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Lessons From Ft. Hood and Beyond:Reflections on Veterans, Sacrifice and Coping
By Dave Livingston. Dave is a management consultant with almost 30 years of experience with analyzing complex business problems and developing solutions and new businesses. He blogs on public affairs at his blog Parts,Systems, Structures and Outcomes ( http://llinlithgow.com/PtW/ ) where he attempts to apply that toolkit to current affairs and public policy.
 
Introduction
The incident at Ft. Hood was and is horrific but offers some valuable lessons about stress, coping with strain andadversity and asks us to look far beyond the surface events and easy interpretations to see what we might learn.To be clear there is no excuse for Maj. Hasan’s decisions but there are reasons. Clearly he was under a greatdeal of stress, made worse by the wide gap between his own beliefs and the demands of his duty.Beyond that though he was under enormous stress as a dedicated caregiver trying to help our veterans cope withthe extreme and extraordinary strains of combat from repeated tours of active combat zones. But it is the veteransthemselves, who seem to have more compassion for the Major and are coping better with the incident and theother strains than we or our society.Instead we are trying to blame anyone but ourselves by blaming an over-strained institution asked to do too muchwith too little. More importantly the values that that our veterans, living and dead, made their sacrifices for call usto honor them by living our lives as best we can. And by building the best society that we can manage.As part of that challenge we need to recognize the enormous strains that many of our fellow citizens are underand the difficulties they are having in coping with the consequences of the economic crisis. Our personalchallenge is to find the Strengths and Faith to meet these challenges while also reaching out to help out fellows.Perhaps the most important challenge we face, the one that honors our veterans best, is by choosing the meetour large-scale social challenges. For over three decades we have collectively chosen the easy path by voting forrepresentatives who provide simple answers to complex, hard and difficult challenges. It’s always easier to rallybehind simple slogans than it is to support the long, difficult and painful road to change required to deal with thesegreater challenges. But we no longer have the luxury of pretending that simple answers will work.At the end of the day we honor the sacrifices of our veterans by meeting these challenges head on, as best weare able.This collection of recent blog posts attempts to reflect, however imperfectly, on the examples of our veterans, onthe lessons for our own lives and for the implications for the larger good. As always the URL’s are provided for theonline blog postings from which they were drawn. At the end of this collection you’ll find the selected readings thatsupport those reflections and can track them to their original sources there. You’ll also find a selected reading listof sources if you’d care to investigate further.These are important and critical concerns. The health of the Republic ultimately rests on the values, characterand behavior of its citizens. The well-being of the citizens, you and me, rests on our own character and values butalso on the well-being of our fellows and the health of the Republic. Ultimately both are served together or not andit will be our choices that determine how things work out…. or not!
 
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Table of Contents
EssaysVeterans, the Wall & Magic: Fear, Stress & Loathing on the Reform Road 3In the Heart of the Beast: War, Stress and Pressure 7In Flanders Field...and Here At Home 9ReadingsUnder Fire: Meeting Life Headon
 
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The Wall, the Aftermath and the Ripples 14Welcome to Stockdale’s World 16Understanding Yourself, You Mind & Your Capabilities 17Background Readings 18Previous Posts: Politics, Policy and Lizardbrains 20
 
 
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November 09, 2009
Veterans, the Wall & Magic: Fear,Stress & Loathing on the ReformRoad
http://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/11/veterans_the_wall_magic _fear_s.html Tomorrow, Nov. 11th, is Veterans Day when we recognizeand celebrate the lives and contributions of those who haveserved the country at such great cost. A cost the tragedies atFt. Hood remind us is greater than we're willing toacknowledge or do something about. There are going to beall sorts of emotional tributes, and we've made our sharebecause this is a debt that can only be recognized not repaid. If we ever manage to get to that point we alsoought to recognize that the ones who come back pay their own high costs, often for years to come.In talking about Memorial Day and the Anniversary of D-Day this last summer though we were led to considerwhat payback might look like. Inadequate perhaps but its bedrock is "pay it forward". We honor the sacrifices ofour veterans by how we choose to live our lives, the contribution we make and the world we jointly create.(Frontline Lessons Brought Home: Others, Selfs and Manners) An opportunity they only made the initial downpayment on. It's all to easy to see something like these cartoons have a weepy moment or three and move onback to our daily existences. Yet we're also learning that back in the "World" that the stresses and strains andstrengths of combat have their analogs as well.
The Prices That Keep Being Paid
Bill Moyers last Fri. took a small step in reminding us ofthe larger and on-going price that many veterans pay fortheir service with his special on "The Good Soldier". In ithe portrays the experiences and lives of veterans fromWW2, Korea and Iraq. And, like we said, the recentincident at Ft. Hood certainly brings home in an ugly andterrible way. The Media feeding frenzies that are going onmay serve some good though by finally getting people torecognize what a small minority of our fellow citizens ourpaying for our lives. The photo is taken from the film clipand tells us part of the price paid in war, and a terribleone. But to know the real price listen carefully to theveterans or, better yet, watch their faces. Go ahead it's ashort clip. Then tell us these aren't men who've experienced the stress of combat and are still experiencing ityears later. And continuing to pay a price.In the readings you'll find one of the more interesting excerpts we found that talks about Homer's Illiad andOdyssey. Most of our impressions are Trojan horses and the strange creatures that Oyseus met on his longvoyage home. But, as the writer reminds us, these are works about the terrible devastation of war and how thestrains and psychological damage persists for years and may never go away. We like to forget that most of theseworks were more about an unflinching look at violence and how men deal with it and how it was the same forthem 4,000 years ago as it is for us today. With one major difference - they didn't deny its existence or impact.Though the veterans of that day had as difficult a time in explaining it all to the civilians who didn't know.
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