5 Things You Need to Know About Veterans Affairs

In honor of Veterans Day, we’re breaking down what you need to know about the Department of Veterans Affairs.

  1. We've had a system for assisting Veterans longer than we've had a Constitution.

  2. Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs has 4 missions.

  3. VA is enormous.

  4. VA does some amazing work, and it also needs a lot of investment.

  5. Veterans need more than America is currently giving.

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Episode Resources

Transcript

Beth [00:00:00] We say this all the time. We don't live in averages. You know, we live in personal experiences and what we owe to every single veteran is a lot. So it's hard to say, Well, look, this data tells me that this should be fine for you, but well, it's not fine for me. You know what next? 

Sarah [00:00:24] This is Sarah Stewart Holland. 

Beth [00:00:25] And this is Beth Silvers. 

Sarah [00:00:27] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. 

Beth [00:00:43] Hello, everyone, we are so thrilled that you're joining us for a new episode today. We occasionally like to step back from the news cycle to learn a little more, and since this week we are commemorating Veterans Day. We thought it would be a good time to talk about the Department of Veterans Affairs. So that is our plan, but before we dig in to five things you need to know about the VA. We just want to remind you that our holiday huddle is fast approaching. 

Sarah [00:01:07] Yes, we will be together on Zoom. You can ask questions live or in advance if you want to email them to Alise@pantsuitpoliticsshow.com. We're going to cover practical strategies for gathering with friends and family around the holidays, and your ticket gives you access to the recorded event for up to seven days. So even if you can't be with us live on November 18th at seven p.m., then you can catch it at your convenience in the next week or so. All of the information you need to register is in the show notes, and we hope to see you there. And also so excited. I'm about to hit my one-hundredth ride on the Peloton, and I decided that who needs the mere promise or hope of a shout-out from an instructor when I could celebrate this massive milestone with all of you. We had so much fun on the last pantsuit politics ride. So I'm inviting everybody along on my century ride Monday at seven p.m. Central Standard Time, we're doing Robin's Hamilton Ride, which I've not done yet up and sign up for this special occasion so you can click the link in the show notes, and it'll just add it to your schedule. And then you just join the class at the time and we'll all be there together. And there's like VIDEO so I can pop in and say hi to people. My husband knows I want those big gold 100 balloons, so I'm very excited about my century ride and doing it with all of you. So if you're Peloton, then join us on Monday night as I celebrate my century ride. 

Beth [00:02:34] Congratulations to you. And if you are not Peloton like me and don't know what most of those words meant, you were not alone either. And we hope that you can appreciate that Sarah has committed to a goal and is going to celebrate it with others who appreciate that goal. 

Sarah [00:02:45] Well, I love this. Maggie has an elliptical, and she was like, Can I just join along and ride my elliptical a little bit harder? And I'm like, Absolutely, you can do that because it's just you can, like lots of people, have an off bike and just do it through the iPad app. So I just I loved Maggie's enthusiasm. I was like, Yes, absolutely. Please join us. 

Beth [00:03:12] We wanted to talk about the Department of Veterans Affairs today, and before we give you five things we think you should know about that department, we want to acknowledge that this is just a difficult topic to tackle. It is intensely personal for people who have served, people who are serving for everyone who supports those who serve in any way. And I just want to say our intention today is not to beat up on the Department of Veterans Affairs or diminish the serious shortcomings in our nation's approach to caring holistically for our veterans. We want to highlight some of the good work being done and some of the enormous challenges. All of this matters to assessing both how we devote resources to our veterans, how we devote resources to people who are currently serving. It matters to assessing how we decide whether and when and under what circumstances to enter into future conflicts as a country. So we hope that our research and discussion today honors everyone who depends on VA services and the people who provide those services. 

Sarah [00:04:12] I mean, there are about 18 million veterans in the United States. Think about the diversity contained within that number of experience within the military, everything from National Guard to lifetime service to combat missions. Think about the diversity of demographics contained in that 18 million people and then think about the diversity that will come up over the course of someone's lifetime. They sign up at 18. They're still a veteran at 75. So dealing with the enormity of that is a huge undertaking, and we want to give an enormous amount of grace to the people not setting policy at the highest levels, but who are just working in the VA to do the best they can to meet the needs of this big, diverse community and to recognize where it falls short without feeling like this is some sort of judgment on the people who work day to day or the people who have dedicated their lives to the military like it's just we just want to hold that huge complexity as we move forward through this conversation. 

Beth [00:05:28] So the first thing that we want you to know is that we've been trying to do this as a nation since before we had a constitution. We have had some system for assisting veterans longer than America has been constituted as it is today. 

Sarah [00:05:41] In the 1600s is pilgrims passed a law entitling disabled soldiers who had been, you know, fighting indigenous tribes to support from the colony. The Continental Congress provided pensions to disabled soldiers from the Revolutionary War and individual states and communities provided medical and hospital care. Here's a fun trivia fact from my personal history. My sixth great grandfather, Elias Loveless, fought in the Revolutionary War. The only reason we know the specifics of his service is because he swore a testimony about where he had fought with a fellow soldier so that that soldier's widow would be entitled to his veteran's benefits. So I mean, this is, this goes. This goes all the way, way back. 

Beth [00:06:28] The first medical facility for veterans was authorized by the federal government in 1811. We rapidly saw the government expand support to include veterans, widows, and dependents. And when you just walk through this history and see how that support for veterans has evolved, it is a stark reminder of how much war has shaped our country and our culture and our government. The modern VA traces its mission statement to the Civil War, to President Lincoln's promise to care for him, who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan by serving and honoring the men and women who are America's veterans.

Sarah [00:07:03] Well, I think it just speaks to a universal value. You know, it's easy to get wrapped up in the specific policies of the VA and lose track of like, why do we do this? Why have we done this throughout history, not just in the United States, but across the globe? Like this is an important value we hold. That when you dedicate your life truly the risk of death your entire life to a cause, then we owe you something in return. We owe you care in return. And I think the Civil War, of course, brought that home in a way the country had not yet truly experienced. It's not surprising to me at all that the VA really points to the Civil War as the start of its history. You know, after the civil war care that was being provided for injuries and diseases from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, wars in the Mexican borders and then of course, we get into World War One. 

Beth [00:08:07] And World War One really changed the kind of care that needed to be provided because you had technologies that had not been employed before and that exposed soldiers to mustard gas and other chemicals that required specialization in care. So the government starts providing more services around respiratory issues. This is also when we see the government providing more support around mental health and we see disparate services for veterans throughout the government starting to consolidate toward a single government agency. 

Sarah [00:08:39] Well, it makes sense, right? Because with respiratory issues, you're talking about long-term care. You're not talking about acute treatment like you would see with an amputation or something like that with the Civil War. World War Two, obviously, hugely increased the population of veterans. Congress passed the GI bill, which we all know the name of, and know the loose foundation of which established many of the priorities and programs administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs today. 

Beth [00:09:07] And that brings us to the second thing we want you to know that the Department of Veterans Affairs today has four missions. The first mission is probably the one we're most familiar with. It's health care. The Veterans Health Administration has around 1200 health care facilities serving nine million veterans annually. This is the largest health care network in the United States, and there is a lot of reporting on some truly egregious issues with veterans’ health care. But studies since the mid-1990s consistently find that the quality of care delivered by Veterans Affairs is equal to or better than care provided in the private sector. 

Sarah [00:09:45] I believe that. 

Beth [00:09:46] Veterans Affairs has been a leader on electronic medical records, adhering to evidence-based medicine, patient safety measures, and high levels of care coordination and research. 

Sarah [00:09:55] And the VA was way in front of the private health care system on telehealth, which was extremely helpful during the pandemic. The VA has been providing support and supplies to civilian hospitals throughout the pandemic. In fact, what we're seeing is that the death rate among veterans during the pandemic is lower than the overall death rate across the United States, and a lot of people point to that access to health care through the VA as a big reason for that. 

Beth [00:10:23] Veterans Affairs also has basically unparalleled behavioral health care. You cannot get better behavioral health care services in the private sector than you get at VA. And it's important to just remember that there are a lot of negative stories because there is a lot of transparency and scrutiny around VA. The private sector health care system is not supervised by standing committees in Congress and inspector general advocacy groups and the press. You just have more eyes on Veterans Affairs, and that is not to diminish those negative stories. They matter. Some of them are excruciating to read and have life and death consequences and create tremendous suffering. We just want to be clear-eyed about the fact that we hear more of those stories about Veterans Affairs than we hear in the private system because there are eyes on it. 

Sarah [00:11:13] Well, and you know what I think happens. I think if you hear an egregious story about the private health care industry in which there are many. You hear it as an individual, right? And you see the story of another individual there just representing themselves, maybe the story is sort of formulated around maybe cancer survivors or women or like maybe there's some demographic that is the angle for that story, but it's still an individual and you're hearing it as an individual when you hear a story about the VA. It becomes well, if it happened, here, it happens to all veterans. I've heard those stories before, right? You hear an egregious story and you think, Well, this must be happening to all veterans in the system because the angle of the story is veterans health care. And I just think that's sort of an assumption our brains make that fuels that perspective, that those egregious stories are representative of the entire health care system. 

Beth [00:12:08] And I think as a public, we legitimately have very high expectations for the care being provided through a government agency for people who are suffering because of their service to the country. 

Sarah [00:12:21] Right. 

Beth [00:12:21] So health care is one of the formations. The second mission is benefits administration. We know about veterans' programs around education going back to the GI Bill, home loans, life insurance. These are the types of programs that are supposed to assist our service members with transitioning back to civilian life. 

Sarah [00:12:37] And that's a huge thing. The GI Bill, the reformulation of the GI Bill after 9-11, like those, are massive programs that touched so many lives. Even, you know, the VA loans and all. I mean, the health care sucks up a lot of oxygen in the room, but those aren't little missions under the benefits administration, either. The third mission surrounds our national cemeteries. The National Cemetery Administration provides burial services and maintains more than 150 cemeteries across the country. It also commemorates veterans digitally through the Veteran's Legacy Memorial. 

Beth [00:13:10] And then the fourth mission is actually called the fourth mission, and that is to improve the country's preparedness for responses to war, terrorism, national emergencies, and national disasters. It's a little amorphous because it is so all-encompassing and because it is somewhat reactive, but it is extremely consequential. This comes from a 1982 law asking VA to help with responses to hurricanes and floods and fires, and the fourth mission has been such an important aspect of supporting responses to COVID 19. And we'll talk more about that as we go on. But just remembering that the VA continues to serve the nation in this very particular domestic way through the fourth mission. 

Sarah [00:14:09] The third thing we want you to know is that the VA is enormous. Again, eighteen million veterans, we're looking at health care, education, home loans, life insurance, cemeteries, and this fourth mission. Yeah. This is a this is a big undertaking. 

Beth [00:14:28] For fiscal year 2022 to the VA's budget request is two hundred sixty nine point two billion dollars. That makes it the second largest discretionary budget in the federal government just behind the Pentagon. This is more money than state USAID, the DOJ and the entire intelligence community combined. 

Sarah [00:14:48] Now that surprises me, it's I feel like the CIA is probably burned through some money, but that I mean, I guess you get there pretty fast with 18 million people. 

Beth [00:14:55] It is also larger than the entire defense budget of China. Just to put this into perspective, VA has about 380000 employees operating out of 6000 buildings, and those buildings demonstrate a level of complexity that we just don't see in the vast majority of American companies. I remember, Sarah, talking about this a little bit when there was controversy over confirming President Trump's VA secretary nominee, how this is a really difficult position to fill. You cannot find many CEOs with enough experience to run an organization this big. 

Sarah [00:15:32] Well, it was also controversial because there are people that have been pushing for privatization for a long time within the VA, especially the health care system. But I mean, it is a massive undertaking to operate medical centers, hospitals, outpatient sites, home loan programs, and education programs. Cemeteries like it also oversees the largest home-based primary care program in the United States. So to find I mean, it's usually a CEO with that level of experience at that size and complexity of an organization is difficult. 

Beth [00:16:04] The fourth thing we want you to know is that VA does amazing work, and it also needs a huge amount of investment. So there is already this massive budget that is growing very quickly, but more money is going to be needed. Understaffing has been a persistent problem for VA, and the Trump years were especially hard on VA. There were five deputy secretaries during a four-year term. I read an article published in May of this year saying that VA has 50000 empty positions. 

Sarah [00:16:36] And the department's infrastructure, like much of the infrastructure across the country, is aging. It's on average 58 years old. The new infrastructure legislation includes $18 billion for upgrades to the VA medical centers. And this is important because it impacts the everyday lives of American veterans. I think there is the perception that once you join the military, you have lifetime health care. And it's really interesting there was a case, in I think the early 2000s where a court said no, a military recruiter who promises you lifetime health care, that's not a contract, that's just a promise, and they're not obligated to meet that because they can't. Because there's not enough space within the buildings. There's staffing problems, budgeting problems. And so the court was basically like, they need to meet it to the best of their ability. But if there's not a spot, there's not a spot. If there's not a bed, there's not a bed. And I think that's what we often run into with these sort of, especially the really egregious stories we hear about wait times or putting people off. Or is this issue of aging infrastructure, a massive population, a big promise to a massive population, and how to meet that. Especially when we have such a large cohort of aging veterans now from the Vietnam War and 4.1 million veterans coming out of this like post-9 11 phase. 

Beth [00:18:02] We also have a department that is not built for everyone who serves. Maternity care is not available at any of the VA's facilities. Treatment for sexual trauma and just defining military sexual trauma broadly enough to cover all of the suffering that results from military service. Those are areas that need attention. Radicalization of veterans is a serious concern, and the department isn't really built to deal with that currently. 

Sarah [00:18:31] And they're still not doing enough on toxic exposure. You know, burn pits get a lot of attention. But there are huge problems from toxic exposure for veterans who aren't even around burn pits. And when you go especially into another country, that's not like OSHA has been applied across the globe, right? There's lots of circumstances where veterans would find themselves exposed to toxic chemicals, air pollution and God knows what else. 

Beth [00:18:59] And burn pits get a lot of attention among people paying attention to these issues. But there are still lots of Americans who don't know about burn pits and about how just getting rid of trash on a military base is making so many people seriously ill and causing people to die. Additionally, service members who aren't U.S. citizens have a very difficult time going through the naturalization process. There is a program built to help service members get to citizenship, but it doesn't work very well and it takes a long time and it's much harder than it should be. 

Sarah [00:19:33] Now we have seen budget growth. The VA received its largest ever budget this year, and the budget has doubled over the past decade, so there is increasing investment in the VA. But you still see services falling short. They had a huge spike in calls to the crisis hotlines following the Afghanistan withdrawal, so they're going to see surges in need at different times. And even with a doubled budget, they're not going to be capable of meeting all that need. 

Beth [00:20:01] And that budget growth is both a positive. We're seeing the investment that's needed. Any program that you're managing in any capacity. You don't want to see the budget needing to double over the past decade and projecting so many needs that haven't even been addressed yet. The claim backlog for VA has increased because new benefits have been rolling out. That's a good thing, but it necessitates additional investment. The benefits administration is set to hire 2000 new employees in the coming weeks to help deal with that claim backlog. 

Sarah [00:20:35] And so in 2018, under the Trump administration, Congress passed the Mission Act, which is when we have this backlog, when the VA can't deliver care for six reasons it should pay for care outside of the VA, and those six reasons are pretty broad service isn't available at a VA medical facility. Your state or territory doesn't have a full-service VA medical facility. You qualify for private care under a previous program. Certain drive time or wait time requirements can't be met, or it's in the veteran's best medical interest to be referred outside of the VA or the VA service line doesn't meet certain quality standards. And it looks like the VA is trying really hard to hold on to patients instead of connecting them to care outside the system. VA physicians make recommendations that go through review by their staff, and there are a lot of incentives to keep patients in the VA, just like private health care systems have a lot of incentives to hold on to patients, 

Beth [00:21:28] and this is just a really difficult topic. There's a lot of stories being written about the Mission Act right now and about how it's failing and how VA is putting up all of these bureaucratic barriers to veterans getting private care. And there are heartbreaking stories about people who need care outside of VA and are having trouble accessing it. And the Mission Act is an outgrowth of a push toward privatization like Sarah was talking about earlier. You have had from certain activist groups for a long time a feeling that the VA delivers inadequately on its promises and that the private system could do a better job. And there is a fierce fight about that, and that's why those studies continue to be done to actually measure what is the quality of care provided within the VA. And how does it compare to the private system? And how can we do the best job by our veterans? And it's just a challenging topic. 

Sarah [00:22:28] Mm hmm. 

Beth [00:22:30] One aspect of this topic that I think is so hard to manage, and I even have grace or people at the highest levels of decision making here is that so much of health care depends on a patient's personal confidence in their provider. Yeah, and it doesn't matter what, study after study says, if a patient's personal confidence in their provider is low, the health outcomes are going to be difficult to achieve, right, you're going to have difficulty in people complying with what their doctor says. You're going to have added stress. I don't know the answer to this issue, that balance of care from within VA and outside it. And I think that the Mission Act is a first step toward continuing a conversation about what that balance looks like. But they're going to have to figure out funding mechanisms that incentivize everybody in the system private and in the VA to do what's best for the individual patient. And that is hard. 

Sarah [00:23:27] Everybody thrilled with how Medicare and Medicaid goes? Everybody thrilled with how sending people out into the private health care system to use government-funded benefits goes for the taxpayer or the patients? I don't really feel like that's the case. That's not my perception of Medicare or Medicaid. And so to me, it's like if they have funding issues, sending people out into the private health care is certainly not going to alleviate that. It's going to be even more expensive. And like you said, like I think on average, the health care within the VA is superior to the private health care system. But there's a lot of experiences across that average in both systems. There are people that are getting concierge health care within the private health care system that are thrilled and there are people in the VA who are getting neglected. It's just it's it's a really, really difficult situation. 

Beth [00:24:19] And we say this all the time. We don't live in averages. You know, we live in personal experiences. And what we owe to every single veteran is a lot. So it's hard to say, Well, look, this data tells me that it should be fine for you, but well, it's not fine for me. You know what next? 

[00:24:36] Another challenge just generally with VA is is I just want to point this out because VA is not immune from the challenges that any employer has. There was an October 18th deadline in place for VA workers to show proof of COVID 19 vaccination. Seventy percent of employees have done so. That means over one hundred fourteen thousand people haven't. They have lots of people seeking medical and religious exemptions. I read an article today about VA discipline measures going into effect for people who haven't shown proof of vaccination yet. That's a big challenge. Just having a workforce this size in any climate is going to be really difficult. In this climate, it is even more challenging. 

Sarah [00:25:18] The fifth thing we want you to know is that veterans still need more than America is currently giving. When it comes to this health care that is the source of so much controversy and debate, there are limits on access to service for veterans because laws require specific degrees of disability related to military service. Well, how do you prove disability related to a burn pit or to exposure to air pollution or whatever the case may be? So many veterans who have suffered from their service are just categorically denied benefits. The Blue Water Navy veterans they have hypertension, bladder cancer, Parkinson's because of Agent Orange, who served on the coast of Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand. You have veterans of wars in Southwest Asia who have suffered from toxic chemical and radiation exposure, and they're getting denied benefits. That's really, really difficult. 

Beth [00:26:09] And to kind of step back again and think about this. The secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs is not only running a much bigger enterprise than almost any CEO in America, with more complexity and greater expectations, but they are doing so subject to congressional action. There are things that I am sure Dennis McDonough would love to do, and he needs Congress to pass laws to allow him to do those things. And that is something that private CEOs don't run into, right? Like, there are some regulations that affect private businesses, but where you truly want to provide a new service and you have to wait for an act of Congress to do it. I can't imagine what that feels like. 

Sarah [00:26:52] Yeah, yeah. We also need expanded access to disability benefits. Of course, the mental health challenges, addiction, suicide, these are huge and growing issues that the VA is trying to wrap its arms around. 20 veterans die by suicide every day, every day. And between 2005 and 2017, 79000 veterans died by suicide. That's more than the number of troops who died in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. 

Beth [00:27:23] We also know that veterans own guns at higher rates than other adults do. And they use them to die by suicide more often than the civilian population. I read a piece in The Washington Post about a veteran who is really working on just things like safe storage of guns with veterans, because the difference between like a few seconds that it takes to access a weapon can be the difference in someone living or dying. 

Sarah [00:27:49] And not just with suicide, but with domestic violence. 

Beth [00:27:52] That's right. Representatives Greg Murphy, North Carolina Republican, and Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat, are introducing legislation aimed at better understanding opioid use and overdoses among veterans. They are introducing this law that would require VA to conduct a survey, looking back at the last five years at where people are using non-prescribed opioids and why that's happening, where it's happening and what could be done about it. 

Sarah [00:28:21] And this discussion around benefits are for people who are honorably discharged. Veterans with certain types of other discharge don't have full access to benefits, but still experience a huge amount of stress and trauma associated with military service. Let's talk about the decades that the military spent dishonorably discharging LGBTQ veterans who now can't access benefits. That's a big deal. 

Beth [00:28:50] And the level of officer discretion that goes into military discipline, citation of issues, racism as an underlying cause of disparate outcomes here. There is a lot to do to build trust with people who have not historically been eligible for benefits and now are. That's particularly true for LGBTQ service members. And to just provide gender-affirming care going forward. This is an enormous challenge, and it sits alongside all of these other enormous challenges housing and employment and education. You know, we know that we have an unacceptably high population of veterans experiencing homelessness. We know that there are opportunities to improve our educational benefits. We know that the pandemic drastically increased unemployment among veterans. It had been steadily declining as a result of lots and lots of work and partnership between the public and private sectors. You know, there are companies that sort of made promises to Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, who spent a lot of time talking to the Business Roundtable about how we need employers to reach out to veterans, recruit them, hire them, train them, employ them. And that work had been going well. But the pandemic set it back. And so, fortunately, the American Rescue Plan has some money to try to help with this. The Veterans Economic Recovery Act was passed along with the American Rescue Plan. That's the COVID Relief Reconciliation Act that was passed earlier this year. This specific piece of legislation was introduced on a bipartisan basis. Senators Jerry Moran, Republican from Kansas, and Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, a perennial favorite of mine, and someone who has worked fiercely on behalf of veterans his entire time in Congress. So this legislation will fund rapid retraining assistance programs to help veterans get into high-demand jobs. 

Sarah [00:30:47] And there are opportunities to expand and improve educational benefits as well, like we're working on it. It's not that we're not making progress, but there's also a huge backlog of compensation pension exams because of the pandemic, because not that the pandemic just affected veterans in the private sector. But, of course, it created backlogs in the public sector as well, where they're trying to get pension benefits, whether it's seeking compensation. Again, it's a huge organization. And so if it's understaffed because of the Trump administration and then with a pandemic, that's going to affect a lot of things. 

Beth [00:31:23] And I just wanted to mention the study of moral injury because I think every benefit we provide to veterans, every bit of service, we have to keep in mind that even people who do not have the most diagnosable mental health needs. There is a sense that they have been through something unusually stressful and can feel a sense of injury based on having been involved in things and witnessed things that go against their beliefs about what is good in the world. There is a sophisticated definition of moral injury from the National Center for PTSD, which is part of VA. And we'll include a link to that in the show notes. But just reading it and understanding how difficult people find it to reconcile their personal beliefs with what they have to be part of as a warrior and even things they can't do while they're serving that they might wish to do because of their personal beliefs. That gap created when you are part of a mission to serve your country with what you personally see as your mission as a human being in the world is enormous and enormously consequential. 

Sarah [00:32:38] I think Amy McGrath writes about this so incredibly well in her memoir, where she talks about her faith and this conflict between the mission she was put on and her personal faith as a Catholic. And I just think that journey in the way she describes it is so heartbreaking, and she does such a good job of like just realizing what a difficult place we put human beings in. The book I was reading Humankind that our listener Max recommended he does a whole segment. It's really interesting about how often even like in wars in the Civil War and in World War Two, the soldiers weren't firing, they weren't firing, they couldn't do it like they would get up to the front line and they and you would think that they were just reloading weapons and firing them, especially like in the Civil War. And it just it wasn't happening because of that, that moral conflict. And I think we thought we were removing people from that front line and maybe preventing that moral injury. But that's not how human beings work. That's it might not. It would be less of an individual decision to fire your weapon if you're up in an aircraft, you know, but it's still a very difficult position to be in. And it and it works on you, it works on you and really, really tragic ways.

Beth [00:33:55] And for always, right? None of that ends. I think that process probably only really starts when people come home and try to adjust back to life, and we're not good at helping people adjust back to life. Senator Tester has put it this way We do a great job making civilians into warriors, but we don't do as good a job making warriors into civilians. 

Sarah [00:34:16] Well, and I think that back to the we have removed war. We've even removed soldiers from the front line of war. We've put them in the air, we've put them operating drones. But as Sebastian Junger talks about so well in Tribe, which is in our extra credit book club this month. The further away that experience is from the civilian experience, the more you see PTSD, moral injury, And just a difficulty adjusting back. Like so interesting in places like Israel, where there's mandatory service, where the conflicts are happening incredibly close to home, you see less of that, that separation because you're not acclimating them back into a society that has no clue what they've been through. It's just a different experience. And I think that's that's another aspect of the burden is that it's just so far removed from the civilian experience. 

Beth [00:35:24] I have to tell you that preparing for this episode has probably accelerated my my journey to being a pacifist because I just I look at all of this and what it costs and think, how can we possibly justify entering another conflict and not to say that what we have done in the past is unjust. I do not want to contribute, especially to people having witnessed our withdrawal from Afghanistan wondering if their service meant anything. It did! I don't know what it meant. I can't know, but I know that it means something and that that no one serves in vain. But I have to already reconcile. Did I fight in a just way in a conflict that was hard to know if it was just or not, right? Was the conflict just? To already have all those pieces. I don't want to add to any of that. I also want all of us as a public to be more clear-eyed about that burden before we enter into future conflicts, even small feature conflicts, even the types of conflicts that the public will never know about. All the places across the world that people are serving, that Americans will never, as a public, really reckon with the fact that they've been there. Their has been sacrifice there. It's too much. And I'm I'm having a hard time with some of my personal opinions in the past about where I think we should have deployed troops because I now look at that and think the sacrifice is too great. It asks too much of people to do this. 

[00:36:58] Well, Sarah, I was thinking about how important it is to hear the voice of a veteran any time we talk about veterans issues and I got I kind of went down a path of research about witness poetry, about how many veterans are writing about their experiences and found this poem Repairing the Artifact by Margaret Viboolsittiseri an Army veteran and military spouse. So I wanted us to just read this poem if that's OK to close out. And before we do, there's a reference at the end of this poem to Kintsugi which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the broken parts with a lacquer of gold, silver, or platinum. And I just the words sits very powerfully when you know its meaning. So I wanted to define that before we read Margaret Viboolsittiseri’s words. 

Sarah [00:37:52] I will not stand United 

For some of us can't stand 

Beth [00:37:56] Our lives were flipped 

Turned inside out as pain engulfed 

smoke gathered round. The very foundation shook. 

Sarah [00:38:04] The bedrock quaked and for years and years 

we've choked on soot. 

Beth [00:38:10] Now some of us must sit. These broken bits--these aches. I grab 

gold paint to fill the gaps. Our liberty is cracked. 

Sarah [00:38:18] These seen and unseen pains, some of us 

...still ill. We lack the strength to gather round. Our limbs are gone. 

Beth [00:38:28] Our sight not strong. 

Our lights flicker away for long. 

I say to all who read this poem: 

We cannot stand, but we can be excited for our dreams. 

Sarah [00:38:39] For what we've lost, we've mustered up 

Empowering us to carry, crawl, or sing 

To shake our hips. 

With quivered lips. 

This love makes us all free. 

Beth [00:38:51] And we can be united, or we can simply be. 

Love and let live. Just striving. Guiding. 

Sarah [00:39:00] Maybe not standing, but at least we're lasting 

until a time when we can thrive again. 

Beth [00:39:08] A day closer 

...we're closer to 

Kintsugi than may seem. 

[00:39:20] Thank you all very much for joining us. Thank you to everyone listening who is a veteran who loves a veteran who is currently serving. We appreciate all of you. We'll be back with you on Tuesday. Until then, have the best weekend available. 

[00:39:43] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.  

Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah [00:39:48] Megan Hart and Maggie Penton are our community engagement managers. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music. 

Beth [00:39:55] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:39:59] Martha Bronitsky, Linda Daniel, Ali Edwards, Janice Elliot, Sarah Greenup, Julie Haller, Helen Handley, Tiffany Hassler, Emily Holladay, Katie Johnson, Katina Zuganelis Kasling, Barry Kaufman, Molly Kohrs.

The Kriebs, Laurie LaDow, Lilly McClure, David McWilliams, Jared Minson, Emily Neesley, Danny Ozment, The Pentons, Tawni Peterson, Tracy Puthoff, Sarah Ralph, Jeremy Sequoia, Katy Stigers, Karin True, Onica Ulveling, Nick and Alysa Vilelli, Amy Whited.

Beth [00:40:38] Melinda Johnston, Ashley Thompson, Michelle Wood, Joshua Allen, Morgan McHugh, Nichole Berklas, Paula Bremer, and Tim Miller. 

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