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All right y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org, right around 14 years now, 4,400 and something interviews for you, ScottHorton.org slash interviews there, and all the stuff gets posted first at LibertarianInstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show, and then I'm doing the Q&A show on the whole show feed.
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I've got a brand new one I posted yesterday.
Okay, introducing Matthew Ho.
He's a former Marine and former State Department official who heroically resigned in the summer of 2009 and leaped to the papers.
Why?
He wrote a big memo to the boss saying, basically he was trying to stop Obama's surge, trying to give the American people someone to cite, to say, this expert says we don't have to do this, and of course the whole thing was a bust, just got thousands of people killed for nothing, just like he said would happen.
But anyway, he also is experienced in Iraq from Iraq War II, and he's become an anti-war activist and other kinds of activist too ever since then.
Welcome back to the show, Matt.
How are you, sir?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
I said that all so nicely because I want a blurb for my book, dude.
Absolutely.
My pleasure.
My pleasure, man.
Yeah.
That was me subtly manipulating you.
Yeah, of course.
Now you owe me a blurb.
I know.
I will do my best to be like Scott Horton's, you know.
You know what I'm thinking?
I'm thinking all the blurbs should say, this book is not wholly inaccurate, or you know, for a book by a guy who's never been to Afghanistan, this isn't too bad, I guess, and you know, that kind of stuff.
I mean, basically something along the lines, like I actually finished reading this book, you know, something on it.
Yeah, I made it to the end, and you know, it wasn't wholly terrible.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't, you know, I didn't throw it against the wall or, you know, I mean, exactly.
But then to have all those kind of like very deadpan sort of quotes, but then have them be by Ron Paul and Danny Davis and Matthew Ho and Patrick Coburn and Anand Gopal and all of my heroes, then that would be rad.
Like this book, I can tolerate it.
I mean, I don't know if I'd share it with somebody, but it's worth reading once, I guess, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
I'm happy I didn't have to pay for it, you know.
Right.
He sent it to me in the email.
What am I going to do?
Not read it?
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know?
And, you know, it is, it is kind of long, you know, I'm, you know, I mean, but I'm pleased a lot of the, a lot of the pages are notes, you know, I mean, so I don't have to read those.
Yeah.
I think, I think about 10% of it is footnotes, maybe more than that.
But that's great though.
I mean, in a sense of that, you know, you do, you see a lot of these books that come out in those guys, not to go on a tangent, but some of this stuff, you know, there's no notes, you know, or the no, I mean, it's just like, who are these people who are writing this stuff that just, there's no documentation, you know, and you see, I see that more and I think it's okay.
If you're Eric Margulies and you're writing worth the top of the world, then trust me, man.
I was there.
It's sort of good enough, but I'm a Texan.
I wasn't a journalist in the war and I wasn't a soldier in the war and I never been to Afghanistan.
I don't speak a word of Pashto.
And so we're going to have to figure out something else.
Like I read as much stuff as I could.
And I interviewed a lot of guys.
That's about my experience.
I mean, I, if I can get away with that with a lot of this stuff, but Scott, you know, I go, I go back to that.
What's the old line?
You know, I don't have to have been to the grand Canyon to know that it's a giant hole in the ground.
There's something, that's a good one.
You know what?
I think that quote might just go in my book right now.
Right.
I mean, there's the, you don't have to have been to Afghanistan to know it's a giant hole in the ground.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know that it's a, it's a absolute catastrophe that has been nothing but a tragedy that the Afghan people have been suffering for decades, that it has just been just a huge racket, a moneymaking racket for corporations, you know, a, a, a, a policy disaster.
I mean, however you want to describe it, you don't have to go there to, to understand that.
I mean, all you have to do is read a few things.
Yeah.
It's amazing too.
I just read another article from the New York times the other day, the way people keep talking about, uh, journalists keep talking about the resurgent Taliban, you know, these phrases that they keep using that the resurgent Taliban, the way that, that they're, they're, they, they keep, they're, they've been using the same phrases for 10, 12 years now.
Um, you know, it's, but you know, yeah, well, I mean, it looks like, um, as long as we're talking about Afghanistan, um, one of the last things I'm waiting on, I'm still working on some comments and stuff, but one of the last things I'm waiting on is the number, because any day now we've been saying for a couple of months here, any day now, Mattis is going to submit his official Afghanistan report to Trump asking for, we know already at least 5,000 troops cause that's what, well, we don't know that, but presumably, uh, since that's what the Afghan war commander general Nicholson has already asked for publicly.
Uh, so we're only just getting started on chapter three right now.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
What, to send them back into what, to send them back into Helmand to fight the battle of Sangin three or four or whatever, I mean, to redo all that stuff over again, just to, just to kill more and get more American kids, you know, become amputees and everything else just to do what, you know, exactly, exactly, uh, all right now, wait a minute though.
So here's the only and most important and best argument that I need to make sure I have covered right from my book anyway.
And that really, if I'm right, then, um, I'm right.
If I'm wrong, then maybe there's a problem and it needs to be reexamined kind of a thing.
But here's, here's the deal.
It's the safe haven mitt that like, okay, Matthew Ho look, dude, fighting a war for the Tajiks against the Pashtuns isn't really working out that well, or, okay, your memo is right about that, but we can't leave because if we leave Al Qaeda will come back.
And in fact, we just saw a special operator was killed in Nangarhar province yesterday or day before yesterday, uh, fighting a group declared loyal to the Islamic state.
And so now you're telling me we're going to leave right now when the baddest of the bad people were there and, and you saw what a wonderful safe haven is for horrible anti-American terrorists and we can't ever allow that to happen.
So you know what, maybe we can't do a counterinsurgency pacification campaign, but maybe we do have to leave a garrison in Bagram airbase forever to make sure that even if there are a couple Islamic state fighters around, there's nothing like the situation with bin Laden and friends in 2001.
Well, I, I think that the, the, the correct word is the word he used at the beginning of what you said there, Scott, is that a safe haven myth.
And it was a myth.
I mean, we know from what the FBI said, from what guys like Ali Soufan said, or from what Peter Bergen has reported that at the time of 9 11, the total strength of Al Qaeda worldwide was between 200 and 400 people.
And now look at the size of these groups, Al Qaeda or the Islamic state or whatever.
But I mean, the most, uh, the most important safe havens that the 9 11 hijackers had were the flight schools, you know, in Florida, you know, the martial arts academies they attended.
We had, uh, we had 9 11 hijackers in the United States for what, 18 months, almost two years before the 9 11 attacks.
I mean, so the best, the best safe haven they had was actually here in this country.
Um, they actually, the 9 11 hijackers were actually not actually even in Afghanistan for very long.
They kind of, from everything I know, they, they went to the ones that actually did go to Afghanistan, went to meet Bin Laden to kiss the ring basically.
Um, and that was it.
Um, and then the rest of their training occurred, maybe some in Pakistan, uh, and then the rest of it was in, in Europe.
Uh, they had meetings, uh, in Asia, Spain, and then of course all the things they did here in America.
So this notion that for specifically 9 11, the safe haven, it's just an absolute myth.
I mean, it really was something that, uh, never really existed.
This idea that, uh, they utilized, uh, Afghanistan's as training ground to launch these attacks that killed 3000 Americans.
Um, no, I mean, they were, uh, the leadership of Al Qaeda was hanging out, uh, in Afghanistan.
Um, they had this really difficult, complicated relationship with the Taliban.
Um, and it seems that everyone you talk to, you get a different answer about what the Taliban was planning on doing with Al Qaeda in 2001, whether or not they're going to kick them out, whether or not they were looking to hand them over to somebody, whether or not they were still friendly with them.
I mean, everyone seems to have a different answer to that.
But this notion that Al Qaeda actually needed physical ground, that, you know, Tarnak farms where they lived in, in Kandahar was a vital essence to the 9 11 operation or to any other type of operation they were going to, uh, carry out in the future just simply isn't, uh, supported by the evidence or by, you know, by, you know, uh, you know, logical looking at, uh, how these groups actually operate.
So no, I, I don't believe the safe haven argument ever really, uh, had any merit to it, but it's emotionally good, right?
You know, if we're not there, if we're not there, they're going to do it all over again.
They're going to come and attack us.
So we have to, you know, it goes back to that old George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld.
We've got to fight them there or we're going to be fighting on here in the streets type of thing.
Mm hmm.
Okay.
But maybe you and me were both right about that all along or for the whole time you thought that or that kind of thing I always did, but maybe now we're wrong because maybe now George W. Bush and Barack Obama have created so many jihadis in the world that now it really is a problem.
Right at the time Obama was killing Osama.
He was taking his side in Libya and Syria.
Now look what happened.
This whole freaking thing is exploded so far out of proportion all across the Middle East and North Africa.
And again, you got guys declaring their loyalty to Baghdadi in Afghanistan.
What if we left Matt Ho and Baghdadi and all his guys said, ha ha, we chased you out of Afghanistan because you're the weak paper tiger and we can keep attacking you and we're going to, and this kind of thing, like what right wingers think.
Well, I mean, I think the, the, you could have that possibility.
Sure.
There's all kinds of, of, uh, things you can come up with reasons or speculations you can come up with for what might happen, but we know what is happening, Scott.
We know what has been happening, that our presence in this predates nine 11 again, again, we can go back and look at why the nine 11 attackers said the hijackers said where their reasons for the attack.
They attacked us because of our support for Israel, our presence, our military presence in Saudi Arabia and our sanctions against Iraq, uh, you know, which were killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Um, you know, I mean, our actions in the military, in the middle, Middle East, our military actions, our support for despotic governments, our actions against the people of the Middle East for decades have been fueling people's anger and have been pushing them towards terrorist groups and some of them, a very, very, very, very small minority have joined groups like Al Qaeda.
So that's what we know has happened and is happening.
So this speculation that if we leave there, they're going to come chasing after us, waving their banners and shout, you know, waving their black banners and, and, and, and shouting, you know, we're the army of, uh, you know, of Mohammed and, and, and, and now we're coming after you.
Uh, I don't know.
Might it happen?
Sure.
Why not?
Maybe possibly.
But what we do know is happening right now and has been happening for decades is that our presence in the Middle East has been causing this anger, um, and in many, many ways, justified anger that has fueled support for these groups.
Um, let alone our actions, which have caused these wars, which are fueling these wars, which are arming these wards, these wars.
Um, yeah, so, um, I mean, also too, I mean, you look at the attacks, right?
I mean, you look at, at the people who are actually conducting, uh, the, the, the attacks that we do, uh, have here, say in the United States or in Britain or in, um, you know, or in Europe, uh, the majority of those attacks are caused by people who are from here, who are born here in the United States or who have lived here for a very, very long time.
Um, you know, they're not from the people who are refugees.
They're not from the people who are coming, uh, on a plane over here yesterday.
You know, it's, it's, those instances, um, are incredibly rare.
Uh, you know, uh, very few, again, the majority of those attacks are conducted by people who are native born or who have been here for most of their life.
So again, the evidence just doesn't show that that's what has occurred or will occur.
Yeah.
Well, and quite a few of those have cited America's continued occupation of war in Afghanistan as their motive for doing their crimes here in America anyway.
Uh, hey, did you see Lindsey Graham?
Uh, I hate to make light of this at all, but it's, I can't help, but, uh, it's worth bringing up.
Uh, Lindsey Graham on the Tucker show the other day.
Did you see that?
Oh yeah.
Cause that's what I do.
I, I, uh, I have a, a Google alert, uh, for Tucker Carlson and Lindsey Graham.
And so when, well, it was going around on Twitter, I mean, that makes my day.
I was, I had that.
I was waiting for that.
No, of course I didn't watch that.
No, it was so good though, because here's what happened.
I mean, you know, Tucker's no good on any of this stuff either.
Like he can kind of pick up on some of the contradictions, but he doesn't have any kind of real compelling narrative in his head for, for how to contradict Graham necessarily.
So they're both just kind of all over the place.
But Tucker's saying, well, but you just said ISIS is the main enemy.
And Graham says, yeah, yeah.
And he goes, no, but you just said Iran is the main enemy, but they're fighting each other.
And then, so Graham is just melting down, basically trying to figure out some sort of coherent way to talk about this.
And, you know, Tucker didn't even bring up blowback.
It was almost like Lindsey Graham's guilty conscience bringing up blowback or in fact the way he was kind of setting up the straw man in a way, or what he thought anyways, the straw man, like, Hey, look, you can't just not fight them.
As though that was what Tucker was offering as the alternative, right?
As though Tucker's you or me, look, you can't just not fight them.
After all, Graham said, we were attacked on nine 11, even though we didn't have troops in Afghanistan.
And I just thought it was so great because, you know, Tucker didn't pick up on it or anything like that.
He might as well have said, Horton is right.
You know, what can I say?
It was the troops in Saudi Arabia.
Everybody knows that it was a bunch of Saudis.
Yeah.
Who were hiding in Afghanistan.
But yeah, it was the troops.
It's just, I mean, for him to, to hide, to, to kind of argue around the point like that to me was basically a full admission.
Well, you know, I mean, I think too, you do have to worry.
You do have to wonder, does, you know, Lindsey Graham, if you were to stop Lindsey Graham in the street, you know, and, and, and, you know ask him, you know, who, you know, were there Afghans involved in the nine 11 attack?
He may not know.
I mean, this is a man who I don't believe is smart.
I mean, I have a, you know, I mean, it's, it's an anecdotal story, but I know a guy who briefed him in Afghanistan one time and he could not understand the difference between Hellman and Kandahar.
He couldn't, he couldn't understand the concept of provinces.
Like he could not get that concept, you know, um, like in Canada.
Yeah.
You mean like he couldn't, yeah.
Right.
You mean like, and, and, and so you do, you have to worry.
I mean that these are the people who, and this is the man who one of two who every time there is an attack is always the spokesperson for our Congress.
You know, it's all for whatever reason, it's always him or John McCain is who CNN and MSNBC and Fox and everyone else always puts forward.
Right.
I mean like it's either Lindsey Graham or John McCain or the ones that the mainstream press is running to for a comment, even though you know what they're going to say.
Maybe they're just trying to get something more, uh, outlandish or, or more aggressive or something, you know, um, uh, better than what they said last time.
Maybe they're looking for, I don't know.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, I, I, I totally believe that that's what he said that he, you know, he, uh, his, his line of thought is that, and the understanding, um, the, the, the understanding of the importance of troops in Saudi Arabia to what Al Qaeda was doing on 9 11 is just simply not there in Lindsey, Lindsey Graham's mind.
But also too, I don't think Lindsey Graham cares.
I don't think, I mean, I really don't think he cares.
I mean, I don't think he, he, he cares for anything other than what's important to Lindsey Graham's personal, uh, arc of history, right.
Where he sees his own political, you know, he's got this view of himself as this defender of the United States somehow, you know, as this great crusader for American virtue and values and strength across the world.
I think he's got this view of himself that he's a psychopath, like a lot of these guys are.
And I think that's what we're dealing with here.
A lot of people who are in these positions of power, they're there, they have this view of themselves and it manifests in various ways.
And in cases like Graham or McCain, it manifests through this, uh, desire to use military force, uh, you know, as, uh, you know, this manifestation of themselves, but as, you know, really as a manifestation of, of who America is.
Um, and so it doesn't matter why they attacked us at 9 11.
All it is is an excuse to continue to do what we're doing.
Yeah.
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Well, and it really is something to, to really realize how ignorant, especially the most vocal war Hawks are, um, reminded of John McCain and his trip to Iraq.
And I guess 2007 or eight where he's going on and on and on, I guess it was 07 on and on and on about how Al Qaeda are going to Iran to be trained to fight.
Even though of course, Iran was backing the bottom brigade that America was backing against Al Qaeda and Iraq, the major Sunni Shia split.
And at some point he was going on so long that Joe Lieberman went ahead and stepped up to the, stepped up next to him and interrupted the statement in order to whisper in his ear, the Iranians, they're training militants.
Okay.
Militants.
They're training Al Qaeda because that's stupid.
You know, he said, he says after years of the Sunni Shia civil war in Iraq and he still had no idea even that, like in the West, that's the predominantly Sunni based guys in the insurgency.
And in the East, that's where the predominantly Shia there toward Iran, right?
He can't even picture that in his head, the difference and, and which side America is on when it was pretty black and white at that time that we're fighting for the bottom brigade.
We think the bottom brigade is fighting for us, but, and you know, they couldn't even understand that the worst war hawks in the Senate at the height of the thing didn't even know which side we were on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it wasn't like you said, it wasn't like the bottom brigade was one of the multitudes of smaller militias and you're caught up in the minutia and everything else.
I mean, this was the bottom brigade.
This was one of the biggest, if not the biggest type of deal.
I mean, and yeah, et cetera, et cetera.
And they don't know and they don't care because it doesn't matter.
But this is also the man too, that just went a few days ago or last week regarding the Russians said, I don't care what the Russians say.
I don't care about them.
We're tougher.
We're bigger than them.
Well, I mean, like just these remarks about the, the cavalier nature towards conflict with the Russians that John McCain continues to spout is just, it's horrifying.
I mean, it's absolutely horrifying.
You know, and certainly these are, these are people that have no business being in positions that they're in.
And certainly if they continue to be in these positions, I'm afraid that we're going to be burying a lot of people.
There are going to be a lot of mothers and fathers and young wives and young children, you know, at gravesides because of people like McCain and Graham.
I mean, it's just, I mean, it's happening.
It's still happening.
It has been happening.
It's still happening and it's going to continue to happen probably in greater numbers.
If these men and women are continued to allow, to conduct actions like they're doing without the American people stopping them.
And of course the suffering of the people in Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, et cetera, is just going to continue on in just such a manner that is just absolutely horrific.
I mean, just in ways that we can't understand.
I mean, the horrors there are just absolutely horrific.
So, yeah.
Well, and I want to point out here to remind the audience that when you say that, that's not just some rhetoric and you're a guy whose friends are dead because of these wars in real life.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's a, that's something that, yeah, I mean, it's an anger that I will have and I will always have, you know, and I'm sorry to do that to you, but I just didn't want people to think that.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
People die.
People die.
People die.
Blah, blah, blah.
That this is very real stuff.
This is not just a game.
It's not just words.
These are real corpses.
No, absolutely.
You know?
And the same thing too, when I say about the, the, the Iraqis and the Afghans, the same thing as well.
I mean, I, I have a, I have issues with guilt over what I took part in, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The suffering that what we did to those people.
You know, I have, so I, I speak about it publicly.
I talk about the, you know, my, my own suicidality, my own issues with that, thoughts of taking my own life because of the things I did in Iraq, you know, as part of the war effort, you know, things that occurred, things that you did, things that happened to people.
I mean, it is very real and it's still occurring.
And so just the, the, the way that people discuss it, the way that people talk about it or the, the, the nature of people saying that war is a dirty business or, or things happen in war, or just the, again, the very cavalier nature of it.
These are people who have not dealt with it, which is all the more surprising for McCain because McCain is someone who has dealt with it and McCain is someone who had, whose son served in the Marine Corps over in Iraq and whose son, I assume probably had to go through some tough times over there because I believe his son was in the infantry.
So I am surprised that McCain is so cavalier, but also too, I think McCain is, I think there's something not right in McCain's head.
I think the man is senile.
I mean, I think the man is, there's something wrong with him as well as the fact that I think he is a narcissistic psychopath like so many others in Washington DC and nothing matters to him besides his own personal ambition and power and you know, his own personal victories.
So but yeah, I mean it is, it certainly is not a game and you know, I mean the suffering that occurs every day and has been occurring every day is just a, it's legion.
I mean it just, it's, it's countless.
It's just, it goes on and on and on and there really is no end in sight for it.
And so this notion that somehow we're going to continue, we're going to escalate or that our military actions are going to bring about an end to it when there is no evidence of that in the past of that working.
You know, I mean there really is not a, that makes that anger deepen even more.
Yeah.
Hey listen.
I brought you on to talk about Palestine.
We haven't even started with that yet.
So but I kind of want to at least give you a chance if you want to, to address some of the PTSD stuff because I know that not only have you had some problems with this like you just said, but that you know, you've been working on it and that you've been helping other people and that you know of, you know, you sent me an article before about some new techniques and things like this that are being used on soldiers to help you and to help other people that you know and this kind of thing.
So you know, I know there are a lot of veterans and in fact, active duty military guys who listen to this show and a lot of them may be very interested to hear what you have to say about some of that stuff because of course, not just suicide, but a lot of, you know, negativity short of suicide to put it, you know, euphemistically, you know, takes place in this country as a result of all of this stuff.
There's a lot of hardship for a lot of people and it sounds like I think you've had some success in figuring out how to cope with this and how to help others.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Thanks guy.
Yeah.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, it does.
It wrecks everything.
It wrecks everything.
It wrecks stress that does manifest as like, yeah, basically it's negativity, this anger, this guilt, this sadness that manifests into depression, you know, that then of course the substance abuse comes with it, whether it's alcohol or drugs or prescription meds or whatever.
You know, I mean, these, these are all things that, yeah, just damage and then wreck everything in its path.
You know, it destroys relationships.
It destroys jobs, destroys intimacy.
It destroys, you know, I mean financially I know so many guys who dealing with the after effects of war who are financially in trouble right now and they look around and they say, how did I get like this?
And just, that's just something that happens.
I mean, so there are so many levels to it.
It becomes very complex, you know?
And then there's the other side of this.
There's another element to this too, something that I've been experiencing that a lot of us who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from neurocognitive disorders or traumatic brain injuries because of the explosive blasts.
And these are really are invisible wounds.
If you put us into an MRI machine, you can't see on the brain the damage.
But there is something wrong with the, you know, we've got what, 85 billion neurons in our brains or whatever.
There is something wrong with us.
And for me, a couple of years ago, I started having some neurological problems.
I started having some real bad migraines and exhaustion issues as well as issues with memory and concentration.
And I have some problems.
It's interesting how it manifests.
I'm still able to write and speak, but when it comes to doing rather simple tasks like copying and pasting things or moving things around on my computer, I tend to get overwhelmed really easily.
It's a memory issue for me.
And so a lot of guys are experiencing these things right now.
I have a friend of mine who used to write computer code, went to Iraq, and now he can barely get words down on paper.
Again, something that's manifested over the last couple of years.
It's something that is similar.
It's different, but it's similar to what football players and boxers are experiencing.
That type of exposure to concussions which manifests after time, like that buildup, that chronic buildup of damage.
And so for many Iraq and Afghan vets, also, too, a lot of this occurs in training because you're exposed to blasts.
And I think that's where most of mine may have come from, was in training, because I was a combat engineer and did a lot of demolitions, did a lot of breaching, you know, when you stand next to the door with the explosive device right on a door and you blow the doorknob off the door and those kinds of things.
We did a lot of that.
And we're now learning that that can cause a lot of damage to the brain, things we didn't know 10, 15 years ago.
So we're seeing more and more of that, and people are starting to learn more and more about that.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to identify, and you can't really see the damage.
There's no way to see it.
So and it manifests the same as PTSD and depression and some other things.
But there are, you know, one of the things, the VA treatment is, you know, there was a big study came out last year on the VA suicide rates, and it was 20 a day kill themselves.
And the numbers really are off the charts for veterans who are 18 to 29 years old.
Their suicide rate is five and a half times higher than their civilian peers.
And we also know that for infantry units, for the few infantry units that have been tracked post-combat, we're seeing rates as high as 14 times.
So for infantry battalions, after they come home and those guys get out, their suicide rates can be as high as 14 times that of their civilian peers.
Now the silver lining in all this, if there is one, is that if these veterans get into veterans health care, and if they go and they see doctors and they take part in the various treatment programs that are available to them, while the suicide rate for them is still higher than their civilian peers, it is much, much, much lower than those who are not enrolled in veterans health care.
And so the VA, which has a lot of problems and has a lot of issues, it's grossly under-resourced.
You know, I mean, most VAs are operating with patient loads two or two and a half times or three times what they were designed for, you know.
If we get the veteran in there and they can commit to a program of therapy, things will get better.
It takes a long time.
And what I tell most people about recovering from war, and again, there's so many levels to this.
There's the PTSD, there's the guilt and the moral injury, there's the substance abuse and alcohol abuse, there's the depression, there's financial insecurity, there's transitioning to new life, there's on and on and on, plus possibly these neurocognitive disorders and these traumatic brain injuries that we're now truly understanding.
It's a lifetime of managing this.
And we see this.
We see this.
When we look at World War II veterans and career war veterans, time does not heal war wounds.
It might heal broken hearts.
It might heal things or relationships.
It might heal other issues.
But the research shows that war-related issues, war-related memories don't get better on their own over time.
So this all goes to say that it's tough.
It's really hard.
And if untreated, it gets worse.
And it usually ends up pretty bad.
Usually ends up with homelessness, destitution, domestic abuse is very high.
It ends up bad.
But if you can get into treatment, and if there are wives and girlfriends and moms out there listening, I always say this to them, because they're the ones who do this the best.
You have to get them into treatment.
You got to nag.
You got to push them.
Right?
You got to get them into treatment.
And yeah, I mean, that's the key, is getting help.
And understand that's going to take a long time, that this is not a six-week process.
It's not a six-month process.
It is most likely a lifelong process.
It's unfortunate, but that's the way it works.
That's unfortunately the way the brain works.
That's unfortunately the way that we have to manage ourselves to get over the things that occurred in war.
In my case, the PTSD specifically, the starter reflexes, the reactions to basically what you have is, with PTSD specifically, with the post-traumatic stress disorder, Scott, what you have is you have a way I like to describe for people is that you have a Marine or a soldier, he goes to Iraq or Afghanistan for eight months, nine months, a year.
His job is to leave his base every day and hunt for somebody while other people are hunting for him.
His survival system is turned on.
That survival system was created in our bodies so that we could fight the saber-toothed tiger every now and again for a short period of time.
It's not meant to be kept on for nine months or for a year like it is.
So what happens is it breaks, it gets stuck open.
And when that young man or young woman comes home, that survival system is stuck on.
It's pumping all these survival chemicals all the time.
So that's what they have to deal with.
Everything is always tense, everything is always on, everything is always aggravated.
And there's ways you could deal with that.
For me, the biggest problem was the guilt, was what they call moral injury.
And as I said, a lot of good doctors have helped me in getting past all that and now dealing with some of these neurological problems, which again, you get some good doctors and they help you.
And you accept it and you figure it out.
And you keep moving forward.
All right, now, a couple of things here real quick.
Not to lecture anybody or anything, but yeah, in 2002, the message was, oh yeah, no, don't worry.
This is going to be great.
In fact, one of my childhood friends was in the army then.
I talked to him on the phone and he goes, yeah, you just don't understand.
George W. Bush is doing some really good things for the military right now, meaning the grunts were getting a raise.
And he was not Bill Clinton.
So great.
And the whole message was unstated, but it was there that even though you have all just spent the last 25 years looking at Vietnam veterans begging on the side of the road, this time it's going to be different.
Even though we were already more than a decade into this will not be another Vietnam, the war against Iraq.
This will not be another Vietnam.
We're going to go in there.
We're going to get Saddam and get out.
That's what everybody was saying.
We're going to go in there and get Saddam and get out.
And so the whole thing about, yeah, it's true.
You've seen homeless Vietnam veterans on the side of the road your entire lifelong still in their army jackets.
But don't worry about that.
Dismiss that.
Don't consider that because that and this are just entirely separate issues.
And now look at us here in 2017, when the stuff that you just you just described, you're talking about millions of people who have gone, I mean, I don't know how many hundreds and hundreds of thousand.
I think millions have been combat vets in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places for that matter, over this last decade and a half and more of war.
Yeah, they have.
We have the the Iraq and Afghan vets.
This is misconception that most people don't see combat in Iraq or Afghanistan when the reality is every study I've seen, I've looked at over 10 of them, you know, done by universities, the RAND Corporation, you know, National Institute of Health, the VA, et cetera.
Iraq and Afghan vets have the highest exposure to combat of any veterans going back to the First World War, but based depending upon the study, between 60 and 80 percent of Iraq and Afghan vets have some form of exposure to combat.
That can mean being shot at.
That can mean seeing a dead person that can mean, you know, seeing a friend getting shot or killed.
I mean, there's all different levels to it.
But, you know, we have the high and that's because of the nature of the conflict.
That's because of the nature of the war.
That's because of the nature of how things were set up over there.
Also to the fact that so much of the logistical work has been contracted out.
So you don't have those tail that that support element is now done by contractors or civilians where in the past, you know, say in Vietnam or even in the Gulf War, you had uniformed personnel doing that work.
But certainly, Scott, I mean, I was under that misconception, I mean, I just had that those thoughts as we were going into the Iraq war was that we're not going to make the mistake again.
Look, I have on my shelf when I was a second lieutenant, two of the books I read as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam and A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Shaheen, two of the best books about the Vietnam War and two of the best books I feel about American government and American history that described so well the lies about the Vietnam War and about the decision making process by the American government based on those lies that got us into Vietnam and prolonged the Vietnam War.
Those were books that were on the Marine Corps' required reading list for officers.
I mean, so this was stuff our generals were saying to us in the Marine Corps that we're not going to make this mistake again.
Don't worry about it.
Vietnam is, was, you know, let alone everything else, we're not going to make this mistake.
You can trust us.
Let alone the society saying, don't worry, we're not going to do the same thing to you that we did to the Vietnam vets.
We're going to take care of you guys.
And absolutely, we just walked right back into it.
You know, I mean, what are we going to do?
I mean, like I have to take some of the blame for that myself for being naive enough to believe it.
Right.
You know, but but we did.
We walked right back into these wars.
These wars are still going on, you know, and we trusted these people and these wars are still going on.
And we trusted them again that they're going to take care of us.
And guys are putting guns in their mouth all the time and blowing the back of their heads off because they can't deal with what happened in those wars.
You know, they're not meanwhile, you know, they're not getting the help that they need at the level they need.
The hospital, the hospitals are under resourced.
You know, my hospital, which has got, again, my doctors here in Durham at the Durham V.A. are terrific.
But if I was to call right now and say, hey, look, I'm a veteran.
I fought in Iraq.
I'm not doing so well.
I need to come in and talk to somebody.
It would take me one hundred and fourteen days to get in to see somebody.
Yeah.
I mean, that's where we're at right now.
OK, so talk to me about then the groups of veterans who are just helping each other anyway.
So a lot of guys, there's a lot of it.
I mean, you see a lot of it.
Some of it's informal and some of it's formal.
I mean, that that's where, you know, there's this problem, right?
Because you can get online and Google it and you just see all these different veterans groups.
I actually one thing I've seen a lot of those on Facebook, not.
And I know of different units have done this different.
They come home and they form these Facebook groups or maybe Google groups or whatever they do, or maybe they're on, I don't know, whatever, and they're younger.
So they they're on, I don't know, whatever it is they use now.
But they this way, they keep tabs on each other because they come home, they separate from the army or the Marine Corps, and then they go back to Kansas and Washington and Florida or wherever they're from, Detroit and Topeka or whatnot.
And this is how they keep tabs on each other.
And some of them go so far as they make each other check in every day with one another to make sure that they're doing OK.
Because that's what they need to do to keep alive, to keep going, to keep moving forward.
And you're seeing more and more of that type of informal.
Because one of the things, Scott, that's interesting, if you look at the suicide rates for active duty service members, it's higher than it is for civilians, but not very much.
Right.
But if you look at, of course, the suicide rates for veterans, people who have separated from the military compared to civilians and the younger, and then, of course, those who have been in combat, the rates are off the chart.
And the idea, the assumption is once you leave the group, once you're out of that bubble, you know, that's when the problems come on you.
That's when you lose your support.
That's when also, too, there's an understanding, too, that PTSD, traumatic brain injury, the moral injury, the guilt, these are all things that manifest with time.
There's a latency that comes with them.
For whatever reason, there's a delayed onset with them, particularly the traumatic brain injury, the neurocognitive disorders, also, too, with the moral injury and the guilt.
There can be a real delayed onset with them.
So it may not hit you until you're out of the service for a couple of years anyway, when all of a sudden, bam, you get hit with this stuff.
But yeah, so you're seeing these young men and women who are banding together to try and help one another because they're not finding it anywhere else, or they're going in to get help and they're not being able to get in because the VA is overwhelmed, because it takes them three months to see a doctor, you know?
And then, like anyone else, they go to the VA.
They don't want to go because they're stereotypical.
These were the kids that we recruited for the infantry.
These are the ones who need the most help or whatever.
These are the kids that we told were tough.
We told that they were exceptional.
We told that they were ...
And every time they go to a baseball game, they're told to stand up so we can applaud them because they're heroes.
Every time they go someplace, they're told they're a hero.
Every time they go someplace, they're told that they're exceptional and they fought for our country and they protected us and everything else.
But inside, they're breaking down.
Inside, they're having all these problems.
Inside, they may be, like a lot of us, again, have these horrible guilt issues about what they did, what they saw, what they took part in.
And so now they're trying to go get help.
They're having frustrations getting help.
And so when they go to get help, they're looking for any excuse not to get help, right?
So they run into a wall and they turn around right away.
So again, they're turning to one another because that's what they know.
That's what's comfortable and it does help.
But again, you're dealing with serious medical problems here that require professional help.
So I mean, it is good that they turn to one another, but they really do need to get in for professional care.
So yeah, I mean, the point being here that, well, you think about how cavalierly they talk about what to do in Syria.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
And it's just sort of presumed that any old soldier or Marine loves it.
And that, you know, they're just pit bulls on a chain, man.
All we got to do is let them go.
And this is what they're all about.
Doesn't matter what the mission is.
All they want to do is go on it as though there's these aren't, you know, this is part of Chris Hedges had said, you know, back years ago, war is a force that gives us meaning about how we treat soldiers and Marines, whatever troops as these golden idols and we put them up on such a pedestal.
Well, we're dehumanizing them all the same.
Just the same as calling them a Haji.
We're making them kind of so separate and different from us, like they ought to be able to just drink a beer and get over it because of what tough guy heroes they all are and whatever.
Like you're just saying.
And so they end up neglected when really it's just the neighbor kid who George Bush put over there in some insane situation.
There's a movie like this that's out right now.
It's on the Pirate Bay for people.
I forget the young man's name, his long halftime walk.
It's called.
Oh, yeah.
It's based on a book and a true story.
This kid, you know, hand to hand combat ended up killing an Iraqi.
But who's trespassing on whose property?
And yeah, he was heroically trying to save his sergeant.
But who was trespassing on whose property?
And so he's totally 20 kill this guy with his bare hands.
And here he's like, oh, my God, I'm going through all this.
And at the same time, they're like, yeah, you're the prop at the Super Bowl and we're going to set off all these fireworks and we're going to have Beyonce dancing.
And it's like the most crass Pepsi commercial for this week's lingo kind of exploitation of this poor kid.
You know, like he's this superhero when he's just the neighbor kid.
And yeah, I can see why people end up not being able to handle this when they're just left alone, basically so excluded from all sides.
Well, and killing in our society is so commonplace in terms of our culture, our society, our movies, our video games.
You know, last year, the National Center for Veterans Studies at University of Utah looked at 22 studies that examined the relationship between killing in between combat and suicide.
They threw out one of the studies and but they found that the 21 remaining studies, all 21 found a significant relationship between being in combat and then committing suicide.
And they found that that relationship deepened the more you were exposed to killing, whether you were directly involved in killing or not.
So whether you directly did the killing or you were indirectly involved with the killing, it didn't seem to matter.
But the closer you were involved to it, the more proximity you had to killing or to atrocity.
And atrocity is defined however you want to define it.
I mean, atrocity could be 35 dead people or just one dead person.
And I've seen enough of it to know, you know, just the dead eyes of one kid.
One little kid is enough atrocity.
You know, I mean, so, you know, I mean, but but that that's what the reality is.
I mean, so we send these young men and young women over there and they take part in killing.
They take part in this killing experience and they come home and they're not right any longer.
It's not right.
They have violated all kinds of moral codes.
And then, too, on top of it, like you said, Scott, we're invading someone else's land.
We are fighting people who are defending their own land.
It doesn't take you very long to be over there to realize that you're the occupier.
It doesn't take you very long to realize, looking into the faces of the people around you, that you are the occupying army.
You know, you don't have to have that much of a brain in your head to get it.
You know, I used to say it all the time when I commanded my company in Iraq.
I had one hundred fifty three Marines and sailors.
And look, in 2006, if you know, if my if my young men were Sunni males, you know, of those one hundred fifty three, you know, a third, a third of them would have been dead.
A third of them would have been Nabu Grabe and a third of them would have been fighting us.
You know, I mean, because they were the same type of young men as those young Sunni males that were fighting us in 2006 and 2007 in, you know, in the Euphrates River Valley there in Anbar.
You know, so it doesn't take much to understand that.
And so you come home, you take part in that, you take you participate in this killing.
I mean, you can call it whatever you want.
You can use whatever terms you want to use it.
You can you can call it kinetic activity or whatever nonsense.
You know, they say, you know, that the generals and the public spokespeople say and the think tank people on TV say or whatever, you know, and you can watch your friends play Call of Duty and everything.
But it's still never the same.
And then particularly when it involves the civilians.
And that is something that you can never, ever shake.
And also, too, it doesn't have to be killing.
It has it can also just be the terror that you put in people.
We conducted raids when people's houses, the terror that we put in people, the terror that we put into women and children because we went into their homes with our guns up and everything.
I mean, that's something that will never leave me.
I mean, that's something that will never, ever, ever leave me.
You know, and that's something that other guys talk about, too, what we did in terms of terrorizing people and went into their homes.
You now come back a different person.
You went over there, you joined the military, you were raised as a certain person with certain moral values, with a certain moral fiber, with certain moral pillars.
You thought of yourself as a good man or a good woman who was always going to protect somebody who was going to do the right thing.
And then you go and do that and everything collapses inside of you.
Everything crumbles.
You know, I knew a guy who he had PTSD.
He said he was a wreck.
And then it turned out that what was really killing him was the dissonance, because in the back of his head, there was a real him buried down in there somewhere screaming that this is wrong.
And he said it wasn't until he got home and this PTSD was just wide awake nightmares all damn day.
He couldn't get over it until he finally admitted to himself.
That was the key that, oh, I was the occupier.
That was the insight.
I wasn't helping the people.
I was the bad guy.
I was the stormtrooper.
They were the innocent civilian of Tatooine who I was terrorizing.
But the realization was what freed him.
And he went, OK, what I did was wrong.
Now I understand it.
Now I'm not tearing myself apart trying to rationalize this crap anymore.
And then, you know, he dedicated himself to antiwar activism after that to try to help make it right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that was what that but that was what freed him was that he stopped lying to himself about what it was that he had just been a part of.
Yeah.
And I think you exactly.
The thing is, too, you come home, though, and like I said, you go, you know, you're at the hockey game and they make you they want you to stand up so 17000 people can applaud you, you know, and you're thinking to yourself, for what I did, for the things that I did for the people I terrorized, for the things I took part in, you know.
So yeah, there's that.
It really is.
It's a horrible, horrible thing.
And if you don't get help, if you don't, if you just try and suppress it or if you do like I did deal with it with alcohol, you know, self-medicate, you know, it just, you know, it spirals and then the suicidality comes.
And then I was a mess.
You know, I. I stayed in everything and I went to the State Department and went to Afghanistan and thought I was going to help end the war there by being a political officer in negotiations.
And of course, that didn't work out, you know, and come back and I'm trying to end the war and I'm still not getting help and just drink trying to drink my way through it and everything.
And that is, you know, a surefire way to make things much, much worse and destroy everything around you.
You know, and that's why I say you got to get help.
You have to you know, I mean, once you have the realization that you have these problems, you know, the next step has to be to get help.
I mean, that's if you mean that's the that's what you have to do, not just for yourself, but for everyone around you, because you will destroy everything around you, everything you value, you will destroy.
I mean, that that's that's the nature of the of war.
I mean, that's what war does.
War comes home with you and everything you destroyed over there, everything you took part in destroying all the suffering, you bring it home with you.
It's this contagious disease.
It's this vermin.
It's however you want to describe it, but it comes home with you and you destroy things with you.
It's you know, I mean, the Romans and the Greeks got they had, you know, gods for everything.
And sure enough.
Yeah.
There is a God for war for really good reason, because it was a force that was greater than mankind and it existed, you know, Mars, you know, and he existed.
And it's true.
I mean, you go to Iraq or Afghanistan.
It comes home with you.
You can't leave it there.
You know, I mean, maybe some people can, but I think they have other problems in themselves or they were in a position where they were able just to, you know, stay focused on something or they've got some special circumstances.
But for most people, I don't know how they can come home and say that they didn't bring it home with them because most people do.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't want to promote this as some kind of silver bullet or magic cure.
And even worse, I'm kind of afraid that the side effect of this is that they're going to be able to get away with more and more in the future.
That is having some kind of cure, like a pill or this thing that we talked about before, the shot in the brainstem that you talk a little bit about that to help reduce these feelings of guilt and all that.
I mean, you know that from the Pentagon's point of view, the this double edged sword, this new technology is that they can make some guilt free super soldiers in the future if they can figure out this whole brainstem thing.
But on the other hand, what's important in the immediate future is that people like you, you know, have the ability to get a little bit of relief.
I don't know how much, but this sounds like a pretty big breakthrough.
Can you talk about it?
Yeah.
So there's a nerve block I've received.
It's called the stellate gaggling and nerve block.
And it doesn't it doesn't affect your guilt.
What it affects is what it can help with is those involuntary physical symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.
So again, if you imagine that people who are involved in with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
So someone who grew up in a house of abuse or again, a soldier or a Marine or sailor or airman who goes to Iraq or Afghanistan and they spend an entire year where their survival system is turned on.
You know, again, there are survival system was meant for is meant for temporary momentary systems of fight or flight response.
It pushes the adrenaline and cortisol or whatever.
It gives us that that boost of of, you know, strength and speed and whatnot.
So when you're over there or again, say if you grew up in a house of abuse and that system is always on, your body is pumping these chemicals.
And when you come home, it's still pumping all those chemicals.
And so that's why when you come home, you can't turn it off and you are driving down the side of the road and everything on and you're driving down the road and everything on the side of the road, your body is reacting to as if it's an IED.
You are sitting with your back to the wall because everyone who comes into the room, your body is tensing up like they might be a suicide bomber.
You know, your brain is constantly at night going into your dream cycles and having these tension, anxiety, dreams, these nightmares, these night terrors.
You're having these night sweats, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Everything is an emergency.
Everything is a big deal because your survival system is stuck on.
You knock over a glass of water and it might as well have been, you know, King Kong might as well be attacking your building type of deal.
You know, your system is turned on.
So the nerve block is basically just like a three inch needle that the doctor sticks into your neck, into the nerve that's responsible for regulating a lot of these chemicals that your body is producing.
And basically it just has some anesthesia on it and it, in lay terms, resets it.
This particular nerve block, the stellate-giglian nerve block, has been around for about a hundred years.
It's a pain management treatment.
It's used for a variety of different things.
And one of the doctors in Chicago, a guy named Eugene Lipoff, who has been pioneering this for the last five or six years, has really been pushing forward on this.
The Department of Defense and the VA are doing studies on this, clinical treatment studies, to examine it.
I know at least five or six other guys, along with myself, who've had it.
It's been very helpful for me.
The relief from those involuntary physical symptoms was immediate.
Those extra chemicals in my body, that stress, that tension, that feeling of being turned on, right?
Like, as if, again, I am getting ready to go out on patrol.
My body is producing these chemicals, survival chemicals, was turned off.
It was this instant relief.
I actually have a friend of mine, a friend's wife, I've known her for 20-some-odd years.
She recently went to go get it.
She suffers from PTSD.
I'm not sure from what was a traumatic instance.
But she went recently, received the nerve block, and she said the first time she's had relief in 20 years as well.
Now, it's a temporary solution.
I've had to have it three times in the last year.
You can tell when the symptoms come back because you start feeling edgier.
All of a sudden, you start noticing people more.
Your partner or your family or someone will say to you, you're looking around a lot more.
Your dreams will start to get a little bit worse or more worse and worse and worse.
You do notice the involuntary physical PTSD symptoms coming back.
Like I say, it doesn't do anything for the guilt, doesn't do anything for your depression, doesn't do anything for your substance abuse, doesn't do anything for traumatic brain injury.
But for your involuntary PTSD symptoms, it does help.
It has helped me, and it has helped about five or six other people I know.
From what I've seen on some of the research, it helps about 75% or 80% of the people who it's been done on.
Again, it's temporary.
It certainly is not a magic bullet from what the doctors out there in Chicago, who they seem to think that the people it doesn't work for are the people who are still drinking, the people who don't have a good support network, the people who are not receiving professional counseling.
It's just one more tool in the toolbox.
You've got to still be doing all the other things.
You've got to have a good lifestyle.
You've got to be receiving professional therapy.
You have to be not engaged in substance abuse, et cetera, et cetera.
But it is something that helps.
Now, to your point, Scott, absolutely.
There is a good article on this by Matt Farwell in Rolling Stone.
Last year, Matt wrote about this nerve block.
He talks about how the Navy SEAL teams are getting this done a lot, because team members are able to come home, get this nerve block, be relieved of the tension and stress of the deployment, and then be able to function.
So absolutely, for the military, this is terrific.
I think Matt's article, it was referred to as a God shot, because you're able to function.
You're able to be done with all that stress, that tension, that extra anxiety.
You talk about all the things that it doesn't really address.
I could see how that's taken a really big edge off, though, that permanent flinch.
If you're not having to suffer through that physically, now maybe you can begin to deal with some of this other crap.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Scott, it's really weird, too, when that edge disappears.
It's really weird.
Because you've been living like that for a while, with this tension, that that becomes your normal.
And so when that's gone, you have this period of readjustment, of being like, oh yeah, that's what life was like before this constant tension.
The first time I remember driving past something on the highway, and I knew, I've been doing this for years, every time driving past something on the highway, and my body just involuntarily tenses up for like a half a second, I can't help that.
And I'm used to it.
It's not a big deal.
That's just what occurs.
And my body didn't do it.
And yeah, it was amazing.
You know, it was amazing.
And it's a really freeing thing, a really great thing.
And it is.
It's just one less thing you have to deal with, and very helpful.
But again, it's temporary.
It's not permanent.
You know, how long this last nerve block I had, I had the last one in December, will last for, I don't know.
You know, and whether or not it will be accepted into the VA as a official tool there, as an official type of healthcare for them, you know, we'll see.
I mean, it'll take a bunch of years, right, for it to get through all the trials and everything.
But hopefully it does, because yeah, it has, again, not just myself, but five or six people I directly know as well then too, the stuff we're seeing in terms of some of the reports on it is that it has been helpful.
But again, it's just one element of many things that people need to do.
All right.
Listen, so we're a little bit more than an hour here.
So we ought to go ahead and wrap it up.
But so I'm really sorry.
There's no way I'm going to start asking you about Palestine now and give him that short a shrift or your trip over there.
I want to hear all about it.
So maybe we can do this again in a week or so.
Yeah.
Talk about what I had you on to talk about.
Sure.
That sounds good.
All right.
We've got a great piece.
It's at Mondoweiss.net by Matthew Ho, a U.S. veteran reflects on protesting alongside Palestinian human rights activists in Hebron.
And it's a very interesting article.
I hope you guys will take a look at Mondoweiss.net and then we'll have you on next week again to talk about that.
But thanks for coming on the show, Matt.
Great talk to you again.
Terrific, Scott.
Thank you very much.
All right.
So that's Matthew Ho, former Marine, former State Department official.
He really did do everything he could to try to stop the surge, the doubling, tripling down of the Afghan war in 2009.
Read all about that in The Post and The Times.
And he was written for everything.
And again, this one is at Mondoweiss.net, a U.S. veteran reflects on protesting alongside Palestinian human rights activists in Hebron.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Find all my stuff at scotthorton.org slash interviews for the interviews slash show for the questions and answers stuff.
Use the hashtag SHSQA if you want to ask me stuff.
And yeah, follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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Thanks.
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