Historian Interview: Lt. Col Dave Grossman

Hello, everyone. Neil Eckert once again for another episode of War and Conquest. And we have another one of the authors and historians that I have read in researching the show. Today's guest is Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of On Killing and On Combat, as well as several other books that I have yet to get into. But we are here today to talk about whatever comes to mind. And everybody put your hands together for Dave Grossman.

Hey, Neil, how you doing? And it is just Dave. My rank is kind of my brand. There's a lot of Dave Grossmans out there. There's only one Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman.

Yeah, that does help differentiate. It's interesting because like with most of the people I do, if I do get them to come on the show, I've usually listened to their audio book. And there's always like a culture shock because like, after 10, 15, 20 hours of listening to the audio book, my mind is naturally associates the author's voice with whoever was narrating the book. But since you narrated your own book, I don't have that problem. You're at the first one. I'm like, Oh yeah, yeah. I recognize that guy's voice.

I'll tell you a funny story about that.

Go for it.

The Marines, you know, my, as an author, you, you, you pull up Amazon author and see how your books are doing. And the audio books, the audio edition of my books always are really the best sellers. And, uh, and I've got two books, men, Marine Corps commandants required reading lists. So, you know, that we always joke, the Marines can't read, right. So they, uh, so they, which is totally untrue. They're some of the most well-read people on the planet. They've, they've got a real reading culture, but, uh, So they'd all do the audio book. So I'm in 29 Palms Marine Base in California. I'm at the pisser in the bathroom, you know, the latrine head, whatever you want to call it, talking to the guy next to

me before we were headed out there to present to a Marine battalion ready to punch out to Iraq. and a voice comes out of one of the stalls and says, I know that voice. It's really cool that the audio books are a neat thing. I'm dropping a series of science fiction fantasy books right now, and I'm doing the audio narration on them and having a lot of fun.

But it's unusual for the author to really narrate their own books. It's hard. It's a skill. It's a learned skill, but as a speaker and a presenter, it's just something I wanted to do myself and it's worked out well. And so thank you. It's a big, close the loop like that. That's fine.

My, uh, my question is though, did you have somebody else edit it or did you edit it yourself?

I'm a professional. I tell you, that's one place to spend money is, uh, having somebody else do the editing as far as I'm concerned. Yeah.

Cause I mean, I've, I do that cause I do everything myself still. And it's just like, I'll talk history. I'll do the research. I'll, I'll read 50 hours a week. I don't care, but like, it's the editing that I'm like, ah.

That's one place to put your money on a professional. And, and I got a great friend doing it. He's retired, uh, uh, air force officer, got a studio in my little town here and, uh, that he's using AI a lot to help him, But it's still one of those things that I don't think AI will ever take over. It's just the craftsmanship of putting it together and being able to get the human inflection into the voice. You know, they can pick up your voice, but they've got a long way to go before AI takes that away from us, I think.

Yeah, well, like, for me, it's always the paranoia is, like, what if I screwed up? Like, an editor can piece things together. He can take out, like, the dead noise. He can take out, like, the mouth noises in the background, but, like, if I screwed something up historically, like I have to, like sometimes I got to eliminate like entire paragraphs. Like I have to do two or three minutes because I said the wrong year or I said the wrong nit, but like an editor would be like, yeah, it's fine.

And I got to try to like, like I've had times where I've had to like chop things from like the end of an episode. Like if I said, you know, the Persians instead of the Ottomans, I'd have to try to find some place where I said Ottomans and splice it in. But like a regular editor would, he's not going to know I made a mistake. So that was always like the paranoia in the back of my head.

Like I still have to do it myself. I had to sit here for five hours to edit this half hour episode.

I think the average listener right now has no conception of the kind of work that goes into that dynamic. So it's a lot of fun.

That was definitely the biggest surprise for me, like going in. Because I just, I famously just, one day decided to do the podcast. Like one day I was listening to them and I was like, I could do that. And two days later, the first episode came out and it was so bad that I permanently hit it from everywhere.

I was like, we're going to start on season two, which isn't much better, but it's a little bit better than the previous one that I did. It makes me wonder though, like as an author, because I do it all the time with episodes is like, I'll, I'll listen back to it just to make sure I didn't screw anything up. And I was like, ah, I forgot to do that. Like how many times, like how long after you publish a book, do you like wake up with nightmares? Like, man, I really should have done this. I should have put this anecdote in there. I should have put this story.

You know, it's, it's funny you say that because it's even more so with the fiction. Because for me, you know, the, the, the whole, the, the whole author world, we could do a whole episode on, You know, I started in 1995. I had a Manhattan agent. My book has sold a million-odd copies, and On Killing has sold a million-odd copies in eight different languages. And then I self-published my second book kind of from the beginning, and we got half a million self-published. We'd done everything in between. And my Manhattan agent, when I went to him with my science fiction fantasy series, said, Dave, everything's changed. It's completely broken.

The agents as the guardians of the gate, the mainstream publishers, it's all broken. The local printer doing your local print run is broken. I mean, basically, there's something called the long tail. And the idea is that once upon a time, the biggest bookstore on the planet might have had 50,000 titles.

I don't know. But everything from number 50,000 on just Just doesn't exist. Can't be in the bookstores, backordered. But Amazon has more titles in the long tail from number 50,000 to number 6 million. There's actually more titles in there than there is in all your bestsellers put together. And so there's never been a better time to be an author.

Have AI transcribe your podcast, put them together, get them out there as a book. There's never been a better time. my local printer, KDP, Kindle Direct Press, KDP, this is Kindle's, you know, mass dynamic, they can, they can print on demand my, my, this sci-fi fantasy book, they can print it on demand and mail it for less money than my local printer can print for a print run of 5,000 copies, so It's like everybody loses. My local printer loses. The bookstore loses. Who wins? Amazon wins. And the author wins.

And the readers win. Because we've got this huge crowdsourcing out there with the review system. And there's never been a better time to be an author. I'm making literally 10 times more money off of every book being sold now. than I did. I mean, I've sold roughly a million copies from the beginning. It doesn't, not that much, you know, added up over all these years. But if I'd have made as much money off of those books as I'm making off of books now, I'd be in a lot better shape. So it's a crazy time. And I tell you, Neil, just get those things transcribed. Once upon a time, you had to pay some lady in Malaysia who you found on Uplink to do the transcription work today. get them transcribed and get them out there. But there's never been

a better time. But the place where you, it's kind of carved in stone. I can update what KDP is printing out, print on demand. I can update the Kindle, but the audio book is where it's locked in stone. And I've got alpha readers that are coming up and having great ideas and great fixes and boom, Once that audio books out, there's not much I can do about it.

And there's this great sense. I wish I could have put this in there, but just save it for the next book and rock on. Yeah.

Cause I have that all the time because I do all my shows without a script. Like I'll just sort of like dry rehearse it throughout the week. And then, you know, it's like a snowflake, whatever I do that day is that, and then like, I'll be driving like two days later. It's like, Oh, I forgot that joke that I wrote on Tuesday or this analogy that I put here. And it's like, Do I go back and put it in? And I'm always like, yeah, I'm going to do that. And I never do. But, you know, the idea is always there.

Set it up for next episode, next book. Always another opportunity. You know, you're a young guy. How old are you, bro?

I'm a year older than your book. I was, I'm 32. So I was born in 94.

So I just turned 70. And, you know, Will and Nelson is 92 and on tour. And that's who I want to be when I grow up. I mean, I truly have a 20 year plan. But you've got the majority of your productive adult life still in front of you. And it's hard for a guy like you to wrap your mind around that. But the vast majority of your productive adult life is still in front of you. Look what you've done, man. It's incredible. Uh, what's next on the, on the hit list for, uh, for, for, for Neil? What's, what do you, what do you think has come down the road?

I mean, I've been slowly working on, uh, my series on the first world war. Um, I mean, at my peak, I was doing these like once a week. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed to do that. But like these days, you know, between work and, you know, playing 200 plus softball games a week or a year and, you know, everything else I got going on in my life, I don't do them as often. You got a life.

What's work? What do you do for work?

I work for a general contractor. We do a lot of like office remodels. Like we'll go in and Well, since COVID, it's been great because all these offices are downsizing. So we'll go in and split up offices into like three or four different places for the property manager.

So their apartments is setting up apartments now?

It's just like regular, like it's mostly commercial office spaces. So we just, you know, stand up walls. We redo the HVAC, the electrical, all that stuff.

Do you rehearse the podcast in your mind while you're doing all of that?

Kind of. I mean, technically, we're not allowed to listen to anything at work, but when nobody's watching, I got my earbud in, and that's where I listen to most of my audiobooks. That's why I like them so much, because I can work most of the work I do, unless I'm doing a lot of math. I can just sit there and listen. I'll usually go through one or two audiobooks a week, depending on how long they are.

You know, this is... Just stop and think about that. The idea of you... doing manual mindless, you know, kind of hard labor all day long. I wouldn't call it mindless by any stretch. But the fact that you are processing information while you do it, this is a human revolution. So we've got at the same time that we were just destroying the, we've got, we've got 30 second clips and we've got, we've got all these things that are destroying our attention span and, We have this other segment of our society that's listening to this long-form podcast. And I think it's one of the most positive things happening in our civilization today is the people producing them and the people listening to them. It just gives us hope

for our civilization, for people to go beyond a 30-second clip of a cute cat doing something stupid watched by 10 million people.

I mean, I hope so. I mean, like they always say, like the pendulum of society swings back and forth. So hopefully, you know, we get to a certain point, either, you know, we learn how to use AI productively or, you know, we have like the Terminator franchise and, you know, it kills us. You know, hopefully if we can get past that, like we can swing back to like people that actually want to learn more than just, you know, what a YouTube short or like what they've seen on Instagram. But you never know that there's so much, Especially history. Maybe it's just because I see more history because of my algorithm.

But there's so much history slop out there. Every time I hear that disembodied voice, I'm like, all right, next video. Next video.

It's the worst. I hate that voice. But I think we've got to think in terms of multiple pendulums going at the same time.

Oh, for sure.

When they get in alignment. You know, we've got the pendulum that's listening to long-form entertainment, and then we've got the other mindless aspect of it. But let me lay a foundation on where I'd like to go with this. You know, sitting in my lap right now is Charlie. I don't know if you've got a video aspect of this, but Charlie is my service dog. My ears are shot out.

He lets me know when the alarm goes off in the morning, and he's a good guy. He works for a living.

Your tinnitus is not service-related.

It is.

Wow. Not according to the VA, I'm sure. That's a big meme that I've seen around that. Every time someone's like, my ears are ringing. Oh, there's someone in the VA in the background. Your tinnitus is not service-related.

Mine is. But I think what we've got to think about is this. Look, I've watched one dog. She had a big old lab. She had a 15-year-old Labrador retriever sitting at my feet. And she's got the most vivid dreams I've ever seen a dog have. she talks in her dreams all the time, and dogs always do that, but here's the thing, what do dogs dream about, right, you watch them, they never dream about sex, you don't see them, they almost never dream about food, you don't see them munching, they dream about hunting, and it's what we're wired to do, and I wrote a book on hunting, and I commend it to your attention, and it's It covers every aspect of hunting that it just kind of bores people. We almost overdid ourselves because it talks about

the ecology and the ethics and the economy and every other aspect of it. But the thing about combat is that it's intimate. My story begins in 1974. Private Grossman staggers into the United States Army, 82nd Airborne Division. We have Vietnam vets all around us. And we wanted to know what combat was going to be like. And they wouldn't say. And I realized it's like this taboo topic.

And so it's very, very much like asking about sex. You know, how many people you killed? How many women you had sex with? You know, I I mean, you know, just if you ask, you know, how's his sex life? How are you getting it on? You're not going to tell people. But fast forward 10 years, and Captain Grossman, West Point psychology professor, Army Ranger, and I'm interviewing World War II veterans or Vietnam veterans, and they tell me.

And they tell me things that they say, I've never told anybody about this before. And you really get to the heart of what's actually happening in combat. And I'll tell you, at the very biological level, at the very biological level, one of the things that's happening is people are pissing and crapping themselves a lot. You know, I'm in a boxing family. My little brother was a North Dakota state champion, Golden Gloves. You know, when a boxer gets knocked out, they lose finger and bladder control. They crap themselves. They piss themselves. Anybody knocked unconscious. If you're out cold, boom. You no longer have sphincter control. You don't have bladder control. Of course you don't. You're unconscious.

And they stand them up. They wrap them in a robe. They walk them on out. And you don't see the crap, you know, dribbling down their legs. They get in the shower and they hose it off. They keep on going. But it's like this hidden secret. Of course it happens. You're unconscious. You've lost bladder control. You're going to piss yourself.

Of course it happens. But we never talk about that. I think almost everybody under concussions, almost everybody that has a TBI to one degree, a large portion of the people with TBI, there's a very good chance they've pissed themselves. And I've got this great narrative from World War, it's a Canadian guy, landed on, I think it's in Anzio Beach, and he's a replacement, and he crawls into Foxhole, and they're under artillery fire, And the Sarge in the foxhole says, shit, shit some more. And he said, what's wrong? He thinks the Sarge has been shot. He said, well, he said, I piss myself. He said, I always piss myself. And the guy said he wasn't apologizing. And he said, I felt some wet and I felt down there. And I said, Sarge,

I piss too. And he says, welcome to war. And the concussions and the dynamics and But the thing to understand is this, I do a lot of work in hospitals, and I do a lot of work with cops. I think I'm the only person ever to be certified to train police in all 50 states. And that's how many traffic accident victims, I ask in the ER, I ask state troopers, how many traffic accident victims have crapped themselves?

How many have pissed themselves? I don't know. Almost everybody's pissed themselves. And if there's a load in the lower intestines, they probably crap themselves. And people are devastated. I'm talking lifelong, humiliated, shattered, devastated. Because the last time it happened, you were three years old.

And it was a really big deal. And so when you lose bowel and bladder control, you're tapping back into something that happened when you were three years old. And I tell people, I tell everybody, you look at them and you tell them. You're a state trooper, you're an ER technician, or you're an ambulance tech. You look at them, you tell them, that's your body's natural response. It happens all the time. Don't worry about it. You can literally save somebody from a lifetime of shame and despair, but just say that's your body's natural response. Happens all the time.

Don't worry about it. So when we talk about the body's natural response, One of the most fundamental biological dynamics of all is the response to gunpowder weapons. And I ask hunters. I've got an audience of 100-odd people. I've been doing this full-time since 1998 when I retired. And I'm in this constant feedback loop. When people come back and say, here's what it was like for me, here's what happened to me. Just nobody in human history has had that opportunity. You know, we got the GWAT, we got cops, we got everybody who's out there coming and giving me this feedback loop. And all of a sudden, it's okay to talk about it. It's like sex, again, very intimate. But one of the most fundamental dynamics, how

many of y'all are hunters out there? You ever notice something? You fire your hunting rifle one time at the range without hearing protection. Your ears will ring for the rest of the day. You go to shoot a deer. It's a still, calm morning. Boom. People a mile away hear the shot. Hunter, what do you hear? Nothing. And they all go like this.

Nothing. Nothing.

And your ears don't ring. And nobody, nobody, I mean, we live in this little, nobody went back to the campfire and said, you know, I didn't hear the shot. And my ears didn't ring. And usually they don't feel the recoil. And how could we have had 500 freaking years of gunpowder combat and not let people know the most basic, fundamental, biological thing? Like, you probably won't hear the shot. And your ears probably won't. And by the way, you are still getting hearing loss. The shutout is in the auditory nerve. The ear is still being hammered. wear hearing protection when you hunt, you'd be a devil.

Well, in my experience, at least hunting and at the range, it's not your gun that makes you go deaf. It's the guy next to you. Cause like my dad and I have hunted together for years. And like, if we're both shooting at something away from us, we're both fine. But as soon as someone crosses that 45 degree angle and you get that, that sonic burst next to your eardrum, that's when your hearing goes out.

Amen.

Amen. Amen.

I'll never forget. I was, uh, the one range I used to go to, they had in, well, before they built the outdoor range, all they had was the indoor one. And there was this guy shooting, I think it must've been either a 30-06 or a 308, some like big rifle caliber. He's two lanes over. I have the mushable ear protections and noise canceling headphones on, and I could still feel the pressure change in my ear. Like And that's, I mean, 7.62 is one of the most classic, like, battle rifle calibers there is out there,. 30, whatever it was.

Yes.

So now imagine that. Imagine how loud that is. And then realize that you, when you're shooting, don't hear it. And here's, you know, we talk about buck fever. We talk about when you have your first kill. And I tell you, I believe at a biological level, when you have your first kill, it's very much like your first orgasm.

It's that biological. It's that powerful. It's that profound. And it's intimate. It's intimate. And so, again, dogs don't dream about having sex. They don't dream about eating. They dream about hunting. They're always hunting in their dreams. They're always woofing and chasing. And we're the same way. And so, from a hunting perspective, if you collapse the existence of our species down to 24 hours, I think it's up to the last six minutes or so. All we did was hunt. You know, the existence of our species collapsed.

You know, the whole agricultural revolution began six minutes or 12 minutes or whatever it was ago. And the rest of the time, all we did was hunt. But we were always in the middle of the food chain. And here's the key. We have the forward-set eyes of a hunter. We have the gripping fangs of a predator. but we have the side set ears of a grass eater. And we have the chisel teeth of a crap yourself, run like hell rabbit. And the grinding molars of a grass eater that says, I don't have to outrun the predator.

I just have to outrun the slowest person in the herd. And so we've got this capacity to survive as predator or prey. You see, we've We've always been in the middle of the food chain. Nobody can deny that things that hunted us and things that we hunted. But the greatest achievement of us as a biological organism is to hunt and to successfully hunt. But the crazy thing that people understand when we try to apply that to war is this incredible resistance against killing our own kind. And people say, oh, how do you explain this? How do you explain that? Well, just right now, we're a nation of a third of a billion people. On any given day, there's a little over 30 murders. So the numbers work out really well. It comes out to 30 out of

a third of a billion. That comes out to 10 out of every 100 million or one out of every 10 million So out of every 10 million people out there, divorce, infidelity, layoff, traffic accidents, out of every 10 million people out there, there's three of them that are killing. And my big question is, explain that. Explain that. Explain all the people that aren't killing out there. And so the big secret of warfare is that we bring all these people together, we give them guns, we train them, we send them off.

And in World War II, we found out an awful lot of them wouldn't pull the trigger. And one of the weirdest historical dynamics you've ever seen is this whole attack on SLA Marshall after he was dead. So he made up all that stuff. Why would he do that? And he lied to Eisenhower. And all these guys in World War II... believed him, and all these guys, and I've got a great thing from McCall's magazine, Collier's magazine, from 1950, an article about how half of our people won't shoot, and they've got all these case studies and narratives, and this is a magazine with a distribution of three million people, and it's accepted, and then the guy dies, and oh, no, no, he made all that up, and so it was one of the weird historical dynamics, but

However you cut it, we were having a hard time getting people to actually pull the trigger. Crusade weapons like machine guns are almost always fired, and key weapons like a BAR or a flamethrower, you know the drill, you've read my book, they usually fire. If a leader stands over his shoulder and demands he fire, but left to their own devices, the individual wouldn't pull the trigger.

Well, one thing I, uh, I found interesting, like throughout your book is, you know, cause I, you know, spent years hunting and like the, my dad and I, we used to hunt with a club that we used to push deer. And you know, when you were talking about like your, your firing figures and like guys who like shoot high or whatever, and like the whole buck fever argument, I found it interesting that there may have been guys that did want to actually shoot at the enemy. They were just so excited. They shot high and then, and then looking, cause like there's been, like there was one time we were, we were lined up, we were getting ready to start a drive. So you got 15 guys all lined up in the woods, all, you know, 50

yards or so from each other. Our deer is running through the brush in front of us. And he finally breaks out. We joked later that they picked a weak link because they P picked the guy to run to that. So Judd, yeah. Judd throws his gun up, fires three shells off. And like, he's got a semi auto. All three of them are like taken off the tops of the trees and, But yet to this day, he swears up and down, oh, I hit that deer. Oh, I hit that deer. And meanwhile, half the gang watched him just completely whiff with three air balls and not even– the buck probably didn't even hear the shot going over it was so far over his head.

Instinctively knew the weak link.

Yeah. Well, because it's funny because he ran down the line like three times like in the brush and then broke out exactly at the one guy who was the worst shot in the entire class.

But the thing about Marshall's data is not that they missed. It was that they didn't fire at all. They never pulled the trigger. And they would tell you so. They would tell you so. And then you've got that portion that did pull the trigger. And the question is, how many of them were firing high? How many of it was intentional, just some kind of a spasmodic resistance? How much of it was, like you said, excitement? And here's a guy who sincerely wanted to hit the deer. The excitement of the moment pulled him off.

Speaking of your book, this happened to be scrolling through my YouTube shorts and I found something, a video from this one sketch group from years ago that I saw at the time, but after rereading your book before this and the whole thing you did on the firing squad, I think you'll really enjoy this.

I'll pull it up real quick.

Mr. Frank Rosenthorpe, you have been found guilty.

Can you hear the video?

I got it. I got it. Rock and roll.

Of treason, and it has been decided that you should be put to death by firing squad.

No!

Shut up! Now, do you have any last words?

Yes, just three.

Okay, moving on.

Firing squad each of you has been handed a rifle and only one of these rifles.

Is there an actual bullet?

This is so that no one will know who actually fires the shot and that none of you will have to bear the weight of guilt on their conscience understood All right now on my mark you will aim at the criminal and fire if you dare shut up All right ready air Aim.

Fire.

Okay, nobody hit him. You have to aim, all right? Whoever has the bullet didn't hit him. Don't assume you don't have the bullet. You still need to aim.

I was aiming.

Well, aim better, okay? Robertson. Paying attention, all right? Hey, why'd you single me out? No reason, no reason.

I have the bullet, don't I?

I'm glad I didn't.

I can't bear that guilt.

Give me the gun back. Give me the guns back. All right.

I'm shuffling the guns, shuffling the gun.

That way we don't know who has what gun. It's all going to be shuffled. All right, here's your gun. Here's your gun. And here's your gun.

It's that one.

I watched it. Give me the gun. Give me the gun back. Give me the gun. All right, don't watch this time. I'm shuffling. No one can see me. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. You men, free me and tie him to the post, and I shall make the king. Shut up! All right, here's your gun. Here's your gun. Here's your gun. Now, let's...

Don't look in there! Give me that. All right, now you have this one, and you have this one. All right. Was it the one?

No, you're good.

That means I probably have the one. No, it doesn't. It means either you have it or he has it.

I'm not going to aim.

You have to. Give me the guns back.

Welcome to 101 Ways to Make Steak and Potatoes.

First on the.

On that note.

yeah i saw that the other day and i was like this would be perfect to bring up on there.

What a great example you know and and truly supposedly with the classic firing squad you know first off the guy's blindfolded not for his sake you know do you want the blindfold no i do not want to blindfold oh you are so brave but we're going to do it anyway yeah because we don't want to look at your ugly face dying in our dreams for the rest of our lives you know and And then the idea that supposedly out of 10 people, there's one that has a blank, and they don't know which one it is.

But anybody that pulls the trigger knows whether he's firing a blank or not.

Yeah, just like you always know whenever you're firing the last round out of an M16. You can tell because the breech stays back. You can instantly tell in the recoil.

Or you know when you're firing a blank. But there's a lot of mythology revolving around it. I love the... I love the whole thing about Marshall Ney and the firing squad and him and how hard it was to get them to kill the guy. And you see this historically. I think it's Saratoga, the fort outside in Florida. It's got this wall where supposedly all the firing squads happened.

And there's bullet pock marks all the way up this wall. That's kind of interesting, isn't it? It's a whole dynamic across history that a lot of what we think of as ancient battles, and I had a great, I did an article with an archaeologist quite a while back about how the battles were big shoving matches until one side or the other ran, and then the killing happened. Usually, when somebody had a mobility advantage, the chariot, that's where the chariot did its thing, or the guy on horseback just riding along doesn't have to look him in the eyes, pseudo-speciation, because he's this creature. There's a lot of dynamics in play there. But the reality, if we think of this great killing match and grinding bodies away and death on

the ancient battlefield, I think there's archaeological support that an awful lot of the killing actually happened afterwards. when one side of the other ran away and archaeologically we see this trail of bodies and debris all the way back as this pursuit took place. And we know, we know that, uh, you know, without Cav to support the pursuit, that, uh, that the ability to actually hit the enemy is greatly reduced.

And that's represented in a lot of gaming and it's, it's pretty realistic. So it just, this whole image of war, you know, is, is totally different than, than the reality that we've, we've, we've got in our heads, I think. Uh, you've done a lot of World War I research, and you've got the non-firing data, and World War I, we know the machine gun. I've only had one World War I veteran I was ever able to interview, just one.

I think it was in the early 1990s. But how much of that kind of resistance dynamic stacks up in the trenches and firing line in World War I? Where do you see it?

Well, I mean, like, the most famous one is, you know, Ernst Junger, who, you know, by all accounts, including his own, thoroughly enjoyed his World War I experience. You know, if you can get past the trenches and the rats and the smell, like... But then again, he may have been a sociopath. Like, someone who is... Yeah, because, you know, I don't know if you've ever read Ernst Junger's book or not.

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, it's like, you know, he was a guy that's, like, on all... Like, he made up his own assault tactics because he just liked... going on patrols and throwing grenades and stuff. So maybe, you know, Ernst Junger isn't the best, you know, memoir to, you know, try to support that.

You always have to have your BS meter going off too, how much of it was truthful and how much of it might be, you know, fanciful. It was, it was embraced in, in its time as truth. And so I think that's a pretty good test. There weren't a whole lot of people at the time standing up saying, nah, that doesn't pass the smell test. So that's, that's kind of your first test, but, I tell you, you really mentioned something important there. World War II, Normandy Beach, 60 days in, 98% of those who were left had become psychiatric casualties. They weren't permanently, just their mind was a weak link. After 60 days of inescapable day and night combat, 98%, at least temporarily, were driven crazy by combat. So I

always ask, what about the other 2%? And then And they were crazy when they got there. The World War II researchers lumped them together as aggressive sociopaths. But I think it's more complex than that. I think we can take that pool of people who take pleasure in combat and divide them into two parts. And none of this is, boom, you're 100%. I use the sheep, the wolf, and the sheepdog model. And it's really a continuum. People are somewhere in the continuum between the sheepdog and the sheep. But what we've got is you've got the sheepdog who's devoted truly to protecting, and you've got the wolf who's devoted to killing. And one is a sociopath, what's the other?

If you have the propensity for violence in an absence of empathy, well, that's a pretty good thumbnail definition of a sociopath. A psychopath. But what if you had a propensity for violence and a love for the lambs? What if you spent a lifetime building the capacity for violence and a desire to use it to protect the innocent?

Now what do you have? And I actually have the U.S. government trademark for the term sheepdog. I coined it and it's taken off and it's been a real... As a culture, we like dogs, and we're willing to embrace that more than past cultures might have been. But I think that sheepdog dynamic, the protector versus the destroyer, I think that's important.

He was a sociopath. Well, maybe. Maybe he was a wolf. Maybe he was a sheepdog. And I think we've got an awful lot of people out there who really, really... want to be the sheepdog. They want to be the protector. But have they got the capacity at the moment of truth?

Did you ever either read or watch Generation Kill? Yeah, sure. I always think of that one thing where they're talking about Trombley. It's like he's bumping down a road. We're going 50 miles an hour and he fires three bursts and hits exactly what he's shooting at. And the other guy's like, Yeah, because he's a psycho. At least he's our psycho.

He's our psycho.

That was such a great show that went over so many people's heads because they just made it too accurate. People with no conception of military acronyms and the way the military works, that show is so inaccessible to people. People who did spend time around the military... It's generally one of their favorite shows of all time.

It never occurred to me that that would be, and you're right. There's like this barrier for those who, my wife, I don't, I read a lot, but my wife watches shows a lot. And she was listening to all the talk about RPG and they were talking about the QR, big quick react, QRF is standing by. And I said, do you understand all that stuff? You know what an RPG and a QRF is? And she says, oh, yeah.

I watch these shows. I know that. Okay. So, you know, I wonder how many of those people pick up on that and become accustomed to that.

Well, I feel like some of it has kind of, I mean, back when it came out in 2008, I feel like more people didn't. But like with the rise of, you know, with the military spending all this money so Michael Bay can make movies. and like the Call of Duty franchise, like a lot of like military vernacular has sort of like trickled down through our culture, through other forms of entertainment that I feel like people like looking back at the show now probably understood it a lot more than like when it first came out.

Yeah.

It was like the guy. I mean, the guys who made it were the same guys that made The Wire. And I think it was Ed Burns. He was a Vietnam veteran. So he already had that, you know, military background.

You know, you look back and you say, what will be the defining movie of our era? What will be the defining movie at that age? And I never thought that maybe Generation Kill will be the one that floats to the top. And when we look at current history, you know, we got the whole GWAT. We've got 20 years of war. We just now left Iraq. We've been in there all this time. We've had more people at war over a continuous period of time. And, of course, our military is very, very small. But I had a command sergeant major. I was a young lieutenant, almost captain.

And this guy had had five tours in Vietnam. And, you know, nobody was made to go back for a second helping. This guy had five tours, and he won the DSC on his fourth tour. And I asked him how he did it. And he was basically a platoon sergeant, an E6 platoon sergeant in charge of understrength platoon defending an airfield. And he said, I've been at war at that point for four years straight. He said, I had a little cloud of radio operators around me. I was calling in mortars, airstrikes, artillery. I was maneuvering subordinate elements.

And it was just another day at the office for me. And I thought, man, that's just astounding. Some of our people out there that have been doing this now for decades, some of our more elite folks, they're at levels of performance it's hard for us to wrap our mind around. And there's this idea that they all have PTSD and they're all broken, when the truth is we've got this post-traumatic growth. And I think one of the most important things to talk about to any audience is how the body responds to a life and death event and the sympathetic nervous system arousal. So as a West Point psychology professor, I was the only OCS guy teaching at West Point at the time. It was kind of rare. And what do we want to teach psychology to? What's the most

important thing? Well, right at the top of the list of things that they wanted taught was sympathetic, parasympathetic processes. And what we tell people is to first to lean into the adrenaline rush. We give the example of two musicians, right? One of them says, oh, I got staged right. Every time I go on stage, my heart's pounding, my guts are turning out. I don't think I can do it anymore. Snowflake.

The old man says, every time I go on stage, my heart's pounding, my guts are turning. I want to do it for the rest of my life. Rock star. So two different people are having the exact same physiological response. And they're processing it exactly differently. So the first stage is to lean into the adrenaline rush. This is what you signed on for. This is what you want. You know, the life of adventure, roller coasters and rock climbing and parachuting.

But the other half of the equation is that something triggers that sympathetic nervous system when you don't want it to. A sound, a smell. And the best example I've got, I taught the International Association of Hospitals Security Administrators and Chiefs. And the one security chief says, I got one of my security officers gets punched in the nose in the ER.

He said, Chief, I can't go in the ER anymore. Every time I go in the ER, my heart's pounding, my guts are turning. I got PTSD. I'm broken. And I said, no. Nobody wants to be broken. Nobody wants to have a disorder. But this is what it feels like to level up in a video game. This is important. Look, we've all played video games. Your character's in combat. Poof, you level up. Oh, that's cool. Well, what's it like in real life? This is what it's like. You go back in that ER. with a bottle of water in your hand. And one of the best ways to control the sympathetic nervous system arousal, take a big swig of water.

You go back to that ER and you take that big swig of water and you push on through this thing. The World War II generation, they would push through it. They didn't say, ah, I'm broken. They didn't even have a word for PTSD. A new generation thinks, I'm broken. They don't know there's another alternative. Now the World War II generation, they... So they didn't get help when they needed it. And we didn't know how to help them.

So they turned to alcohol or they got mean, but most of them were truly the greatest generation. The World War II generation were an example of post-traumatic growth.

So I'm curious, you know, I assume you continue to talk to veterans and stuff in your, you know, do you find that the younger generation is more open about, talking about combat experience, not only because, you know, therapy these days is less stigmatized, but because you have random people going out there, putting every detail of their life on social media as it is. Like, do you find like older millennials slash, you know, Gen Z combat vets are much more willing to talk to you than the older generations were?

I don't, I don't, I don't see any fundamental difference.

Really?

It's funny. You know, we still don't, we just still don't get hunters sitting around and say, oh, I didn't hear the shot. You know, that biological dynamic. I mean, let's put it this way. I think it's really, really like sex. So have we got a generation that sits around at work and talks about their sex life now any more than there was before? To a certain degree.

I mean, I can tell because, I mean, I sit at an interesting place like in construction because I'm surrounded by both like 50 to 60 year olds. And kids right out of high school, and I'm the fulcrum in the middle trying to keep balance between the both of them. But, I mean, at least, especially with the kids these days, they'll brag about what limited conquests they've had so far.

I think that was true. I was 17 years old. I lied about my age and worked on a wildcat oil rig in Panhandle in Nebraska, and And when I turned 18, I became a paratrooper. It was infinitely safer. Those guys on the oil rig, they couldn't spell lotion, let alone comply.

Oh, yeah, oil rigs are a nightmare.

And those guys were always talking about their sexual conquests and some of the other stuff. But when you sit down one-on-one and really try to get intimate information, it's just, you know, people throw out stupid stuff. Like you said, your sexual conquests, but I think there's something very fundamental.

The new generation truly is better equipped to talk about sex than ever. And yet, how much of that is just BS? And I think the new generation is better equipped to talk about war than ever. I mean, my books from Marine Corps commandants required reading lists. They got this frame of reference. And I'll give you a great example.

One of the most important things to understand is in combat, you've got slow motion time. I've had hundreds of people tell me they can see the bullet in combat.

I've experienced that before, so I know that one's true.

Yeah, it's like airsoft, they're paintballing. I've had dozens of people tell me I could see the bullet leave the barrel, I could see the bullet enter his body. And so this slow motion time, the tunnel vision, the auditory exclusion we talked about, you don't hear the shots. And then the memory gaps, and then the memory distortions. People who just flat remembered something that did not happen. And usually it's something bad. They imagine something that happened, and then it becomes hardened. And I'll give you an example. A SEAL team in Vietnam, 20 years later, one of the members of the SEAL team said, I've got to confess, I've got to confess. He said, we're on this one op.

We're at the end of the op. We went in this hooch, and we killed all of these people. We killed them all, and we committed an atrocity, and I've got to confess. And it didn't happen. And I could see where somebody would have, like, this nightmare, this manifestation, and then live with it. And they didn't debrief. They didn't do a critical incident debrief. And the truth is that the timeline was such that it could not have been happening. It could have been recreated. So fast forward to...

A Navy psychologist had told me he's in country in Iraq. A Marine has been wounded. The Marine is in bed, in country, in the hospital. And he said, my buddy in my squad is dead. I had a shot at this guy. I didn't take the shot. My buddy's dead because I didn't take the shot. It's my fault he's dead. And so they did an AAR. They did just the squad sat around. Their psychologist told me the squad sat around the guy's hospital bed. And they did it by the numbers. after-action review, an AAR. And they said, no, basically, they said, dude, that wasn't even in your sector. There's no way you would have had a shot at him.

And my book, Marine Corps Commandant's Required Reading List, and he said, whoa, man. Maybe it was one of those memory distortions we read about. Okay, I can accept that that happened. But I'll give you a case after case where people didn't know it was going to happen and are blindsided by it. I'm really interested, though, about your slow motion time seeing bullets. Can you tell me?

So I wasn't getting shot at the one time I was shot. the church I used to go to, they used to do like a retreat up in New York. It was, they called it snow camp. Like he went up to the mountains and like one of the activities was snowmobiling. So I had done it the year before. So I was familiar with the snowmobile. So I was going around this corner and instead of breaking, I just tried to let up on the throttle and I had some wet snow on my fingers. So when I tried to let it go, it slipped and it punched the accelerator forward and it stayed in that position. And so I took off. I had two thoughts. I was like, why am I here? And oh, look, fence. And so I hit this horse fence going 50 miles an hour

and I jump off the snowmobile. And as I jump and hit the fence, I'm going towards the ground and I could literally see it all happen in slow motion. And it actually gave my reflexes enough time to throw my hands up. I did a handspring, broke both my wrists, but it saved my life.

Oh, what a great example. Of slow motion time in a life and death event.

And I haven't shot at before. I mean, not in combat, deer hunting. Cause you know, guys, I was literally looking down the barrel of two guns. I watched the, fortunately these guys can't shoot to save their lives. Otherwise I would be dead. But you know, I hit the deck immediately. I knew about the whistle and the snap rule about bullets. So, you know, I was getting as low as I could.

I didn't piss myself. but I also, I didn't see slow motion time there. I saw, like I said, I saw the two, the two chrome insides of the barrels. And I was like, you know what? It's not worth it. I just, I just hit the deck and let the, let the buckshot rip the tree branches above my head.

But what a great example of slow motion time. You know, I was, I'm a 2 million miler on Delta and about hit 2 million on American and United. And I've been in the area. So I'm in Casper, Wyoming and, in a little prop plane. And there's one seat down one side and two seats on the other side. And I got my little window exit row seat. And one of the biggest human beings I've ever seen is coming down the aisle. I said, dear Lord, don't let him sit with me. I'm over here, you know, hunched over here.

And look, I said, you're a pretty healthy guy. He said, what do you do? He said, I'm on the national sports team. We're headed to Salt Lake City. I said, what's your sport? He said, I wrestle. I said, oh, you've been to the Olympics? He said, well, I won the gold last year. It was Rulon Gardner. It was this guy that beat the Russian, has never been beat.

And I'm sitting in, I've got the privilege, sitting in an airline seat with Rulon Gardner. And he says, so what do you do? And so I told him about it. And we got talking about slow motion time and tunnel vision and sensory focusing. And he says, that's what happens to me in a match. He says, slow motion time is the norm, you know, just all the time in the world. He said, and I'm doing an underhook. I ain't got a clue what an underhook is. He said, I'm doing an underhook. He said, the only thing in the universe is my hand and what it's sensing as it goes in and under. And he said, I don't hear the crowd, but I hear the creak of his foot on the mat and I hear my coach and sensory folks. So the point is, what you experienced in

the snow, you know, like I'm, like a baseball player at bat, a really, really good baseball player at bat, supposedly, 100 mile an hour fastballs coming at them, and they can see the stitching on the ball. That's slow motion time. So what you experienced in a life and death event is what I think world-class athletes are tapping into. But in this life and death event, we're experiencing these things.

But just, you know, my book on combat won a Ukrainian Book of the Year award I spent the summer of 24 in Ukraine training their troops, working on a bit. I tell everybody, set aside the fact. You know, I tell them, set aside the fact somebody's trying to kill you. If you were sitting here right now, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, blackouts, hallucinations, that would meet every definition of a psychotic episode. Just those things by themselves would scare the daylights out of you.

The fact that somebody's trying to kill you is bad enough. without your body doing weird and one of the things nobody warned you about. So the very first thing we ought to do before we send anybody into combat or even into any life and death event is to know, hey, slow motion time is probably going to happen. It's normal and it gives you all the time in the world to think through what your reaction is going to be.

And it's good and it's normal. The memory gaps and the memory distortions and the need to debrief and fill in the memory gaps and fill in the memory distortions. This should be just the fundamental things that every human being ought to know about themselves.

And I'd be very curious to see too, like after the Ukraine war is over, like what those combat stories are, because like, because the Ukraine, like, especially like now, like when there's drones everywhere, you have like on top of the normal stresses of modern combat, you have that like panopticon feeling, like where guys won't even like take a piss on a tree because like that thermal signature might give like their unit away. and they'll get artillery dropped on their heads 10 minutes later. Like, I'm curious to see, like, what that looks like post-war with those guys.

Let me tell you what I think is a fundamentally new thing about the battlefield. Killing people from a distance is not new. Being killed from a distance is not new. I mean, in World War I, you know, all you had to do was, you know, the snipers could pick off anything, and you lived your lives in it. If you're being killed from afar and killing from afar... The fundamental biological of that, it hasn't changed. I'll tell you what's new, and is sleep. In World War I, World War II, Korea, even Vietnam, when there wasn't anything to do, they would write letters, they would read, and they would sleep.

And as long as there was no immediate demand, they always got enough sleep. But sleep is a biological blind spot. Any 10-year-old girl in a slumber party can go at night without sleep. It's not that big a deal to go without sleep. Now, try to make that girl go that long without food. And so the body needs four things to survive. We need air. We need water. We need food. We need sleep. But the body is really, really bad at making us get enough sleep if there's something exciting. And television and movies and video games are doing that to us. And so what's happening is the most fundamentally new thing on the modern battlefield is not drones, it's this, the cell phone. And instead of sleeping, they're

watching movies and they're playing video. I know it's hard to believe. I had a command sergeant major 101st Airborne Division. I'm training a brigade of the 101st, punching out to Iraq. And he said, on our previous deployment, he's Battalion Sergeant Major, he said, we're doing combat patrols during the day and barracks operations at night. He said, I told my troops, it's lights out at 2200. He said, if I catch you playing video games after 10 o'clock, I will take your video games. The Sergeant Major said, a week later, I had a closet overflowing with video games. He said, these are good troops. They wouldn't disobey an order. He said, these are exact words. He said, they cannot not play those damn games. And so the games give an illusion

of control. They give an illusion of progress. It's very seductive to people under stress. And they play the games and they watch the movies instead of sleeping. And that's the new reality of the battlefield. And so I'm in Ukraine, and I'm talking about this. One of the things I talk about every presentation is sleep hygiene and sleep management and how there's this desire to watch movies and a desire to play video games and how they give an illusion of control and how we've got to confront it and make our troops get enough sleep. And I'm working in small groups. I kind of pull back. If there's more than 50 people, it kind of becomes a target, and small groups... of a primarily captain, major, lieutenant colonel level,

being pulled back from the line. And my book is a national bestseller and a book of the year award. And one young captain stands up, and it took a lot of courage to do this, in front of everybody else, probably a company commander. He says, you're right. He says, you're right. He says, you never know when the Russians are going to bomb us, so you can't sleep. Now, that's not true. In World War I, World War II, we learned you can sleep through anything. You get tired enough, you're going to sleep. He said, you can't sleep. And so I play video games. He says, I never sleep.

I just play video games. And he's given us this great gift. He's saying, you're right. This is happening to me. Another audience, another young company commander, you know young captain probably a company commander stands up and he says he said I have terrible nightmares he said I don't want to sleep and so I watch movies I have nightmares I don't want to sleep and so I watch movies all the time and once again you know he knows this isn't making it better he's saying you're right And so this illusion of control, and I use an example of a Marine Artillery Battalion that was in Syria about five years ago. It was a Marine Reserve Artillery Battalion.

They're in Syria. They fired some missions. They came home. Terrible PTSD. And by the way, if you're sleep-deprived, a great study, if you're sleep-deprived, you're five times more likely to get PTSD, nine times more likely to have major depressive disorder, and six times more likely to have suicidal ideation.

Sleep deprivation is one of the most significant factors in suicide. It's huge. And so this Marine Artillery Battalion comes home. They got all these suicides and PTSD, and they say, oh, yeah, I was firing that artillery. It was bad. No, it wasn't. World War I, World War II, they fired artillery for years on end, and this didn't happen.

With no air protection, too.

Yeah, and I'll tell you what happened. They did their job when they had to, but they were not sleeping. And this absence of sleep is the great epidemic. You can do online search, a global epidemic of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is the key factor of mental illness and suicide.

I'm curious, too, though, beyond the sleep, what is... Especially these like drone operators that fly like the little, either like the one-way drones or the ones that drop grenades. Like I've seen some of the footage where like Russian or Ukrainian soldiers will like see the drone and like drop their weapon and like literally like drop to their knees and like start begging. Like what is, and then the guys will still like drop their grenade on them.

Like those are the guys that I would be curious in like interviewing after the war to see like what kind of, because it kind of, bypasses like for those who haven't read the book like there's like the closer you are to you know the person you're killing the more resistant you are but this one kind of skips a few steps because technically you are long distance but with a good enough camera you know you can see the sweat and the tears on the guy's eyes when you kill him so.

Yeah what i always try to do is i try to find a historical analogy you know with snipers in world war one and world war two or or people in the machine gun as the waves are coming at them. And I tell you, there isn't really a good historical analogy to what you just said. That very specific of dropping a grenade on a guy who's trying to surrender, that very dynamic, other than flat-out atrocities, other than flat-out murdering people who are trying to surrender it, we can't really find equivalents, and it's going to be hard for these guys. I think it's going to be a little difficult, but we get this, oh, they're all going to be broken, they've all got PTSD, they all have moral harm. Well, maybe not. Most of them won't be able to get

on with their lives and probably be just fine, but it's not good, and it's not right. It's hard.

It's interesting, because my neighbor, he was in the Coast Guard, and I didn't even know this, but like after like 9-11, like the Coast Guard got deployed. I thought like legally the Coast Guard had to stay within how many miles. But apparently after 9-11, the Navy was coming up short and they were doing this raid in the Mediterranean on some pirate ship or whatever. And you would have never known to talk to the guy because, you know, he's just a happy-go-lucky guy. But one night, because he was part of a veterans motorcycle club, they used to have like bonfires in his house and they would come over.

And one night he gets drunk and he tells us the story of like them boarding a ship and his like best friend like taking a grenade and he was in front of him and he caught some of the shrapnel and he said like after that like we were supposed to take survivors on that raid and we made sure like everybody on the boat was dead and like you would never know that like he took part in that i mean i guess technically it's an atrocity i mean they weren't surrendering but you know they were supposed to take people alive but like it took all of that like we knew this guy for years Never said a word about any of it. And one night, like he has one, you know, shot of whiskey enough, he starts telling stories.

You know what? And not my BS meter goes off. You always have the baloney meter going. And, you know, I've trained the Coast Guard a lot, a lot of their guys. And there was several medals of valor. And it was the only combat ops that they actually had. were in the Arabian Gulf right in there. And they did have some combat hops and they did lose some people.

But my baloney meter would be going off to a certain degree. And you got to give people credit. But, you know, it's almost like somebody wants to put on this model. Yeah, we did these terrible things. Maybe it's true.

I mean, I know for one thing, he definitely... took shrapnel from a grenade because I've seen his shoulder and he definitely has grenade shrapnel. Whether the rest of the story is true or not, I don't know.

You know, subsequent raids and we killed, you know, and you can see him saying, you know, in the future, I'd be a lot less inclined to doing it. But as if there would be a series of events in which they were killing, you know, prisoners, you know, there's this dynamic. There's this, you know, we see it a lot in World War I. where the machine gunner is killing and killing, and finally the wave approaches, the machine gunner stands up and tries to surrender, and they say, too late, bub, and they kill the machine gunner. And so there's this dynamic of, you know, you surrender too late, or we don't take time to accept the surrender. There's a big gray area in there. But, you know, you're right.

A lot of people are carrying a burden around, and a lot of them I tell you, I believe this with all my heart, a lot of them didn't happen. And they believe it. And I'll give you a great example. A police chief in Montana told me about one of his police officers with a suicidal kid. And the cop knows the kid. He's trying to talk him down. The kid's got a gun under his chin. The cop's got his gun out. And the kid says, okay, I won't do it. The kid lowers his gun and the cop lowers his gun. Boom, the kid kills himself. And the cop said, I shot him. I had an accidental discharge.

I shot him. He said, no, you didn't. Your weapon never fired. He said, no, no. I have a distinct memory. I pulled the trigger. I felt the recoil. I shot him. No, you didn't. And the chief said, we went to the grand jury and we had to coach this guy. We said, this is the truth. your weapon never fired. We can prove it this way and this way. His weapon fired.

We prove it this way and this way. The injury wound was such that it could not have been you. You've got to go to the grand jury and tell them the truth. So the chief said, he walked out of the grand jury. He said what he was supposed to say. He walked out of the grand jury, looked at me and said, chief, are you sure I didn't kill him? And so that's how powerful those memory distortions can be. And And the solution is twofold. Number one, to know these things are going to happen. And number two, to conduct a debriefing afterwards to fill in those memory gaps as sleep-deprived people. I'll give you another example. A young cop in Indiana, just before the pandemic, call it 2019, 2018.

A young black officer, super squared away young man. He said, you're right, things are out of control. He said, I've been in three deadly force incidents. In just the last two years. He said, in the last incident, a guy's arms reach away and he pulls out a knife. Now, you start a knife fight, arms reach away, you're probably going to get cut. At some level, this cop says, I'm going to get cut. I'm going to keep fighting.

He said, I drew and fired. Hit the spinal cord. Bad guy dropped like a bag of rocks. Almost never happens in real life. You know, I tell people, you know, how many times on TV you've seen somebody shot with a pistol and they fly? Yeah. And I said, all you hunters out there, all you hunters, you know, you shoot a 150-pound deer with a high-powered rifle. Have you ever seen the deer fly away? You know why the deer don't fly away? Because you don't watch TV, right?

And so the idea that you shoot them one time, they fall down, it almost never happens. But if you put it in the spinal cord, all the way from here down to there, he's going down. And so the cop said I was never touched. but I had this vivid memory of blood on my hands. I kept looking for the blood on my hands. Cops said the peer support guy came and linked up. One of the good things that's being done today is the whole peer support thing.

Peer support guy linked up with me. We're headed to the hospital. And we tell people, always go to the hospital. Set this guy aside for a minute. I young police officer in Utah is telling me about there's a crime scene cops are on the crime scene they said like flies and a turd just all over traffic's backed up I'm controlling traffic somebody pulls out of traffic and starts accelerating he's going to plow through those cops he's going to kill a bunch of cops So this guy sidesteps and shoots the driver and saves a lot of lives, killed the guy. He said, I went home that night.

I took my pants off, and the entire left side of my leg is just black. I don't mean black and blue. I said black. He'd been hit by a car and didn't know it. So those are the kind of things that are happening. So go back to it. They're headed to the hospital to get checked out. He's fine, but he said, on the way to the hospital, the peer support guy said, dude, for the last time. There is no blood on your hands. Stop asking me. So that's how powerful those kind of memory distortions can be, and how vital it is to, number one, understand they happen, and number two, to be able to debrief them. Because sleep-deprived, stressed-out people have these crazy things in their head And then they live. And so you've done an AAR. You

have a military background. You understand the idea of doing an after-action review. In training, the majority of the learning in a training event happens afterwards in the AAR. Everybody talks all the way through. We fill in the gaps. Well, how much more so do we learn the lessons in real life and fill in the memory gaps, sort out the memory distortions? So go back to our drone operator.

Are they doing a debrief? And is there a diffusion of responsibility? Is there kind of a leader standing over his shoulder, holding him accountable for dropping that grenade? Or is he making the decision on his own? There's a lot of variables in that whole equation. And then, like you said, when it starts moving into the realms of people, maybe it went on ship after ship and they killed everybody, but odds are it falls somewhere in between.

I think it's interesting because I forget if it's on killing or on combat. You were talking about that, like drone operators. They go, they sit in a cargo container with a computer in it. They blow somebody up and then they go home that night and have dinner with their family. But at least back when the book was written, that's like a Reaper drone where they're blowing somebody up from a few thousand feet in the air. It's basically just a pixel on a screen. But the new drones now, they're either crashing the drone directly into something they know they killed, or like I said, they're hovering over and just watching this all happen. I imagine that it's probably different than snipers, because I feel like snipers are almost

selected to be the kind, because you would think snipers would be the same way. You're at a long distance, but you can see the facial features of the guy you're shooting, usually. But they've been through so much training, the type of people who wouldn't take that kind of shot have already been weeded out by training. But I feel like with drone operators, they're probably just picking up whoever can control the drone and, you know, make it to, I mean, I don't know what the Ukrainian military's after action report looks like, because I haven't, you know.

Discussed it with them. But you're right, the only historical analogy we could probably find are snipers, and it kind of breaks down. So So it is something kind of fundamentally new until you come to the Nazis or somebody like that who's just executing prisoners. And then when you take it from that perspective, it's not new at all.

I'll tell you, at the end of the war, those Germans who came home, who were on the Eastern Front, who fought the Russians, and it was It was evil versus evil on that front. It was evil to the second power, you know. The Nazis versus the Soviets. It was evil to the second power. And here's these guys that are just normal people caught up in this thing, and they come home, and they got on with their lives.

You know, it's not like they lived the rest of their life in some kind of trauma, but maybe they sat down and got drunk one night and told their friends about it. Yeah.

Well, I mean, like my uncle, like he was... He was Max Sog in Vietnam. He was one of the guys they would just send out into the jungle for a month or two, and he would come back. I don't know if he did it personally, but he told us that a couple guys in his unit were one of the ear necklace people. He was out there doing some real hardcore stuff. Once again, you'd never know. It's kind of the thing, because I see it a lot online.

I'm actually.

I'm part of this one subreddit on Reddit. It's called just boot things. And it's people making fun of people who were like newly in the military, you know, doing the cringy things that, you know, a 19 year old with his $ 10, 000 signing bonus does. And it's always like the, you know, don't test me. I'm a killer kind of thing.

And it's like you, you were at base security for three years before your medical discharge. Like, It's never the guys that actually went out there and like actually killed people that wear those kinds of t-shirts.

It's interesting you talk about that. First off, some people may not know the ear necklace is the idea that you cut off the enemy's ears, string them up and wear them. And that's another one of those, you know, maybe an urban myth and to whatever degree it happened. Yeah. But, you know, to talk about there were guys in the unit who maybe did that. And that's kind of the ear necklace concept.

I mean, scalping, it's basically the same thing, you know. It happened for, you know, generations on the frontier.

But, you know, it's funny, the scalping, the historical dynamics on the scalping, as I understand it, always be careful talking to historians, is during the French-Indian War. They wanted to be sure that the Indians were actually not killing other Indians. And so the scalp was proof because the hair was different. And that the nature of the hair could prove the nature of who it was that you killed.

And then it all begins with that, you know, okay, maybe. But kind of moving on to what you were talking about, the subreddit. What was that again?

It's called, I actually, I pulled up a few select pages just to show you, because I anticipated this part of the, so here we go, share screen. Some of these are pretty great. It says, for the people listening, it says, when you look up and see the missiles coming and start wondering if the Camaro was worth it.

That's pretty good. I thought the Camaro was worth it.

Here you've got, let's see, one, two, three, four. You've got six people in Harris Jewelers all looking at engagement rings.

What are they going to do with their bonus? Separation anxiety.

Recruit kicked out of Air Force for separation anxiety. The comment says, this is the most Air Force shit I've ever read in my entire life.

Yeah.

It was a military bases go on lockdown for dealerships outside the base. I'm never going to financially recover from this. Because that's one of the running jokes in that community is that the new recruit with their- There really is.

I mean, you built your base codes on lockdown. There's a dealership right outside the front.

The Camaro dealership selling the 29% APR to the new recruits. You saw that one already. And then I figured as an officer yourself, you would appreciate this one.

I'm a prior service sergeant.

For those listening, it says, Sergeant, I just got a ticket on base. And he says, send me a picture. And the guy sends him a selfie. And the sergeant responds, of the ticket. Of the ticket. You know, it's funny.

I enlisted in just a quick more story in 1974. And very quickly, I became Radar O'Reilly. The First Sergeant found out that I could type and was a reasonably smart guy. And I was in the orderly room and I got a ticket one time and came in and told the First Sergeant. One phone call and boom, he made it go away. And those days are gone. He was an amazing guy. He was a Sante Raider and pretty incredible guy. But that was magic when the First Sergeant calls and makes a ticket go away. In reality, you give the sergeant a picture of your ticket, not much is going to happen today.

I feel like as a first sergeant on any kind of base, one of the first things you have to do is get acquainted with all the local law enforcement officers because sooner or later you are going to get that call. Some bar fight or some ticket or some shenanigans a bunch of drunken 19-year-olds get up to at night on leave.

Let's go back to the myth. And it kind of moves back. And we've all heard about 22 veterans a day take their life. And to a certain degree that's true, but I want you to examine that as a historian. Veteran means anybody who ever served. During the Cold War, a very large portion of every 18-year-old kid was drafted and they served. So throughout the late 40s, the entire 50s, the entire 60s, early 70s, we drafted all these kids for the Cold War and they were veterans. They served for two years and they got out. And so Elvis Presley was a veteran. And now, All of them are 70, 80, 90 years old. They're Cold War veterans. And suicide among the elderly is a totally different subject. Every suicide is

a tragedy. But suicide among the elderly is very, very high. We've got the old guy that's got Alzheimer's who just goes outside and saves his family the expense. I mean, suicide among the elderly, we've got whole cultures where it's the elderly's job to go ahead and and take themselves out of the picture. So these 22 veterans a day, one study said only two of them are from the GWAT.

And that doesn't mean they're not a tragedy. And only one of them was deployed. And of that one, probably the only one ever left the FOB. So the idea that these 22 veterans a day are all GWAT veterans, who are all veterans of close combat, who are all taking their lives, is this misrepresentation. So I tell you, the Vietnam veteran really was spit on. I think I validated in my book on killing. We got great research.

The idea that the big early Green Beret coming home and being spit on by the hippie, it really did happen. One of my soldiers told me, his mom told him one time about how they did that, and she told him, she said, I am so ashamed of what we did. So the Vietnam veteran really was spit on. The anti-war movement attacked the individual. And the anti-war movement focused their energy all on the individual that allowed themselves to be drafted and participated in the process. So the anti-war movement for the GWAD in the current era is that they're all broken. and they're all suicidal, and 22 veterans a day are taking their life, is this tragic misrepresentation, counting all of those Cold War veterans that are 70, 80,

90 years old, who are skewing all of the data on all of our veteran stuff. And then the idea of how many of our veterans actually contract PTSD in the war. I do a lot of work internationally, and There's always some British psychiatrists as well. The British troops run at 5% PTSD. Why are the Americans so much higher?

And the Dutch study, their troops in Afghanistan, 5%. We keep coming up with this 5% PTSD number. Why are the Americans so much higher? When we actually examined the data and my presentations, I put up a screenshot straight off of the VA website, PTSD and in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the numbers come out to about 5%, 100% disabled PTSD.

But as you know, a lot of them never left the FOB. And they're claiming PTSD. And no amount of money is worth a lifetime of mental illness. You're not getting some get over by getting 100%. But the actual numbers of those 100% contracted PTSD cases Service-related, you know, we're very, very generous to our veterans. And my son just retired Air Force Combat Controller, nine combat tours, three Bronze Stars, dropped to an ODA on every deployment. My grandson just came home from a deployment overseas, got an ARCOM with C device. I never heard of that before, under combat conditions. But the idea that they all have PTSD and they're all suicidal, is one of the great misrepresentations of the veterans in this war. And just take

the 22 veterans a day, examine it carefully. And if we gave it, you know, instead of spitting out veterans, we said, thank you for your service. It's all great. And welcome home is better. But then we turn around and say, you all have PTSD and you're all suicidal and you're all broken. When the truth is just the opposite.

They're a new generation. greatest generation they have post-traumatic growth and and the problem is that there's a whole generation we talked about that before they get punched in the nose they walk back in the er their heart starts pounding they don't know what to do about it nobody wants to be broken nobody wants a disorder is i got ptsd i'm broken when the world war ii generation and their kids they said what doesn't kill me makes me stronger and they would push on through it uh a uh I use the example of an Arkansas state trooper, first gunfight, bad guys down, he's alive, happy, end of the story. A week later, he's sitting in the bleachers with his wife, watching their daughter at a swim meet.

Swim meet. What do you suppose for a swim meet? Stutter's gun goes off. He said, when? I didn't expect it. Boom. Heart pounded, gasping for air, drenched with sweat. He didn't know what was going on. His wife thought he was having a heart attack. But now, imagine if he'd have said, I can never go to the swim meet again. I can't qualify anymore. I hate Fourth of July. I hate loud noises. One of the manifestations of PTSD is trying to avoid symptoms, trying to avoid circumstances and events that would remind you of the event. So he spends the rest of his life trying to avoid loud noises. That's broken.

He didn't do that. He went to the range. He pushed on through it. He knew, I got a problem here. Went right out to the range. He qualified. He pushed on through it.

Isn't that the new, well, at least one of the new theories about treatment is exposure therapy. They'll use the VR headset and basically recreate whatever the traumatic incident is that the person is complaining about and let them relive it. That's the way that a lot of them now can get through Exposure.

Therapy, let's talk about that. That's important because exposure therapy, let me talk about a couple of therapies. One of them is EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing. And it sounds crazy, but what you've got is you've got the midbrain reacting when you don't want it to. And the midbrain is sympathetic nervous systems kicking off, fight or flight mechanisms kicking in.

The midbrain can only do one thing at a time. And so you're following a visual stimulus. and you talk about it, and you think about it, but the midbrain's busy. And just one or two EMDR sessions, and you separate the memory from the emotions. The brain is always rewiring. The brain is, the word's plastic, but that isn't adequately explained.

It's like a bunch of spaghetti noodles that are always moving around. And so you think about it a few times, you talk about it a few times, without that, the puppy coming through the screen door without the sympathetic nerves kicking in. And boom, you separated the memory from the emotion. I'll give you a case after case. I was on a panel at Fleet Week at San Francisco, and it immediately became a discussion at EMDR. So another technique that they have is a sympathetic nerve block. They actually block the sympathetic nerves so that you're not capable of having a fight-or-flight response. You think about it, you talk about it.

By the time the nerve block is done, you've separated the memory from the emotion. So go back to exposure therapy. A Vietnam vet told me he came home and somebody threw a firecracker and he hit the deck. And his dad was a World War II vet. This guy hit the deck, he's got no idea what's going on, and his dad says, ha, he said, that'll go away in a little while, it's normal. And having that World War II vets, you know, the noise goes off, he hits the deck, World War II, it's normal, that'll go away.

And so that's kind of exposure therapy, if you will. But here's what you've got to do. You'd be exposed to the event without the sympathetic nerve system kicking off. How do you control that? Breathing is one. But even better than breathing is taking a big swig of water. So you go through the exposure therapy, you experience the event, and you remain calm. So people think a video game is going to do it for them. They think a war movie is going to do it for them. And the war movie gets you pumped up and hyped up, and your sympathetic nervous system is kicking off. The video game has got you fired up and pumped up. And you never separate the memory from the emotions. You continue to feed... that dynamic of the memory of the event

creates this physiological arousal. So exposure therapy is fine, but it's got to be done right. And it starts with maybe a little bit, and it builds its way up like snakes. You have a fear of snakes. And you might see pictures of snakes until you're sick of it. And then you might have an actual snake in an aquarium on the other side of the room until you're bored and you're eating. One of the best ways is eating.

Eating is, you got sympathetic is fight or flight, Parasympathetic eating is one of the most fundamental. I'm calm. I got no problem with this. Laughter. Laughter is one of the most powerful tools we have. Laughter is straight up parasympathetic processes that allows us to say, This has no power over me. I know your podcast got lots of laughter.

That was always my response. Like whenever like high tension, like the few near fatal accidents and times I've been shot at, like I either get one or two, like mom, I'm a shiver or a laugher. Usually one or two are the same. Like I'm always, I always laugh. Like after I crashed the snowmobile, like the camp counselor came like running because he saw the whole thing. And like, I'm laying there on my ass with two broken wrists and, And he shuts off the thing and he's like, are you all right? And I said, I wonder if this is going to make my car insurance go up. Literally the first thing I said after almost breaking my neck at 50 miles an hour.

See, this is such a positive. Instead of saying, I got PTSD, I'm broken. You laughed in the face of danger. You confronted it with humor. And laughter is one of the most powerful tools. Laughter says this has no power over me. If I can laugh at it, then it has no power over me. And so a generation that can just laugh at it is one of the most healing things we can do. But by itself, it's not sufficient.

We've got to continue with the process of separating the memory from the emotion and not living in fear of it popping up at a time when we don't want it to. And so... Laughter has a great role, but by itself, it's not going to completely deal with it, but it sure is the right way to respond to a life and death event. And people think there's something wrong with you when you're laughing at it.

Well, I mean, I'm naturally like drawn to adrenaline situations to begin with. So that may just be a brain wiring thing to begin with.

Yeah.

You know, I'm usually the one they send up on the roof and the dangerous situation because I live for it. You know, I like the little bit. I like the thrill of danger to make the day a little bit more interesting.

So the shaking is a great example of sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight of hormones flooding through your body. And there's no way to use them. And so you got this overload of fight or flight and the shaking is normal. you know, the best way is to push on through that, you know, set of push-ups or some hard physical action or just go ahead and use your breathing.

The big swig of water, the big swig of water is so powerful. If we just, your listeners, kind of walk out the door with one tool, it's the fact that that big swig of water is just such a powerful tool to separate the memory from the emotion, to control the to control that sympathetic nervous system arousal. Laughter is, is nice. And laughter means you have the right mindset, but the tool that you use then it's just take a big swig of water, separate the memory from the emotion or drive on.

It's fascinating. Cause you say that. Cause when I was young, I used to have epilepsy. I had childhood epilepsy, so I grew out of it, but like, I used to get like almost seizures. Like I would feel like my vision would distort my, my, uh, speech would slur, but like, I wasn't like, I wasn't completely out of it. So I could, I could walk around, like I could like get my parents and I, but I felt for some reason, taking a drink of water would make it all stop.

Why doesn't everybody know that? This is another one of those, one of those things, every human being ought to know, you know, in Oriental cultures, when somebody gets upset in Oriental culture, when somebody gets upset, The first thing to do is hand them a glass of water. Of course, that culture is kind of over-manifest controlling your emotions. This business, it's fun. Why doesn't every human being know that one of the tools to control that, you know, why didn't everybody facing a potential epileptic seizure know the most powerful thing I'd do is just get a bottle of water and take a big swig of water. Now you found it by yourself. We need to know that every human being needs to know that we need like this little

instruction book that comes with us when we're born.

I mean, I can't say that's going to work for everyone. So if you see someone having a seizure, don't try to pour water down their throat. You may drown them, especially if they're having a full on like convulsive seizure. But like in my scenario, when I was like halfway there, because like all the all the seizures I had that were actually full seizures, like it's a blackout. It's like I can remember a little bit before and I can remember after. The middle is nothing. I can remember distinctly walking around, but I sounded like I was just hammered.

My mind was racing. I used to get visual distortions. I could look at something. I'd look at my computer monitor and it would be normal size and then it would be about the size of my phone. And then it would just go back. I used to use a nightlight too because I used to get lost in my own room. Like, even though my door was only five steps away from my bed, like, I would just wander.

So I would look at the light, and if I could see it, like, changing size, I knew, all right, I need to take a drink of water to somehow stop this.

That's so cool.

I don't know if it's the same, you know, the same principle or not, but I found, you know, oddly enough, that that helps alleviate my symptoms temporarily.

It's, you know, control of the sympathetic nervous system arousal. Just, you know, and it's funny, what makes us humans, is to control that. So we got fight or flight, and then we got feed and breed. And it's called the four Fs, fight, flight, feed, and reproduction. And it's like this joke from this 1950s psychophysiology textbook, that function of the midbrain can be thought of as the four Fs.

The four Fs are fight or flight, feeding, and reproduction. And of course, the last F is, you know, so... But if you look online and you look at feed and breed, it's the most common term for the parasympathetic nervous system. And it's also called rest and digest. So one of the first things we learn as human beings is not to crap ourselves. That's a pretty significant achievement.

We learn to control that. Animals don't control that. If you house train a dog or potty train a kid, that's not easy. Then about five years old, we learn to control fight or flight to a degree. We learn we can't choke Johnny out, we can't punch Johnny out, no matter how mad he makes us. And then what happens is, look, you've got sympathetic nervous system arousal, then the parasympathetic backlash. It's feed and breed. And there is a powerful drive to reproduction. When we talk about the pillage of a city, we see rape as one of the fundamental acts of war. The parasympathetic process, feed and breed, A lot of people, crime victims, go home and seek intimacy and they seek reassurance. First responders go home after

a life and death event and have very intense sex. And a lot of them will talk to you about that. But one police chief and his wife called it gunplay sex. And every time something happened where he had to pull out his gun, they went home. That's really intense. So there's sympathetic and parasympathetic. But what I tell people is, So many first responders get in trouble every year for having sex on the job. So you go home and you have intimacy and you have both partners are very invested in life and it's biological and make the most out of it. Off duty, wait, wait until you're off duty.

And we crap at the appropriate place We kill people at the appropriate place and time. And we have sex with the appropriate partner at the appropriate place and the appropriate time. And these are the things that define us as human beings. The ability to take the four Fs and bring them under physical control. And so, you know, getting sex under control is a constant challenge. It's one of the great, you know, every drama, every... But getting...

fight or flight under control, getting that swig of water, that deep breath of air, the other tools that we have that control the sympathetic nervous system arousal. This is pulling us as a species to the next level of control and ability to take all of these things that every animal has. The definition of life is some form of fight or flight, the ability to take in energy and reproduction. And bringing those things under conscious control, I think, is kind of a step forward for us as a species.

I know you probably didn't mean it this way when you wrote it, but by far, at least to me anyway, the funniest part of On Killing was kind of this part of the book when you started talking about the sexy girls with sexy guns thing. part of the i got the last time i listened to it like i could not stop i guess it's i guess it's kind of the way like your inflection the way you said it and it's just kind of like a ridiculous thing to say like oh sexy girls and sexy guns like pendulous mammalia or whatever mammaries.

Getting caught in the breach.

Just the way that like that cable the last time i i re-listened to the book like i i just could not stop laughing at that section i'm I.

Am so glad you responded that way because that was the goal.

I'm glad you meant it as that way.

That was the goal was, you know, absurdity and, and, and whimsy. I try to put that in my fiction a lot too. And just, find things to laugh about. And right in the middle of all of this, this little bit of absurdity you plug in, you know, you hear about people who plagiarize other people's work. And I think, what a tragedy. Just cite them and quote it. I think one of the greatest things that I can do is just gather together all of these great quotes and organize them in something decent. You know, I One of the nicest things anybody ever told me one time was I read your book and I kept looking forward to the next indented paragraph because I knew something really cool was coming. And I think what a great thing it

is for us to be able to go and take all the cool stuff and pull it all together and string it together into something readable. And so I'm glad that particular portion hit you that way.

Yeah. Well, it's like I've... I know you quoted him several times. So I'm assuming at least for your sci-fi thing, part of your inspiration came from Robert Heinlein or Heinlein or whatever. And I just, I couldn't help but laugh at that one. The section of starship troopers, when he's talking about, he's being on like the all male ship and he gets this one detail. It's like coveted because it's like the female section of the ship. And it's like, we got to watch a woman go by and like, she's like, we could like feel the breeze as she came past. And they're like, everybody on the ship was fighting to be in that like one spot.

You know, it's funny. We talk about gender fluidity and, and, and girls who think they're guys and they might be, and I'm, I'm not judging anything, but, but people don't understand how powerful the biological drive in the male is. And like I said, when dogs sleep, they don't dream about sex. They dream about hunting. So in basic training, there's this perpetual myth that they put something in the food that makes the sex drive go away. But the truth is, in the absence of females, this weird dynamic happens for the first time in your life. You suddenly, without females for an extended period of time, And for the average heterosexual male, all of a sudden, this thing that's always been there goes away, and it's conspicuous by

its absence. Well, in ranger school, we would go days without food and days without sleep. And a friend of mine just captured the reality of what it's like to be without food. He said a beautiful woman could strip off her clothes and spread herself in front of me, and I would I would paw through her purse for the Tic Tacs to eat. And once again, the drive for hunger, you suddenly realize not only has the sex drive gone away, but the food drive is so much greater than that, that it has completely surpassed it, and it's conspicuous by its absence. And so that dynamic of being in that all-male environment, having just the whiff of a female... is kind of powerful.

I remember, I always forget the name of the author, but he wrote a chronicle on the Third Crusade. And they're talking about the march from Acre to Arsif. It was like 20 days or something like that. And they ran out of food at one point, so they were eating their horses. And the line is, they were flavored with hunger instead of sauce, and they thought the horse meat was delicious.

Okay.

You know, it's a line. The greatest spice is hunger. And, you know, I've done fasting for several days. And, of course, it went without food. I wish before Rangers Rule, I had gone without sleep. But I had never gone without food. And so the first time my body slammed into this dynamic of no food, it's a stressor that the body had never encountered before. I tell people, you know, one of the preps for ranger school is do fasting and have your body go through ketosis before you have to encounter it in this stressful event, you know, that's a career-defining stressful event. But it's part of the human equation, again, that a lot of us should have experienced periods of time without food. And when you, you know, you go,

you know, what I usually do is I'll wake up in the morning and have nothing all day and then go to bed. So I've got two nights and one day. And that next morning I go out for breakfast and it's really, really good. It has a flavor the protected will never know. The spice of hunger, you know.

Yeah, I'm definitely like a walking Snickers commercial. I always tell my boss whenever they talk about working through lunch, it says, my productivity plummets every minute past noon that I go without my lunch.

You understand what a limitation that is of us. Yes, it's true. It's true of all of us. But the ability in some emergency situation to push on through that, and I'm sure you can, and I'm sure you have, but that shouldn't define us. And once again, it's this, you know, this drive, you know, we've got fight or flight, and then we've got feed and breed. And the drive to eat, the drive to seek food, overcoming that drive and pushing on through it is one of the defining characteristics of us as a human being. And so there's nothing wrong with that. But it represents one of the challenges that we as human beings should be pushing the envelope in that. Try fasting. And the key to fasting is people around you should know. It's not like, oh,

I'm fasting today. It's really hard. Nobody should ever know that it's happening. And it's just like a normal day to go a day without food. Now you doing vigorous physical activity, it becomes a lot harder. And there will be a deterioration in your ability when it comes to physical ability without food. So maybe not try it at work with what you're doing, but, but all of us can give it a shot during the day.

So we're, we're coming up here on time. So I just wanted to ask like one final, like overarching, like question, like in the end of on killing, you have a, you have a section on like video games and what you think their effect on society. Now this was, you know, 31 years ago. And I know like back in the day, that was kind of, you know, the new thing, like the, Do you still think that that's something that's damaging us as a society? Or has your opinion on that changed with new data and, you know, over the last 30 years?

Things have evolved. And I think the defining challenge of our age is sleep deprivation. And the link between sleep deprivation and violent crime is overwhelming, irrefutable. But there is also how that sleep deprivation manifests itself. And again, I think the video games are part of the equation. I was there at the night of the Jonesboro School Massacre.

You know, we call these things shootings. Just wrap your mind around that as a historian. We can't call them massacres or mass murders. We call them shootings. We're in such denial. Shooting is an Olympic sport. Shooting, you know, when we talk about active shooter response, would be real busy during deer season. You know, we can't even call these massacres, these mass murders. So, I was there on the night of the Jonesboro massacre in March of 1998, and my book came out in 95. And here we are three years later, the two little boys, 11 and 13 years old, pulled the fire alarm, sucked the girls' PE class in the kill zone, waited until the fire door slammed and locked shut, and then gunned down 13

little girls and two teachers. Ultimately, five would die. It was the all-time record juvenile mass murder in human history until the following year, the Columbine Massacre. And now the normal, Russia, I've got a news clipping I show up, Russia had five school massacres in one part of Russia in 15 months.

These are worldwide. These are global. To this very day, you know, the Parkland, Florida school massacre was an adult. Uvalde was an adult, over 18. To this very day, the all-time record mass murder by a juvenile was in Germany, a school massacre in Germany. And so around the planet, children are committing crimes never seen before. And we know, we had trouble getting troops to pull the trigger and so we trained adults and we made killing a conditioned response.

And it's a factor in the equation. And we're doing a good thing. When we talk about murder, I told you how rare murder is. We got to explain the 10 million people today that didn't kill anybody versus the one that did. But the murder rate is being held down by medical technology. Again, as a historian, anytime anybody starts throwing the murder rate out there, you need to automatically think, Are you allowing for medical technology, holding down the murder rate? The number of dead people just tremendously misrepresents the situation. It's far more complex than that. But around the planet, in spite of everything we're doing, and I've got a chart that I show up, every year we see a new record dead by violence in schools. Meanwhile,

how many killed by fire?

Zero.

Not one single kid's been killed by school fires since the mid-1950s. And yet every year, we show you a chart, we get a new record dead by violence in the school in spite of everything we're doing. And so the data's there. This is worldwide. It's not just in America. It is a factor in the equation. We know how to take young 18-year-old kids as adults, under discipline, and make them capable of far more likely to effectively kill the enemy. And I think we can say that this is a factor in the equation that's kind of pushed the envelope of mass murders by children to levels never seen before. The industry themselves have undergone some major changes to try to reduce the impact and put safeguards into

the equation. But you just got to look around and, number one, recognize juveniles committing mass murders. It just never happened in human history. And now you've got to recognize that they're everywhere. And you've just got to ask yourself, what's the new factor? And, you know, you're a hunter, you know, with people, oh, it's the guns. And I threw up a picture of an M1 carbine. You know, I got the 30-round magazine. There's one right there. My wife gave me one for our 50th wedding anniversary, an M1 carbine.

Is that a replica or is that an original?

Well, that's a real baby. Oh, nice. My 50th wedding anniversary gift. Here's another gift I got up there. It was an M1 Garand that was given to me by a police department. I got a thing about the giving of a weapon and what it implies about your desire for the well-being. But take that M1 carbine. Up until 1968, any kid at any age could order one of these through the U.S. mail. And the friendly mailman would deliver it to your door. Thank goodness for James Adlaw. But I mean, wrap your mind around it. Up until 1968, any kid to order one of these to the U.S. mail.

So just the guns are not the new factor. Something fundamentally new is happening out there. And I still think that this is part of the equation. I'm increasingly convinced that another huge part of the equation is sleep deprivation. tied in with the video games, which becomes very, very common. How many of us have played a game, and suddenly it's four or five o'clock in the morning, it's time to get up and get dressed, and we've got no idea where the last eight hours went. And they do that on purpose. This sleep deprivation is a factor in mental illness, it's a factor in suicide, it's a factor in violent crime. And when you combine it with the killing-enabling dynamics, I think it's a piece of the equation.

And I think the data, when the book came out in 95, I predicted juvenile mass murders. And unfortunately, the first, the all-time record juvenile mass murder in human history happened in my hometown. And then we had Jonesboro and Columbine, and now they're everywhere. And in spite of everything we're doing.

And just got to ask you, we just had one in... in Oregon that was stopped by a father that goes in and shoots a 14 year old kid with a shotgun that he stole from his mother. Uh, this just happened on Monday.

I'm curious in, uh, in your travels, did you ever hear anyone, uh, reference, uh, the, the game spec ops, the line before? Oh, it, it was kind of an under the radar hit because of the way they marketed it, but it's one of probably one of the most impactful video games I've ever played. So it starts out your standard, um, over-the-shoulder third-person shooter. The plot is you're part of, like, a special forces team that goes to Dubai after, like, a massive, like, sandstorm buries the city. And you're trying to find out what happens. But, like, as the game goes on, the story of the game is based on Heart of Darkness. So, like, you're going into this city that's been destroyed, and you're realizing, like, the game is

basically railroading you into committing atrocities. But you have a choice. You don't have to do it. But the game never tells you that you don't have to do it. The most infamous scene in the game, it's a white phosphorus scene. And this came out a couple years after the Call of Duty Modern Warfare started to trend. It's like you get in the gunship and you just see little blips on the screen and you pull the trigger and they go away. So this one, you're shooting white phosphorus grenades at these people. But then the game... you know, pulls the rug on you and it makes you walk through the area that you just blanketed in white phosphorous. So you, it like, it basically like, it's like rubbing the nose

of the dog in the pee on the carpet and come to find out like, Oh, by the way, you just dropped that white phosphorus on a bunch of civilians because you were just looking at it through the scope. And it like the whole game does this to you. It's like one of the, it's one of the most like interesting, like psychological things I've ever seen like a game do. Cause like on one hand, It's the same like glorifying violence, you know, military realistic shooters you see.

And then it's like, you did this.

I think there's potentially something good coming out of that.

Yeah, because I mean, it makes you like it. It lets you free. And then it yanks on the chain. It's like those old like Tom and Jerry cartoons where like the Tom or Jerry like pisses off the pit or the bulldog. and then runs just out of range of the chain and the dog, you know, and then yanks on the chain and pulls them backwards. It's one of the, like I said, it's one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen a game do.

I think there's potential for something positive to come out of that, but I don't know.

Yeah.

We really are in a realm where, where we don't know. I just, I know there's a connection. I know that the data is there to show it is worldwide. I think the industry is kind of self-conscious. You know, you got to wrap your mind around the money. One video game, Grand Theft Auto V, one video game, the year it came out, made more money than the entire global music industry.

It's still, it's like the second or third best-selling game. I think, well, there is hope. Minecraft still has the number one spot. So people mining blocks and building houses.

The money is bizarre and the political influence in this industry and the degree of self-awareness And the degree of saying, well, you know, are we a factor? Are there things we could be doing? Are there things we should be doing?

I don't know.

And I think when we really deal with sleep deprivation is the greater factor in the whole equation. Sleep deprivation will make you mentally ill on the third day without sleep. I will tell you, from personal experience, you'll see things and hear things that are not there on Sleep deprivation is a key factor in suicide. Right now, it's physically impossible for you to take your life. The drive to self-preservation is too powerful. But alcohol inhibits the drive to self-preservation.

Cops will tell you they go to suicide. There's almost always alcohol there. Alcohol inhibits the drive to self-preservation, and sleep deprivation works exactly the same way, and it's doing it to your kids. And so we see teen suicides and tweenagers. We see 10, 11, 12-year-old girls killing themselves at rates never seen before in history. And so what these things are doing more than anything else is when they steal our sleep. And the whole industry is designed to steal your sleep. Now, here's the key. This comes full cycle to kind of where we began with the podcast.

The visual imagery can convince the brain that something exciting is happening and push sleep aside. The spoken word doesn't do it. The written word doesn't do it. And so the podcast represents something very positive in our society. Books represent something very positive in our society. But, you know, you read a book and in a little while you fall asleep. You listen to a podcast and usually you fall asleep. Hopefully your podcast keeps them alert and awake for a little while. But a movie, the brain processes it differently. The video game, this visual imagery is like a 10-year-old girl in a slumber party, and we push sleep aside. And so when we look at the factors in our society that's stealing our sleep, these are the concerns.

We look at the written word, the spoken word, that's what we're designed to process. And it's a very positive thing and good things are happening. And I'm proud to be part of your podcast. I'd encourage you and all your listeners to keep driving on with the written word and the spoken word and try to preserve what it is that makes us human.

So is there any, as we come to the close here, is there any upcoming work you want to promote? Any, you know, website and, you know, where can people find you? That kind of thing.

Thanks for asking. My website is GrossmanOnTruth.com. You know, the truth on killing, the truth on combat. GrossmanOnTruth.com. But I really have had a lot of fun with the new science fiction fantasy series that's dropped. Lots of humor. It's got kind of a Lord of the Rings motif. It's got a naval motif. In order to travel between the stars, they go into the second dimension. They go into Flatland and they carry a little bubble, a little ship that's a little bubble of three dimensions traveling around And nobody's ever done that. A book called Flatland came out in 1884.

And actually, my book number 3.5 is going to be a reprint of the 1884 book with my people doing a commentary on it. But a lot of humor, a lot of fun, something totally different than anybody's ever done before. A lot of my warrior science stuff woven into it. Check out my website, GrossmanOnTruth.com. Check out the The Galactic Two-Space War, and the second book will be, I'm doing the narration for it just next week, it's The Galactic Guns of Two-Space, and then the third one is really the best one so far, it's called The Magnificent Midshipman of Two-Space, so always got a new book out, always rocking along, always driving on, and like I said, I'm 70 years old, and I got a 20-year plan to to keep driving on. And I encourage you and everybody

out there to keep driving on and stay in the fight. The world needs what you got to have, what you got to give brother, the world needs it.

All right. Well, I'd like to thank Dave Grossman from coming on and from all of us here at war and conquest, drink some water and go to sleep.

Historian Interview: Lt. Col Dave Grossman

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