How Veterans’ Service Abroad Creates Responsibility At Home

>> John Moses: Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. I think most of the people I've met here, I handed the invitation face to face and then called you several times to make sure you'd show up. Hey, Jody. Hey, Jody. So I did want to say, before we even start, just so people that don't know, when Stanford asked me to do this, they said, we want to focus on a small town.

And I was like, there is no way we're gonna focus on a small town that's not Chelmsford or, and then Chelmsford is gonna show up, and then here you all are, you showed up. Even though I know not everybody's from town, but Chelmsford's here. And for people that don't know, Chelmsford was founded in 1655 and was originally a much larger town.

It encompassed Lowell, Westford, parts of Carlisle, and this room that you're sitting in, even though the building upstairs is newer, this original room in the vestry is one of the original buildings in town. So when you walk outside, although we have to move that van out of the way, when you walk outside, you have the sweeping view of the, of the town green that would have looked the same to somebody that lived in this town a few hundred years ago.

And to the right is your forefather cemetery, which is a lot of revolutionary war have been buried and a lot of the town leaders throughout the years have been buried. So we have a representative former government. So town meeting. So God bless you for asking for questions cuz they're gonna have good questions and we do a really great job of having good political discussions.

But I just wanted to acknowledge a few people. So, first of all, the chairperson of the Chelmsford School Committee and one of my favorite people, Donna Newcomb, Pat Wojtas, who's the chairperson of the select board, a veteran, runs the military covenant community and a bunch of other stuff, town meeting Rep..

So if you want to talk about service after service, did Paul Cohen show? There he is.. Paul Cohen from Harvard, Mass. Regina Jackson, who is our veterans representative in town, who does an astonishing job helping veterans. Did Mister Elliot come? Not Rodney. I'll call him later. Dean Contover, who is one of our Vietnam veterans, and she does a lot of work with veterans in the community, interviews, talks to people, politically active, one of my heroes.

Sam Polton, as I had mentioned, who has been a veteran of two wars and runs quite a few different activities in town. But if you wanna talk service after service, that gentleman there is also embodies that. One of the things, Mister Joe Reddy over there, his dad, one of the things I always like about veterans is it kind of extends his past generations.

His dad was a veteran and then passed on this incredible service to Joe, who continues to serve. Where's Terry? Terry Smula. There you are. So Terry is from Harvard, Mass. And not a veteran, but she has helped dozens of families, I think, at this point, like in Harvard, Mass.

And does a lot of the same work we do here. And Jodi Hilton, my favorite photographer and my good friend in the work. And then just the people in the back that are cooking, we have Sabra and Zari, who are cooking some delicious Afghan food that will come out.

And then for my family, I wanna say hi to my family and my mom. My mom. Hi, mom. Everybody say, hi, mom. And then my board. So I have Farishta back there. Farishta Shams emigrated here in 2019 from Afghanistan. And when I came to her, said, I need a really strong, brilliant woman.

She was like, well, I'm your woman.

>> John Moses: And I was like, here you are. And then Jason Shenanda, who's my chief technical officer, and then more than anything, my kids, Ian, Ella, and my wife Cindy, who show up for everything. And that's all I had.

>> Moderator: Thank you, John, for having us here.

I love New England. I was really excited to get some dunk in this morning.

>> Moderator: We have all this fancy coffee in California. Sometimes you just want a nice, good iced coffee. But this particular town hall is really important, and it's our last scheduled one. And so I think it's a really good one for us to end on.

So I want to give you a little bit of a background about what the series is in general and why we're doing it. So at Hoover, we have a veteran fellows program, which John is a member of that. And what it does is it looks at post 911 veterans and it says, do you have a dream?

Do you have a passion? Do you have a project that you're working on that makes your community better? And we try and help these extraordinary veterans make that project vision a reality. I'm on that selection committee, and I'm the only post 911 veteran on the selection committee. And in the process of selecting people like John for the fellowship, it made me think about my own service and the legacy of my service and what I believed our generation, what the legacy of our veteran generation was going to be.

And I was so inspired by the people that were applying for this program, and yet I felt like we actually hadn't had this kind of generational conversation about how the experiences over 20 years of combat affected this generation of veterans that are now going out, and in many cases, leading their communities.

So that's what the town hall series is about. It's about going to the communities where our veterans are leading and making a difference and having conversation about how their military service has affected who they are today as civilians. Now, this particular town hall, I think the way I phrased it was very academic.

It was like how service abroad affects your service at home. But really, this is a conversation about Afghanistan and what 20 years of combat in Afghanistan and veterans experience is there, what that means to who they are now, as in our case, American civilians? In some ways, this is a conversation that is extremely complicated because I think, and I was 18 when September 11 happened.

I had just signed my ROTC contract, and the world changed. I signed up September 10th, September 11th, the world changed. And I think for those of us who remember those early days and months after September 11, it was not a surprise or a debate why we were in Afghanistan.

And I think there was a real belief that we were there to do something good. Now, 20 years later, that's a really complicated conversation about what the legacy of those 20 years have been. And for many who served two, three, four, I mean, there are people who served seven, eight tours in Afghanistan.

They now have to reconcile what they did quite often, really extraordinary things, building schools, helping out in afghani communities, defending afghani communities. But they now have to reconcile that with what did it mean when we left. And so that's what this conversation is. Now, I'm often told that I should have a bumper sticker and a clear and concise kind of summary of what argument I'm trying to make, and I'm not.

I'm trying to have a really complicated conversation with people who interact with veterans in their community on a day to day basis. So that's what this is. So I think it's helpful to get a sense of kind of how large Afghanistan was for this generation. So it's 20 years of combat.

It's four presidential administrations. It's $2 trillion. There are approximately 800,000 American troops that served in that time in Afghanistan. And while in one metric, we lost a smaller percentage of troops in Afghanistan than maybe any other American war, we still lost over 2300 troops in combat. Since combat, we've lost, by some accountings, ten times that number to suicide.

And I think the approximation right now is about 20,000 came home wounded. That's actually a pretty big toll on the societies and communities in which people return to. I think the toll was even greater in Afghanistan. Despite these really extraordinary things that soldiers did to build communities and schools, educate women, fight the Taliban, there are estimates that over 47,000 afghan civilians died in the process.

And as a result of that war and our withdrawal afterwards, we have 2.5 to 3 million Afghanis who have had to flee their country. And many of those are Afghanis who have had to flee after fighting alongside Americans for a long period of time. There was a poll taken in 2021.

This is as we were leaving Afghanistan. In that poll, over 60% of Americans said they didn't believe the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting for. That is a tough statistic for this veteran generation to understand. Not to understand, but to reconcile. And I think actually, some veterans, maybe many, would agree with that percentage.

That's the complicated conversation we're here to have and what our service in Afghanistan meant, what that retreat at the end meant, and what that means, I guess, kind of for the relationships in the communities that we have now. I want to start with talking about why the veterans on our panel decided to serve in the first place.

I think that's a really important story. I was looking it up, in Massachusetts, only about 6% of the population is veterans. And according to a 2019 study by Brown University, Massachusetts had one of the lowest percentage of residents that served in post 911 wars. There's a few kind of potential explanations for this.

I mean, part of it is that it's a higher income area, very educated, but also because the primary reason why people serve is because they know somebody who served. And if you have a military family, you have an even exponential more chance to serve. So as that population of military families dwindles, you have less people that end up serving.

I like to understand what brought people to service. You guys are like statistical outliers. Most of you did not come from a military family or have these tight relationships in the military. So I want to start with John because. I've identified a few reasons why people serve. One is family.

Another is education, benefits. That's not why you decided to serve. Can you tell us your route to service.

>> John Moses: Sure, you want to hear this story? I'm enlisted, so I didn't have a plan. I think my mom's actually here, so she's going to laugh. Hey, Felicia. So my mom's here.

She's gonna love this story. But when I was gonna join, I actually was gonna join the marines. But the reason I decided to join was because I was in high school. I was a split op, which meant I went to basic training before my senior year. I remember this recruiter walked into the cafeteria, and all the girls heads swung towards the guy in a dress uniform, and I was like, that's what I wanna do.

 

>> John Moses: It's true. I was gonna join the marines, and my mom was like, you're not joining the Marines. And I was like, well, if you sign now, I'll join the army. She signed now, but 23 years later, I've gotten some. First of all, it didn't work. No girls didn't like me anymore.

But that's why I joined. Then I had family in the military, and I was interested. I didn't have a lot of direction, and so I picked one. I just chose a direction that seemed interesting, and I ended up retiring.

>> Moderator: But I think it's important to note there's a lot of different ways to serve.

I think those of us who served in this post 911 veteran generation kind of have seen the total force at its apex. Can you explain to folks you actually joined the reserves? Can you explain to folks the difference between the active duty, the reserve, and the National Guard?

 

>> John Moses: I was a reservist from my very beginning when I joined in 96, my first contract. Reserves are kind of, everybody talks about the one weekend a month and the two week. That's, first of all, it's not true. It was not true during my career. The reserves, we have an expectation to go to schools and do missions and do the things.

I was really fortunate. I actually joined before 911 in 1996. So it was really boring. There was really not a lot happening. Then 9/11 happened, and it just went off the rails after that point, but. So for the reserves to really get a deployment, you have to end up in a unit that can deploy.

You can someplace you can volunteer, and so in on active duty, you kind of have expectations to deploy. I ended deploying three times. So we end up volunteering for a lot. I love the reserves because we actually had the opportunity to have a civilian career as well as a military career, and if you can leverage it right, it can do good things for the community and for yourself.

 

>> Moderator: I want to take that kind of conversation with a total force and highlight our extraordinary panelist, Felicia. Felicia, you also have an experience. It's not the active duty, it's the National Guard. Can you explain, folks, kind of why you decided to serve and what's different about the National Guard versus the active duty?

 

>> Farishta Shams: Well, it's really interesting. First of all, I apologize for being late. It's really interesting in hearing you speak about most folks having military family that they can rely on for feedback. And what would it be like if I were to join? That wasn't the case for me, either, although I found out much later that I did have family members that have served.

So for me, I worked really hard, really, really hard, and ended up graduating, like, number four in my class. But I was the first child in my family that would be heading off to school, and I was the oldest, so I had a lot of family responsibility. Hindsight is 2020, when you're thinking about your parents, you need to give them a little bit of grace, right?

So they just were afraid. They were afraid of me going off to school. And I was like, there is no way I am staying in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the rest of my life. That's what happened. I finished up one semester at UMass Lowell, and my father had made promises to cover the, well, at least signed the financial aid paperwork and then ultimately refused to do that.

So I lost every scholarship that I worked hard, so hard for. But luckily for me, there were options, and I took that option and ended up joining the military 1997. Things didn't really begin to truly warm up until after 9/11.

>> Moderator: Jason. Your pathway is interesting because it involves the arch rival of the United States, the USSR.

How did the Soviets convince you to join the military?

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah, so like everyone else here, my family, many of whom are here tonight, no real strong connection to the military. When I was twelve years old, I played hockey in Beverly, and our team was selected to go represent the United States in the Soviet Union.

And we went to then Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow. And from the hockey point of view, we won three out of four games against the Soviets. So it was April of 89, so 1980, everyone remembers the miracle that was 1980. College kids beat the Red Army. Well, nine years later, our twelve year olds beat their twelve year olds.

Then the wall came down. Then the Soviet Union collapsed,.

>> Jason Shenanda: Just for the record. But I went there as a twelve year old kid from Beverly, thinking about the evil empire behind the Iron Curtain. Didn't really know what was going on. I just knew that the United States and the USSR wanted to destroy each other.

I didn't know why. When I met the people there, it was a quick realization that, why am I supposed to hate these people? These are very kind, very friendly. Watching the soviet kids interact with their families after the game was much like what we did back here. Sometimes at Skate 3 rink in Tyngsborough or after games, and said, if the people can get along, what happens at the government level, at the collective, where we're willing to risk nuclear annihilation?

And I couldn't understand. So it put me on this path to want to understand why governments make decisions, why governments do what they do. But it also sparked in me this desire to serve, or at least give thanks to the country in which I was so fortunate to be born.

Because I recognized that as a 12 year old kid, I dreamed of playing in the NHL, or had dreams to do whatever I wanted and I could pursue those dreams. I realized that the Russian kids, whether or not they had dreams, and I assumed that they did, that they couldn't really chase their dreams.

So I was very grateful for having been born in the United States. So at twelve, I thought, I want to say thank you to the United States. I don't know how or what that will look like. And I want to understand why states do what they do. And then, when I was 17, one of my best friends was killed in a car accident just before senior year of high school.

And I also, in that moment, committed to live two lives in one, one for him and one for me, and also to contribute as much as I can to the world in whatever capacity. I could do as quickly as I could for as long as I could. And about that same time, West Point started recruiting me to play hockey.

And on my first visit to West Point, much like you described your daughter's visit to West Point, I visited, saw the school, saw the cadets, saw this big team, saw this idea of serving and understanding why governments do what they do. And that was really my path towards the Army.

 

>> Moderator: Must have been a nice day at West Point.

>> Jason Shenanda: It was a brilliant day. They brought me down for the football team, beat the Citadel in a last minute field goal. And the hockey team was playing Boston College, which is speaking to me, watching them play Boston College.

So it was well played on their part.

>> Moderator: Every time I'm there, it's like gray and dreary. I can feel like the ghosts most of the time.

>> Moderator: Yeah, well, Cohen, I saved you for last, and that's because you have the most service on this panel.

>> Paul Cohen: Wow, okay.

 

>> Moderator: Yeah, so you joined in the mid 90s and you've served, I mean, almost three decades at this point.

>> Paul Cohen: 32 years.

>> Moderator: There you go.

>> Moderator: So I think especially those last few years, is why you get those round of applause.

>> Moderator: So I wanna ask you, why'd you join?

And then I want to turn it a little bit and say, so you served probably almost a decade before September 11 happened. So how did your service change after September 11?

>> Paul Cohen: Yeah, so I came from the home of the US military industrial complex, Berkeley, California.

>> Paul Cohen: I'm not making this up.

I was the son of a conservative political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. And I don't know if you just sort of either break left or break right. And I took a different path than I think most of the high school kids coming out of Berkeley. No, but I had no background in military service in my family.

My dad had had a near miss, thought he was gonna go to Annapolis, decided differently.

>> John Moses: Which one?

>> Paul Cohen: And I don't know if it was that sort of back of the mind thought that had me going towards military service, but I went through Princeton's Army ROTC program, which has been in continuous presence on that campus since 1919.

It was the only one of the ivies not booted off in the later phase of the Vietnam War. And so I graduated, joined during the Cold War, thinking it's gonna be Tom Clancy, we're gonna go fight the Soviets in Europe. All of a sudden, the wall came down in the middle of my experience.

Then there was Desert Storm. Before I graduated, some of the kids in the program ahead of me went and were lieutenants in the desert shield, Desert Storm phase. I thought, I've missed the big one. This is the way young kids think go in. I did my active duty service in Germany, had a wonderful time, met lifelong friends, had a great active duty experience.

But it was really the trough between Desert Storm and the beginning of the balkans, and certainly before 911. So I then exited, got back into the reserve component, leaning on a skill I never thought I would use, which is french language, which I learned in school. And the Army is like, well, you could be a translator or a linguist in this thing, and thought very little of it.

So I had a very low tempo existence between 96 97 and 2001. I was living in Houston, Texas, on 9/11, and I was on a trading floor looking up at big plasma screens. And I remember that morning I was reading. I was still fascinated by all things military.

I had my Jane's intelligence review on my business counter. Thank God my employer didn't know.

>> Moderator: Back when you used to read these things in paper format, little glossy Jane's.

>> Paul Cohen: That's right. Well, this was the article about the assassination of Massoud. And I'm looking at that, and then I look up at the screen and I see the aircraft hit the towers, and they're starting to pipe this through.

And I remembered there had been an incident of an accident in the second world War where a plane collided with the Empire State Building. I said, that must be an accident. And then, like many Americans, I look and I see the second plane hit. And this was this fundamental change.

I went back on active duty in December, or I started looking for it in December of 2001. Ended up going back on active duty for about six months, I guess, total, between leaving my civilian employer and going to MIT for a PhD in security studies.

>> Moderator: Slacker.

>> Paul Cohen: Slacker, very much so.

But that brought me back to New England, which is where I've been since we live down in Rhode island. I've got one son who, not at my urging, but of his own accord, went through ROTC. He's now an infantry lieutenant in Germany. And my daughter, Inshallah, will go to West Point here a year and a half out.

 

>> Moderator: Well, I think all four of you joined before September 11th. Farishta, I want to know kind of what was your experience before September 11, and how did you feel on that day? How did that change your service after that time period?

>> Farishta Shams: As a national guardsman, it was just a very different experience.

You're fixing broken Humvees on drill weekend. You know, you go from sort of that to, you know, coming home from class, watching plane one hit, and then hearing about another incident at the Pentagon, you're like, something is happening. And, you know, in pretty short order, you began to get your act together as a military unit, and things changed so rapidly for my small element, and we were out the door pretty much immediately for the first round of rotation.

So you wouldn't think much of, like, a finance element, you know, having much to do for deployment. But everything is finance. So these guys are out there in Humvees, traversing areas that are not necessarily the safest. They're in Blackhawks, they're in CH 47s, getting the funds to wherever they need to go, because you're building new cities on the ground in places that where they never, ever existed.

So the training came hard, and it came fast, and it was, you know, you know, 18 months away from home in the beginning, you know, and it's very, very different for, you know, a 22 year old to, like, begin thinking, okay, this is my life now. These are the things that I need to get ready for.

This is no longer, you know, play warrior games. This is actually, like, real, real life. So, yeah, it really shifted things.

>> Moderator: I think, especially as a guards member and as a reserve member, it must have been extremely jolting to go from this kind of. You're living this existence where you're quasi civilian, quasi military, and then September 11 happens, and you're, no, this is me now.

This is not these people that are already in the military. It becomes an identity shift. I imagine that you had a similar identity shift, John.

>> John Moses: I did, absolutely. I was at my nana's house, my grandmother's house, when 9/11 happened. The first plane hit and the second, and I remember, in the reserves, I hadn't been particularly active.

I actually went in the IRR for a while. I went in, obviously, I didn't have a great plan to go in the military. You heard how I joined. So I didn't really know if I was going to stay in, and I didn't. I went in the IRR for a while.

I was like, an e three, and then the second plane hit, and then everything changed. I immediately was like, what is the fastest way I can go overseas so I don't miss this war? Because, of course, I thought we were going to miss Afghanistan if we didn't go right away.

I was wrong about that, too. Nobody should trust my judgment on these things. But immediately was like, I'm going to change my MOS, my job. I'm not going to, I'm no longer going to do paperwork. I want to operate heavy equipment because it has the best chance of deploying, joined a transportation unit and then started volunteering for everything.

Then unfortunately, and fortunately, after I met my wife, after about a year together, somebody finally accepted me. And I was like, and I don't even think I asked. I was like, I'm going. And she was like, what? And then I was off. But I changed everything for me.

I wanted to do new work. I wanted to volunteer, I wanted to be part of it. And even all the way through 20 1112, when I finally got to Afghanistan, like, it's where I wanted to go from the very beginning. And they had sent me to other places prior to that.

Yeah, it was a sea change. It just changed my whole view on everything. And I knew that at that point I had to serve other people in this way. Like, that was what I had to do.

>> Moderator: Jason, you've mentioned a few times you went to West Point.

But at West Point, part of being an army officer that comes from West Point is you're really trained in army doctrine and who the army is and what the army does. But the army that you entered West Point was doing these kind of, not much. I mean, they were trying to figure out what their role was in a kind of post cold war.

And then you have a big shift by the time we get to Afghanistan and Iraq to a completely different type of war. How did that change for you? How did your ideas about who you are as an army officer change from before 9/11 to fast forward 5,10 years and you're deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan?

 

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah, well, I was at West Point 96 to 2000. As you've heard, not necessarily a whole lot going off the army. In fact, I think we called it then, operations other than war. Use your military for something other than war, which, from a strategic perspective conversation. But when I showed up at Fort Carson, Colorado, up by Colorado Springs as part of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment and the unit was just getting back from Bosnia, they'd been doing the Bosnia mission and then that was December 2000.

In that first eight months of my time there as a brave new lieutenant, we had done gunnery on our tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. We went out and exercised them and did all the, all the shooting that we had we were required to do for being proficient on our equipment.

We had gone to Pinon Canyon Training Center, not far from Colorado Springs, did some force on force, and then we got on to the big event at that time, and the army was going to the National Training Center. So in June of 2001, we had gone to the National Training center, and we had exercised our operations there, and we were certified by the army.

We were prepared to fight and win our nation's war. I remember talking to my fellow lieutenants in that summer of 2001, saying, well, we've done everything we can possibly do as a lieutenant except go to war. We just kind of had these conversations. And then on September 11, that summer, August of 2001, we started manning the gates of Fort Carson.

For whatever reason, the DoD contractors disappeared, and they used combat platoons on the gates. And my platoon took over on September 10, 2001, for 24 hours, 9 AM to 9 AM, something like that. I remember early in the morning, September 11, it's Colorado Springs. It was around 6:37 AM.

I was getting up, getting ready to hand over to the next platoon and have our 24 hours off. One of my soldiers came in and said, hey, sir, a plane just hit the World Trade Center. We went to our little operations center, much kind of like your response, an accident, the first plane.

Then we saw the second plane. We all kind of looked at each other, and we knew that everything was about to change that. This conversation we had a few months ago about, well, we've done everything short of war. Well, now we know it's something. And I remember getting a phone call as the officer in charge of the gates that morning from the post commander, saying, we must close all the Fort Carson, close all the gates except for one, five, and 20, and arm the guards.

We thought, okay, we have no. This is all discrete uncertainty, and this is why we've been training and being prepared to do whatever it is the country's gonna ask us to do. And from that point forward, like the rest of the world, I mean, our Operation Tempo was much faster.

We always take our training seriously, but it was a little bit more, I think, more urgency. And as the conversation became around Afghanistan, we were a tank unit. So we thought, well, that's not really best for us. What are we gonna do in the mountainous areas of Afghanistan?

Then not long thereafter, of course, the conversation about Iraq started. That's when we started, kind of focusing our efforts on the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

>> Moderator: I think people may not know this, but on bases there's different force protection conditions. We have not been force protection condition normal since September 10, 2001.

 

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah, we all quickly learn what threat con delta, threat con alpha, what they all meant. We're like, okay, this is what I mean.

>> Moderator: Now, the reason why we have these four extraordinary panelists here. And first, they all have a connection to New England, but they've all served in Afghanistan, but in these very different capacities and at very different times.

So I'd like to talk a little bit about your experiences in Afghanistan. Colin and Jason, you both served in kind of strategic advisory roles in Afghanistan. Can you describe each of you, your time in the country, and how you supported the us kind of strategic efforts in Afghanistan?

 

>> Paul Cohen: Yeah, so my first connection was in 2009. Then army Colonel Randy George was a student of mine at the Naval War College. He comes up to me after I give a lecture on something related on, I think, Vietnam War stuff, and he says, hey, do you wanna come out to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, this summer and help me out for a month?

And I was a reservist, but I was going to go as a civilian. And I thought, well, sure, I'll help. If I can help, I'll do it. So I went out as a civilian buying the rei eastern mountain sports outfit, feeling very strange because I'm a reserve officer, but I'm not on orders, but I'm out there with an army unit.

Anyway, I was well prepared psychologically for it, but I never thought I would do it again. I came home then I deployed in uniform in 2011 and spent a year in Kabul working for General Petraeus and then General Allen during that sort of peak of the surge. And so I spent a fair amount of time looking back towards Washington from the senior headquarters in Kabul.

And that was an interesting education in two parts of it. One, what the military was trying to do at the very peak of the effort, and the second one was the way that that military command then plugged into what was going on in Washington. And that was absolutely fascinating education, both in the way our government works in foreign policy and the way it translates into action on the ground.

So I was in a very, very interesting place to sort of observe and learn during that year, then go back the third time, unplanned, to the Pentagon, 2017 to 2019, as the deputy assistant secretary of defense. So the person who's the civilian in charge of US efforts on behalf of the secretary in Afghanistan.

So this was another bizarre chapter, completely different chair. I'm looking from Washington back at Kabul, where the commander is now my old boss from six years before General Nicholson. So it was just absolutely bizarre. No plan involved here, but I saw Afghanistan three very different ways.

>> Moderator: Did you see big changes in how we thought about what our strategic goals were in the country?

 

>> Paul Cohen: I would say that actually the goals are remarkably stable over time. I mean, if you ask people at this sort of foreign policy level, they said that our job was to prevent a second attack emanating from Afghanistan towards the United States or other allies' homelands. That part stayed the same.

What we were doing part oscillated tremendously over that time period, 2009. I'm out there at the beginning of the surge as we're starting to pour lots of troops into Afghanistan to try and hold back a Taliban resurgence. 2011 is the peak of the ski slope. We're up at over 100,000 us troops.

We're all over the country, lots of combat operations. And when I came back as a civilian in 2017 to the war, it had dropped from 100,000 us troops to 10,000 us troops. So you would visit the country and I'd be out there every four to six weeks on the ground.

And I was like, it's empty of Americans. I was used to seeing lots and lots of American troops. And it was a very, very different war from about 2014 to the end.

>> Moderator: What was your experience, Jason? Cuz you were also kind of this strategic level.

>> Jason Shenanda: So 2011 and 2012, same time that Colin's at the four star headquarters, I was at the three star headquarters, the NATO training mission, where I worked for General Bill Caldwell for six months and General Dan Bolger for six months.

And we were a NATO mission. So our job was to train the Afghan security force, the Afghan police, army and air force, and trying to train the Afghans so that they could fight and sustain the fight themselves in the country so that we could withdraw. And that was fascinating as we looked at it from Kabul to Washington.

We also had a view from Kabul to Brussels, talking to the NATO ISAF partners that were all involved in that. As a young army major getting an opportunity to engage and travel to Brussels and travel to Chicago to a NATO summit, kind of a strange kind of compared to what I had been doing.

But to really watch the dialogue between on the ground in Afghanistan and back to DC and then 2014 to 2017, I was on the National Security Council in the South Asia office. So looking at it from the White House perspective, and this was the last two and half years of President Obama's administration, the first 100 days of the President Trump administration.

And I was there for, when President Obama made the decision for what our presence in Afghanistan would look like in 2016 and to be part of that decision process or be up close with the decision process. Back to my twelve year old self, wanting to understand why countries made the decisions that they did, I got to see it firsthand with two different presidents.

So just very unique look as to, as Colin said, that overall mission to prevent another attack and prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven from which attacks on our allies and partners could be emanated stayed constant, all that in between. It varied, perhaps year to year.

>> Moderator: I think it's interesting cuz your experience at the strategic level is kind of a top down, but I think Felicia and John, you kind of experienced from the bottom up.

So, Felicia, I'd love to hear about your experience in Afghanistan and military service. And then, if you don't mind, I'd like to understand a little bit about how your experience has now translated to who you are as civilian and how your time has affected your decision to kind of help veterans now in your civilian capacity.

 

>> Farishta Shams: Yeah, so much different experience. Definitely going. When I arrived in Afghanistan, I was an E6. So that's an enlisted. So that just meant that I was in charge of the enlisted individuals that were on the ground there as staff sergeant. So for us, the work was the day to day.

How many flat vests do we have? Does everyone have their weapon? It's our responsibility to make sure that if alarms are going off, that everyone is accounted. If we are being rocketed, was there areas that were hit? How are our people? So it was a very different sort of situation, I think, for us, and it's the same for officers as well.

Your biggest responsibility in this incredible weight is to your brother and your sister that's right next to you. The decisions of the powerful are so much less important than the individual that you are sharing a bunk with or the individual that you're gonna be out in the firing line training with.

They just become so incredibly important to you, and not just for the time that you're on the ground, but forever. It's a different type of brotherhood, it's a different type of sisterhood. It's the type of sisterhood that would take Take, I don't have to see your face for ten years.

It doesn't matter, because if you called me tomorrow, I'd be on a plane tomorrow. I'd be at your house tomorrow. I'd take care of your child tomorrow. It's a very different situation. It changes you that way. I'm the oldest of seven, and I can't tell you that my relationship with my siblings is the same as that.

So it's really, really difficult for a civilian to truly understand that type of relationship. So, for me, in coming home after this experience of making it back with everyone that we left with was huge. But understanding that there were so many additional things that took place for everyone.

We didn't sleep for weeks because the rockets came in at 3 AM. we were out on the ground, and the convoy before us blew up. But our convoy didn't blow up. This time, our convoy did blow up, but we didn't lose any of our people. So it's this sort of situation that you find yourself in when you come back and you're wondering, okay, what do I do now?

Who am I at this particular phase in my life? You know that you're different because you can't even have the conversations that you used to have. You know, you're like, are we talking about the real Housewives of who? You know what I mean?

>> Farishta Shams: Girl, if you don't get out of my face with this nonsense.

 

>> Farishta Shams: So, like, you know, you. You also understand that, like, so many more things are possible. You don't have to work within the confines of some sort of predetermined structure, because you were not working in the confines of some predetermined structure then, so I was able to shift my career focus and began to work in different career paths.

And ultimately, where I am right now is, like, the third iteration of a nonprofit organization that I've been a part of, like, but this one, I'm really proud to say that I am supporting the efforts of growing a program that supports the mental health of veterans and their families.

It's a national program. When I joined, it wasn't, and I was part of that group that turned it to a national center of excellence. And now, like, we provide mental health, resiliency wellness services across the country for veterans at no cost to them. So that's what I do now.

 

>> Moderator: I think you and John came back and decided that your life was about service. Everyone on the panel did, but I think the two of you really exemplify service here at this local level. John, you told me, I'm gonna quote you. I thought this was brilliant. You told me that,.

 

>> Moderator: How much you loved the Real Housewives, so. Felicia, stop talking to me.

>> Moderator: So you told me that it was amazing to you how. How big the war was and how local the war was at the same time. And why we're here is you've led an extraordinary effort to resettle Afghan refugees here in Chelmsford.

So what motivated you, and can you tell us more about how your service in Afghanistan, and the particular experiences you had in Afghanistan motivated what you're doing now?

>> John Moses: Yeah, absolutely. And I wanna address the quote first, because I think people don't realize. No, it's true. One of the things I've learned, I think for everybody here, not everybody here, there are some people that served in Afghanistan in this room, but the people from Chelmsford that didn't serve in Afghanistan, the war probably seemed really far away.

The end of Afghanistan probably seemed far away, and that isn't necessarily true. And I think when you talk about democracy, these tiny filaments, these people that live in these communities, and what changes they can make. So when the war in Afghanistan was ending, during the evacuation in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and my wife and my kids were there for this experience, I literally gave up my entire life for two weeks to help Afghans.

There's some in this room, right, some people that I attempted to help and get out. And that was in your town? I was in Chelmsford when that happened. And to take that a step further, and I'm not gonna point this person out, but there was a Chelmsford High graduate in the airport.

So you had somebody here in Chelmsford helping Afghans, and then you had a soldier that was in the National Guard in the airport, a Chelmsford high graduate. That war wasn't far from us at all. So I think sometimes we look at the big war and the small town, we forget that those tiny little filaments are the people, that it's our people.

So that was the first part of the quote. What was the second question? I missed the-

>> Moderator: Well, I wanted you to talk a little bit about your experience in Afghanistan, how that's led to where you are today.

>> John Moses: Yeah, I was really fortunate. So my career was a little different.

I ended up getting selected for the embassy. So my battalion came down and one of the offices there had a lot of faith in me. Major Tam, actually, Colonel Tam and a couple of other great officers that were like, hey, we're the only per, I wasn't even the right rank.

They were like, you're just the most political person, and you won't burn everything down at the embassy.

>> John Moses: So they sent me to the embassy, and I was like, all right, I'll go to the embassy, which you don't have a lot of supervision. But what I did have was an incredible group of Afghan employees and interpreters and people, because on embassies, it's almost all local nationals that work there.

It's like 70 or 80%. So you're working with Afghans all the time. And then by just the nature of my work, I was able to go into the communities. I would go to Kabul, I would go to Mazar-i-Sharif, and I would meet with people. And universally, afghan people were kind to me.

My interpreter, Massoud, pulled me out of some really squirrely situations. And I think at the end of it, all of that service, all that work we did just reflected back on Afghans, and I wanted to give back. When everything ended, I felt like I owed them. I made that promise, right?

You make that promise, like we're gonna do, we're not the Russians. We're not gonna do the Russian thing, except we did, right? We just left them, a lot of them behind, and it wasn't okay for me. So that experience of being around afghan people, being around afghan children, eating food with Afghans, and learning about their incredible compassion and humanity and the love they have for each other and the people that they care about.

When the war ended, there was 100% chance that I was gonna give everything up to get as many out as I could. And that's how I ended up doing that work. A lot of people along the way, though, I didn't do that work alone. It was a lot of people helped get those people out.

 

>> Moderator: Well, I think your experience with the Afghan population and the relationships that you built and this kind of deep but also very intimate connection in your time in Afghanistan, I think that's an experience that actually, many American troops had. And I think that intimate kind of relationships that they built in Afghanistan makes our retreat kind of more complicated, right?

Because you can be individually proud of the work you did. And yet also, I think some people feel shame about the way we laughed or. And I think in general, America doesn't really want to talk about the legacy of Afghanistan or how complicated those feelings might be for veterans.

And one of the things that I have realized in doing these town halls is how important just having the conversation is, both between veterans and between veterans and their local communities. I want to turn to Jason, because you've been organizing efforts to try and do this kind of civil discussions within your local community of my home state of Texas.

Can you describe a little bit about that effort and then talk a little bit about your perspective as a veteran, as someone who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, now working with the Bush Institute to support veterans to help heal some of these divides?

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah, well, thanks for giving me a chance to talk about the prosper exchange.

So I grew up in Beverly, went to West Point from Beverly, but I now live 30 miles north of Dallas in a town called Prosper. I figured we'd go there and try to prosper, that's the idea.

>> Jason Shenanda: But while I was there, I retired from the army in 20 and showed up there in late summer of 2020.

And the first guy I met there in town was an Air Force academy graduate, class of 87. And he and I started talking about just sort of the state of the world, very kind and welcoming my family, me to prosper. And we, of course, in summer of 20, COVID's happening, my family's transitioning.

If you recall, there was some presidential election happening, so there was rhetoric, there was just all this stuff. And we said, man, what has happened to our country? What is this? What is going on? And we just started saying, like, man, we gotta bring people back together, we gotta have conversations, we need to have real conversations, not talking point platforms.

We need to have real conversations about real issues in person and how are we gonna do this? And back to the idea of service after your military service. I thought of that as service beyond the uniform. And I quickly realized in that conversation not long thereafter that my service to the country was gonna be more challenging after the uniform than while I was in it.

It was almost in the uniform it's pretty easy. It's afterwards, it's much harder, cuz now I'm in a disguise that people, they don't see US Army and automatically give you the credibility. And so David Bristol and I talked about creating this forum, and after about a year, we launched what we call the Prosper exchange.

The purpose of which is to promote civic engagement and participation through honest dialogue and civil discourse around a country's most challenging issues. I remember saying to David in our town of 28,000 people. If we can't have real conversations about the real issues in uncomfortable ways, then the american experiment is doomed is it.

And I'm proud to say last year in 2023, we launched it. We tackled three issues. We haven't done Afghanistan yet, or foreign policy necessarily, but we tackled immigration, we're in Texas, let's go after immigration. So we had immigration talked about taxation, which would have been popular here in Boston at taxation.

We talked about reaffirmation of democratic principles. And just last month, our first one for 24, we actually brought in the gentleman that portrays Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg. He was kind enough to fly down, and we posed one question. We asked Mister Jefferson, our first secretary of state, our third president, what is freedom?

What an interesting dialogue we had. But the point of all that is we brought people together. We started with 30 people, the last one we had was 95 people. So it's venues like this, we're not meeting in any fancy places, we're meeting at school cafeteria, community rooms, and just trying to bring people together to have the real conversations around real issues.

 

>> Moderator: Well, Cohen, you're my professor on the panel, and you've studied this war?

>> Paul Cohen: Right.

>> Moderator: You've experienced this war and now you serve on the Afghan war commission.

>> Paul Cohen: Yeah.

>> Moderator: So meanwhile, at the same time, you have kids that are now making decisions about whether or not to serve in the military.

So I wondered, from your kind of both scholarly and as you're like dad hat, how do you think Afghanistan and two decades of combat service has affected the all volunteer force?

>> Paul Cohen: So I think it's had an enormous impact generationally. And it's not just the Afghanistan war, it's the combination of Afghanistan and Iraq as an experience, certainly for the military in all its dimensions, reserve guardhouse active.

It was a generational experience, and I was teaching at the war college in my civilian capacity during much of this time. So I joined the Naval War College in 2006, and I was seeing essentially mid grade officers come through the college. And the level of exhaustion, elements of anger for the cohort of sort of majors and lieutenant colonels coming through in sort of the peak of the Iraq War and then into the peak of the Afghanistan War was palpable.

And on an individual level, I was very ambivalent, I have been an active duty person, but now I'm in the civilian capacity. I'm watching these people who are worn out come through the college for a year, and then they're gonna go back to Iraq or they're gonna go back to Afghanistan again.

So I sort of had a first person observation of what that looked like of the toll it took, I think, cumulatively, on the officers and families who went through this. On a scholarly level, I mean, I've always been interested in this question of whether the volunteer military that emerges from the post Vietnam period is a good thing, bad thing, what are the tradeoffs?

I think most of us who have served in this volunteer military have been astounded by the quality that comes with volunteer, volunteering, right? No one is being forced to be there, everybody's raising their hand once, maybe twice, maybe three times. On the other hand, the strain it imposed on this tiny subset of the american population went largely unnoticed for people outside of large military communities.

And the number of friends either from my year group, year group 92 that were commissioned then or later year groups, a lot of them made decisions about whether to leave the military based on the toll on their families. And I worked for and with a number of people who ended up becoming general officers only to lose their first spouse the spouse said, I can't do this anymore.

So I think there was like an unseen toll not only of the mental health on veterans, but the strain on the families who in many ways carried the heaviest burden during these deployments, where all of us on this stage are off doing exciting things. It may be dangerous, but it is a very vital experience.

For the families it's worrying every day, and that certainly is an experience of this generation. Now I'll put my dad hat on. It was very strange, my first son did not show any interest in coming to talk to me about military service. He went right to my wife, who he knew was the real barrier to overcome here.

 

>> Paul Cohen: And he confronted my wife as a sophomore in high school. And he said, mom, I wanna do ROTC for five reasons. And he's very much his mother's father.

>> Moderator: Very firstborn.

>> Paul Cohen: Yeah, yeah, firstborn, and there were, in fact, five reasons, national service, job, etc. And I thought it was telling that he didn't come to me.

And I think I would have been much more ambivalent right? About that experience and that decision had he come to me. The real surprise with this last year, my. My daughter was recruited to go to West Point, and if everything works out, she'll go in a year and a half there.

That was a surprise to me. The family reacted very differently along sort of gender lines. So my parents were thrilled that the eldest son was going to go into the army. When the discussion of my daughter going to West Point, there was a little bit of a tightening of faces, not from myself or my wife, but from my parents.

And they were like, well, we're okay with son number one going, but what about your youngest daughter? So there were some interesting subtext there. But you're definitely, when you wear the parent hat, you wear a very, very different thing. It's more like being a military spouse. You're worried about your kid, right?

I don't worry about myself. When I'm doing something dangerous, that's interesting, fun and exciting. That may sound off, but it's true. But when your kids are at risk, you do really think about it very, very differently. And so that's been an interesting early experience. And now all I do is get phone calls for my son, who now has a cell phone.

I didn't have a cell phone when I was in the army. He calls with all these lieutenant problems, like, I'm dealing with this in my platoon and. And I've got like, you should really have him call me. No, absolutely.

>> Paul Cohen: I can only give him bad advice.

>> John Moses: You're better off.

 

>> Paul Cohen: Yeah, that's exactly right. But that's the surreal experience I'm living now.

>> Moderator: Well, I wanna take the opportunity to get the audience involved. Some of you have received cards when you walked in. Please go ahead and pass. If you guys, or if you need a card, Jeff can give you a card.

Please write down your question on the card that's going to get sent up to me and then I can ask our panelists that question. So please, I'm gonna ask one more question and then y'all take your, I'm from Texas. You all take this opportunity to write down your questions so you can be part of this important conversation.

Farishta, I wanna turn to you because of some of the comments you said earlier about that feeling of kind of brotherhood and comradeship and your work with mental health. I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation that we had, I think, a little over 2000 killed, but we had ten times that number of wounded and untold amounts that came back with mental health issues.

But I think this is a really complicated, once again, complicated story because you have a story about the 911 veteran generation being wounded and having mental health issues. And yet I think the experience can also be something that makes people very resilient and successful. So how do you, as someone who works now in the veteran mental health world, how do you kinda balance this idea of veterans as both wounded and kind of successful and important contributors to society?

 

>> Farishta Shams: Yeah, that's really interesting, right. So I think a lot of things have changed from, I would say, like, the Vietnam era, right. When we welcomed the Vietnam era home, they sort of had to hide. They were not greeted in the airport when you were showing up in your uniform.

They had a good GI bill. A lot of those guys went ahead and went to Harvard and had these great degrees, but you would never know that they actually even had any service. They sort of gritted their teeth through all of it. But as time has gone by, we understand that it's important to care for our mental health.

We understand that, hey, there might be something wrong with the fact that I'm waking up at 03:00 a.m. Every single morning, and having a difficult time resting my head. There might be something wrong with the fact that I don't wanna be around my family anymore like I used to.

You know, there might be something wrong that I'm not with the fact that I'm not getting joy out of, like, being at my kids soccer game. You know, these sorts of things that before, you know, you know, we expected men to sort of, like, grit their teeth and march their way through are not necessarily the things that, like, a family is going to want to be able to deal with, especially after the fact that they've, like, held your hand during their.

Your 18 month or your fifth deployment. And we talk about the family serving alongside the service member and service members, when you say resilient and strong, you can't tell that they're going through anything. Family members know, but you can't tell, you know, and then the next thing you know, we've lost such and such.

We've lost this person, and yet another suicide. We went through a rash of suicides in the Massachusetts National Guard. There was one year where our average was above the national average in losses for service members in the Massachusetts National Guard. And the story would always be the same.

I was just talking to him. He seemed okay, but that sort of canary in the coal mine is always the family, my wife is going to leave me or I'm having a hard time with connecting with my children now that I'm back, as a female. Those sorts of things become these sort of opportunities for us to say to the service member, why don't you seek some support?

Why don't you consider maybe joining a wellness program or reaching out that way? There's ways that you can still be that resilient and strong service member and still seek the support that you require in order to be the best version of yourself. I find that, like, it's easy for individuals that are already civically minded to bury themselves in their work.

It's another trauma response a lot of times. And we aren't facing the issues that are sort of haunting us. And I'm grateful that we live in a time now where the stigma is not completely gone, but it's getting better and we understand the importance of the community wrapping their arms around their people.

As opposed to ostracizing military service members and supporting the families as well.

>> Moderator: Jason and John, I know you guys have kind of reacts, comments that you wanna add to this as well.

>> Jason Shenanda: Sure, I will say, I'm gonna borrow John's quote here a little bit. I think it's the war being so far away but yet so local.

The same with, I mean, with the mental health challenges. And as you might have heard Jackie say, I'm at the Bush Institute. It's George W Bush Institute in Dallas. So I work for President and Mrs. Bush now. And President Bush is the post 911 commander in chief. He was the president that ordered us into Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he and misses Bush have committed for the rest of their lives to take care of veterans and their families. He often asked, in fact, the first question he asked me when I joined the team was, how are we doing on the invisible wounds of war and how do we know people are getting better?

And he put together several years ago something called the Warrior Wellness Alliance. That is not the Veteran Wellness Alliance, of which Homebase is a clinical partner in this alliance. And we have 11 clinical partners and 9 peer network partners, you might have heard of Team Red White & Blue or Wounded Warrior project.

There's a whole host of them that are part of this, and we've seen over the first several years of the program. The program provides no cost access to mental and brain health for veterans, active duty and their families. And the initial part, there was a lot of family referrals.

To Felicia's point, it was the veterans not seeking help. It was their family members knowing. And for me personally, for me, it was August 10, 2012 when my wife told me that I had to get help, that she couldn't do it. And I knew I wasn't gonna go ask my family for help, but I'm gonna figure this out myself.

But my wife Samantha said, this is above my pay grade. She was a soldier too. She said, you need to get it. She walked me through that path. So oftentimes when you encounter veterans, someone in your family, you may have to take that first step. And I'll plug our website.

It's veterancheckin.org, I say it's our website. It's the Veteran Wellness alliance website. You'll see no reference to the Bush Institute on there, but it's a website that family members can refer and get. It's no cost to anyone other than maybe a little bit of time and a little bit of pride.

 

>> John Moses: No, I actually wanted to say, in regards to what Felicia had mentioned, I'm actually a big proponent of homebase, actually. I know a couple people here have used homebase, and I think one of the things that you see is when service members come back, we understand kind of the problems that they have, and a lot of people end up working for organizations like that.

I do think that one thing has helped my generation is that stigma is definitely less. I remember when I, you know, when you talk to Vietnam veterans or even Gulf veterans, I think there was a stigma about having a mental health disorder, especially going back to places like World War two.

My great grandfather became a recluse after World War II, and there's a lot of people that are like, we don't need mental health in the military or resiliency. But I mean, home base really, really saved it for me. And I just think that at the end of it now, with the way leadership works in the military, we became much more open.

So when I came home from Afghanistan, nobody was like, don't talk about it or anything. We had this crusty old fur sergeant that stood up in front of us haggard, and just came out of Afghanistan and he's like, I'm going to therapy, and all you SOBs are going to therapy.

And I was like-.

>> John Moses: And I turned around and I was at e seven, and I turned around and I was like, guess we're all going to therapy, and.

>> John Moses: But we did it. And then we continued on. And even though I will say, even with that work, even with that work.

And then somebody, like, so old and he was so crusty. I love him so much. First Sarg Nicholas, man, he was something else. But, like, to get up there and say that we still, you know, in my career, I've lost four people to suicide. Either suicide, drug overdose, one guy drove into a bridge drunk, and then one guy was a regular suicide.

And all of those had significant impact. And I couldn't even imagine what it would be like in a war where you didn't have any of those resources or the permission, I guess, the permission structure to do it. So I really appreciate it.

>> Farishta Shams: You had to hide your service, yeah.

 

>> John Moses: Yeah, the work that Felicia does is God's work, for sure. Absolutely, the home base organization, I don't know yours yet, but I'll be.

>> Moderator: So I want to stay on that theme. Taking one of the audience questions, and the audience question is really about families, right? So a lot of organizations are built to help veterans, and yet the families often bear the brunt of the veteran service.

So what can communities do to help families?

>> John Moses: Well, I know in my town, because it happens to be my town, so I'm gonna go first. I'm just gonna take liberty here. We have Regina Jackson. We have an incredibly vibrant military community. We have the military community covenant.

I think we just happen to have a really particularly military friendly community, and we reach out to each other and we talk to each other. But I think how you do it is you welcome people back. So I think people came back from the war probably for two decades in Chelmsford.

And how many people really were paying attention if you went back? I went and read a bunch of the old town recordstown meeting records just to kind of see what was out there. And one of the things you saw is during World War II, you saw these rolls, right, roll of honor, and you would see these people that were deploying and you'd see all the challenges the town had.

And then you got to Vietnam and you didn't see the rolls of honor, and then you get to the Gulf and you don't see the rolls of honor. And I think somewhere in there we've lost that community piece where it requires the whole community to welcome the veteran back.

And I think we do a pretty good job in Chelmsford, but I think we can always do better. But we have great people like Regina and the veterans department here in the military community covenant who do work for veterans. But it's really on the residents and the people in the community to volunteer and raise their hand and be like, I want to do it.

 

>> Moderator: I think this can be especially difficult for communities that don't have bases right in their vicinity.

>> Farishta Shams: Exactly.

>> Moderator: So I think this has an outside effect on reserve and guard members who are not near a very large base where there already are kind of these known relationships with deploying units.

And also, I think reserve and guard members sometimes end up deploying individually. And so when they come home, you don't have this large, not always do you have this large unit return?

>> Farishta Shams: Yeah, one of the things that I was working on before I ran out of the Massachusetts National Guard,

 

>> Farishta Shams: Washington, with the adjutant generals and the states, because they have a program called Family programs, which is supposed to be civilian run. But it wasn't doing a really good job of folding in community organizations so that we could provide support for families as they are the ones that are dealing with the brunt of the fallout of losing 22 service members a year, right, a day, I'm sorry.

So and making sure that those individuals have these full wraparound services and at Home Base, we started that way where when the service member serves, the family member serves. But not all organizations have, like, you know, like, brought that mantra in. And I think that if you are a part of any sort of veteran supporting organization here in this room, that's step one is making sure that, like, if your charter does not specifically say that we support the veteran and the family, change it, change it and make sure that you are including military families.

And it's not even just, it's who the veteran says is their family member. Allow that family member that the veteran says is their family member to be a part of what your organization stands for. It'll just go a long, long way because whereas you are not on military bases, the organizations that the veteran belongs to is their extended family, as opposed to the military base being the family's extended family.

 

>> Moderator: So I'm gonna switch gears to what I think is actually one of the most difficult questions we've had all night. So this question is about two decades of time in Afghanistan and a goal to help women and girls achieve their basic rights and education. But when we left Afghanistan, that many of those, if not all of those efforts that were made to advance women's rights and to educate women in Afghanistan have been rolled back quite dramatically in some cases.

How do service members reconcile those efforts and those stated efforts with what the situation on the ground is today in Afghanistan for women.

>> John Moses: Well, I'll take this one. So, I mean, just even to go more full circle, when we talk about that wider war thing, how do we reconcile that?

So I reconciled it by founding Massachusetts Afghan Alliance, right. Which kind of we helped promote this and bring it in. I think, though, that wider space. There are actually families in our community right now in Chelmsford, Afghan families that are separated from their families overseas, right. So we have a person that lives right there, about ten minutes from here, and their daughters are in Afghanistan, and they were going to school past 6th grade, kind of illegally, whatever.

So this guy lives right down the street, he's thousands of miles away from his kid, and he's a Chelmsford resident, works in Chelmsford, has his car registered in Chelmsford. And he had to pull his daughters out of school in Kabul because the Taliban were going into schools and arresting kids, right.

And so these wars in these places that we serve are just not really far away. And I reconciled that by doing, by building mass afghan alliance and helping Afghans. I still help many afghan families in Afghanistan find their way back here, even though it's kind of a process now, it's more process driven.

But how do you reconcile that? Man, I don't know. I think when the war ended that way, I felt like for quite some time and quite a bit of therapy, that all the work I did didn't even matter. It was that moral injury piece to it all. And a lot of that had to do with women, because a lot of the women absolutely understood what they were fighting for.

When we were trying to get people through the airport, we had one family, it was a mom. The father wasn't even in the country. And we were like, either you get through that gate or there's no exit for you and your daughters and everything. And that woman, man, she was like, just bear rushed to get to a marine to get out.

The women in Afghanistan know, they know what they're losing. They know they have online schools. We have organizations that teach afghan women on the side, and illegally. But that's a really hard one to fit. I have a daughter, my daughter Ella's over there. She's gonna be so mad I just brought her up, sorry.

 

>> John Moses: And I talked to my friend Zabi, and when he talks about these things that are happening with the girls and the women in Afghanistan, and I know if it was my daughter or my wife, I would crawl through the walls, right. And so these wars are really close and these people are really close, and they really just don't underestimate how much Afghanistan veterans are affected or iraqi veterans when it came to the Kurds.

 

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah, for me, the way I kind of reconcile or I don't know if that's the right word, but you used it.

>> Moderator: It's a hard verb. I don't know.

>> Jason Shenanda: I'm fortunate to be at the Bush Institute, where we have a global policy effort. We have actually a series of three papers coming out on Afghanistan, one of which is on how do we kind of motivate or inspire and incentivize the international community, whatever that means today, to hold Taliban accountable for what they're doing?

And I guess from a policy perspective, the most significant impact we've had so far is at the House Foreign Affairs Committee asking questions about certain Taliban ministers who have been given waivers for travel for their health to Turkey. So we're trying to roll that back. And so as the Taliban are rolling back education, they're getting this healthcare outside of Afghanistan, that this is our part, this is our contribution to the effort.

And so for me, having served in Afghanistan, both in Kabul and from a policy perspective in DC, continuing to contribute to the effort from where I sit now is the way we try to do it. And obviously, we have some great people still trying to, despite US not having an official presence there, doing what we can.

 

>> Moderator: So the next question asks specifically about this, right? So it says that veterans are among these leaders helping to evacuate. And a lot of the informal organizations and now formal organizations that stood up during that evacuation were led by military members. We had a big effort that happened, led by General McMaster at Hoover and continues to be working on that.

Why was it veterans that felt so struck? And that's the question is why are veterans the one that see this problem? But I'm going to flip it a little bit. And is it the ownness? Do veterans bear the onus of kind of trying to solve? Not solve, but trying to reach out to these populations that they spent two decades serving inside their country?

 

>> John Moses: I served, I mean, I don't know about anybody else, but when Afghanistan collapsed, my interpreter called me. He was like, hey, I need help. My whole family's here. He was in the us, fortunately, but that was what started it for me. And then, yeah, I think, yeah, I'll let the next person go.

 

>> Jason Shenanda: I think it was all hands on deck.

>> John Moses: It's all hands on deck.

>> Jason Shenanda: We got calls to, can you help fill out these forms? And who do we know? Can we get this to the state Department? It was just all hands on deck.

>> John Moses: I think for a lot of us, it was like this really.

I mean, for me, it was like a PTSD thing. All of a sudden, these people, I had made these incredible. I didn't make promises, first of all. Americans made promises to Afghans, and we did it through elections, and we did it through votes, and we did it through administrations, and we decided to be there for 20 something years and build that country.

And then so when we left, I felt like we had made these great promises to these Afghans and we had built up for over 20 years. People went to university, they went to real schools. They were really Americanized. And then to just pull out like that and just leave and just people leave hanging with the bag.

And some of these people, I don't even think a lot of people know this when you're talking about these Afghans, a lot of them earned their right to be here. The SIV program, special immigrant visa program, they worked. They worked really hard. Some of them were interpreters. Some of them put their lives, many, many Afghans died as interpreters in other roles.

And so for me, when everything collapsed and only 120 something thousand people came out, for me, it was a broken promise, and it was an antithesis of the promises that we had all made to the people that we cared about. And so for me, there was no question that I was going to dive in and I was going to do the NCO thing and make sure it didn't fail as best I could anyway.

 

>> Moderator: I think for many people who served during Afghanistan, this generation that served includes folks who served actually kind of at the tail end of Vietnam. So there are post 9/11 veterans who actually served as Vietnam was ending. and I think the mantra for many was that Afghanistan was not going to be our generation's Vietnam, that we were not going to leave Afghanistan the way we left Saigon.

Do you think that's true? Is Afghanistan this generation's Vietnam?

>> John Moses: I don't think so. I don't think so because of us, right. I think there was this whole community. I think we learned a lot from Vietnam. I'm very empathetic and sympathetic to Vietnam veterans after cuz Saigon happened, right.

And for me, I'd seen it on a documentary. You probably saw it in documentary. Well, maybe not all of us, but some of us saw it on a documentary,

>> Paul Cohen: Wounded.

>> John Moses: Sorry, I'm sorry.

>> John Moses: But so for me, when I saw Afghanistan, and in a very similar way, I mean, the helicopter photo and everything, I was like, we don't have to do that 20 year cycle again.

We don't have to take ten years to try to heal the wounds of the. And then to spend another ten years declassifying things, another ten years getting them the medicine for Agent Orange. We don't have to make the same mistake with Afghan veterans, so why do it, right?

Like, that's kind of my stance on it. Sorry about that, I feel-

>> Paul Cohen: No, that's okay, it's okay. But I guess I would take, I mean, I think everyone's sharing, both stated and unstated, this sense that I think it's natural within the veteran community that we somehow broke promises, or someone broke promises that have been given to an entire country.

And particularly, a generation of young people, not just women and girls, but everybody under the age of 40 was so touched in Afghanistan by what the United States was trying to accomplish. And I think it's hard to look at this with any sense of goodness wrapped up in it.

My caveat would be, I don't think it's accidental that the veteran community is the community overrepresented in responding to this crisis, in wanting to make amends, because I think it is connected to what drew people to military service or how they were changed by military service. This notion of bonds that are unbreakable, that are built not only between Americans serving together, but with partners in these countries.

And I don't think it's accidental that you would see, I remember finding, I think I mentioned to somebody on the panel, a Vietnam veteran who had worked in Laos, in Vietnam, who in 2011 was the guy giving the eulogy for a Montagnard he had worked with who passed away in 2011.

These bonds are unbreakable for veterans with their comrades who are Americans and also with, whether it's Vietnamese, Montagnards, or Afghans, it's the same feeling. So I think there is a real nobility of service. There's something deeply virtuous that veterans feel. They may have left the war zone, but they haven't left the people who touch them or the problems that they left behind.

 

>> Moderator: Well, I think we probably have time for one more of these questions, and I'm gonna bring it back to community. And what do you guys think are the greatest obstacles or issues that veterans face when they integrate back into their communities? I think, Cohen, you just mentioned kind of this nobleness and this value and this service.

And one of the things that's been remarkable to me doing these town halls, how every veteran I've spoken to talks about their desire to find value when they return back to the civilian communities. What do you think? I mean, that's a great and extraordinary thing, and it makes people like John do extraordinary things that can also be a heavy burden to hold.

So what do you think are the biggest obstacles to doing that transition successfully?

>> Farishta Shams: I think it's different for everyone. I think it's different for all the folks on this panel. He's going back to be a full time dad of these flourishing young adults. And what does the world look like for him now?

You're starting this great organization that forces Americans to talk to each other again, and then John is trying to keep the promises of a nation

>> John Moses: Doing all right.

>> John Moses: I got five promises and we're good.

>> Farishta Shams: But I think, as everyday Americans, we all have different things that we are battling with.

I think for many of us, we want to find a sense of purpose. Trying to come back to community. We want that sense of, the work that I'm doing now makes just as much sense of the work that I was doing while I was deployed. And trying to find that sometimes is difficult.

How do I go back from working alongside Afghan nationals at the embassy to working at Home Depot and making it make sense for me? It's just hard for some people to reintegrate. And the thing is, there's so much value in the community and there's noble work, working at any place.

But this getting rid of that sense of service in such a way that allows you to crack yourself back open and become part of the community again is the work of all of us, it's the work of the community. Saying, you know, I know that you have, you know, may feel a little bit different, but we're your family and we're here for you.

We have these things, we're doing this for the family. We're supporting your wives and your children, your mothers and your daughters in this way, we can do it. You know, we can help the service members. We can help the family members. You know, just, it just takes a little bit of opening up.

 

>> Jason Shenanda: I mean, I think Felicia said the sense of purpose is the key. And I think for whatever reason people choose to join, I think you could categorize into four buckets, purpose, variety, stability-

>> Moderator: The chicks, right?

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah, yeah.

>> Jason Shenanda: That's right, even though it doesn't work out.

 

>> John Moses: It's a small percentage game.

>> Jason Shenanda: But when we leave service, that sense of purpose feels as if it's stripped out from underneath us, and then we're left saying, okay, wow, now what, and it's this search. And I am almost four years into civilian life, post army life.

And it took me, I don't know, a good three years to really establish my new sense of purpose, and it took me opening up and looking around my community. And you joked about Home Depot, but I was at Lowe's, and Lowe's some of the associates in Lowe's, they have the camouflage vest.

And I watched this gentleman and I watched him, really, he was doing a great job helping some shoppers there in Lowe's, and I started chatting with him. He medically retired as a staff sergeant in the US army. And I just could tell the passion he had. I said, well, what do you do now?

What do you do now? I know you're here at Lowe's. And he said to me, well, I helped my community members get what they need here. And it hit me, right, almost in that moment, he's found his purpose, he's found his service, his service beyond the uniform.

>> Moderator: Exactly.

 

>> Jason Shenanda: And I went home and my wife is the PTO president of our local high school. She was in the uniform, now she's serving in the community. So it's your service to country didn't go away. It's just helping us see how it transformed.

>> Moderator: All right, I've been told, we have got to finish because food is coming out.

 

>> Moderator: So what I didn't tell the panelists is that I like to end with a lightning round. And what the lightning round is, is it's a combination of, like, easy, funny questions with, like, questions that require dissertations, and you have the same amount of time to answer them.

So we're gonna start, Felicia, on your end, we're gonna start with easy, iced coffee or hot coffee?

>> Farishta Shams: Hot coffee.

>> Paul Cohen: Same question.

>> Moderator: Yeah.

>> Paul Cohen: Seasonal.

>> Moderator: That's so not very New England of you.

>> Jason Shenanda: Hot coffee.

>> Moderator: Hot coffee.

>> Jason Shenanda: Yeah.

>> John Moses: Coffee and coffee, but chai, a lot of chai.

 

>> Moderator: See, I actually thought you guys would I mean, like the stunning thing I learned from living in New England is that it can be, like, 15 degrees and you're gonna get a nice coffee at Dunkin.

>> Moderator: But that was shocking to me.

>> John Moses: The iced coffee is when you need the caffeine fast.

 

>> Moderator: Yeah, yeah.

>> Moderator: Okay, all right easy one. Now we're going harder, John.

>> John Moses: Yeah.

>> Moderator: Should we reinstate the draft?

>> John Moses: No.

>> Moderator: Jason?

>> Jason Shenanda: No.

>> Moderator: Colin? Maybe. Farishta?

>> Farishta Shams: Maybe.

>> Moderator: Maybe, okay.

>> Jason Shenanda: Yes or no I thought it was right.

>> Moderator: All right, Colin, I'll start with you on.

 

>> Moderator: I'll start with you on the next one. White or red clam chowder?

>> Paul Cohen: What?

>> Jason Shenanda: I don't

>> Moderator: Cohen.

>> Paul Cohen: I'm the only one in my family who doesn't eat chowder.

>> Moderator: You don't eat chowder? My God, you really get to California.

>> Paul Cohen: I know.

>> Moderator: Hot coffee and no chowder.

 

>> Moderator: Jason?

>> Jason Shenanda: White

>> Moderator: White?

>> John Moses: I didn't even know there was ranch.

>> Jason Shenanda: Exactly.

>> Moderator: Y'all don't spend enough time out of Massachusetts, come down to Rhode Island.

>> Moderator: Yikes. White. My gosh. All right, Jason, favorite place to be stationed?

>> Jason Shenanda: Fort Carson, Colorado.

>> Moderator: Okay. It's a little harder for the reserve and guard members, but-

 

>> John Moses: Fort Eustace, Virginia. Awesome post really far from the flagpole. Nobody messed with me, it was a great post.

>> Farishta Shams: Home.

>> John Moses: That's the right answer.

>> Moderator: Colin, you've had the luxury of being, you're an army by military service, but you've now been at a Navy base for a long time so where do you choose?

 

>> Paul Cohen: I'm not going Navy. I'm going Fulda, Germany.

>> Farishta Shams: Yeah

>> Moderator: Nice, nice.

>> John Moses: That's a good one.

>> Moderator: Okay, Jason, what is one lesson you learned personally from your time serving in Afghanistan?

>> Jason Shenanda: To trust myself.

>> Moderator: Okay, interesting. John?

>> John Moses: One lesson I took from Afghanistan?

 

>> Moderator: One, I've been told, like, cut it.

>> John Moses: I know, I can see him over there looking at you. It's really awkward. I'm gonna keep talking just keep looking at me.

>> John Moses: I really found, I think, my humanity there. I mean, between the then and after humanity.

>> Moderator: Farishta?

 

>> Farishta Shams: That we're very small.

>> Moderator: Cohen?

>> Paul Cohen: That everybody is down on younger generations, but they shouldn't be, because it's the Every generation is like,

>> Paul Cohen: The greatest generation when they serve in uniform. It was a renewing experience for me to see young people being their band of brothers.

But in our contemporary era so have faith.

>> Moderator: Well, I think I'm gonna end on that because I smell delicious food.

>> Moderator: I wanna hand over to John to do the final thank you. But I wanna just say, from Hoover and from Stanford, thank you Chelmsford. Thank you for having us here.

Thank you for coming to hear these veterans' stories. And thank you for being the type of community that opens your arms to people who really deserve to be embraced and given all those opportunities that we fought for in Afghanistan. Please say thank you.

>> John Moses: All right, so he's getting mad at me again, but all right.

No, I just wanna say thank you to everybody coming. Like I said, when Stanford asked to come to Chelmsford I was like, Chelmsford is gonna show up. There's no way Chelmsford won't show up for this. People underestimate small towns, right, they really underestimate. But how important in the fabric America small towns really are?

I think is evident when you talk about wars like Afghanistan, it's all fueled by people. There's some amazing food that's about to be served back there. There's Afghan food, there's Kabuli Palau, there's all kinds of stuff. So if you like Afghan food, go back there and try it.

And then afterwards, once you guys mingle for a bit, we're gonna head over to Navigation Brewing, which just opened and it's about a three-minute walk. Take a right and a right, we'll get you over there. Not you, Dean, you're not allowed.

>> John Moses: I'm just kidding. But no, thank you so much for coming and I really appreciate you.

I'm not native to Chelmsford. I came here in 2012, but we've definitely adopted each other, I think so at this point. So, thank you all for coming.

>> Moderator: Thank you.