Original subtitles

911 was is your emergency?

Somebody's just killed themselves.

Somebody's tryin' to hurt themselves?

No he killed himself.

He did?

Yes, he isn't breathin' now.

Oh god!

If there's a flaw in the approach

That we have taken to wars,

It is this feeling that once we go to war,

We limit what we're prepared to do.

We were very focused on the combat side,

We didn't give much time to mental health.

You couldn't have drawn up

A more catastrophic way to fail

To meet mental health needs,

Than the blueprints that were followed in this war

And that were followed in previous wars.

55% of veterans treated by the DA

Have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder.

55%.

There's not a single veteran that I know

Who doesn't know somebody who has committed suicide.

The numbers are staggering.

We don't even know what's gonna hit us

In the next 10 years as a result

Of the past decade or dozen years of war.

I always wanted to be a soldier.

I wanted to be a marine.

A good marine is somebody who can get the job done,

Look death in the face and run right at it.

The salt flats have this feel to them,

It reminds me a lot of Iraq.

You really can't tell distance.

The mirages confuse you.

All of a sudden it's a combat zone

And you're running for your life.

Your adrenaline's going and your blood's pumping

And you just wanna fight something.

It's kind of exhausting

Feeling like you're under attack all the time.

You try to rationalize it,

So that you can just live a productive, happy life.

It's,

It's really hard to do.

When I got back from Iraq,

I was still tryin' to make it big.

I had a beautiful wife, had beautiful children,

Had a great job.

On the outside, man I looked good.

But on the inside I was tore up.

I didn't really understand what I was going through.

I just broke down

And that's when it got outta control for me.

I've been tryin' to dig outta that whole ever since.

There were other marines in my unit

Having problems as well, because of what had happened

And what we as marines had done.

Had a real hasty order.

Said, "hey you guys are gonna walk and clear this city."

"you're just gonna walk down the blocks."

We got off of our trucks outside the city

And started patrolling.

The civilians were warning us,

Saddam many many, Saddam many many.

"Police compound up ahead, you don't wanna go there."

We're goin' there.

We started hearing gunshots.

And one of the platoons is completely under fire.

I remember running towards an alley

Going up to that position,

And hearing the rounds flying over my head.

Me and Vidanya were the radio operators,

It was our turn to run across the street.

All of a sudden, it sounded like somebody hit Vidanya

In the head with a sledgehammer.

He just dropped like dead meat, just like PFT.

When we heard that one of us had gone down,

It just kinda really became real.

We were firing at the enemy across this open field,

Takin' small arms fire, takin' sniper fire.

I was up on a building that was our makeshift command post

And I see these vehicles coming down the road.

We had received word that the enemy

Was stopping vehicles, getting in the vehicles

And then coming towards us.

One of the vehicles came out

And started turning, right at my building.

I felt like we were about to die.

I picked up my rifle.

I ran up some stairs.

And we all opened up.

We heard yelling from the vehicle.

They were waving a flag of some sort,

Screaming, "we are peace people, we are peace people."

They were innocent civilians

And the girl from the vehicle,

Her husband and two sons were shot and killed.

Their wailing, this complete painful cry.

"You killed my son, you killed my son."

We didn't have time to care.

We didn't have time to process it.

We still had to do our job.

It's really sad because I feel proud of how we did

And I'm so ashamed of what we did at the same time,

So what do you do with that?

My interest in traumatic stress injuries

Began during my childhood.

My father was a marine,

I lived on a marine base during the height

Of the Vietnam war.

That stuck with me,

In trying to understand the affects of war on human beings.

In 2003, our field hospital

Added on some innovative, proactive ways

Of identifying battlefield evacuees

Who might have some kind of a combat stress reaction

And did some early intervention that seemed to be effective.

What really opened my eyes in this war,

When admiral came to our field hospital.

We gave him this short dog and pony show.

Basic lessons in, how you meet mental health needs

During a time of war.

This is something we thought should be replicated.

Admiral took it in and stood up and said,

"you guys did a great job,

"but unfortunately it'll all be forgotten

"and somebody else is gonna have to rediscover it

"in the next war."

As a marine,

Made me feel like that was an absolute betrayal.

That unlike battlefield lessons in war strategy,

The lessons of war trauma aren't important

To listen and learn from?

Why do we not do everything possible

To try to meet the mental health needs of this generation?

Why?

As our troops deployed,

We knew it would be critical to have a robust network

Of mental health resources in place.

But preparation on a broader and deeper level

Was not a welcome topic.

Thank you.

My fellow Americans.

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.

Our political leaders thought this was going to be

A very short war.

Cake walk was one of the phrases that was used

And so our military of course

Served within that framework.

We were not allowed to speak of the unseen wounds of war,

We were not allowed to prepare for them.

It was incredibly distressing.

What really got me,

I did a survey of mental health providers

And asked them,

"what kinds of training have you received

"on understanding and treating combat stress?"

Out of 133 clinicians, 90% have not received any training

On any of the top treatments for PTSD.

The next few days after April eight,

That's when the pain started for me.

What we must've done to those families.

For a while I was not really wanting to think about

That we had just killed human beings.

They weren't human beings then.

I was...

Pretty fucking cold.

I started having recurring nightmares

Of a car driving down the road,

We're yelling at it for it to stop and it keeps coming,

So we shoot it.

And I look inside and it's my family,

It's my kids that are dead.

I actually went to a psychologist while I was in Iraq

Who said, "do you feel suicidal?"

And I said, "yes I do."

They had me talk to a corpsman who I didn't know,

Didn't trust, asking me extremely personal questions

And I lied to him,

Because I didn't know who he was.

I didn't wanna talk with him about everything

That was going on.

You know, who the fuck are you dude?

No I don't wanna kill myself of course not,

Only wussies do that.

The whole stigma.

You don't do that, you suck it up and you carry on,

You don't do that.

So you're broken.

The military knew in 2003, four

There was a very serious mental health care crisis.

There were suicides in the war zone,

Suicides back at their military installations.

After just three months in Iraq,

TJ shot and killed himself.

Army specialist Cody baker

Took his life earlier this month.

Daniel Silmers, sergeant shot himself.

Staff sergeant Jared Hageman

Committed suicide.

Part of a growing problem

Among our nation's fighters,

As the number of them committing suicide continues to rise.

I was deployed as part of a team

Called the mental health advisory team.

To look at home mental health services

Were being delivered in Iraq.

There were problems with the way in which

Mental health professionals

Were distributed on the battlefield.

There was difficulty with access to them.

I lost my best friend in a mortar attack,

While he was sleeping.

I had walked in and seen him splattered all over his room,

After I had been out for three days.

And nobody ever came and asked me a thing a about it.

There wasn't a Chaplin showed up,

There wasn't a psychiatrist,

There wasn't anybody.

The most important finding in this study

Was the data on stigma and barriers to care.

Very few who needed care were accessing care.

There is this message we send,

If you raise your hand and ask for help,

Your career is over.

First of all you lose your clearance

And then if you don't have your clearance,

You don't have much of a future.

The study was also the first snapshot

Of the prevalence related to post traumatic stress disorder,

Before deployment and after deployment,

Showing the startling difference.

Doctor Hogue and others certainly

Had alerted the leadership to what was going on,

But those measures, however necessary,

They were insufficient.

The diagnosis of PTSD is this absurd idea

That you can reduce the human response to trauma

To a single diagnosis.

It shows you how far behind

We are the rest of medical science

In understanding these injuries.

There is substance abuse and depression and suicide.

Those things aren't covered in PTSD.

What it's like to lose somebody close to you,

Or see somebody killed in front of you.

We're not including the whole spectrum.

And the consequences, many people are gonna be missed.

And these crisis will perpetuate.

Hello?

Oh, so good to see you.

So thankful for you.

You look wonderful.

Oh well thank you.

Growing up, my relationship with my religion

Was everything to me.

Religion was everything.

I wasn't happy that you had been called out

To go to Iraq.

I had taught you the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Not ever knowing that you would ever have

To be in a position to shoot anybody or kill anybody.

I was thankful to have you home.

After 2003, I was going insane inside of my own head.

The turbulence I had with my morals being violated

The way they were.

I couldn't make sense that I wasn't a murderer.

It would actually make me upset

When people would come up to me and say,

"oh thank you for your service, welcome home."

I would get angry and I'd be like, "what do you know?

"What do you know about being home?

"And coming back from a war,

"and living with these memories?

"Don't thank me."

It's interesting, just looking back know, going to combat

And not being prepared whatsoever.

When you are in combat,

You actually leave your ordinary world behind.

You actually enter in a different space.

I call it the sacred space

Because what you're dealing with is death,

Your own death or you're taking the lives of others,

That's the act of a god.

Then you come back.

How does the human psyche handle

Trying to come to terms with what have I done?

I needed to reevaluate who I am.

What have I become?

And I saw that I wasn't that same person that I was before.

It bothered me at night.

It bothered me when I looked at myself in the mirror.

It wasn't just trauma, it was something more going on here.

We have a label for it today, moral injury.

That type of a wound, it's devastating,

But as a mental health provider in the military,

I'd never even heard of moral injury.

How do you help people who've come to your office

When they've killed?

We don't have shells, we're not turtles,

We take the hit.

So you're gonna come to terms with it someday.

But it'll sit there in your psyche until you deal with it.

After I was out of the marine core,

I started feeling the void of no comradery.

The whole time, you're saying to your brothers,

"I'll die for you."

When that was gone, it was heartbreaking.

So I started looking up our unit online constantly.

Anything that I thought would give me a thread.

It was about a week after Saddam's regime had fallen.

The city was in a state of absolute pandemonium.

I was just driving around Baghdad

And I saw an enormous crowd outside this hospital

And they were trying to get inside,

So I said, "well let's go in there."

A doctor walked up to me and he said,

"there's a really sad case here

"that I wanna tell you about."

So I followed him to the back

And there sat a young Iraqi woman,

Her name was Nora Khachadoorian.

Her mother was there, Margret.

The American's got into a firefight with the Iraqi army

Right in the middle of their neighborhood.

There were bullets everywhere,

So they took a turn and they went into an intersection

And before they knew it,

The three male members of the family were killed.

It was the first time

That I heard a voice of the victims.

Their side of the story.

I was so happy to have Louis home.

He didn't look any different to me.

It wasn't until probably months later that you realized

That he had changed.

Louis was always the protector,

Until he got back from Iraq and all of a sudden

We had to start worrying about him.

The dad's name is James,

The son's are Nicolas and Edmund.

It puts the human aspect back into your thought process.

I wanted to try to find the Kachadoorians.

I wanted to talk to them, I wanted to get to know them.

They tell you in the marines, be no better friend

And be no worse enemy.

You're told to protect and to defend,

But you don't stop doing that

Just cause you're not over there.

I found a wealth of knowledge on the internet.

At the time I was videoing the journey.

I came across this site, Rehumanise. Us

About the Iraqi civilians who were killed in 2003,

I go down to April 8th and it smacked me in the face

That it was real.

James, Nicolas, Edmund dashed in front of the family car

Which contained the father.

Margaret was the woman and the daughter

And her name's Nora.

The whole nation builds the rifle.

Pays the taxes, puts it together

And decides through it's representative bodies

Where that rifle will be used.

The veteran is the person that pulled the trigger.

But what happens is when the veteran comes home,

It's like the veteran was the only one that did the killing.

We've gotta change that attitude.

They wonder why veterans feel alienated.

If there's an unconscious feeling on the part of the country

That, well, he did it,

That's going to go a long way toward making that veteran's

Healing way more difficult.

What the issue is, when you get back home,

How fast are you going to be able to heal

So that you can have a normal life,

So that you can have a family?

And we're failing at that healing part.

I met Phil before he went on his first deployment.

He was full of life, full of ambition,

He was a hopeless romantic.

On his second deployment, I remember getting this envelope

And look at this thing.

It looks like it had been to war.

Dear Margerie, I'm headed to Al Fallujah

Which is still very active with enemy insurgents.

By some chance I never get to tell you how I feel again,

Margerie I have loved you since the day we met.

I knew from the moment I laid eyes on you,

That you were special.

I love you Margerie

And I can't wait to see you when I get home.

Thanksgiving day,

We were patrolling this one neighborhood.

We found a weapons cache in a house that was wired.

A few guys in our unit, Benson, Marku, Rodriguez,

Hodges and Holmes were supposed to clear three buildings up.

I stayed with the lieutenant, the radio operator

And squad leader.

And we started hearing shooting.

We thought it was Holmes and those guys clearing by fire.

But they had actually entered this building

And walked right into an ambush.

We could hear the firefight going on.

They were stuck in this house

And there was nowhere for them to defend themselves.

We tried going over the wall,

But as we got to the top we had incoming machine gun fire.

I was like, "fuck this I'm gonna get on the rooftop

"and start engaging."

Lookin' down I could see them all

Down in the courtyard screamin'.

It was Holmes and Markus voice,

"we need help, we need help."

I was yellin' back, "be still, be quiet."

Every time they would yell, rounds would go off.

I was tryin' to engage the enemy

But it was just chaos.

Next thing we know,

Holmes had a grenade land on him

And Marku was hit with a tracer round.

I watched him burn to death.

My exit with the marine core was very quick.

"Best of luck to ya son."

That was what my co said, "best of luck to ya."

I knew that first night

That there was something really wrong,

His anxiety was just terrible.

Before we even went to bed he said,

"if you have to wake me up,

"don't touch my upper body.

"Just hit my feet or touch my legs."

He couldn't sit still, he had to be moving all the time.

In the house I mean he couldn't sleep in a bed,

He had to sleep in a chair.

I was mad

That he couldn't get it together and get rollin'.

You know I'd advise him to do stuff

Cause that's what dads do.

It was like he was just blowin' me off.

He couldn't engage with family.

He felt guilty that he was home

With me and his family

And he'd lay with David and just kinda put him on his chest

And he would say, "god there are some guys

"that'll never know what it's like to be a father."

Was it just me and my training?

The guys around me protecting me?

What was it that kept me alive

When other guys weren't so fortunate.

The conversations about the guys that died

Always came in the form of a fight

Or in the middle of the night right after a nightmare.

He would blurt out, "you don't know what it was like

"to see your friend burned alive.

"You don't know what it's like

"to hear those screams in your head."

I wanted to know more about it but he wouldn't let me in.

He just wanted to escape.

I started completely blaming myself.

What am I doing?

What am I not doing?

It was a year into our marriage

And we were already falling apart.

I would say, "what happened to you, where are you?

"Where's the Phil that I know?"

And he would say, "he's dead, he's gone."

I had no idea how to make it work.

So, it ended up not working

And we split up.

This isn't how this was supposed to end.

Why didn't the military

After hundreds of years of experience with veterans,

Give us more insight on what was likely to happen

When we got home?

At that point in time,

Nobody ever told us about PTSD or what to expect

And then when it started comin' out

What PTSD, well you didn't wanna seem like you had PTSD.

Didn't talk to anybody about it,

But the guys that were there.

The military needs to make it okay to go seek counseling.

To do that you have to break down a male ethos

That goes back 5000 years.

Just make it mandatory.

You will go check up with the shrink.

Everybody goes and so there's no stigma.

The general goes and the private goes.

We have to start from day one,

When they join the military,

That it's part of the culture,

It's part of what they learn about,

It's part of what they're evaluated for.

But you're gonna have to have enough shrinks.

That's the issue.

I used to cringe whenever the Va went on a hiring rampage

On behavior health specialists

Because they would end up taking

Many of the civilian behavior health specialists

That I had in the military,

Would be lured over to come and work with the Va.

The problem is, the country does not have enough.

Well the military could've done one very simple thing

When the generals went to war,

They could've drafted more doctors.

They could've put the word out

That colleges and universities need to be training more

Mental healthcare providers to meet the demand.

During our time in Iraq,

We had, about halfway through,

Combat stress training,

Which actually I conducted for our battalion.

I certainly am not, a a medical doctor

Or B an expert on post traumatic stress or readjustments.

We knew that we were behind

And when I initially brought this up I was told

That since I was a psychiatrist,

I was clearly just trying to feather-bed my own profession.

On this base,

I was the only credential

Mental health provider for 6000 marines.

And not only meeting the needs of the marines

And the sailors on the base,

But also the children and the adolescents.

These marines were coming right back from Iraq

And Afghanistan.

They'd fly right out of the war zone in literally one day.

I carry a pager 24/7, 365 days.

It was very common to get pages and phone calls

In the middle of the night

About drunken, suicidal marines

Or a domestic violence incident

Or somebody threatening to kill somebody.

I asked for help from headquarters.

I sent many point papers up the chains.

Never amounted to much.

The workload doubled every year.

I could not keep up with the numbers.

I would squeeze in as many patients as possible.

But even then, follow ups would be a month

Or two months later.

Marines were quite upset and very tearful,

That they needed help right now

And there was nothing I could do about it,

There was no other resources.

A lot of these marines never got the help that they needed

And left the marine corps in a lot worse shape

Than they ever could've been in.

It led me to file a formal grievance

Of the department of defense inspector's general office

For gross mismanagement that was harming

Hundreds of thousands of veterans.

I didn't get a favorable response from it.

I didn't get any response from it.

The government doesn't love you.

The government isn't designed to love you.

Government agencies don't love people.

They treat people like numbers

And they treat people like statistics.

What makes this set of wars different,

Is the level of combat exposure.

Go!

Orders of magnitude above what any of our troops

Spent in world war I, world war ii or even Vietnam,

As difficult as those conflicts were.

This is the first long war

That our country has fought with a professional force

Where individuals truly do volunteer for service,

Rather than being drafted.

There was a draft.

It was the most unfair draft in United States history.

And the draft was stop loss.

This is involuntary, totally involuntary.

They'd been asked repeatably

To do multiple deployments

In a very non-linear kind of fight

Where you can't escape the enemy at any time.

They spend a year followed by another year

Followed by another year.

Another day man, another day.

This was one of the differences that I had

With some of the senior army guys,

They said, "these guys know that this could happen to them."

But I felt like,

If a guy thinks the end of his tour's comin' up

And he's planning for that

And his family's planning for that

And then all of a sudden to be told you gotta stay in,

Has gotta be a morale downer of it's own.

I'm a three time Iraqi freedom,

Operation enduring freedom veteran.

I served for six years with the 101st airborne division.

This is the first time I've seen my plaque on the wall.

Between my second and third tour I was lost.

It was really hard to gear up for another one

And to get back into that frame of mind

And put everything else aside.

And have to see it cycle after cycle

Was very difficult to deal with.

I had two children that were born

While I was overseas on two different occasions

And kinda got too much.

Pretty soon it gets to a point where,

How many times can you roll the dice?

Or you start seeing guys get hit.

Your friends don't come back with you

And that sort of thing

And you start asking yourself, how many times?

Just because somebody dedicates their life

And service to a cause,

Doesn't mean you have to call them out on it

Over and over and over again.

You just feel it coming,

It's like a black shade coming over

You can't do anything about.

What troops went through with extended tour,

With repeat tours is reminiscent

Of what prisoners of war went through

Who were in Vietnamese camps, year after year

With this constant sense of helplessness and anxiety

That just never went away.

The anniversary was coming up.

The weeks leading up to that

I didn't sleep for five days.

Went to the doctor, they gave me pills.

It was a way to escape.

It was a way to numb.

It became all I cared about.

It's too easy to just hand out the pills.

And the number of pills these guys are taking.

They've got pills to get to sleep at night,

They've got pills to wake up

They've got pills to stay alert.

There is a tendency to use medication

When you don't have enough behavior health specialists

Who can do the treatments that do not include medication

That have proven to be very very effective.

Psychotropic drugs does not bring them back

Into a social setting.

Does not bring them back into a quality of life.

In fact I think that that is a leading cause

Of this fog we're going through.

We have to remove the pathology associated with this

And realize what these service members are going through

Are normal human reactions.

As soon as we define it as a medical problem,

It's easy to dismiss the soldier.

There's something wrong with his brain.

We have to stop referring to veterans who are traumatized

As sick, and look at them more as,

They are holding something for us.

The guilt.

The shame.

The confusion.

The fog of war.

How do we approach it in a non-medical, social,

Political way?

Somehow we've got the idea that combat is like football.

When people come back from a war,

It's not something that you cheer about

Like your team just won the state championship.

When you win the state championship

There aren't dead kids and destroyed cities

And maimed bodies and dead friends.

There shouldn't be cheering ever,

It's not something to cheer about.

Several years ago,

I was visiting a well respected psychologist at the Va

And he just had this sort of dark,

Kind of foreboding look and I pulled him aside

And I said, "what's up?"

And he shook his head, he said,

"this generation is going to be lost."

He felt they were just shoveling people

Through the system.

People weren't getting what they needed.

The waits were too long.

The VA and the DOD, even to this day

Have difficulty working together.

So this took a long time to coordinate,

Not only between the domestic world and the military

But even within the military,

Between the Va and the DOD.

There was not a lot being spoken about.

We knew of horrific first hand accounts,

Of veterans who went to Va one, two, three times,

Trying to get mental health care, only to go out

To a Va parking lot and literally blow their brains out

In their car.

I remember my first cabinet meeting.

The secretary of veteran's affairs

Comes up to introduce himself

And I said to him, you must be overwhelmed,

I know we are in DOD.

And he said, "no we've got it completely under control."

Any head of a government department

That says he's got everything under control

Is either a liar or delusional

And I don't think this guy was a liar.

Even in the navy in 2005, 2006,

And I'm the head of the navy at this point in time,

Mental health wasn't something that was out there

On the front pages at that particular point in time.

I kept reading about the Va and military officials

Testifying that everything was fine.

I got fed up with it.

In 2006 I was invited to go speak

At a large medical military conference.

I decided to take that as an opportunity

To publicly speak out

And I knew the military is not gonna take very kindly

About someone who's speaking out in a critical nature.

But the navy has a code of conduct

About honor, courage and commitment,

Being always faithful.

I felt we were not being faithful.

We were leaving people behind.

I would not be a true marine

If I did not speak out.

I knew eyes wide open

That if this repeats itself,

I am as responsible as the folks who could've done something

And didn't.

There were 200 military medical professionals

In the audience

And I pretty much laid it out.

How we are failing to implement basic war trauma needs.

Stars and stripes runs the story

And then USA today picked it up.

I received an email from my commanding officer

To cease any other communication with the media

And headquarters was preparing a public affairs guidance

In how to deal with the communication aspects

Of my message.

It has several pages worth of distortions and some spin

And some outright lies.

"Navy marine corps leadership are committed at every level

"to the issue of mental health.

"They are proactively addressing mental health needs

"with early intervention and work

"to build resilience prior to combat deployments."

That is not true.

"Navy medicine is working

"to increase the number of providers where needed."

Categorically false,

Because next month I get this memo,

Informing us that the navy was going to eliminate

It's social workers.

Military social workers,

That are no longer gonna be employed.

The part of the department of defense that I had

The biggest problems with,

The whole four and a half years I was secretary

Was personnel and readiness.

All these problems come under their auspices

And it was a source of continuing frustration.

And it's the one area where I feel like

I failed to get the changes there

That I thought were necessary.

If you killed yourself 121 days

After you were discharged from the military,

We don't even count you as a suicide statistic

In the military.

Too many young ones kill

Themselves beyond that 121 day mark,

Their suicide is directly related to their military service.

I had lost everything that I'd ever had.

My marriage had disintegrated,

I'd lost my children.

I'd lost my job.

I had been through all these changes with my beliefs.

I went from searching for god, to searching for science,

To searching for humanity

And that was about the time

When we started saying why did we go to fight?

And that started messing with my head.

Destroyed everything I wanted.

And I didn't really know who I was.

I had a 357 revolver

And I put two rounds in the cylinder and I spun it.

It hurt right here, in my heart.

I didn't wanna shoot my face, I didn't wanna shoot my head,

I wanted to get shot right in the chest.

I wanted my heart to explode.

So, I spun the chamber and I pointed the gun to my chest

And I pulled the trigger and it fell on an empty cylinder.

And then I pulled the trigger again.

Then when it came down to pulling the trigger a third time,

The shot that would've killed me,

I couldn't do it, I was too scared.

The pentagon and the Va are losing the battle

On mental and behavioral health.

Part of it is bureaucratic, part of it is systems,

Part of it is just the complicated.

You can't imagine what it sounds like to hear that.

Bureaucratic.

I mean if you're in this system

That's not the word you wanna hear.

Part of the problem is,

That when the congress wants to take a look at a problem,

They wanna first find somebody to blame.

The congress I think has very little understanding

About how bureaucracies work.

In 2010, I saw the war supplementals

Were going to disappear.

PTS programs, family programs in those supplementals,

I moved them all into the base budget

Believing that we would need these programs

Long after these wars were over.

Well go figure.

These programs to help our warriors and their families

Under sequestration are cut at the same level

As the least important thing the defense department does.

It's madness.

It just felt like there was no,

No way of reasoning with the system

Who's bureaucracy was set up to support business as usual,

Rather that to support the troops and the war

That we were currently engaged in.

The nature of military mental health

Is that it's a completely fragmented, disconnected system.

There needs to be a priority established

For military mental health care, that is not there.

In the military we have things that are called corps.

For each profession that show an identity

That there's a priority developing these professionals.

There are dozens of centers of lessons learned

Policies of lessons learned about what worked,

What didn't, to incorporate that

Into institutional memory.

To have that become part of the DNA.

Every branch of the service

Has a medical corps,

A nursing corps,

A chaplain corps,

A legal corps,

A supply corps,

There is no mental health corps.

We don't even identify it as something significant

Or important enough to have it's own corps.

Mental health professionals are split.

Psychiatry is assigned to the medical corps.

The psychologists and the social workers

Go into what's called the medical services corps

And they're lumped in with 20 some odd different

Types of professionals.

Many of them are administrators running the hospital.

Social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists

Don't have a coordinated policy on training.

Or provide the same kind of standardized care

In terms of how do you assess and diagnose?

Nobody's in charge of mental health.

In order to have

As much emphasis put on behavioral treatment

As is on physical treatment, needs to be broken out

And it needs to be separate.

I was on a lockdown ward for almost two months.

They had me on eight medications at a time

And cognitive therapy.

It just wouldn't click for me,

Wouldn't click, wouldn't click.

When I got out I wasn't able to really

Integrate with society too well

So I went and lived in the mountains.

I slept outside.

I slept more nights on the ground than I did in a bed.

I came back here, got online and first thing I read

Was how Lou had found the Kachadoorians

And how he was gonna go and meet them.

I was shocked.

Hello Nora.

I was a member of fox company,

Second battalion, 23rd marines.

One night when I wasn't sleeping,

I decided to send a video to the Kachadoorian family.

I often think of that day

And I feel like I have a chance to actually reach out

And meet you.

I hope you understand that,

For me it's not a question of whether or not

Me and my friends did the right thing that night

Or if we could've tried harder

Not to shoot at your vehicles.

None of that to me could be changed.

I need to talk to you if you'll let me.

I didn't hear anything back for a week.

Two weeks.

I needed to take another step.

I noticed a message from a guy named Lou Lobello.

"Dexter can you please get in touch with me, please.

"I think it would really help me if you did, please."

Hey I'm Dexter.

He said, "look I've been trying to kind the Kachadoorians

"for years, I've done a lot of work on this

"and you could tell he was just obsessed."

Come on in.

He said, "I'm not really sure

"but I think the Kachadoorians are just living up the road

"like an hour and a half from here, in California."

"so I just can't go knocking on that door.

"If it is that Kachadoorians you know

"maybe they're gonna wanna shoot me."

And he's just like, "I'm afraid to do it, can you help me?"

You can practically see the demons

Just raging around inside of him.

It really hurt him what happened.

It just fractured him in a really fundamental way.

And he just was like, "I gotta do this,

"even if it's gonna hurt, I gotta do it."

One way or another I got the Kachadoorian's phone number.

I said, "look there's somebody who wants to meet you."

Nora's husband was very uncomfortable with the whole thing.

He said, "you know if anybody did this to my family,

"I'd kill 'em."

In the middle east you know, an eye for an eye

And boy in Iraq like nowhere else.

I advised him not to go for it.

Let's see, somebody comes and kills your mom,

Your dad, your brother and your sister

And then they come back and see you 10 years later

And say hey can you forgive me?

What exactly do you think you would say?

I said, "you know he's just got a big heart.

"He's a sensitive guy, he really really wants to come."

They said, "okay, let him come."

Lou was terrified, I was terrified.

I just thought this is either gonna go really well

Or it's gonna go really badly.

As I walked up, I see the door's open.

I see Margaret and Nora lean over.

The moment Lou saw them, he started crying.

I said, "I'm sorry.

"I just wanna recognize your loss."

there on the mantle right next to us

Was the photograph of the three men,

Margaret's husband and her two sons who'd been killed.

They asked, "why did you shoot?"

I said, "we didn't want our friends to die.

"We love our friends."

And the mom kind of made it.

She said, "so do you feel better now?"

Lou said, "look, I suffer, I'm suffering because of this."

Margaret would say, "well I suffer more than you."

And he'd say, "but I never sleep,"

And she'd say, "I never sleep."

And he's like, "I'm haunted by this,"

And she's say, "you have no idea."

I knew that no matter what,

Nora would live the rest of her life

Watching her kids grow up thinking

I wish my dad was here to see this.

I wish my brother was here to see this.

He just kept dragging it out and it was excruciating.

We traveled a million miles in that room.

But the ice started to crack.

You could almost see their hearts opening up.

Taking him in.

Margaret looked at Lou and looked at her children

And said, "you remind me of my son, you remind me."

She said, "I'm not kidding, you're just like him."

they teach you in the marines,

You don't leave anyone behind.

And they were a part of our marine corps experience in Iraq.

They were with us on April 8th 2003.

If I stay true to my word

And treat them as I would my family and my friends,

Then I feel like I've done a good thing.

It's an integral part of my recovery.

I can't imagine it.

I mean seriously, I'd wanna freakin' kill us.

But they don't feel like that though man.

I think it helped them a lot, meeting me.

Because it's not just about you anyways.

- No it's not. - It's also about them.

I'm so proud of what Lou has done.

Being able to go and get this closure that's so important.

But I would not have the balls to do that.

I don't know what to do.

I'm freakin' lost out there, feel empty.

These kids have a terrible time adjusting.

You adjusted them to go there.

Don't you think you should add a little readjustment

To get them back here?

If when I got out there had been some kind of program,

And I think it ought to be mandatory.

You're not done with military service.

You're just no longer active.

Now you're in the re-constitution phase

And part of that is re-constitution boot-camp.

That's what they found out in world war ii.

The military was just discharging people into society

And their families and counseling centers

Couldn't keep up with it.

They're overwhelmed.

President Roosevelt mandated the military

Provide mental health treatment before discharging.

The goal was to help people

Get as well as they could, before they leave the military.

Here, the patient learns

To understand something of the basic

Causes of his distress.

The film let there be light documented

What the army was doing for soldiers who returned back home

With what we call today, post traumatic stress.

Now a new way of living begins,

Very different from killing and trying not to be killed.

The movie shows how,

By having some kind of reintegration camp,

That many do recover when they receive maximum benefit

Of treatment before discharge.

Men, may your lives as civilians be as worthy

As your record as soldiers.

That process for exiting the military,

I don't think has been redesigned for quite some time.

Can we disrupt that process

To really rethink how we cut the cord?

And what does re-assimilation need to look like

And who needs to play a roll in that.

You have to look at the good non-government organizations

And foundations that have popped up in the last dozen years

That have been filling a lot of gaps

And serving a lot of the needs of our military

And their families.

I really didn't know too much about the programs

Like save a warrior.

I'd never been to a non Va program.

Gentlemen, this program

Was only designed for you, just you, the warrior.

Because you deserve that.

You know we all this face on,

We're trying to keep it together

And I understand that.

I do this work because I love the way it makes me feel

And my role in life is not to share it with you.

I was going into a real dark place in my own life,

I was suicidal for a long time.

I looked at some non traditional healing modalities

And I thought, there's resources available

That maybe aren't being utilized to break the strategy

Of a competitor,

In this instance the competitor being suicide.

Carlos.

Are you open?

Yes.

Stand up and get open then.

Kenny are you open?

Definitely not closed.

Alright, well are you open though?

I don't know I was a lineman.

There was a reason

Why they didn't let me touch the football.

So every single person in this room is here to heal.

This is not the medical model.

You're going to learn by doing.

You're gonna be able to practice by doing.

What is suicide strategy?

Isolation.

Frustration.

Resentment.

Anger.

Hurt.

Fear.

So how do I break it's strategy?

There you go.

There's three protective factors.

Take your time rick.

Sense of usefulness.

Sense of belonging,

Avoidance of the pain of death.

Go with your left foot!

Just one of those protective factors

Is enough to keep you here.

But once they're gone, your fate is sealed.

You're gonna pick your moment

And that's where I was in my life.

Come on Kenny!

You got me?

You can trust me brother.

The ropes course builds community.

Dude don't worry about it, he's gotcha.

There's the sense of safety

And I'm back in the circle of warriors.

Nice job.

- Yeah! - Nice!

- Relax your arms man. - Aye yai yai.

There you go.

- Take a break man. - Take that load off your arm.

I wanna come down.

Good job.

There's historical precedent for this work.

Warriors did this in times past

And where we've really short changed ourselves

Is moving away from some of the more

Powerfully spiritual warrior type ceremonies.

Flew into rapid city and met up with Phil.

Will?

- Yes sir. - Nice to meet ya.

Nice to meet you.

Went driving through south Dakota.

Man this is a beautiful place isn't it?

Absolutely beautiful.

It's awe inspiring really.

A lot of veterans carry those war wounds back

And there's not much of a place to share those wounds.

We still have to go through a healing process.

We are gonna do Lakota style and see how deep we can go

With one another as brothers.

Whenever we have a veteran that comes back from war,

The community gathers together for a healing ceremony.

A lot of times our warriors come back unbalanced,

They're not the same.

Once they see something that's not used to seeing

On a daily basis, their spirit is separated form their body.

So these ceremonies are done to call their spirit back.

That way they can go back into society

Without having any problems.

A man maybe full of tears,

But he never had to learn an avenue

How to share those tears.

So if we want to kick-start that emotional communication

Channel that can open us up inside.

In the Lakota culture, it is a warrior society,

So there is an honoring their automatically.

The veterans lead different ceremonies.

The veterans are out front and honored.

Nowadays and the days of my ancestors,

The community always stood together

In support of one another.

The lack of rituals in our society really affects guys.

They're built up on a squad mentality

And then they get out as individuals

And now what do you do?

The battleground's right here.

We're gonna be doing a wild horse round up

Over the next couple days.

The horses out here are rescue horses

That have been neglected, abused.

We'll be going through them one by one,

Photographing them.

And keeping their information current.

We're sureing up the fences

So the horses don't break out and scatter to the wind.

Everybody working as a team,

Everybody communicating well,

It was just like having a successful mission in the army.

All the skills I learned as a young NCO

That I had tried to forget about,

Sometimes they're applicable all over our lives

In such a positive manner.

A horse herd is a lot like a military unit.

They run together,

They are very aware of what's going on around the,

And they all act as one.

This experience really pulled me out of my comfort zone.

I felt part of a squad again.

Nobody does this on their own.

In the morning we all helped set up a fire

For the traditional sweat.

A bunch of the elders heat up these rocks

In the middle of the road and it gets hot.

You're sitting in a pool of your sweat.

All warriors go through this sweat

To purify the mind and spirit

So that we can walk in balance.

The stones represent life

And the medicine is put on these stones

And the steam cleanses us.

It's an energy that is healing.

It's like being in your mother's womb.

You feel so isolated with your thoughts.

Caused a lot of looking back at past

And things that have happened.

You're expelling all your fears.

All the negative inside you is coming out.

In breathing the steam,

You're breathing in that new energy.

You're breathing in new life.

Never felt like that before.

It was almost like I was given a clean slate.

I've messed up a lot of relationships since I came back.

I went through two divorces after this war

And I haven't always done the right things you know?

And it forced me to have to look at that.

After a couple tries, you know it isn't them.

And the ability to be authentic and to open up

And to have to look at that,

I think is very healing in itself.

In the past, I've never felt safe to sleep.

The dreams kick in.

And at times I've been afraid

To go to sleep

For what I'm gonna have to go through.

Last night was the first time I've actually slept

And felt like I didn't have to worry.

It had been a long time since I saw an 18 year old Phil

And when he talked about south Dakota

I saw 19 year old Phil.

It was nice to see peace in his eyes again.

Warrior meditation has been around for thousands of years.

Since the time warriors have gone into battle.

It allows a person to dive within,

It's very blissful it's very relaxing.

You let go of everything.

Concentrate on your breathing

And just accept the thoughts that come into your head

And not judge 'em.

Which was a new concept for me.

It's one component but it's a powerful component

Because it gets you to a place where there's some peace.

It doesn't come in a pill,

It's not addictive other than wanting to feel good

And some of these guys haven't felt anything in years.

Doing great Carlos.

Stand up mate.

Oh yeah!

That pole is a terrifying obstacle.

Take your time, you're all good buddy.

It puts back in that protective factor

Of fear of the pain of death.

It presents it to that warrior.

And if he completes that move

In front of his brother warriors because he feels safe.

That's how a guy gets his life back.

You're safe brother, your safe.

Play like your life depends on it.

This is the fear to live for right here.

That's it Kenny, that's the fear to live for.

I'm terrified.

Good, means you're alive.

Just breathe.

- Awesome bro! - There it is.

Next foot up.

Up as a wave Kenny.

Come on Kenny.

- Jesus. - One step brother.

Show me how to do it.

This is.

This is terrifying.

You're safe man, you are totally safe.

Totally safe, you're goin' nowhere.

I've gotta move.

I've gotta move my leg.

I've gotta do this.

There you go.

You can do this big man.

Put your hand on your knee.

Look at that horizon Kenny.

- Look up. - Right there.

Stand up Kenny, just stand up.

Don't grab anything.

- Straight up. - Stand up.

If something like this would've been in place

When I got home, I know lives would be saved.

If you were with people who understand

And people who can tell you that it's okay

And that there is hope.

You guys played full out, you had a lot of courage,

You walked through a lot of pain.

Do me two favors, just breathe and meditate twice a day.

Think about what you're doing to pay it forward,

Even it's to yourself because your family will benefit.

There have been some amazing experimental efforts

At various military posts around the country.

It was a combination of unorthodox treatments.

They were having tremendous success.

The problem was, how do you scale something

That works for a few dozen soldiers

Into something that could work

For a few hundred thousand or more?

One trillion dollars annually between the DOD,

The Va and the veteran services organization

And you've got a 10 tour green beret

Eatin' out of a dumpster,

Hours off a plane from Afghanistan?

It goes beyond verbal.

There should be no shortage of this kind of a resource.

The biggest function we have

Is vetting all these existing organizations out there

So that we can find the ones

That are the most efficient,

The most legitimate and those that actually

Have the biggest impact on these lives.

How many lives can we really affect?

How many people's lives we can improve.

Thank you for playing like your life depended on it.

Thanks for letting us love you

And thanks for lovin' us back.

Thanks for opening your heart and your soul to us.

You're a beautiful spirit.

Alright brother.

Whoever said that you can't teach an old dog new tricks,

Didn't know shit about this program.

I'm gonna continue spreading the word

And I'm gonna start with my sons.

I don't want anybody else to have to wait thirty years.

The Vietnam generation lost 150,000 to suicide.

150,000 names that are not on the Vietnam memorial wall.

There's 54,000 that are.

The more I look at it,

The more I see my generation of veterans

Going down the same road.

And something's gotta give.

You'd need a congress to reread

Article one of the constitution

Where it says that congress is responsible

For the health, welfare and care of the armed forces

Of the United States.

And legislate the change.

We were not ready in world war two,

We were not ready in Vietnam,

We were not ready in the gulf war,

We were not ready in the Iraq, Afghanistan conflicts.

If we send our troops to war ever again,

It has to be something we talk about from the beginning.

We have catastrophic system-wide failure

Due to chronic neglect essentially.

We cannot provide even basic mental health needs

During peacetime right now, let alone war time.

There's nobody in charge, there's nobody accountable.

We need a behavioral health corps

Doing anything otherwise will perpetuate crisis.

I need six volunteers.

Phillip Straub united states marine corps.

William Rodriguez, United States army.

Detail, attention.

Present

Arm.

Lets hear it for our military,

We'd like to thank you.

So this is their home.

We are going to meet the Kachadoorian family.

Lou tells me that they would like to meet me,

So I would like to meet them as well.

This wasn't even an option a few months ago for me.

And now I'm actually looking forward to it.

It's gonna be scary to step onto this pole.