more of gear and it ends with an i e d strike one of his soldiers is is dying he puts a turnip kit on him at the end of the story is his medals are in a drawer and he feels no satisfaction from his medals very very powerful story and that kind of launched a launch this project so i did apply for a sabbatical to collect stories and i ended up spending hundreds of hours sitting with veterans talking w veterans i went to fifteen campuses around the country and i'd like to tell you a few of their stories so this is brandon and in the fall after he graduated high school was was nine eleven he just graduate from high school he's in community colleges where his story starts nine eleven for an eighteen year old and a lot of this generation angered them greatly but he didn't list he had a job delivering pizzas need to leverage a pizza to one house and it was a marine recruiter and he knocked on the door and the took the pizza and said you look like a big strong guy i should like to join the marines and brandon said i don't think so but i'll take a free t shirt he went on the next morning and he got his free t shirt and watch the videos are very compelling very appealing the marine idea being the best he didn't list right away that happened a couple months later and he'd had a big fight with his parents he had taken a nap  there was a mistaken assumption that he had skipped his classes that day and there was a big big fight and the law that was laid down you go and get three job applications or you're going to get kicked out he went you know the story right he came back the next day and he had the the signed contract to the marine corps and he and he joined the marines his unit deployed and brandon was taken off from his unit and was sent to run an airport in kuwait where they received new soldiers and marines coming in country they received the ones that were leaving out of country that were going home many tons of material they also received the remains of fallen marines and soldiers from the theater this was a central collection point from iraq  and during his time he carried two hundred twenty six fallen angels that was the radio sign that they would receive there are seven eight one day there was thirty fallen angels they would go meet the aircraft the remains were usually in transfer cases some were in body bags on stretchers they perform a ceremony  and as they they brought them respectfully off the plane the remains were taken to a morgue and and then ultimately sent from kuwait to dover air of air force base where they were they were sent to their families  he told me he only cried twice during this this deployment one was a body of a marine he learned had  very close to him another time when there were so many of thirty thirty at once when brandon came back home he was in portland oregon and he had a job coaching soccer he was living alone very common for vets and they come back to want to isolate and not feel feel alienated not feel able to connect with with the community he was having a terrible nightmares and he called terrifying nightmares and as a lot of veterans do he was drinking to remove the nightmares or at least he could get a night's sleep three four five nights a week going to bed with a bottle and one night he went to a convenience store just a little bit down the  road on the way in this car he had a really bad sense about a car felt a car was following him changed lanes that car would change lanes they both got to the convenience store about the same time brandon waited in his car let this person go and buy their materials and leave before he went in and got his stuff and on the way home he passed a fast food restaurant the fast food restaurant had  a street light one of those yellow sodium street lights and had a chimney that was putting a flue of smoke and steam and the the street light was exactly like the the airplane airport in kuwait where he'd worked and this took him right back there and he he started crying it was difficult for him to get  home he did get home and he stepped on his doorstep for quite a long time and during that time he did contemplate ending his life and about one in the morning he calls his mother mom i'm not doing very well and she offers so she's going to drive down from seattle that night right then and there to meet him and he talks with her for a while any says that the connection with his mom kind of pulled him back and he was going to make the night at the next morning he did promptly drive up to the v a he started his his journey his post trauma journey of healing there really that day and has since been been telling his story and that's been part of his his healing process you can see he's got a lot of tattoos and each each of those tattoos is highly symbolic he designed them every everything down to the individual colors of the leaves there in the tattoo on his on his left arm one side is his marine life his deployment life the other side is his life after the core rebuilding his life after deployment and he credits his mom and his actually the artist to help him work with him to design these tattoos with saving his life so you're going to get to meet brandon in a little bit robin grew up in wisconsin grew up in any house and she said her parents should have had children step not step dad but mom's boyfriend reprehensible individual put in a foster home in high school at twenty years old she's got three jobs low paying jobs in wisconsin and she assumes custody of her fifteen year old sister who's also been in foster care and she joins the wisconsin national guard because she needs of income and a judge says if you're going to take custody of your sister you need to have five thousand dollars in the bank in a larger apartment such so she goes active duty and she goes this is the late one thousand nine hundred she goes she goes with her unit to germany and when you go into the military you take something called the asvab the armed services vocational aptitude battery test it's kind of like that all branches of the service get robin scored very high if she was going into the navy they would maybe put her in a nucular submarine something like that very high level work wisconsin national guard said you want to be a cook or a truck driver she said i'll take truck driver so she was in europe and she said here i was a piss poor girl in europe none of my friends would have got here and she just soaked it up travelling as much as she could to italy to belgium for belgian waffles of course and she found a wonderful sense of community and family in the military she loved the service she loved the service very satisfying and started to kind of imagine her own future within the service well she's in germany nine eleven happens and as other stories around there is kind of instant confusion and chaos on the base everybody gets in full battle rattle and walks around the perimeter and no one really knows what's going on or what's the threat the gates are closed the local germans come to the gates and leave thousands of flowers and candles and bring food and that their weeping at the gates very moving scene in time of course we all know the iraq invasion occurs her unit does deploy she stays behind just a little bit while there are you know went ahead of her while her unit was in iraq they had their first casualty and there was a memorial on base looking at the boots and the weapon you probably know what that looks like and that was kind of this moment for her and i heard that i'm wrong so many veterans this kind of recognition of the mortality that was that was at stake  here some veterans talk about this actually being a liberating a liberating point for them except their own mortality their death and then they are fervently fighting to protect the lives of the people around them who they  for almost more than anything she was stationed at the baghdad international airport and driving military semi trucks to the forward operating bases in the area pallets and pallets of food weapons spare parts and many many pallets of bottled water there was iraqi citizens who were hired to work on base and she she interacted with them she wanted to talk with them they were professors that spoke perfect english and they were paid three dollars a day to have to pick up garbage on the base and they would share their lunches with her she's pretty disturbed one point the the military was burning food they had excess food that had been shipped and it was being put into a bit and  burned she said can i just drive it outside the gates and give it to the people out there and they said no we can't do that each day they would load up the trucks and then they would receive the orders for where they're going and each day there seem to be new set of what's called are we rule of engagement orders d's or in dead animals p c a dead animal on the road avoid that if somebody is in the middle of the road and attempting to stop your vehicle you can run over the individual if an iraqi is on a bridge and you're going to pass into the bridge you ordered to shoot to kill and this one particular mission she was in the t c truck commander position meaning she's in the passenger seat with the weapons pointed outside the vehicle and there is a bridge they're going to go under and there's a there is an iraqi on the bridge but it's it's a boy about five years old she thinks he's leaning over the bridge and she points a weapon at the child as she's been ordered as the rules of engagement are the vehicle approaches closer and she continues to aim her weapon at the child but she does not pull the trigger and the truck goes underneath the bridge so when robin told me this story which she had stalled told a number of times to folks here but she got fairly emotional as you might guess and i i said robin you didn't but you didn't you didn't pull the trigger as if as if that would make it explosive and was going to drop it i would have i would have shot the child and and honestly this was earlier in the deployment as a deployment went on i probably would have done it then because we all  quite callous and used to death and that's just how things were operating at that point robin separated just excuse me redeployed came back home number of months later and was living with a friend briefly did not want to go outside very common story isolating but she had a new dream this was to become an officer and this was quite a strong dream here she really imagined herself she was clearly had very high leadership capabilities very high intelligence very capable and they're out in a training mission she gets accepted into the officer training program they're out in the wisconsin woods with with what they call rubber ducks which are they come and sixteen's and there are laying in in the  woods practicing their maneuvers and they're laying sound in the woods and the the memory of the boy on the bridge starts coming forth and she is trying to suppress it cuz you can't show emotion and she's struggling and struggling the emotion comes out and she has she has a breakdown for not a very long time fifteen minutes where she's weeping and unable to compose herself unfortunately that fifteen minutes instantly ended her officer dreams and the and the sean sean's story starts with a phone call in high school from his girlfriend i'm pregnant and i'm keeping the baby no matter what sean did not grow up with a dad and he was actually happy about the news he told his mom and she said well now you got to man up basketball does not buy diapers you might try the military into so i went down with with a buddy often enough people joined up with with friends together i went down and they were trying to actually in a list in the in the army the army guy said what high school you're from i can't recruit from that high school so sorry and then as they were walking down the hall marine recruiter stuck his head out the door and he said you want to join the best and fighting force in the world so they walked in the office think you probably know what i'm talking about an awful lot of us myself included sixteen seventeen eighteen so highly highly appealing that idea of being able to fulfill that role  sean trained up and and became a marine and i met with the shawn for three hours on the first time and he wanted to tell me more of the story could not finish his entire story so i went back and met with him for several more hours in the first time to sean broke down and wept was when he pulled this photo out and that was his daughter and they all this was right at marine boot camp graduation she had been born three weeks before he was on the field in the captain came out and said peoples i need to talk with you he thought i was getting kicked out of the marine corps he was very worried at that point he'd had arthritis as a child and he lied on his former he thought that had been found out he was going to get kicked out but the captain said congratulations your father and gave him the captain gave miss phone you can call your wife cables and he had about a two minute conversation and that's why he says he joined the marine corps was to be a dad he did three deployments in this first was to to iraq to northern rock a place called claim they were going to be part of operation iron fist which was this is right by syria and it was to block in this time trying to block people coming across the border  on his first trip out there leaving at three in the morning pitch black black out all lights taped over the earth is dry and powdery and when you step it puffs up like flower and they're driving in complete blackness the driver has night vision goggles on and is following a cow might tape to the vehicle in front and he feels the humvee start to lean and it leans more and it leans more until he says i got we know we got to the point there's no coming back and they roll down a hill multiple times and up on the roof of the vehicle at the bottom the doors are jammed they can't get out and then they start smelling the fuel tanks of g p a to the military fuel that was strapped to the back the lieutenant starts screaming inside the corporal tells him to shut up and in due time they were there for came and pulled him out of the dock looked at him in the eyes and said you're ok capless keep going so we took a sleeping bag which was soaked in fuel and they were out for several weeks and during this time some of the images he talked about houses and rubble next to one that was a mansion with a satellite dish laundry outside untouched the crack of the sniper rifles and the thought of each each report is another another person hit a pair of feet in the road a pair of feet that they drove by whose feet were those left by the side of the road and at one point they are waiting in the in the heat the sun is straight above  it's quite kaya there's not action and in a small compound are civilians and they were in a house that was hit with a tank shell they're injured s injured there is a teenage girl who's who's holding an infant who's badly injured and the infant is crying and they are waiting for the med of x to come in and that's all they can do is sit there and wait and listen to this listen to this infant cry that just fun did not think the child was going to live he doesn't know ultimately what happened to that child and it's actually back after his third deployment he he's got two children now and he's in camp pendleton california he's got custody of his two kids his wife and he separated for a little bit he's a little bit of a unusual success story still married so many that sort of talk to the their marriage or their relationship did not survive coming back  he's a dad with two little girls the most precious things in the world to him and what he's finding is when they cry he gets starts getting very angry normal kid stuff get in the car get your shoes on get your get your backpack and he's getting very angry and this is distressing him he takes the unusual step of of going to see a camp counselor there at pendleton i and after talking with her realizes that the the crying is the is the trigger and that sense of helplessness and terrible sadness that's connected with that first deployment experience was still following him  shawn was going to be here tonight he works for u p s and his route took him longer but i hope you get a chance to meet him in the future his stories are going to be in this book here this was a memorial book to sean showed me and he had learned graphics in high school so when it came time to assemble these he was the one who was given the task of assembling the photos other time he wept and he actually said this is mike my greatest grief was for a fellow marine named michael brewer and they had deployed together he had quote unquote trained him up and like a little brother brought him into the corps taught him they had both come back alive and bruner michael bernard died in florida on a highway he was in a pickup truck he was in the back of a pickup truck trying to climb inside the cab while the car was the truck was going down the highway thel and it was it was killed in that accident and assurance of my greatest grief and heard that from a number of veterans when they lose their brothers once they get back home sometimes it's chasing the dragon that's the phrase that they use they're chasing the dragon trying to relive not just the intensity of what their experience was deploying but also meaning when they come back life is it's hard to find meaning in ordinary civilian life they're desperate for situations where they're actually life and death and they're protecting people so the impact of combat is nothing new and it's gone by a mini names over the years probably these are familiar to us soldiers heart was the term that was used in the civil war and some counsellors and such working on it prefer that term a lot to our current term here they feel that that much more accurately captures the condition of the soul and not afraid to use that word that's it's a word that's used the sense of identity the sense of connectedness and spirit facing greeks seem to know a great deal about this the twenty four centuries ago the the iliad and the odyssey homers were about about combat veterans achille ulysses spent ten years at war and then he spent ten years getting home in the odyssey and that's can be read really is a journey that's parallel to veterans from our recent wars of course here the course everyone knows what is what we call it today now post traumatic stress and of course you know i left out the the last word there the d word the disorder word i tend to really avoid that word and i have and i tend to avoid pete saying p t s d a lot there's a couple of reasons for that it's been a good thing it was coin hundred eighty and put into the d s m and it was surely motivated by a collective social guilt in this country for the appalling treatment and shameful neglect of  veterans of it as we're living in and that's shaping our attitude towards veterans today and a lot of good things have happened with that in that there's there's more resources that are available veterans aren't kind of left out in the cold as so many vietnam veterans were my my issue with with it is the definition is pretty narrow and it's doesn't encompass so many other issues such as the guilt that i feel is almost universal among veterans this crushing grief that lasts and lasts and lasts and something that's known as moral injury witness to something that profoundly violates sense of right and wrong i think of giving you some examples the stories i've given you today here those things don't go away they way on veterans and other reason that i have a little bit of an issue with it is i keep talking with veterans and they are recognize a sense of the how it's been pathologist de shawn who's going to be here tonight told me when he applied  s he said that was a question do you have p t s d and i was working with a student couple weeks ago on his application to the u dub he had deployed to afghanistan he was very afraid of talking about his deployment he said if they have any hint that i have problems they will take my application and throw it away and he's a strong sense of i can't be the crazy person a stereotype about that and it's kind of one of the personal missions i've got is to push back on that stereotype so i've got some beliefs actually convictions that i've i've come to and one is one is this the journey home from having gone war requires telling the story and i guess before i say that the impact of war is absolute i talked with seventy veterans and i felt all of them that are deployed in a powerful shape on their personality depending on their experience depending on how they went into the military what they went in with but for those that are carrying the wounds the wounds of the heart articulating the story is as necessary and it has to be given to us in ninety nine percent in whose name they went went to  war we have to share that burden with them and receive those stories and i also think it's our obligation our moral responsibility to receive those stories and the the journey of the warrior continues until they assume a place in society traditionally of respect and leadership some of you have heard the recent political discourse we have we have the phrase carpet bombing out there and political discourse like you've probably heard it and we need our veterans to advise us on the course of our country we need we need their voices and my message to you is you can be the person to receive those stories just have to be a compassionate and none judge mental listener this is not a conversation to have at the bus stop or on a barstool but a purposeful reaching out and only takes one hand to reach out and connect and and help the help it help a veteran come home so this time i'd like to introduce you to some veterans brandon and robin are going to be here for you did sean called me just before this program began and he was very heartbroken he works for u p s and he was not able to make it this was a really important event for him to be he wanted to tell a story engage with you but i will do an event again in the future and give him that opportunity patricio more all this is going to join us  robin's friend and how are you guys doing out there everybody ok ok this is emotional stuff and if you're feeling emotional it's ok that's what's supposed to happen how about robin brandon and patric o how are you guys good you guys want to come on up cool so this is this is the q and a kind of period here and brandon robin to protect are available for you to talk with and ask questions that you may have and of course if you want to ask any questions of me i'll be happy to answer anything ethan is got the microphone over there as where i had mentioned so if you'd like to talk with the veterans here just raise your hand you know thank yous too but i think my common response now is vote please think i was a high school teacher and there was always a controversy about recruiting and talking to high school seniors or juniors at some point and do you feel do you have a strong sense one way or another that you were i don't know though if the word is misled taken advantage of or not i'm just curious what your perspective is looking back on getting into this when you were much younger yeah for me i joined when i was twenty two i was a little bit older but i didn't have a lot of experience my dad was a vietnam vet but he never talked about anything and so i didn't have anybody to go to and i did feel a little misled i mean i'm going to lie the recruiter told me that being a truck driver was a totally safe job and that i would always be but you know away from the danger yeah and then not to mention the fact that i could have had other jobs and they didn't offer it to me because it's more about filling the exact slots but i think that you know for all of that you know corporations like you when you get take a job from them too you know they don't they don't tell you oh yeah by the way i'm going to be calling you every saturday to come in so i you know i think everybody i don't have a problem with them like recruiting at high schools i guess so much because for me i wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the military too i mean there was bad stuff that happened but there was a lot of good stuff and they gave me confidence and they gave me a chance at a life and i'm grateful for that yes well my question is about jobs term moral injury which i thought and very interesting concept of i mean everybody knows about grief everybody knows about about guilt and these feelings but i don't know did you sense in any way that your feelings about right and wrong were somehow changed or damaged or somehow hurt by the experience of war i'll get back to that question i don't think the marine corps let misled me at all they said it was going to be tough they said it was going to change your life and it did and i'm very happy that i did it as far as the the idea of war changing your sense of right and wrong it definitely does definitely does and you know jeb kind of alluded to the fact that once your own mortality is kind of realized that that kind of drops on your priority list i guess and again my experience and my one deployment was vastly different than driving a truck right through through dangerous streets and whatnot and so in terms of there's a deployment or does that the idea of war being in war in a war does it change your concept of right and wrong absolutely and it's for a period of time and  slowly kind of trickles away at least in my experience and then you find that you're at least for me and some of the people i've been around that you find that your sense of right and wrong becomes very rigid in terms of golden rule type ideas following structure and treating people all people as you would treat your your mom your sister your wife or girlfriend your brother your father so it kind of changes for a while and i think that's i think that's a necessary evil to be able to do certain things and experience certain situations and deal with them well and keep yourself and your your squad mates as safe as possible but then ultimately i think for me it rounded everything out and kind of reinforced i mean that mom and dad taught me from this high and i try and live it every day well speaking for myself when i was in iraq i didn't think i was going to run into any more conflicts until they actually happened and so being faced with things that i thought were wrong or what i was doing was wrong was had a huge burden on me because i had to do certain things to survive and i had to do certain things so that my comrades would survive so in the moment you're doing things that greatly conflict with you but it's being a part of survival mode and you really don't think about it until after you're out of the situation and it's when you start thinking about it that that's when the grief comes in and you start to question yourself and your own belief and what you're doing if it's right or wrong you try to justify it in some way and you always don't find an answer but you try and there every question over here the speaker there mentioned that that our vets need to tell their story in order to go home and i'm i'm guessing you guys have shared your story  with with him or with others and i wonder how you're doing that because you know you can't roll up to somebody at a bus stop there seventy five people here but with compassion and interest in communicating with vets but how do we engage in that just knock on the v a hospital and say you know i want to buy i want to help her do you have any ideas about organizations or even how to interact with  that there's various organizations veterans organizations such as the v f w american legion that have veterans there a lot of them are older vietnam vets and some of them are the younger guys are starting to come in right now  the iraq and afghan war people but some vets would be receptive into talking to people i was just the way you present the question in they can tell if you generally want to hear your story speaking for myself when i was when i first got diagnosed with p t s d and i was getting counselors it was hard for me to find a counselor that actually worked because i had to find one that was actually genuinely wanting to hear my story instead of them trying to throw medication at me who are doing something else if they would just sit down and hear me i would be with that person and i would tell them my story and that's their opinion itself because you're able to talk to them and just get everything out in the open and you get good feedback from them and veterans experience a lot of lost and our loss is different from your loss but it's still a loss and there's still grief and that's still a common thing that you could share stories in that we could relate to normal people about loss it's just and i guess i would say in my it just in my own experience the first thing that kind of popped into my head it was that those of you guys that are from all year you have a really big v a the v a here in seattle and there is a locker or about the top floor and i've spent some time in there and fur where we go when things get really bad and they have volunteers that come up there and play games with us and do other little things and that kind of you know you can't just ask of that to open up to you but if you're just there and you're genuine and you're just trying to do something while sometimes it just happens you know that will end up to you but that would be my thought because i know in that locked ward it's really for and if you want to you know i know that they will allow volunteers you know you have to be involved in organization but you have come up there and paint and stuff and i was just going to say you may you may know veterans right now but you don't know that they veterans and maybe it'll come up in conversation and you could just say if you ever want to tell me your story i'd like to hear it you know patricio mentioned the standard counseling of fifteen minutes or an hour and i've been to shawn did the same thing and found it very very disturbing to be cut off and i i had i had a great i had the luxury i didn't have to do that to anyone i sat with on that for four and a half hours and those those are kind of the context that that i'm thinking of if if you run across it you can just open up it really is robin said they really need to know they're not going to be judged  some of them feel very worried that they'll be condemned for veterans they can't tell their wives my wife would love me if i told her she would not love me what are the stories that i would have to tell her it's a it's a terrible place to be anyway i was just going to add you know i think jeb it right on the head with you know just saying that i'm willing to listen to your story and if you're willing to tell tell it it's kind of like you can open the door for somebody in than just kind of wait for them to walk through you know i mean for me personally like like jeb said during his talk to the people that i credit with saving my life or my mom and my tattoo artist  and he knows that jerry his name is jerry works down in portland i found him just randomly one day i walked into a shop and had been a dozen before with an idea and everybody before had said cool idea put a deposit will start working on it he was the first one to grab a scratch piece of paper and a pencil and said just like this and i was like you're my guy and he knows to this day that he is one of the people in this world that have saved my life and it's another covered up right now but when i wear short sleeves i get a lot of questions and that has been on par if not even even a better form of therapy than my v a counseling was  because i have to tell those stories and i have to you know what's sad about i have one of the helicopter crash from january twenty sixth two thousand and five where we carried thirty marines in one sailor who perished in the crash and and  you know having to tell that story is now getting the tell that story and so it's helped kind transform my life and how i view the experience that i had and hopefully going to give help civilian population because they found that civilian injuries can end with p t s d as well as military ones so i don't want to divert from your focus on the military but just wanted to mention that  was though very interested in your comment about the problem with the word disorder because i have found that a lot of the patients that we have if you try to question about p t s d they think that means you think they're crazy and i've been trying to put together an informational brochure that would deal with this but what kind of wording or how do you think is the best way to approach talking with people about this problem and yet not using words that make them or anyone else think they're  crazy i'll just say a way to conceptualize it disorder means you're broken and something's wrong with you and it in it's a it's a wound or or an injury trauma it's a it's a traumatic  to the to the soul and not afraid to use that word that needs to heal and it's a sign of a normal healthy person two hundred days in a war zone you have one hundred percent psychological impact on all your troops one hundred one hundred percent if somebody goes to war and they come back unaffected that is cause for concern and talk to the number of medics and they're kind of a compassionate type here and told the same thing to them though this this is a sign this is a sign of a compassionate heart that has to see terrible things and it's it's it's a it's a long process of healing that wound but i don't that's a that's a start you guys got anything to to say about th no i think for myself i would have to say that the problem isn't just how we handle mental health here in the united states or even in the world i think since being diagnosed in two thousand  and getting you know kept out of the military that i have i've luckily worked with and associate nami note the national association for mental illness if anybody is from a lawyer with them  i've actually found that one of my best friends happens to be bipolar and even though it's a different mental illness it's there's there's so much stigma around it and so many issues so like you know when i get sweaty and i have to sit in the back of the room or there's children screaming and i can't handle it you know she understands there's just weird things like that that bother me and she's cool with it and so we get along really well because there's weird things that just bother her  but i think it's just looking at mental illness and realizing that we need to do something better about it and i think that you know and just the fact that they just did the homeless count here in seattle and it's up twenty percent from last year says something big and unfortunately most of those guys are veterans