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All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
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I've done right around almost sort of kind of 4,500 interviews there, going back to 2003.
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OK, introducing our good friend Peter Van Buren.
He used to be a foreign service officer in the U.S. State Department, but then he went to the Iraq War.
And so he wrote a book about how horrible it was called We Meant Well.
Did I say that sarcastically enough?
It was supposed to sound sarcastic to you.
I really appreciate that, because I just got into a Twitter war only last night with someone who was accusing me of supporting the Iraq War and failing to get the subtitle of the book, which is how I helped lose the war for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
I asked specifically for that as a subtitle, because since no one else will take personal responsibility for screwing up that war, I figured I might as well.
Hey, yeah, that's a really good point, actually.
I don't have the clip.
Somewhere I should get the clip.
There's a great clip one time of Paul Wolfowitz when he was the head of the World Bank, and someone says to him, So, man, are you sorry at all or something?
They try to confront him and get an apology, and he just says his actual answer is paraphrasing is I am in no way compelled to answer that.
I do not have to answer you.
And so therefore, I will not.
And he just turned around and walked out.
That was it.
There was no gun to his head, so he didn't know anybody in explanation.
Fair enough.
Good.
All right.
So you wrote another thing.
First of all, you have a blog called We Meant Well, and we republish all your stuff at antiwar.com.
People can find all that.
We Meant Well is the blog, and then you've also written this other book, The Ghosts of Tom Jode, about I don't know what, because I haven't read it.
It's about the economic disparity in the United States, the death of the middle class, the collapse of our industrial base.
You and I need to talk about Austrian school business cycle theory sometime.
And I don't know anything about Austria.
The book's about Ohio and the Midwest.
I know it's a joke.
I get it.
I get it.
Okay, stop.
Stop.
Everyone who's on Twitter right now, stop.
Oh, we're all snickering.
But the book, I wrote the book in 2014.
The book was published in 2014 and received exactly no attention whatsoever, even the parts that talked about how the industrial Midwest was crying out for a demagogue.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
So sorry about that, people.
Could have saved you some trouble in this last election cycle.
But, hey, you know, who has time to read anymore?
Hey, look who he was up against, man.
No, let's not.
Let's not go that way.
Hey, so you wrote this new book.
Yeah.
I think it's really important.
It's a novel.
And actually, I think usually novels are more important than nonfiction books anyway, as far as, well, you know, that's what really has an effect on people, right?
Is art and culture and music and fiction and the stories that people tell each other and these kinds of things and piles of facts the way I compile them.
Sorry to be redundant there.
It's not as important, really, as things like this.
And you wrote this to really try to drive home some lessons to people about the nature of warfare, because, you know, and this is something that we deal with all the time in the antiwar movement is this stuff is so far away.
It might as well not even be happening to most Americans.
And, you know, I was just right before we came on, I was just looking at the pictures from the German paper, the photographer who went in and filmed the Shiite militias torturing the Islamic State captives in Iraq and that side of the war.
And, you know, who knows who these guys are in their blindfolded with a gun to their head being tortured, certainly about to die.
And like Bill Hicks used to say, then you look out your window and there's birds chirping and blue sky and everything's fine.
And you're just going, where is this happening?
And his joke was Ted Turner's making it up.
But no, I mean, the truth is, this is what America has done to what Southwest Asia is, is turn the whole thing into a boiling cauldron, just like Michael Ledeen wanted.
And this is what we got is is people are just suffering unbelievable pain and grief right this moment.
And to most of us, it's almost like the 1990s peacetime again, you know, so-called peacetime, not that the 90s were, but that the feeling of the George Bush era of emergency and wars is has dissipated.
Right.
It's this is in the realm of the unimportant or it matters to me because it's my hobby or it's my interest.
But for people who are interested in other things, it's not an interest at all.
It's just they have scuba diving or tennis or whatever instead.
Well, you know, it's it's it's a matter of math and crayons.
It's it's just like kindergarten.
If you take and God bless everyone's souls, if you take 22 white children and kill them in Manchester, you can dominate the world global news cycle.
If you drop a bomb in Iraq and kill over 100 brown children, use the brown crayon on that one.
It's barely a footnote.
And this is really part of the problem and the theme of my new book, which is called Hooper's War.
It's on Amazon and everywhere else now, you know, is that we devalue the human lives of those who we consider are our enemies.
And it makes it so much easier to kill them because they're they're less human than we are.
Those little teenagers who lost their lives in Britain are so much more valuable to us.
And the world is so much a lesser place because they were killed by a terrorist with a bomb, as opposed to the brown children who were killed by a terrorist with a bigger bomb.
When you get on the ground and there's arms and there's legs, there's blood and there's colors like pink, you don't see the white and the brown.
But boy, our media doesn't get down there.
We take the pictures from a different place.
And so some deaths are certainly more equal than others.
Yeah, it really is that easy to tune out.
And what's funny, too, is, I mean, I don't have a globe in front of me, but Iraq really isn't much further away than England.
Right.
I mean, I think Noam Chomsky calls it the saltwater fallacy.
Oh, no, that's a different one.
That's about it's not an empire unless it's overseas.
It's my saltwater thing that people aren't human if they live across an ocean from here.
But, well, what about Western Europe?
We got an ocean between us and them.
But like you're saying, it really is just a racial thing.
And the distances aren't that far if you're flying in a B-52.
I always know when I interview Patrick Coburn, if he's in England, I got to add five to New York.
If he's in Iraq, I got to add seven.
The only difference is you have one extra in-flight meal.
It's a little further away.
But, yeah, so you know what, though, too?
I think part of it is the American people supported the invasion of Iraq by and large, or at least 150 million of them did.
And so they're responsible, too, in that little bit of a way, like showing up and cheering at a lynching kind of diffusion of responsibility sort of a part in it.
And I think that's a big part of why they don't want to really focus on this stuff anymore either is because they do share in the responsibility for it.
They believed, probably like stupid the president, that the Iraq war would last three weeks.
And it'd be a fun little way to get the last little bit of bombing off of our chest after taking our revenge for 9-11 in Afghanistan.
It wasn't quite enough.
We need a few more doable targets to bomb.
But, geez, it wasn't supposed to last eight years and kill a million people and 4,500 American soldiers and troops, Marines, too.
You know what I mean?
And so and then also with all the consequences from it, as everybody can see, you know, with the rise of the Islamic State and then now with the the Shiite war against the Islamic State, as we're reading about the torture, the El Salvador option back in effect today.
Geez, who wants to focus all this when everybody knows it's America's fault, when everybody knows that whatever problems there were in the Middle East, George Bush did not have to march the 3rd Infantry Division into Iraq the way he did in 2003.
That's all on him.
It's all on the USA.
And this is really where we start to circle back to the topic that I wanted to chat a little bit about today, which is moral injury.
Well, I was getting to that.
You know, I can't stop thinking about it is the problem.
You know, I wish there was some way that I could get a little more of this distancing that that seems to be so easy for the majority of our American fellow American citizens.
I don't know.
Is there like a pill or I mean, I'm trying to drink my way into it, but it just I don't know.
I mean, I may have a weak constitution or weak constitution.
You know what it helps?
Who made that joke?
What?
Well, yeah, yeah, weak constitution.
I'm sorry.
I talked right over your damn punchline.
But yeah, I was gonna say it's a lot easier when Iraq is nothing but a vaguely wrong shape on a map.
To you, it's a real place where you have stood before.
I know.
It seemed like you were on top of Earth looking down at it and all that kind of thing.
I know.
Totally different experience than the rest of us.
I keep trying to figure out when I'm going to start picking up some of this privilege that I keep being accused of having.
And, you know, there's just another thing I don't have any privilege on is being able to to to arbitrarily distance myself from mass murder and torture in Iraq.
Damn it.
OK, I'm feeling better.
All right, good.
Well, and so this is your problem.
This is why you wrote this book is because you're trying to tell people that, hey, man, you know, it's not a TV show.
And that really I think what you're trying to point out here a lot, too, is that, you know what?
I don't want to sound like, oh, you're an Israeli crying and shooting or whatever.
I haven't even read the book yet.
But you're trying to point out not that committing these acts are as bad for the people committing them as the victims, but still that it does hurt the perpetrators, too.
As Ron Paul used to say, I remember in the campaign, he said, look, you know, when you're asking young men to join the military, they should only.
This is sort of the deal we thought was they should only ever be used in the absolute most dire circumstances, because otherwise what you're doing is you're taking young men who are not psychopaths and you are acting.
You're asking them to engage in psychopathic behavior.
You're asking them to destroy and kill on a vast scale.
And if you're going to put them in that situation and you're going to make them suffer their own consequences for behaving in that way, you better have a damn good reason.
This isn't just a game.
These are real people.
I had the privilege of talking with Dr. Paul this week, actually, and we were talking about this topic.
And he was kind of riffing off that in a way that scared me in a way that I didn't think I was capable of being further frightened by these ideas.
You know, it's not just what we do to these young men and women, because we're training women to be killers now as part of our global armed forces as well, is that we are bringing this mindset into our own society in larger and larger numbers.
And you don't want to use words like infection, but you can talk about the idea that you are infusing more and more of the American character with the traits of militarism.
Every time we continue to extend our endless war endlessly, we're bringing more people into the military.
Being in the military now exposes you to far more combat than during what is normally considered quote-unquote peacetime.
And we are building a society around this sense of action, this sense of lack of responsibility, this sense that killing is a perfectly viable act, and we expect you to do it over there.
And when you come back home, you know the fact that 20 veterans a day on average take their own lives, statistically speaking, a veteran is likely to take his or her life during the course of our interview here today.
When you come back and that killing turns inside of itself, either against a soldier as an individual or perhaps as a way of helping chip away further at the goodness of our society, we seem to not be particularly concerned about that.
And this is this thing that drove me to write this book, and if the listeners want to think of it as my form of self-therapy that I'm bringing you all in on, well, that may not be an invalid way to do this.
The idea that we as a society are trying to claim that stuff that isn't our fault somehow is also not our responsibility, and the idea that, well, hey, I didn't pull a trigger in Iraq, and hey, I didn't shoot a veteran in his garage on Saturday morning, means that I have no responsibility for these things is a falsehood.
We as a society are suffering from moral injury on a mass scale.
We have turned ourselves into a nation that is shameless about not caring about the deaths of women, children, and innocent people, as well as our own soldiers.
And I do want to circle right back, because again, I can hear those Twitter keys clicking as I speak.
You mentioned earlier about the idea that we don't want to become Israeli border guards here, talking about how hurt our feelings are every time we have to gun down a Palestinian kid.
When we're talking about soldiers in combat, as I am in this book, Hooper's War, and as I am now, that's what we're talking about.
We're not negating anything else.
We are talking about one thing, because it's a book.
And there are other books that talk about other subjects, and simply by talking about the effects of war on soldiers, though I do also talk extensively about civilians in this—I interviewed a number of elderly Japanese who survived the war as children—we are excluding because the book can't be 500,000 pages long, and the interview today can't be 15 hours long.
So people should please hold their fire.
We are not negating the victims.
We are not making light of their suffering, including their own deaths.
What we are doing is saying we're going to talk about one part of this horrific cycle, and that part, as far as this book is concerned, deals with the soldiers and civilians and how the decisions they make in war affects them for the rest of their lives, and by extension, affects all of us in the society that we share, the place we live together.
So I want to talk a little bit more about Hooper and all of that, but I want to talk more first about why this is so necessary, man, because that's really the whole point here, is that you're screaming in the cry of the wilderness kind of a thing, where, you know, like I grew up my whole life seeing Vietnam veterans on the side of the road begging for change, right, like in the years leading up to the Iraq War.
Like this is a part of this, right?
We all see this, right?
Every one of us has to commute somewhere sometimes.
We all know that this is a thing.
All 300 million of us know that this is a thing, but what we're going to do is we're just going to forget about that, and we're not going to incorporate that into our conversation about whether to attack Iraq right now or not.
We're just going to pretend that that sort of doesn't have anything to do with this, or we're going to have soldiers, these golden idols, these very best and bravest and most wonderful of us, they're going to go over to that war, and you know what, Peter, it would be rude for you or me to sit here and say, when these guys come back and are our deputy sheriffs, they're going to shoot an unarmed black kid driving away in the back of the head.
Some of them are, like just what happened a few weeks ago with an Iraq War vet who killed this kid.
Don't say that about our golden idols.
We already all know these things.
We all know that Timothy McVeigh, the first time he ever murdered somebody was because George H.W. Bush hired him to do it, and he was like, you know what, yeah, okay.
Yeah, you get a taste for it.
Yeah, collateral damage.
That's what it's called when innocent bystanders die.
Who cares, right?
Yeah, the good news is the smells don't change whether it's accidental or on purpose.
You still get that kind of fat in the fire.
Before the war, you know, Matt Barganier wrote in 2002, I remember, at Antiwar.com, he said, how many Timothy McVeighs are going to come home from Iraq War II?
This is the kind of thing, and the point that I'm trying to get to here is that everybody already knows.
Everybody already knows that this is true.
Everybody already knows that deputy sheriffs who've been to war are going to be more dangerous than deputy sheriffs who have not been to war.
Everybody knows that some of these guys are going to not be able to face the loss of their best friends the way they lost them or face, as we're talking about with this moral injury here, the things that they had done in the wars and are going to commit suicide.
I don't know if anybody anticipated the rate of 20 a day or more, as you said, but that's the thing about it.
We are the most, at this moment, the most militarist society on earth, and we're completely in denial about it.
We're acting like we're a normal country in a normal time, but we're not.
It's a hard sell.
You're talking to a guy who just spent two years writing as strong an anti-war book as my skills allowed me to do, and being turned down by all of the mainstream publishers.
I'm a pretty thorough guy when I mean all, I'm including all, who have no interest in publishing a book that does not glorify war, in fact, takes quite the opposite tact.
You have a pretty serious resume too, decades in the foreign service and stuff.
That's not like me trying to get a book published.
You're Peter Van Buren.
There's a Washington Post story about you.
And think about it.
What are we doing?
We're saying that setting fire to human beings is bad, that turning children into black lumps fused to the ground is bad, we're saying that using bullets to put holes into young men and watch them bleed to death in front of us is bad.
We're saying that whether you shoot a puppy or drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, that killing is not a good thing.
And yet, that's a hard sell.
It's not like we're trying here to convince people about an arcane change in the tax code or something crazy like that.
We're saying, you know, the son who you raised, that young boy who you scrimped and saved to give him some good Christmases, that little kid who you love more than anything in the world, would you please hand him over so we can get him killed in a friendly fire accident on the other side of the world for a completely unclear purpose and there won't be enough to fill up the body bag for you?
But hey, you'll get a flag neatly folded, and thanks for your service, and yet somehow that is a hard sell.
Right.
Well, you know what it is?
It's because everybody already knows that, Peter.
Come on.
That's why they call it a war.
Everybody knows that people die in war.
And so you're just being pedantic.
You're just trying to cause a problem when, of course, that is the premise.
Everybody understands that.
But what you're obviously missing is that, of course, this is necessary or else they wouldn't be doing it.
I mean, you're sitting here telling me that there's killing going on, but that it doesn't need to be going on.
Now that's what's the hard sell.
Of course it's horrible, but geez, somebody's got to protect us from the terrorists or else we'll have to fight them here.
What everyone knows, and I say this as we're heading into the hero season, we've got Memorial Day when we will glorify the deaths of so many innocents, followed by July 4th, which has become a fully militarized holiday, followed by our patriotic summer season of fireworks and flag waving.
What everyone knows is that war is a glorious thing, that death in battle is the highest expression of patriotism, that bleeding out in a desert somewhere is the best way for someone to express his or her love of country.
We already know the myths.
That's the problem.
We know the myths too well.
We're the good guys.
We're the ones who are going to save the world for democracy, make it safe, liberate people, free the women of Afghanistan to drive 4x4 trucks and whatever else the goals of war are.
We know these things.
The problem is in trying to communicate to the public the myths are wrong, that they've been sold a bill of goods, the price they've paid is the lives of their sons and daughters, the sanity of the people that they sent off to war, as well as the extraordinary waste of resources, both financial and mental and physical.
That's the problem.
We know war too well without knowing anything about war.
I want to ask you about Hooper in the book a little bit, but not yet.
I want to ask you about the thing that sounds puzzling to me.
On the face of it, I understand that everybody does.
But I want to get more into the in-depth of the thing because it should be a mystery.
Let's everybody start fresh with the question on why the numbers of suicides are so high.
I'll tell you a story.
I had a junior college literature teacher who was a really great guy, a really smart guy.
He's the one who had me read Neil Postman.
He said, yeah, there's a lot of mythology about how everybody came home from Vietnam broken and this and that.
But you know what?
I was in the Vietnam War and there were some crazy horrible things that happened and whatever.
But you know what?
It's life.
You do what you can.
You're all right.
And there are a lot of us who we don't get the attention because we're just fine, whatever.
And that, yeah, a lot of people go through a lot of things in life.
And that, you know, then you try, you do what you can and you move on.
And yet I don't know how the percentages compare with World War Two, Korea, Vietnam or the terror wars or what.
But, you know, suicide is a pretty drastic solution to whatever your problem is.
And I guess I want to understand how these bravest, toughest guys are really feeling that desperate.
Because I think, you know, again, like on the surface, OK, well, yeah, they got a problem.
They're bad memories or guilt or whatever.
And so they kill themselves.
Yeah.
But I don't think that really explains it.
You know what I mean?
I think that's why people like you use a different term than guilt.
You say moral injury because you're trying to say that this is a whole other thing that I don't understand.
Right.
It's complicated, of course.
And the idea that anything, any one thing or any small handful of things is going to explain the horrible decisions that 20 of our brothers and sisters make every day, sitting in a garage in the dark with tasting metal in your mouth with a rifle barrel.
How someone gets to that precise moment is darkly individual.
And I don't pretend to speak for everyone or a mass of them.
But at the same time, when you see patterns developing across a society as blatant as what we see here with these veteran suicides, the need to start to deconstruct it and figure out what is going on beyond an individual level is urgent.
And in my own experience, both personally in the experiences of all of the many, many, many veterans that I've spoken to as research for this book and in the literature that I've read, going back to the ancient Greeks and every war from Thermopylae up until yesterday, there are things that start to emerge, threads that pull together.
And I keep them under a category that I call moral injury.
I didn't invent the term.
It was invented in the 1980s, actually, by a psychiatrist who works for the Veterans Administration.
And it essentially says that as moral beings, people, creatures who have an innate sense of right and wrong, that sense can be damaged.
It can be broken.
It can be bent to the point where it can't snap back.
And that expression comes out in terms of guilt, in terms of shame, in terms of regrets, over things that you both did—in other words, shoot someone in accident, an innocent—or in things you didn't do, such as failing to report a war crime or failing to stop an atrocity committed by someone else.
And it scales up as well.
The moral transgressions that you are reacting to don't have to necessarily be done by you personally.
They can be done by people you're associated with, by leaders that you trusted, whether that's the guy commanding your platoon or scaling all the way up to the President of the United States.
And those moral transgressions strike at us at a level that is at our deepest place, if you want to call it a soul or our heart or our core.
And to joke that it's all in your head is, in fact, quite accurate, because it is in your head.
We don't actually—we can't dissect someone and say, oh, here's this little brown thing.
That's the soul.
But in fact, at our core, we are people.
We are human beings.
We make judgments about right and wrong.
That is an innate part of us.
And when you put someone in a situation where, typically at a very young age—18, 20, 25 years old—you make those decisions in the heat of combat, in the matter of seconds, living with that, and particularly as you have time to reflect on it, they don't go away.
You can't sort of forget what the aftermath of a firebombing smells like.
And if you want to think of it—because we end up talking in allusions, and this is why I ended up writing fiction about this—you think of it as a drop of water swelling on the end of a faucet.
You're watching it.
It's getting bigger.
It's getting bigger.
It's getting bigger.
It's going to fall.
You know that.
You just don't know exactly when.
Plop.
Of those 20 veteran suicides every day, about half of them are veterans over the age of 50, which means that they are committing suicide removed from their events of service by a number of years.
And that suggests that this idea of moral injury—it's not quick and dirty.
It can be.
But it isn't always.
And in fact, in probably roughly half the cases, it isn't at all.
These people are reacting to events from Vietnam, from Korea, from the interstitial wars that we amuse ourselves with in between the big ones.
And you say, well, of course, well, if it's been 30 years, who can say it was the events of his service that caused him to commit suicide, says the Internet skeptic.
And when you look at these things statistically, you cannot walk away from it.
The suicide rate among veterans is so significantly higher than among people who have not had military service.
And of those veterans who commit suicide, the suicide rate among those who served in combat roles is much higher than those who served in non-combat roles.
The lines are very, very, very clear that military service and suicide and combat service and suicide are inexorably linked.
And you can play games with the words and you can poo-poo it all away the same way we used to say there's no such thing as PTSD or you're just a bunch of cowards or, you know, have a drink.
Relax.
You're home now, buddy.
Here, you get free apps at Applebee's.
Thanks for your service.
We used to say those things, and now we understand that PTSD can be measured with MRI tests.
We understand that things we used to call combat fatigue or shell shock are very, very real problems that affect human beings in ways that are ultimately tragic in the extreme for the individual, for the people who love and care about them.
And also for all the rest of us, because this is the society that we are creating around us.
This is the price.
Well, yeah, each one of these suicides, that's somebody's brother, father, son, uncle.
That's lots of people's lives shattered with each one of those at the same time.
As you're saying, it does affect everybody.
Hey, Al.
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Well, and back to the unspeakable part, right?
It's okay to talk about this after the fact on Fox News all day.
The Wounded Warrior Project.
Guilt trip you into giving up all your money to help out all the guys at Fox News got put in this situation in the first place.
But it's still a party foul or something for the next time they propose a war to say that, hey, you're going to destroy these young men because you're not allowed to talk about them like that.
They are supermen.
They are golden idols.
They're inhuman in the other way from the Arabs.
They're supermen who, to say that they're going to come home wrecked little boys or, you know, shells of men when they were promised that they're going to be all that they can be.
It's just, it's, I don't know.
It's not acceptable as part of the argument against war in most cases, it seems like.
It's too taboo.
Because, I mean, hey, it also sounds like, I mean, you really are treading on eggshells here.
You're talking about real people's sons who really have killed themselves and stuff.
This is some sensitive stuff.
So you got to be very careful the way you invoke a subject like that.
And yet at the same time, instead, we're so careful that it just gets ignored as doesn't even count as part of the balance sheet about whether it's worth it or not to do this war or that war.
When we see those wounded warriors, we see them almost exclusively in the media as young men, strong.
They are posing proudly with their prosthetic limbs, their robo legs and robo arms that have been developed for them.
Many times we see them still in uniform with the sleeve rolled up to show off the device.
Sometimes they've even got the arm or the leg painted up to match the colors of their favorite sports team.
We see them running marathons.
We see them doing this.
But what we never see in the media are those people when they're 60 years old struggling to change a colostomy bag, which is one of the most debasing acts that humans have to perform.
A colostomy, for those who don't know, is when parts of your intestines have been taken out and your poop flows into a plastic bag that hangs off the side of you.
It's not an uncommon war injury.
You don't see a 60-year-old doing that.
You see a 25-year-old running a marathon who looks stronger than ever.
They won't show us what war looks like.
There's a scene in my book, Hooper's War, where as an elderly man, Hooper is in Hawaii and he's on the beach near a Department of Defense-run recreational hotel.
And he says, you know, there's a 20-year-old whose side of his face looks like raw bacon.
And sure, of course, it might have been a car accident, industrial mistake, but nah, you know.
Wonder what his friends thought the first time they saw him.
Wonder what his ex-girlfriend said when she walked away from him.
Wonder what he's going to say 40 years from now.
And that legacy of war is what we're talking about here with moral injury and we're talking about with suicide.
We're talking about living forever with the consequences of war and the consequences of action.
And that's something that we do to our own people sort of inadvertently, I don't know, in passing.
And it's something in war that we do on purpose to the enemy.
You know, when you talk about an atrocity on a mega scale like Hiroshima, for example, we managed to create a weapon and use it in a way that created generations of suffering.
There were lots of people who suffered for years with the effects of radiation poisoning or the effects of the burns that they received.
We didn't just want to kill them.
We didn't just want to punish them.
We wanted that pain to continue for as long as possible.
We wanted it to be multi-generational.
We wanted those people whose faces were burned, whose ears and noses were burned off in the atomic blast or in the napalm that we dropped in Vietnam or in the white phosphorus we used in Fallujah.
We want them walking around.
We want them to suffer and we want others to see them and to see them suffering.
Wait, now this is from your water cooler talk at the State Department or where are you getting this from?
Because I thought they would just say, well, we had to do it in order for this tactical thing.
They didn't say that they wanted to scar everybody with gamma rays forever, right?
Oh, of course we don't say those things.
But when you develop weapons that specifically have those characteristics and you use those weapons in ways that specifically inflict those kinds of injuries.
See, I'm kind of of a theory that they don't give a damn, right?
Just like flooding South Central LA with crack or just like using Agent Blue and giving David Hackworth bladder cancer in order to get at them dastardly Laotians or whatever their ridiculous thing is.
I think they just don't care.
Gamma rays.
I mean, it's not like they can reach here from there.
No, it's an interesting argument whether the suffering is meant to be quick and dirty or whether the suffering is meant to carry on as long and as nasty as possible.
It sure does carry on if that's your point.
And I guess in the end of the day, the point is exactly that.
It does carry on.
And so when we pay the price of those 20 suicides a day, and of course, that's an average.
That means some days there's a lot more of them.
Then, yeah, I guess what matters in the end is the suffering does carry on.
It becomes kind of an argument over beers about whether it was supposed to be that way or whether it's just accidentally kind of a collateral benefit that these poor bastards are going to suffer even longer.
But at the end of the day, when you write a book that is you're attempting to write a book that tells people why war is bad, you go those places, you talk to those people, you write those stories, and then you try to find a way to bring it to a human level.
One of the things that affected me greatly was a Japanese woman, very old now.
As a child, she was convinced that her mother gave her more water than the mother gave her brother and that this caused her to live and hastened her brother's death.
There's absolutely no way she could know that, not the least of which is she was five years old, maybe six years old, when all this was supposed to be happening.
There's no rational reason for her to have that conclusion.
But 70-some years later, sitting in a park in central Tokyo, she is as convinced as you and I are that it's daytime that she bears a moral injury and a sense of responsibility for the death of her brother.
Now, you want to talk about suffering?
You want to talk about pain?
You want to talk about what war does to people?
To me, that is where it all came right down.
Sitting on a bench in the middle of Tokyo with cars beeping their horns and buses and people rushing around and hearing that story, if that doesn't make you want to hate the idea of going to war, then honestly, you have no soul and you are indeed immune from moral injury.
That's the good war.
That's the war that nobody questions.
That's the war against Hitler and Tojo, man.
You can't say nothing about that, and yet Joseph Heller had no problem tearing it completely to shreds.
If that's as good as war gets, is Catch-22, my understanding of World War II, then certainly it's something to always oppose, no matter what, for the ages.
You don't have to have George Bush being the salesman for it to know better.
You shouldn't after that.
You guys also talk about how you were in Asia in the State Department for years, and so you speak Japanese fluently and all this kind of stuff.
I guess this is why you set the book in Japan and decided to—I know you've told me before—you wanted to not talk about the terror war and you wanted to not talk about current-day GIs and what they're going through, because that makes it too hard for people to accept sometimes.
So you wanted to make it a little easier, and then you have all this great experience in Japan, and so you're able to set it convincingly in Japan, and as you said, you did all this original research talking with survivors of World War II on their end and all this.
So I didn't mean to sell you short or anything.
There's no break coming up.
I'm happy to talk about the book as much as you want to tell us.
I don't want you to spoil it, but I want you to tell us as much as you can without spoiling it about Hooper, who is Hooper, and what's his war, and all of this stuff.
Go ahead, please.
I think it's what we've been talking about.
In a nutshell, the book Hooper's War is a novel.
It's set in a lightly fictionalized ending of World War II in Japan, and it's set there largely so that I can talk more generically about war and what it does to people without getting too deeply into the geopolitics of the Iraq War, the Afghan War, the Vietnam War.
I want to talk as openly and as broadly as possible, and World War II seemed far enough in the past but yet familiar enough to people that it's easy for them to get into it.
You sort of know who everybody is, I guess.
The other thing about World War II that made it so important when we're talking about moral injury is that the common accepted belief is that it was the good war.
It was the last time when America was all right and the bad guys were all bad.
There were no gray areas out there, and there's certainly a lot of truth in that.
It certainly was a lot clearer than a modern war.
Pick your favorite one.
Instead of a drone strike on a wedding party in Afghanistan, there's an episode in the book that involves an American B-29 accidentally dropping a bomb on a small town.
The pilot didn't even know what he was dropping on.
He just had one left in the hopper and decided to not fly home with it.
He had no idea that he took lives in that moment.
The people in the town had no idea why they came under attack.
They had nothing to do with the war.
They were literally in the middle of nowhere.
Rather than talking about radicalization in Afghanistan after a drone strike on a wedding party, let's move it to 1945 rural Japan and see if people can look at it more openly.
Hooper stands in for every soldier who has been faced with these life-and-death moral decisions where the expedient action seems to be the right one over the moral action, but in retrospect doesn't quite work out that way.
It alternates between Hooper, the 18-year-old at war, and Hooper, the 80-year-old man, looking back at his life and reflecting on the decisions he made as a young man.
With that breath of time and the additional experience he's had, realizing how wrong war is, how wrong it is to put people in these positions, and that he carried the burden of his decisions throughout his life.
That's the moral injury.
It talks about his attempts at finding peace, a form of redemption.
I don't want to give too much away about the actual plot, but it involves his returning to Japan and some symbolic actions on behalf of the other two characters in the book.
One is a Japanese soldier and the other is a Japanese woman.
She is a civilian.
As you can imagine, when you've got two males and a female main character, there's also some triangle kind of things in there, but it doesn't quite play out the way you might think of it.
It's not a classic romantic triangle.
It actually stands in for the interactions between soldiers and civilians in war with a particular dark twist to it.
The book is a very vivid description of what happens in war based on my own experiences, what I learned from so many others, and just an extraordinary amount of literature, diaries, journals, newspaper accounts, anything I could get my hands on in order to make this as realistic as possible.
You can't talk about someone who has been morally destroyed by something he saw unless you can convince the reader that he or she has seen something similar, at least as far as pages of a book.
It's one thing to say he saw a dead body.
It's another thing to say what it's like to live your life having seen a thousand maggots on the ground in the shape of a human being.
All right.
Peter Van Buren.
So listen, I really can't wait to read this thing.
Of course, I'm just up to my eyeballs getting my own book finished.
It never ends.
It's just… But as soon as I get this thing knocked out, I really can't wait to read this book.
I'm really looking forward to reading it.
I hope everyone will read it.
But you brought up a question that I had forgotten to ask earlier.
I thought of it, but then we changed the subject.
And that was about… and I don't know if there's scientific studies and numbers on this, or maybe I'm just asking you for a gut take on it or what.
But I wonder whether overall, you know, when you were distinguishing between, you know, veterans, you know, civilians, veterans and combat veterans in terms of suicide rates and PTSD and all that.
I wonder about if you distinguish or if anybody has distinguished combat veterans who are attacking an army, like, for example, even in the initial invasion of Iraq and destroying a tank division or something like that.
Or say in World War Two, fighting Japanese sailors in battleships on the high seas where everyone involved is a combatant or taking on the Wehrmacht in a field in France somewhere where everybody… they're at least the German army if they're not all just a bunch of Nazis, right?
And so I wonder if at the end of the day, soldiers who go through combat, I mean, assuming the same relative same level of violence in any given situation, right?
All other things being equal, whether those who are killing real combatants in uniforms with, you know, military weapons, a real state army, whether they can kind of rationalize it better and deal with it better than guys who are basically being made to just patrol around until someone shoots at them and then they shoot back.
But they're basically just shooting at the men of the neighborhood wherever they go, which is the nature of our wars, the last few wars here.
Yeah.
I mean, if we stick with this idea of moral injury, then you can sort of start to parse out an answer there.
And I'm not aware of anything statistically, but there is an extraordinary amount of anecdotal evidence that goes as follows.
And essentially, in a situation where you, the shooter, the combatant, are of the belief that you are committing a moral act, then you are less likely to experience moral injury.
The further you get away from that certainty that you are acting morally, the greater your exposure to injury.
And in that sense, shooting at people in uniform who are clearly trying to kill you would be far less ambiguous than shooting into shadows without knowing exactly whether you're shooting at a kid who's running away scared or someone who's trying to kill you.
Or a guy who's working on a car bomb that will blow you up or something in between.
The ambiguity also scales up, and that goes as far as national leadership.
To the extent that – and this is something that emerged out of some studies of people who fought in different time periods in the Vietnam War as well as different time periods in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The clearer the soldier was on the morality of the overall conflict, the less likely he or she was to experience moral injury.
In other words, if you were a true believer in 2003 that it was necessary to invade Iraq, you were more likely to consider your actions morally justified.
The problem, of course, is that we are thinking people and new information keeps coming in.
And so something that you fully believed was true in 2003, i.e. we were there to get the weapons of mass destruction, by 2017 when you realize that that was – and there were no weapons of mass destruction and you were tricked, that can cause you to reevaluate your actions in the new lens.
And this is where you start to look at the fact that a lot of these veteran suicides are by older people whose service was a long time ago.
They are looking at their actions new and afresh and they're starting to think back on this.
They're starting to process it with new information and as new people, as different people, people who have lived more, grown more, experienced more, maybe even a little more wisdom.
It takes a damn hardcore person to continue to believe that burning down cities is something that is still justifiable 70 years later.
Well, it goes back to what you're saying at the beginning about just because it isn't your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility.
Exactly.
It's because I was exposed to great radical politics, right?
Whether it was George Carlin or whether it was John Birch or whatever it was.
So that's the thing.
Like if some 16-year-old right now is thinking, yeah, man, joining the Marines, I saw on TV, that's how to be a full-grown man and come of age in this society.
And everybody knows that.
They got to at least have some other perspective to not necessarily shove down their throat.
But if they'll take the time to look and see and seek and find that they will find people saying, yeah, no, that's not true.
And it ain't all what it's chalked up to be and all of that.
They have to have access.
And that means that people like you have to keep writing books and people like me got to keep interviewing people like you so that there's at least something for them to have reference to someplace to go to find out what the truth is.
Or at least to find out that somebody like Peter Van Buren, who used to work in the State Department his whole career, doesn't believe in it.
He's a serious person and he's no longer convinced.
So something real has changed in his mind.
Maybe he's on to something here.
And I don't think we can overstate the importance of that.
I couldn't have written this book when I was 24 years old.
It would have been impossible.
It was something that I had to wait till I was starting to see 60 coming close in order to be able to write.
And I reflect that in the way the book is written because the narrator, if you will, alternates between 18-year-old Hooper and 80-year-old Hooper.
And so you get both of those perspectives and you can assess for yourself what Hooper has learned over the course of his life.
I did something else interesting in here that reflects exactly on what you're talking about.
In that the story in my novel is told in reverse.
We start at the end with an elderly Hooper returning to Japan, trying to find redemption.
And over the course of the story, chapter by chapter, we find our way back to the events of 1945 in Japan that made him seek redemption all those decades later.
And it was a very purposeful decision to do it that way because that is how someone who has been morally injured looks at life.
You're looking backwards at where you used to be when you were innocent, I guess.
And your redemption is in some ways a hope to come back to some measure of that innocence once again.
And so rather than the classic saving Private Ryan thing where we start off with Hooper as a young man on page one and these terrible things happen to him and at the end he's a broken down guy, we flip that in Hooper's War and we start with him as a broken down guy so that you, the reader, experience his life the way he's now looking at it in hindsight.
And by the end of the book, that return to innocence adds kind of, I hope, a very bittersweet ending here.
We end with Hooper as a young boy.
The character at that point doesn't know what's ahead of him.
He's just a kid.
But we, the readers, do.
And if I can leave the reader with that, that, hey, when you're talking about what happens to an 18-year-old, you damn well better be thinking about what it's going to be like when he's 80 years old living with the results of what you collectively, us, have done to him.
If I can create that in the reader's mind, then I've accomplished a step for anti-war.
Right on.
All right, you guys.
That is Peter Van Buren.
He used to work for the State Department.
Now he's an anti-war guy.
The brand new book is just out.
It's called Hooper's War.
And you can find it at wementwell.com.
And is there a separate site if they just search hooperswar.com?
Yeah, you can go to hooperswar.com.
You can go to Amazon and search for it there or under my name.
Hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to find and hopefully it'll be worth the trouble of finding it.
Did I ever ask you if you were related to President Van Buren?
I'm not.
I'm not.
Long story, another interview, but I'm not.
I do want to throw in a pitch about why it's important for people to consider things like my book.
And I wrote it, so sure.
All humbleness applies.
But look, writing against the mainstream is not a good way to get rich.
However, there are independent publishers who are willing to take a chance to push anti-war books out into society.
There are places like this radio show that are willing to talk about these issues that you're not going to get on CNN or Fox or any place else.
And if you support us, we can keep doing it.
If you can't support us, then it gets harder for us to keep doing it.
And by supporting us, there's lots of things you can do.
If you don't like to read books, if you can't afford to buy books, go to the library, tell them you'd like them to put Hooper's War on the list of titles they're going to order.
If the book's in the library, go ahead and take it out and tell somebody else about it.
Leave a review on Amazon.
That is enormously helpful.
You can support our work in a number of ways.
Buying a book is the most direct one, but if you can't do that, there are other ways to do that.
Your support means that I can keep getting this message out to as big an audience as I can.
And between all of us, maybe we can make a little difference.
Yeah, well, I think you already are making a hell of a difference, man.
Thank you very much.
We appreciate it.
All right, you guys, Peter Van Buren.
WeMeantWell.com, HoopersWar.com.
Buy the novel.
Give it to your friend as a gift.
And he's right, you know, come on.
Help support.
Either way, buy the book and then give it to your buddy.
If it's not for you, give it to somebody else.
I agree with that.
And the same thing about my book when it comes out in a few weeks, too, while we're at it.
All right.
LibertarianInstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show for these here archives and sign up for the podcast feed and all of that, guys.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
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