But then when I retired from the army and began to write my memoirs and travel widely around the country on a speaking circuit, I found that I kept running into young people who didn t have that kind of experience that I saw in the army and the kind of experience that I had as a child, you know, growing up in a home with two parents in the nurturing environment of relatives and church and school and work at an early age. They didn t have that, and a lot of these youngsters were starting to give up on America. They re more worried about whether they re going to get killed tomorrow than they might get cancer 30 years from now. Killed in their own neighborhood. In their own neighborhood by neighbors.
Drugs are a pathology.
Most American young people are going to be just fine. They re great. But we have too many of them, we think 15 million, who are at risk. And they are not coming up in the kind of supportive environment that they need to be successful, especially in this very demanding age we re going through. And I could think of no better use of my time than to try to do something about this.