What Roles Can Veterans Play In Their Community

>> Stuart Helgeson: Well, good evening, and thank you for coming and welcome. I'm Colonel Stuart Helgeson, the President of Valley Forge Military Academy, and I wanna say welcome to everyone who's come here tonight. I want to recognize on the eve of Veterans Day, all the veterans who are here in attendance.

If you could just please stand, it'd be great. Thank you.

>> Stuart Helgeson: Thank you. Valley Forge has been here for 96 years, and when I received a phone call last July asking if we wanted to host this awesome event, I absolutely jumped at it. With not only this town hall being about veterans and what they can do for the community, the timing being on the eve of Veterans Day.

And knowing that we've had thousands of graduates who have served, are serving, and are going to serve in armed forces, it was a no brainer. So I wanna thank the foundation for choosing us and coming here today. We couldn't have been more honored to have you here, so thank you.

I also wanna recognize our Pennsylvania State Legislator, Lisa Borowski, who's here. Thank you, Lisa.

>> Stuart Helgeson: And our Tredyffrin Township supervisor, Mr. Murph Wysocki. Murph, thank you.

>> Stuart Helgeson: And before I introduce this awesome panel, I would be remiss and probably drummed out of the Marine Corps if I didn't say happy 248th birthday to any marines out there.

Do we have any marines? Please stand, any. There we go, all right.

>> Stuart Helgeson: 248 years ago today, the Marine Corps was formed in a tavern called Tongue Tavern in downtown Philadelphia, how appropriate. So, happy birthday, Marines. Now to the panel, we have US Representative Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran, engineer, entrepreneur, educator.

She represents the Pennsylvania 6th District in Congress, she grew up in a military family. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford University with an ROTC scholarship and launched her service in the Air Force and Air Force reserves. And she later earned a master's of science in technology and policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.

A little underachiever there. For our cadets who had the pleasure and honor to hear the general. Lieutenant General HR McMaster, United States Army, retired, is a Fouad and Michelle Ajami senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. Upon graduation from West Point in 1984, General McMaster served 34 years as a cavalry officer in the United States Army.

He's a retired lieutenant general after serving. He retired in 2018 after serving as the 25th assistant to the US president for the Department of National Security Affairs. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's an author of two books.

He's a father, he's a war hero. And he's also a 1980 Valley Forge graduate. So welcome back, sir.

>> Stuart Helgeson: Next panelist, Megan Andros, senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments and is responsible for the foundation's veteran and military Families Initiative. Megan has served for five years as an ordinance officer in the Army's first cavalry division.

She's a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point with a BS in international law and completed the Masters of Public Management program at Carnegie Mellon University's Hines College in 2018. Please welcome Megan Andros.

>> Stuart Helgeson: Dave Foster is the founder and CEO of BDP Impact Real Estate, a social impact real estate investment and development company headquartered here in Philadelphia with projects across the country.

His military service includes active duty as an infantry officer with 101st Airborne Division, had tour in Afghanistan and posting at the Pentagon. Dave received his BA from Washington Lee University and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Please welcome Dave Foster.

>> Stuart Helgeson: And last, but not least, is tonight's moderator.

I don't know if to call you doctor, lieutenant colonel, or put them all together, but another one. Lieutenant Colonel Jacquelyn Schneider, PhD, is a US Air Force reserve and is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Director of its Wargaming and Crisis Simulations Initiative. And is also an affiliate with Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Before beginning her academic career, Jacquelyn spent six years as an air force officer in South Korea and Japan and is currently a reservist assigned to the US Space Systems Command. She has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Arizona State, and she earned her PhD from George Washington University.

Please welcome our moderator and the whole panel, please. All right, cheers.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, thank you so much for that extraordinary welcome and in general, extraordinary welcome to be able to be here at Valley Forge Military Academy. This is the second stop on our nationwide tour to talk about the post-9/11 veteran generation.

So what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Well, I am a post 9/11 veteran. My husband's a post 9/11 veteran. And I had the honor of sitting on the selection committee for a fellowship that we have at Hoover that Megan and Dave are part of, which is the Post-9/11 Veteran Fellowship Program.

And as part of that selection committee, I started thinking about what does it mean to have served after 9/11? What does this generation of veterans that spans over two decades of military service, what do we have in common? And as we kind of come to the end of this generation and we start maturing and kind of moving back into the civilian world, what is going to be the legacy of this generation?

And so that's what this town hall series is all about. It's about telling the story of these veterans. And in the process of telling that story, I hope what we find is what. We on the panel have in common, but also what us on the panel share in common with you.

And the hope is that at the end of this town hall series, we realize how much our veteran communities and our civilian communities actually have in common. And that we'll be able to kind of build our civil society, democracy, and the force of the future one veteran at a time.

So with that kind of large idea, I wanna start by really telling the story of these four extraordinary veterans. And as the alum, HR, I wanna start with you.

>> H.R. McMaster: And the oldest, super old, then.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, that is an interesting thing about this generation of veterans. We actually have some Gen Z in the post-9/11 veterans, so it spans the whole multiple generations.

Now, I understand your father was also a veteran, and I think kind of interesting, he's a veteran of a war that was kind of forgotten in American contemporary politics for a while. But I was wondering how his experience in the Korean War and growing up with a father who's a veteran of influenced your decisions to join the Army.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, he certainly had a huge influence on me. My dad volunteered to serve at age 17, got his parents to sign the paperwork, and wanted to get to the Korean War to fight alongside his fellow Americans. And he deployed there as a private and left as a sergeant first class.

And he then was a first sergeant for a basic training company at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, but then decided to get out of the Army, marry my mom. But he stayed in the reserves, and there used to be a reserve unit. I don't know if everybody remembers of the older guys down there, a reserve infantry unit in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia.

And so he was the first sergeant for an infantry company there when I was growing up. And then during the Vietnam War, he got a direct commission to captain and took command of the same unit he was a first sergeant in. But as a little kid, I was there for all the Veterans Day parades.

But also he put me in the back of his Jeep and we went to Fort Indiantown Gap, and I saw his training. He probably wasn't supposed to do that, but I got to see, so I was exposed to it. But also my mom had a big influence because she instilled in me some intellectual curiosity and a curiosity about our history and our military history.

So when we took family vacations, we went to Gettysburg, we did. And so I had this sense of history as well. So both my parents had a big influence on my desire to serve, and yeah, I wanted to do it since I was three. I begged my parents to let me go to Valley Forge, right?

I was gonna go to LaSalle High School here, and I said, God, please let me go. And it was a lot more expensive than LaSalle, actually. And they allowed me to do it because I saw this as my first step in being able to serve as an officer in the army.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So I think one of the similarities that you share with Dave is both of you kind of knew from the beginning that you really, really wanted to serve. Dave you have an interesting story, because you were at a university that did not have ROTC. And so you could have just done four years of fun normal college and then done OTF.

But you did something special in order to make sure that you would have that fun ROTC experience.

>> Dave Foster: Right, first of all, let me just say a big thank you for having us here and really just wanna acknowledge my family and so many folks who have been part of this journey, which is what we'll talk about here.

It's not just those of us on stage, but those who were along, supporting us all the way along the way, including my parents. I was growing up and thinking about coming from a background, a different kind of service, but starting a schoolteacher and a real history of service in the community and in the church and so forth.

For me, wanting to serve in the military, I can't even pinpoint exactly where it came from. I was an athlete growing up. I loved playing sports. I loved being part of a team, and I wanted to serve. And it felt like leadership and service of the kind that I wanted to do really pointed me in the direction of going to the military.

And so newspaper interviews made when I was in high school and so forth were, yeah, I'm gonna go to the military, and then onward from there. I looked at West Point. It seemed like a place with way too many rules for me. Although I do have to say, knowing General McMaster now, some of the biggest rule breakers I know, people who have gotten stuff done outside the rules that come out of that institution.

I was recruited to play football at Washington and Lee University, went there without a specific plan to join the military. And about halfway through my time in college, as I was starting to look ahead, I realized, all right, I've got to find a way in here. What are we going to do?

Looked at ROTC as an option. It wasn't there at my school. And I said, all right, let's figure out how to make this happen. So we got the president of Washington and Lee University to sit down. The superintendent of Virginia Military Institute was right next door, come up with an agreement and bring the program to W&L, which is where it belongs.

And I think that that, to me, is really sort of a big part of what I hope we'll get at here tonight. And that is, sort of late 90s ROTC disappeared from a lot of campuses, and we really narrowed the funnel of individuals coming into our military. And widening that and making it as broad as we can, as many opportunities for different kinds of people to come in is really important.

25 years later, I was just down on campus, ROTC is alive and well at Washington and Lee, I'm very proud of that, and thankful for the opportunity that I got to serve as a result.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, I don't know if y'all noticed, but I accidentally put too many Army people on the panel.

But-

>> Stuart Helgeson: That's impossible.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: But Representative Houlahan and I are gonna hold it down for the Air Force. But it seemed like, looking at your past history, your kind of your family history was in the Navy. Why'd you choose the Air Force? How did you end up in the best armed service?

 

>> Chrissy Houlahan: So it's a long story. Actually, it's a relatively short story. I grew up in a military family. My dad was career Navy, P3 pilot. He married the boss's daughter, a P3 pilot's daughter. My grandfather was his skipper. My grandfather was a Korean War vet. My father was Vietnam era, both pilots, aviators.

And I was raised, obviously, in a family of service. But when it came time for me to consider where my service would be, I actually was very much encouraged by my father to join the Air Force. And the reason why is, I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be Sally Ride.

And I had looked at her history and where she went to school and what she did. And it looked like the path to be an astronaut was to be either some kind of an engineer, definitely some kind of a pilot. And that there weren't a lot of opportunities for people like me, meaning girls, at that time, that were maybe in the Air Force rather than the Navy.

The Navy had fewer pilot slots, and I was actually a pre-9/11 service member. I joined in 1989, and just a few years after my joining was when women started really having better access to pilot opportunities. It turned out that I was offered a pilot slot, I was an ROTC at San Jose State University because Stanford didn't have a ROTC program at the time.

And I did get that really nice offer to be a pilot, which is what I thought I really wanted out of life. But I had also met my husband at that point in time. He's now been my husband for almost 34 years. He's about a mile and a half up the road right now.

And having grown up in a family of pilots and understanding what the obligations were towards families and spouses in particular, I just couldn't do it to him the way that it had happened to me as a kid. So I turned down the pilot slot. I'm not an astronaut.

That's a spoiler alert. But I think that I've done enough good with my life as a result of my service.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Now, Megan, you entered West Point right after, like, shortly after 9/11. And I think, like me, I did ROTC. It was a bit of a surprise, kind of the whole military aspect of the service academy, the marching, the traditions.

You're a tennis athlete, so I want to hear a little bit about your journey to the military. Because I think there's just as many people like HR and Dave who knew for forever that they want to go in the military. I think there's just as many people who sometimes kind of stumble into it and actually find a lot of meaning.

So I'd love to hear kind of your journey.

>> Megan Andros: Sure, and my story is very different than my fellow panelists in the fact that my father was a banker. My mother was a stay at home mother. I had one grandfather who was in Germany shortly after World War II.

He ran a PX during the occupation. But other than that, I didn't know a single person in the service. I went to National Clay Court, which is a tennis tournament. About the best 150 junior tennis players in the country are allowed to play in the tournament every year.

And I met the West Point coach, and this is the summer of 2001. And I knew I would never be a professional tennis player. I wasn't big enough or good enough, tall enough. And so I looked at college as, how do I leverage my tennis to get into a great school to set me up for the rest of my life?

But service academies had never occurred to me. I didn't even realize they had tennis programs. So I met the coach and my dad was with me and said, wow, that's a really great school. You should consider that. And I thought, what? No, I mean, it was not what I had ever pictured myself doing.

So in the span of about three months, the coach called me every week, as they do with with athletes. And you're allowed, at that time was five official visits to schools. And so I said, for my dad's sake, go with me to West Point, we'll check it out.

And I got in, actually, I landed for my official visit a week after the September 11th. And the Trade Centers had fallen, and I'd landed in Newark, which is right across the river, as I'm sure many of you know. So I was really in the thick of the decision as that was all happening.

I think, at that time, I might be the only person who thinks this, but I don't think we thought the next 20 years would look like it did. So for me, it was still, all right, Megan, this is a great school. This is a great opportunity. You're gonna learn a ton, you're gonna be challenged.

You're gonna do a great thing, you're gonna serve your country, that, obviously, was attractive to me. So I wasn't totally there for the tennis. I knew what I was getting into, but, yeah, I showed up. It was a very big culture shock for me. I was in a little bit of denial as I saw all my friends going off to fund schools where they were gonna join sororities or whatever.

And there I was in a military academy with getting screamed at. And so it took me a little bit of time to adjust, for sure. And the knowledge books for me were, the first summer was a very tough one. I was singled out as the tennis player right away, and it was very clear that I was trying to figure it all out.

It was a steep learning curve, but I will say, I think there were six girls, women in my platoon in basic training. And I was the only one that finished, so I stuck it out. It's not how you start, it's how you finish, right?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I wanna stop there a little bit, cuz it was stop at that moment of time, which is 9/11.

Cuz that's kind of why we're all here. Now, Representative Houlahan, you started your service, you mentioned, far before 9/11. But I believe you stayed in the reserves for a much longer time. And were probably in the reserves when 9/11 happened.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: That's a complicated story.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: Yes, I was, unbeknownst to me and the military.

So this is a really interesting story that we ought to talk about at some point in time. But I separated, I joined in 1989 was when I graduated, got out because the Berlin Wall fell and there was a reduction in force. And there was kind of people saying, who are we fighting anymore?

What's the world gonna look like when we don't have Russia to fight against anymore? It turned out that I was in the reserves for 13 years. I didn't know it, and the military didn't know it. And when I found out was when I was running for Congress, not kidding you.

I started looking for my records to make sure that I could demonstrate that I had served. Because people in politics get attacked for a lot of things. So I was looking for my records. And not surprisingly, those records were pretty antiquated because they were pre computers. I got out when the Internet was just starting to be something that people talked about.

I was at MIT when email was, you had to walk to go get it. It was sneakernet kind of a thing. So, anyhow, I discovered that I had been in the reserves for 13 years without the military knowing it, including during 9/11 and post 9/11. And that my friend, who also went to Stanford with me, who also lives down the street from me now, the two of us grew a company called AND1 Basketball together.

He and I both served the same amount of time. He was in Desert Storm in the AWACS, I was Desert Storm here. And he also had that same glitch, that same computer glitch. And this is part of what I struggle with, is, how do we lose people for 13 years?

And we did, we were lost. And the minute that Desert Storm happened, I was a young mother, I had just had a baby. I ran downstairs, grabbed my fatigues and my combat boots, and I was ready to go. And my husband, who's not in the military, looked at me like I was crazy.

Like, what are you doing? And I said, this is my job, if they tell me I'm going somewhere, I'm going somewhere. And that just frustrates me that for a very long period of time, more than a decade, nobody asked me to do anything.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, that's actually something I want to return to when we come back to the discussion about public service.

Because I think the total force and the reserves is a really important part of the future of the all-volunteer force. I hope that we have people in the future that can stay in the reserves for 13 years, and we can pull them up when necessary and it not be a glitch in the system.

Well, HR, I wanna turn to you. And for those of you who don't know,

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: HR is an actual war hero. Sorry, I'm gonna embarrass you a little bit. HR is an actual war hero. Not only did he win the Silver Star in Iraq in the 90s, he then went on to serve in the second invasion of Iraq and in Afghanistan.

The amount of combat that you have seen over the last two to three decades is pretty remarkable. But you've also been in the midst of it at the tactical, operational, and strategic level for war, both before 9/11 and after 9/11. How do you think warfare has changed since September 11?

And how did the army change and then did that affect how you changed as an officer?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, well, I had the great benefit of being interested in history and then being able to study history full time after Desert Storm. So I had this kind of, this experience in Desert Storm that I talked with the cadets about today, after which I had a chance to reflect on it and to try to place it in context of military history broadly.

But also thinking about future work when I studied military history at the University of North Carolina, and what I began to appreciate is that there are continuities in war, in the nature of war. There are changes in the character of warfare. But in a great book called The Face of Battle, John Keegan, who studied changes and continuities in war across four centuries in the same geographic area, like around Belgium, from the hundred years war to all the way through World War I.

He writes at the end of this book, what battles have in common is humid, the struggle of men and obviously women. He's writing this in the 60s, trying to reconcile their instinct for self preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them.

And then he goes on to talk about this dialectic and what you feel, it's an experience in battle of courage, right? And fear and so forth, describes the human experience. But at the end, he says, what battles have in common is that they are aimed at the disintegration of human groups.

And I really took that to heart as an officer. And what I tried to do is to ensure that my human group, my platoons, my troops, squadrons and regiments did not disintegrate. Because we had the degree of competence and level training that we could could get into the most harrowing experience and fight and win.

And then we aimed in battle to disintegrate the enemy's will to fight in ways after 9/11 that were much more complicated than the tank battle in the Gulf War. And so I see when I look at war and warfare, continuity and change. Oftentimes we're so enamored with the next technological innovation, we think, man, the next war is going to be fundamentally different from all those that have gone before it.

That's never been the case, actually, new forms of warfare typically are layered onto the old. And you see that playing out in places like Ukraine. You see that playing out with the horrible mass murder attacks that occurred on October 7 and the violent aftermath in Israel and in Gaza.

So I really saw more continuity than change. But I'll tell you, you're so funny about this, when you said that you didn't have an enemy, Congresswoman, when you said you have an enemy of the 90s. But I actually got to witness the lifting of travel restrictions from East Germany and West Germany.

Our troop was patrolling the border in Germany when that happened. So we went from staring down East German border guards one minute, to the next minute, the gates being thrown open and then tens and then hundreds and then thousands. And then tens of thousands of these Germans streaming across the border, which was really emotional for me because I had been acquainted with how horrible it was behind Iron Curtain and these college dictatorships.

Because Valley Force gave me a chance to go to Romania when I was here in 1978 under Ceausescu, which deepened my desire to serve. But then at one point, I got into an argument with my wife Katie about something silly, and she said, you're just mad because you don't have an enemy anymore.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: And then, and then Saddam invaded Kuwait. I was like, thank you, Saddam, thank you, we had an enemy.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Dave, I want to turn to you because you have actually, there's an interesting connection between you and HR. So Dave's story is a story of someone who volunteered for everything, who said, what's the hardest thing I can do in the army?

Let's do that. I want to jump out of airplanes. Send me in, if you're going somewhere, send me in. I wanna go first. My bags are packed, I'm ready. But there's a timing thing, right? So your story is a bit of a near misses when it comes to combat until you meet up with HR.

So can you tell us a little bit about that story about how HR brought you into combat? And then I'd like for you to talk a little bit, if possible, about how that deployment shaped your military service and now your civilian identity.

>> Dave Foster: Sure, so also a complicated 9/11 story for me, as you said, Jackie, when I went into the military, again, coming out of college athletics and really just excited to go see the world and do as much as I could.

I did, I said, sign me up for the hardest you got. I wanna be in the infantry, and I want to be airborne. I wanna be ranger, and I wanna do all this stuff. I got to my unit. I got assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. I said, it's the late 90s.

There was not a lot going on. I said, whatever's going on, whatever the hardest is, send me there. They deployed me on a peacekeeping mission in the Middle East and had that opportunity with some wonderful soldiers. Came back, we trained, and on the morning of September 11, just finished our physical training for the morning, our unit, our battalion was what was called DRF1.

And so I don't know if this still exists in the military or doesn't, but we had two infantry battalions ready to go, wheels up, anywhere in the world in 18 hours. So our bags were packed, everything was on a pallete. Your will was updated. You had all your shots, no alcohol anywhere, kind of pre cell phone.

And so if you were going anywhere off of base too far, you had to call and check in, ready to go. And we were in that posture as I was driving down the road in my truck and heard the early sounds of the attack, and my immediate thought was, okay, I'm right where I'm supposed to be.

And it turns out I wasn't. The immediate aftermath of September 11 was not a mass mobilization and an 18 hours deployment anywhere. In fact, I don't know the CIA was even on the ground for another few weeks, and then special forces and sort of a buildup over time.

And so it was a much slower reaction to that. The fifth special forces group with one of the leading elements in Afghanistan, the famous horse soldiers, were right next door to us, we helped to get them out the door, and kept waiting for our opportunity to go. And we got a call.

There was a code word alert. You would get a call on the phone, and if you got the word, then that meant assemble with everything ready to go. And it came in and we got the call. And we showed up, and I'll never forget walking into the battalion headquarters and seeing a map of Indiana on the wall.

And saying to our S2 intelligence officer, I was imagining that he was just working when getting the thing focused, so why would he have a map of Indiana? I said, imagine if we were invading Indiana. And he looked at me and he said, yeah, can you effin believe it?

And I said, well, when we put, I don't know how many of the 101st Airborne Brigade helicopters in the air that night. And we did go into a small town in Indiana where it turns out there was a sensitive site that needed to be secured in the moment.

That was, the whole of our deployment came back. I had already had my applications in for law school. I was coming up on the end of my four years of service, and the war was winding down. We weren't deploying a lot more folks. We weren't kinda doing a massive buildup, and my time was coming short.

I was set to be married, set to head off to law school and get on with my life, and thought, okay, the moment has passed. I took one last shot. I went to the recruiter in town as I was getting ready to leave, and I said, look, I'll turn in my commission.

Take me down to E1 if you can get me on an airplane going wherever there's something happening. And he looks at me and he says, you gotta be kidding me. The Guard and the Reserve are never gonna be involved in this fight. And so that was the end of it, I was out.

And, of course, things progressed in a very different direction, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for me, the thing that I was never settled about, one was that at the end of the day, I ended up losing some good friends and brothers and sisters who I served with.

But my soldiers, the guys that I trained, went, and they carried the load, they carried their burden. And so, not that in an absolute way, I felt like it was my obligation to sort of go. But at that point, given what I had trained for, what I thought I was able to do, what I thought I was really good at, I never had that opportunity to sort of carry my weight.

And so I had been out of the military entirely, I was over in China. I just worked there and back, worked my way back in, and was down in the Pentagon doing some work around stability operations, which ties to my work, the work that I was doing in Camden, New Jersey.

And we've got Reverend Floyd White here from Camden, and we were rebuilding cities there. And we were taking all of what we had learned over the last 40 or 50 years and applying it and changing the way we were doing it. And I was talking to my colleagues, captains and majors who'd been placed in charge of this neighborhood or that, and in Baghdad or Kandahar or someplace else.

With the mission of stabilizing and kinda getting things up and going. And I said, we're doing it all wrong. We're doing the same thing we did wrong 40 years ago here in the United States. And so I was invited to give a presentation at what was called the Expeditionary Economics Conference at West Point, where I was critical of the army's approach to stability operations and how we were doing it.

I had the privilege to sit next to General McMaster at dinner. We had a chance to meet there. Subsequently, very shortly thereafter, you returned, I guess, to Afghanistan and sent word back to West Point, we're looking for somebody who does this thing. They called me and said, remember that guy who's from Philly you sat next to at the dinner?

 

>> Dave Foster: That's the best we can do, as it sounds, so.

>> Dave Foster: I was fortunate, but in one of the most difficult decisions of my life, at this point, beautiful wife and two kids, aged four and two, who thought we had the life that we were gonna lead all set and before us.

When dad comes home and says this is what he's gonna do. And so extreme gratitude to my family, my immediate family, my parents, and extended family in helping me through that. But it did give me the opportunity to serve, and in a way, at the end of the day, that certainly had much more strategic importance than I would have as an infantry lieutenant there on the ground.

Not the story I anticipated, but one that I'm proud of and grateful for.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I think that's a great example, first, about how veterans' stories, their paths are not all the same. And for you, and I think for me as well, how the reserves can also be a path towards continued service, even when you're out of the active duty.

Now, Megan, you were an army officer, but you, like me, were a military spouse as well. And so you are balancing both those identities while you're deploying, your husband's deploying. Your kingdom cometh, are you the spouse, are you the supporter, the supportee? How did you balance those identities during your time in service?

 

>> Megan Andros: Sure, so probably helpful to know. So we were 1st Brigade, 1st Cav, pretty much our entire time in the service, minus training. My husband did a tour with them to Iraq, 2006 to 2008, while I was finishing up my time at West Point and going through officer basic school and all those kinds of things.

He came back in January 2008 knowing he and I were both getting back on a plane in January 2009 to head back over to Iraq for 12 months. I think his first deployment while I was in the States was probably the worst 15 months of my life. I knew what was happening, probably to a level that I wish I hadn't have known.

And we're talking about things like, my husband was an infantry platoon commander in a tank running up and down this road called Route Tampa. And we were there in my officer basic course, talking about route Tampa, looking at pictures of destroyed Bradleys. And so it hit very close to home.

I also knew, I mean, literally, he called me on my birthday while he was deployed that deployment, and he started getting shot at and had to get off the phone. So I knew he was in real combat. And so just like a military spouse that's not in uniform, every time someone in a uniform walked up to me or in a group, we think the worst.

There were parts of my OBC, we toured. Everybody who's injured or killed during this last war, their personal effects go through Aberdeen Proving Ground, or at the time they did. And that's where my OBC was. And we were touring the facility while my husband was deployed. And, nope, I'm not going through that door, that was a little too much.

So I think it was hard, and I think the hardest job, I will say, is being a military spouse compared to a service member. Our second tour or his second tour, we were together and we could talk on secret phones. We were part of the same brigade, so I knew generally what was happening.

I had soldiers, we weren't at the same forward operating base, but I had soldiers at his forward operating base, so I could go check on them, so we would see each other. I think the first nine months of our tour, we saw each other twice, which isn't great, but, yeah, still.

And I knew if something happened, I would know quickly and I could probably get wherever he was. So it was a little bit more peace of mind. But also, the other thing I'll say is, because I knew what was happening as his spouse, I was very careful to not ask a lot of him.

I knew his priority in life had to be keeping his soldiers, training his soldiers. Keeping them safe, keeping them alive, keeping them healthy, and I voluntarily took a backseat, as I think many military spouses do. We served again in the same brigade for pretty much most of our service, and we were at the same place at the same time for about 14 months of the five years that I was in.

And, I think for us, one of the reasons that I got out, we got out, and maybe we'll get into this is. It's very hard to sustain a marriage when you see each other that amount and you choose to put your marriage last, but that was what had to be done at that point, so we'll stop there.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I wanna transition a little bit to talking about this generation kind of versus or what's similar or different compared to other generations. And, HR, you spent a, a lot of your academic career thinking about Vietnam, and I'm sure in your time as a professor at West Point, you probably taught the lessons learned from Vietnam.

I mean, you joined the Army at the inception of the all volunteer force which, was really the result of Vietnam veterans who said, we need a professional military. So I kind of wondered, how do you think the post-9/11 veteran generation will shape the future force? What have we learned from the last two decades of military service that will be taught at West Point or Valley Forge to future generations?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, what was really interesting as a kid at West Point, nobody talked about Vietnam. So I was there from 1980 to 1984, all my professors have been to Vietnam, none of them talked about it, because it was a scarring experience, right? It was at that, by that point, America's longest war, and it was a lost war.

And so this is one of the reasons why I wrote the book I did, I really was interested in how wide did Vietnam become an American war, and how did the way that it became an American war affect the course of the war and its outcome. So, I was interested in the lessons, but nobody was really talking about it.

I read a lot about it because I thought, okay, my responsibility is to get ready to fight the next war. So I got to study the last one as much as I can, to prepare myself and my soldiers and teams for the next one. I think we're in a very similar situation now, Jackie, and, I think because of the humiliating surrender and withdrawal in Afghanistan, I don't know what else to call it.

We essentially, we engaged in self defeat in Afghanistan, and surrendered to a terrorist organization. And that's scarring for those of us who served in Afghanistan and I think what is happening that what you see in the military today. Is not an effort to learn what the heck went wrong in Afghanistan, maybe in Iraq, in terms of the length and cost of that war as well.

What you see is the same impulse after Vietnam, let's forget about that. After Vietnam there was a word for this called the Vietnam syndrome, a phrase for this. And the idea was that, we're never gonna to do anything like that again, a protracted counterinsurgency, right? Well, yeah, we did do it again, and so what I'm worried about is kind of a new form of the Vietnam syndrome that precludes us from learning from the experience in Afghanistan, Iraq.

And I think fundamentally what we might learn, is pay attention to the continuities of war, war is political, okay? It's like the GEICO commercial, everybody knows that, Clausewitz said, war is the extension of politics. But you know what that means? That means the consolidation of military gains to get to sustainable political outcomes has never been an optional phase in war, right?

This is what Israel's confronting now in Gaza, okay? What's next? What happens next? The second is a war is human, people fight for the same reasons that Thucydides identified 2500 years ago, fear, honor and interest. And if you don't address those drivers of the conflict, then you're gonna to have perpetual conflict.

The third is the war's uncertain, the future course of events doesn't depend on what we do. It depends on also the enemy, how do we fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? We announced to our enemy years in advance, here's the schedule for our withdrawal. Here's what we're to do, what we're not gonna do, it's almost we thought we could write the script out for the war.

And hand it to the Taliban in Pakistan and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan say, hey, this is the role you've got to stick to because we've scripted it out. Doesn't work that way, and then finally, war is a contest of wills. If you're gonna fight a war, you gotta win, you gotta determine what does winning mean.

And then you got to do everything you can to win, there are these weird phrases that have crept into our lexicon. A responsible end, we just want to bring this war to a responsible end, hey, I used to box. I never got in a boxing ring, and said I'm just gonna bring this fight to a responsible end, do you know why?

Because I would get my ass kicked, right? I mean so you go in to win and you have to have that, you have to sustain that will. That's from the political level of the president and understand, explain to the American people two things the American people need to know.

One, what is at stake? Why do we care about the outcome of this war? And the second is, what is the strategy to achieve a favorable outcome in that war to win, at a cost that's acceptable to the American public? I think multiple leaders failed over multiple administrations to do that effectively in Afghanistan, and that's one of the high level, I think, lessons of recent wars.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So, I also think that can be why it can be complicated for this generation of veterans to think about what their service meant.

>> H.R. McMaster: Can I say something about that?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Sure.

>> H.R. McMaster: Because I really feel I need to say this really quick because I, okay, so I'm being I'm critical about these wars.

If you wanna know how noble service was in Afghanistan, look at what Afghanistan is today. Look at what American soldiers, and marines and airmen and sailors, what they freed the Afghan people from, after they lived under the hell of the Taliban from 96 to 2001? Because guess what?

Hell's back to Afghanistan, that's what we prevented, sadly, the way we mismanaged that war and in effect, partnered. I mean, I can't even say it, but, partnered with the Taliban against the Afghan government on the way out. That's really in effect what happened, but that service was noble.

That service was in response to the largest mass murder terrorist attack in history against our country, on September 11. And unseating the Taliban and going after Al Qaeda, was a righteous thing to do. And so I think veterans of that war should be proud of their service, and recognize that the outcome is profoundly disappointing to us.

But you know what that means? That means that military service today is more important than it was even then, do you know why? Our enemies are emboldened by that humiliating surrender withdrawal. You can draw a direct line from August 2021, the stain of August 2021, and leaving Kabul, to the reinvasion of Ukraine a year later, in February of 2022.

So I think it's a dangerous world because our enemies perceive weakness now, weakness is provocative. And this is what you see with Iran activating their ring of fire strategy around Israel, and really committing acts of war against us across the entire region. It's a perception of weakness. Now, Japan in 1941 perceived weakness.

That was a mistake. North Korea in June of 1950 perceived weakness, big mistake. So I believe in American resolve and American strength. We have to get it back together, because the world is becoming increasingly dangerous.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: It's hard to follow up on that. But I think that part of what we're trying to do here is to allow veterans to tell that story.

To tell people what their service meant to them and how the experience that they had in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever has led them to be the person that they are today. And how that means that they will continue to contribute to American society and American democracy. And I think I wanna turn to Megan, because Megan, you've had to uniquely deal with the needs of this generation's veterans.

Your job focuses on veteran philanthropy. And I can imagine when you started that job, you were probably the only woman and the only non-Vietnam veteran who was leading veteran philanthropy efforts. I wanted to understand from your perspective, what are the different needs of these generations? And you've been out there in the field trying to support 9/11 veterans.

What does the 9/11 veteran need?

>> Megan Andros: I think more than anything, it's funny, there's always been this conflict, and I'm gonna try to do this delicately. And not a real conflict, but between Vietnam era veterans and Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. And I'll say over the years, I've had so many Vietnam veterans come up to me and say, you are so lucky that people support you.

And it took me a little while, cuz it always used to sort of frustrate me. I'm going somewhere with this, I promise. That was the perception of the Vietnam era veteran. Because the perception, I think often of the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, speaking for myself, not everyone, but partly was people put a sticker on their car and then went on with their lives.

So I'm not making a judgment as to whether the wars were worth it or not worth it, or went well or poorly. But rather, the military, our generation, when something we have in common is that we need the rest of the country. We need it then, we need now.

And I think in particular right now, I think HR, your comment about how we wanna forget the last 20 years, now's the time where we need to have some honest conversations. I've been in the room with people who say that war was unjust. You were a terrible person for having participated.

And if I'm being very honest, which I think we're supposed to be here, I wanted to say, you're responsible too for what happened in the last 20 years. We as a country need to have deeper and more thoughtful conversations about what we're doing and where it's headed. And then, so the reason I'm saying this, is the needs of this generation right now are they're not being absorbed into the workforce.

Well, we've funded a study at six and a half years post-service. 60% of them are still underemployed. It's a really big problem. And some of what Jackie's talked about, some people grow up and the military's their path, and that's amazing. And the country needs people from day one to feel like that.

But there are also people who find their way into the service, and see it as both benefiting the country and themselves. That's okay, too. But I do think we have to deliver. We say that the military is a path to a better life, that it's a path to better things.

And I will say, I question that at times, not for everyone. And I will say it's benefited me greatly. What I do with my life is different because I served in the military. So I'm a huge advocate of it. But because there's this really severe military-civilian divide right now, and the military is becoming a caste system in many ways, this is affecting how well we transition to the civilian sector after we leave the service.

We'll get there in a minute.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I think that's a great segue to talk about what it means as a veteran to return, and what the legacy of military service is for everyone on this panel. This panel was put together because these people have done extraordinary things in public service.

And I wanna highlight, Representative Houlahan, your public service. You started by serving in the military, but you also served in education. And as a mother and somebody who works very hard for education, that's an extraordinary place to be, and now as a legislator. So I'm interested in your perspective.

What do you think these different forms of public service have in common? And then how did your service in the military shape your subsequent service in education and activism, in representing your constituents?

>> Chrissy Houlahan: So I'm really glad you've asked this question. I'm gonna do my very best to articulate what my purpose is.

My purpose is to always challenge myself to the highest, best use. And to always think, what can I be doing at this point in my life with what I know how to do, to be most useful at this point in my life? Knowing that things are complicated, you have a family.

So when I separated from the military, and we can have a longer conversation about why I did that. Not only because there was no threat perceived, but also because it was complicated to be a young mom in the military. And that's what I do a lot of thinking about in Congress now, is to figure out how to be more welcoming and inclusive of all of the people who want to join the military.

But after leaving the military, I joined a group of friends, some of them actually from Stanford and some from the military itself, who grew a basketball apparel and footwear company. And we focused on making sure that we grew a really good company with good values and ethics. And it sounds like you're in the similar business of social responsibility in terms of how you run your business.

So that was of service, too. From there, I helped build something that was an organization that focused on corporate social responsibility. How do you take this awesome country, this awesome capitalist society, an economy that we have, and harness that power for good? And to make sure that we are building companies that not only make money, but also take care of community, environment, the employees as well.

And from there, as you mentioned, joined Teach for America, another organization that I think is really important. And there's some sort of bifurcation in our society's mind that you can either wear a uniform or you can serve in a different way. But there's never a continuity or a spectrum that's understood that all of this is of service to the country.

Whether you're in a for profit company, a nonprofit company, you're in a uniform, you're in Congress. These are all forms of service. And we need to figure out how to use ourselves in every aspect in every time in our life to serve. And I think that's why you were talking about this disconnect, this caste system now.

Where most people who serve in the military came from a family that also served in the military. And you were talking about how we need to open up the aperture and accept more people who come from. From more diverse backgrounds, because our military needs to represent our society.

And right now, I don't know that it's hitting that groove. And so that's also something that I work on in Congress through something called the quality of life task force. How do we give people purpose and reason to want to continue to come back and to re enlist?

How do we give people the idea in the first place that they want to wear a uniform and they want to serve in this way? Because we need you, we need you, here in this community, our unemployment rate is 2.8%. When you're thinking about what it is that you're gonna do with your life, we want you to think about the military.

But it's pretty hard to compete with 2.8% unemployment and not being yelled at when you're in the military. And so I guess that's kind of my journey is trying to figure out how we can make it more accessible that this sense of service isn't, I serve on the military personnel subcommittee, too.

And when I asked all the four stars and all the most senior ranking enlisted people, what is it that's keeping people from joining? What are you hearing? And what they're saying is they don't see themselves in this military. They think that this is a pause in their life.

And I struggle with that, this is not a pause in your life. This is life. Life is to serve. And that's something that we need to be able to provide clarity for more people for.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, Dave, I wanna turn to you now, because your company works to sustainably revitalize communities, build affordable housing.

And in some ways, when you go to the beginning of your story, this seems like a far cry from jumping out of airplanes, or the kind of training that you initially did in the Army. So how did your military service inspire your work? And then how did your work in the private sector and in revitalizing urban communities end up being applicable in your deployment to Afghanistan?

 

>> Dave Foster: Well, look, I think that the military, this is part of the story, I think, that you're hearing here, has a critical role in our country and in the health and strength of our country. Not just as a defense force or a force to enact our will in the world, but also as a training ground for the future leaders of America.

And that's invaluable. We cannot lose sight of that. And to get the full promise of what that means, we have to think about the full life cycle, as Congresswoman Houlahan said, of who we're bringing into the military, what that experience is, and then what the opportunities are after.

I started my own company in 2014. Prior to that, I worked on the revitalization of a city called Camden, New Jersey, just across the river at the time, one of the four cities in America. And when I think about what my military service has meant to that journey, I think about three things.

First is leadership. When I got to the military, it was the first time that I realized that you don't just stand up and lead. That's kind of the high school sports version of it. Hey, you're up, time to lead, buddy. Leadership is something that you study, it's something that you work at, it's something that you practice.

And I say this with the cadets in the room, particularly in mind. It's something that you read about, you find mentors on, and it's something that you never perfect. Probably even at the end of a 30 plus year career, you're still learning something about what it means to be a leader.

But that training and that ability to employ that out in the civilian world and in the military is critical. The second is service. What does it mean to be a servant, to be of service, to be a servant leader, to lead in a way that puts self second?

And that, fundamentally, again, very similar to what you were talking about with your work with the big corporations and the amazing work that you've done around changing the way that we think about the role of companies. That's the same approach that I've taken to my work, that if you can subtract yourself or at least bring yourself a level behind the folks you're trying to serve, you recognize for your time in the military how much more you can accomplish.

How much more impact you can have, and, by the way, how much more rewarding it is along the way. And the last part of it is entrepreneurship. I think this is the thing that people who are not in the military always kind of scratch their head at. That's one of the biggest organizations in the world, and you're following rules, and you're marching in a line, and you're doing your thing.

When I think about what it means to start a small company, you're under resourced. The mission changes from moment to moment. You're in an incredibly fluid environment, you're tired, you're trying to figure out how to overcome the next obstacle. Do I have my eye on the right objective?

Are we headed the right way? How do I motivate the folks behind me to get to the finish line? That's small unit leadership. That's being an infantry platoon leader at 3 o'clock in the morning in a swamp of Florida with after your platoon on the border of hypothermia.

That's standing in front of your platoon as you get on the airplane for the first time, and they wave goodbye and kiss goodbye to their families. You take them overseas and you know that you're the one responsible for bringing them back alive. That's what that is. And the military provides that opportunity to train to lead.

And those are all things that were so important to my experience in the military and as I was able to translate it out, but not just in a post-9/11 context. And as we kind of think about where we're going and even where we've been, I look around the audience, I see Dan Klune, a pre-9/11 veteran who has started at least three or four different companies in Havertown and created hundreds of jobs.

And Victor Cortezi, who has led organizations, is revitalizing $150 million revitalization of a hospital, turning into a community health center in the poorest neighborhood of Philadelphia right now. Reverend Floyd White doing that same transformative work. These are people who are out and leading and taking what they have accomplished and learned through their service and transferring it out.

I was fortunate. It doesn't always happen that because of this odd timing of my own deployments, that I was able to take some of what I was learning and transmit it back. In Afghanistan, we worked on economic development. We worked on shoring up the sectors of the economy to protect them against corruption and organized crime.

And that was incredibly rewarding, and I learned a lot through that. But far and away, where the impact is going to be for me, and I hope for thousands and millions of others, is that post service opportunity. So as we think about it as a country, and I'll close with this, it starts with that big funnel.

How do we keep the military attractive and interesting and an opportunity of choice for the widest range of folks we can? That, to me, is one of the great legacies of 9/11. We had professional football players leaving the football field and coming in, folks who were leaving Wall Street and coming from backgrounds who just normally did not go directly into the military.

We brought the widest and most diverse group ever into the military. And that is the group, that 20 years of service is the group that is now sitting out there as the country looks around and says, we are ready for another new generation of leadership. Those are the folks we ought to be looking to.

And I think anything and everything we can do to encourage that and to support that will benefit the country dramatically.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: HR, you served for four decades in uniform? Close, and you were in multiple wars. You were at West Point, and you ended your service in the White House.

How do you think about public service now as a civilian?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, well, it's a big shift. I do, I miss the army. I really do miss the army still. I miss soldiers. But kind of predictably for a guy who was in the army for 34 years, and 38, if you count West Point.

I made a mission statement for myself when I left, and because I wanted to feel like I was still making a contribution. And the mission statement was that I wanted to contribute to a more full understanding of the most significant challenges and opportunities that we face internationally. As a way to bring Americans together for meaningful respective discussions about how to overcome those obstacles, to get those opportunities and build a better future.

I'm very concerned about the degree to which our society is getting polarized. The degree to which you have this interaction between new forms of identity politics and various critical theories and so forth. The valorization of victimhood and so forth, with old forms of bigotry and racism, I think, that are creating centripetal forces that are spitting us apart from each other.

And so I really think it's important for us to come back together to really regain an appreciation for how fortunate we are. I mean, I think all of us who served in places like Afghanistan and Iraq recognize the tremendous gift, the great promise of our country. Now, if we do have problems, right, we talked a little bit about these today, and then the ZIP code into one which is born determines the number of obstacles one has to overcome before they can take advantage of the great promise to this country.

Now, that's a problem, but, hey, let's get after that then, right? Let's figure that out like Dave has, right, and others have worked on here. I worry that today, this narrative that puts institutional and structural in front of every problem we face robs people of agency and leaves Americans with this toxic combination of anger and resignation.

And so we have to, A, get over it, work together, and B, recognize that we do have authorship over our future. So that's what I wanna try to contribute to that kind of a shift.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I wanna move to some audience questions because we got some pretty remarkable audience questions.

So this question, I'm gonna frame initially for Dave, but I also wanna bring in Megan and Representative Houlahan. So the question is, research suggests that about 2 to 3 million veterans fought in US conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East after 9/11, but many struggle to reintegrate into their communities.

This is my question for you, Dave, what role can communities in the United States play in the lives of veterans? And, Megan, I wanna extend that question to say, what role does philanthropy play? And Representative Houlahan, what role does Congress and the US government play?

>> Dave Foster: When you think about the work of transforming communities, it's about as interdisciplinary as it gets.

There are degrees that are about community development and so forth. But community development is learned in an interdisciplinary, evolving, fast moving, fluid environment where he's got concerns tactically on the ground in terms of how you're working with your project, you're looking at the broader political landscape. You're thinking about your resources that you can bring to it.

It is a tremendous opportunity. Now, in terms of thinking about how we get our veterans connected to that opportunity, I do feel like that is a fundamental challenge. I wish I had a clear answer for it. One is by setting an example and talking about it, for sure, communities and community leaders reaching out to veterans and bringing them into that work.

But these are folks who are born to serve, have an ethos of service, and have the skills and ability. So I think what you're identifying is really an opportunity. Hopefully, we can figure out more and better ways beyond just individual mentorship to close the gap. The work that Hoover's doing, and we should call this out as part of the veteran fellowship program, is a part of that.

As the IRON, Mike Steadman down there is leading a lot of the work in Newark right now in terms of IRONBOUND and area creating economic development there. So we've got good role models. We've got people who are out there doing it. We've got to increase that pipeline and make more of it high.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And, Megan, what do you see from philanthropy? Where can philanthropy help that reintegration of military and civilian?

>> Megan Andros: So I think two things I'll say, first is philanthropy takes risks. If we take risks that government can't take out of the gates is the way at least I look at it.

And luckily, philanthropy has been pretty active and pretty strategic over the last ten years. So I'm one of a number of post-9/11 veterans actually leading pretty significant portfolios, where for the last ten years, we've been testing things. We've been trying to figure out what. I think mostly focused on reintegration, where when someone leaves the military, they get their DD-214, what happens next?

Well, there's a lot of things happening in communities that's trying to make sure that people transition seamlessly, smoothly, successfully. So we as a country right now are sitting on a ton of data around what matters and what makes that more successful. And I actually think philanthropy has not been in the conversation as much as it probably should be.

We have rules and laws around what we're allowed to do and say, which limits a bit, but we actually have a lot to say. We are allowed to educate and inform policymakers, and I feel like we're sitting on a lot of really important stuff. The second thing I would say is that,

>> Megan Andros: I'm gonna lose my train of thought here.

So we take risks, and maybe I'll stop. I'm gonna remember this in a second, but I am right now having a total brain moment. So come back to me, actually, let me figure this. Let me think about this second thing that I was brilliantly gonna say.

>> Megan Andros: I'm honest.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: We'll turn to Congress, thank you, what's the role of-

>> Chrissy Houlahan: Speaking of brilliant, I'll be over here solving all the world's problems. Clearly, we have no problem with that. Congress is a mess, right? But it is, I'm gonna be transparent and honest about it. It's a mess that we've lost our path.

We've lost our way, and it's my responsibility to put us back on the path. As 1 of 435 of us, I share the general's anxiety and concern about the divisiveness of our world right now and our country. And I feel like I need to lead by example, and that's what I'm trying to do in my special 1 of 435 ways.

But we do do some good things, and particularly, what we agree on is that we need to take special care of our veterans, the people who have served us and allow us the freedoms that we have today. And so how do we do that? How do we make sure that the veterans of 9/11, post-9/11, are taken care of in a special way?

First of all, we need to make sure that they feel like that they deserve the acknowledgement that they are veterans. A lot of us, to your point about the bumper sticker or whatever, I know I sometimes feel like when somebody asks all the veterans to stand in the room, I'm sort of looking around.

I know that I should stand. I know that many of the people who have served in the last 20 years need to be acknowledged for their service, recognized not just with the thank you for your service, but be able to feel like they have access to the VA, and even when they don't have access to the VA.

My brother served as a medic during the post-9/11 environment. He lives in rural Iowa. He doesn't have access to some of the care and attention that he needs. I need to provide that for him so that he has a level ground for his health, for his care. Then you need to think about the veteran as just a normal human being, we want jobs, we want good healthcare.

We want good education for our kids. We want to be able to put a roof over our heads. We want to be able to afford living in a community, this is an expensive community. And so that's also my responsibility, not only from a federal perspective, but whoever is locally elected as well.

Our responsibility to provide the ability for people to get to their jobs, to afford the places that they live, to have good education, whether they live here or in North Philadelphia, where I taught. So I need to provide those kinds of no duh agenda is what I call it, for all of the people who live in our community, and not just veterans.

And the last thing I'll conclude with is veterans are special, they really are, as you were mentioning, we are entrepreneurial to the core. And so what I need to do is help our veterans see themselves as entrepreneurs, whether they're starting a company or participating in the growth of a company.

We need to be able to find the pathways for them to be able to do that. And sometimes veterans don't see themselves as entrepreneurial, they don't see themselves as creative, but we are. This is the same problem that you have if you're an engineer, people just decide that you're just, like, sitting in a box calculating things.

So some of the work that I do on Small Business Committee as well is to make sure that veterans see themselves as small and mid sized businessmen and women. And that they have the access to capital, business plans, those kinds of things that would allow them to be able to be successful entrepreneurs as well.

Because we don't have the benefits that many people do of maybe being lawyers, doctors, those kinds of things, with access to capital, so we need to make sure we're providing that, too. So it's a multilayered approach, whether it's VA, small business, or just being a normal human being.

 

>> Megan Andros: Jackie, I remembered. Can I follow up my second, or are we?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: That's great, because it might, like, segue into the next question, so let's hear the brilliance. Brilliance, get ready.

>> Megan Andros: No, the other thing I was going to say is that philanthropy picks up where government leaves off.

There's $18.2 billion going towards transition government funding. You can't cite it yet, but it's coming from study. So it's a lot of money. But really, the nonprofit sector is also playing a huge, huge role, actually, 60% of transitioning veterans every year go to one of four veteran service organizations that philanthropy funds, right.

So that's the other thing I would say, is transition. The federal government is very meaningful in the lives of military veterans while they're in, as they're transitioning, after they transition. But the community also plays a major, major role, and I think philanthropy understands that. And I think a lot of what I've done and my peers have done is really zero in on how the community needs to be working with government at the local, state, and federal levels to help people move around our community to resources through resources.

And so I think that's a unique role we've played also.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: And this called the Improve Act, which is exactly what you're talking about nonprofits and community based organizations are trying to help people, veterans with veteran suicide. And this is a place where we do as much as we can with the VA, but there are gaps.

And we need to make sure that we're working with the community and that we're working with philanthropic organizations to take care of our veterans where they are.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So, Megan, I'm gonna turn back to you for this next question from the audience, which is really tough. The question is, how can we strike a balance in allocating adequate resources for veteran care without inadvertently perpetuating the broken hero narrative?

 

>> Megan Andros: Wow, that is a hard question.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: That's a really hard question.

>> Megan Andros: How do we strike the balance? Again, I think this is a military-civilian divide issue, because people who served in the military are often just alien, foreign to everyone else. We don't have as a country, a nuanced perspective of what a veteran and who a veteran is, right?

When I walk into the room, chances are, nothing pops into people's heads saying, she was an ordinance officer. We have a stereotype, generally, I think, for who is and what is a veteran, and it's often GI Joe looking men, white men, and post war, they're in wheelchairs or they're missing a limb, and that's not the reality.

So, I think we have to work at this, and we've tried a number of programs and sort of philanthropic efforts to change them, including media campaigns, but the problem persists. And I'm just gonna say it out loud, the Wounded Warrior Project has raised a lot of money with the veteran, the wounded warrior stereotype.

And it's done a ton of damage, because that's not always what a service member or a veteran looks like, even a veteran who has mental or physical health needs looks like. So I think I'll just close by saying, I don't know what the answer is, I'm actively trying to figure that out in my philanthropy, but that it's a massive, massive problem.

And I think we're gonna have to figure out how to sit down and have these deep journalism needs to start to get involved in some of this.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I think part of the problem here is that it's all more complicated than a simple byline.

>> Megan Andros: Yes.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And there are veterans that are wounded, and there are veterans and veterans that require and deserve support, but that doesn't mean that these veterans also cannot contribute and play a special role in American society.

Somebody may be wounded, but that might also be what makes them great. And I think we have to be able to support both. I want to end by asking you a question, HR, from the audience, and this goes back to the question about, they're talking about the Civil Air Patrol, which is a civilian auxiliary of the US Air Force.

They say, many of us are veterans to continue to serve with our Air Force Total Force partners, providing youth leadership development opportunity, emergency services, aerospace education. So, my question is, can you think of this as a really great example of service after your kind of traditional military service?

Can you think of other examples of how veterans can continue to serve in their communities?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I mean, I think just overall, get involved within your community. And whether it's community sports and coaching or in education, there are so many veterans who go through this, from Troops to Teachers program, for example, and they're phenomenal.

One of my old non commissioned officers, my gunner from my Bradley in Iraq, who retired as a command sergeant major, is teaching in Texas in an underserved community. And he brought a bunch of the students to Stanford, and some of my research assistants showed them all around Stafford University.

I mean, I think there are just so many examples. I think I mentioned today to the cadets, Team Rubicon, for example, which is an organization that mobilizes veterans whenever there's a natural disaster, for example. And I also plugged the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger, and the degree to which really what a soldier, marine who experiences combat trauma, what they need even more than a healthcare professional is a community that has shared that experience and that sense of community.

So what I would love to see is also kind of an invigoration of existing organizations, like at the American Legion, for example. Which I think could maybe not de-emphasize, but at least balance the advocacy for veteran care with getting veterans involved in community projects and bringing them together to work together to build a better future.

I don't think, and of course, the congresswoman accepted that we can wait for politicians to reverse the polarization in our society. No, we don't ever should. We should all work together to do it within our communities to have those discussions and think about, like, how we can make our own communities together.

Boys and Girls Club of America, another example of an organization in which veterans can serve and make a really big difference.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So now we've gotten to the point of the day that you all didn't know that you were waiting for. But it is, and I'm not sure I warned everyone on the panel, but we're doing a lightning round.

This is when I give you extremely difficult questions and you have to answer them in like ten seconds.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: Can we phone a friend?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Maybe one pass allowed. Okay, so we'll start with the lightning round, we'll start with Megan. If you were in charge of the DoD for a day, what is one change you would make?

 

>> Megan Andros: I would pay more attention to the transition of service members, because a negative transition is impacting people's willingness to serve in the first place. And right now, my perception is that DoD doesn't take that seriously.

>> H.R. McMaster: I would say, I would emphasize what the military is for and make all the priorities combat readiness.

And stop advocating a lot of the nonsense that I see in political appointees in the Department of Defense today.

>> Dave Foster: Widen the outreach, let's get as broad, and as many, and as deep a group of Americans serving in the military that we possibly can.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: I think I'm saying the same thing as you are by saying we need to understand better why so few people are qualified and willing to join the military.

And by ZIP code as an example, a really good example. So I would try to dive deeper into the data of why we are not resonating with the majority of Americans and ask them to serve in some way.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Best place to be stationed, and I'll start with the representative.

 

>> Chrissy Houlahan: I got to stay with my dad in Hawaii my senior year. I was not able to stay there because I couldn't go to school in Hawaii and finish my senior year, so I instead went to school in Rhode Island while my family lived in Hawaii. Because of all the problems that we have as young people when we're in the military.

So back to what I'd fix in the military, it's messed up. I could use a stronger word, that I had to stay in Rhode island when my family was in Hawaii. And we should be able to fix that.

>> Dave Foster: I can just say that my wife still asks me.

She says, you mean we could have been in Germany, Hawaii, Alaska, California, and you picked the border between Kentucky and Tennessee?

>> Dave Foster: Sorry.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: HR.

>> H.R. McMaster: You answer first, how about you?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, my best place I was stationed was northern Japan, Misawa. It's very snowy there, as people don't generally think of it, but it was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, my daughter Kara's here. Kara, what was your favorite place?

>> H.R. McMaster: I was gonna say Fort Irwin, California.

>> H.R. McMaster: 40 miles north of the cultural center of Barstow.

>> H.R. McMaster: It was awesome.

>> Megan Andros: So I was at West Point, if you wanna count that, that was a great station, I think.

But I was at Fort Bliss, Fort Hood, Fort Irwin, and Iraq. That was all I saw when I was in the service, so pretty crappy-

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: It's unfortunate that you didn't join the Navy.

>> Megan Andros: I know, it was a bad choice, looking back, but Italy would have been my dream, I think, Vicenza.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: All right, I'm gonna start the next round with you, HR, it's a doozy. Should we reinstate the draft?

>> H.R. McMaster: No.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Draft?

>> Dave Foster: No, but I would love to see a broader program of service.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: No, and right when COVID hit, it took three years to develop the report of National Service Recommendations.

It dropped right when COVID happened. We lost the thread, we lost all the information that we could have used. So we haven't implemented any of it, to be honest. And we should take a better look at that.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Megan?

>> Megan Andros: I'm gonna go with yes, I'm sorry, everyone.

I really think a lot of these civilian-military divide issues and the engagement of our country in feeling ownership over where we go, when we go, why we go. I think that dynamic would change, and I don't know how it doesn't unless people are impacted broadly by military service in our country.

So that's why I'm gonna go with the unpopular decision and choice.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I was gonna make a joke about, good thing you're not up for election.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: And that's true. I was gonna say, you can't run for election.

>> H.R. McMaster: And I want to see what the superintendent thinks.

What do you think, yes or no, draft?

>> Stuart Helgeson: National Service, in some sort, I think bringing the country together, that will make it happen. I remember my dad graduated college in 1957. I said, dad, why did you graduate college? But you were in the army for two years, and you made it to specialist.

And he's like, well, I had to do my two years. I had a job waiting on me at Procter & Gamble, so I didn't go through the officer pack, but that would have added another two years. And I said, well, what did you think of the army? He goes, I love my two years.

And he would go back to that, and he said he was exposed to people he would have never met. And I think part of that polarization we're having right now is everyone has run into their own little tribe and they're not interacting. And that's, we tell the cadets here, and that's why I love this institution, is we have cadets here from all different states, all different backgrounds.

And I said all the time, what the military does is, it takes people from all walks of life and brings them together. They all started the same way, right? Y'all got the same haircut, same uniform, went through the same process, and all earned the same title, cadet. So I wouldn't do a draft just for the military, but I would give a person four choices.

Whether it be teach, whether it be like an AmeriCorps, where you're going out and fixing something. Or the Peace Corps, or you can do the military, but you do something. And to me, I think there should be a price to admission, right? I think everyone would feel more American.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, hold on to that microphone, I'm gonna make you jump into this next round. What is the one thing you did in your military service that you are most proud of, but quickly.

>> Stuart Helgeson: Go on a Desert Shield, Storm and bringing back every warrior.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: The work that I did help create what is now Iron Dome and other kinds of defense systems like that.

 

>> Dave Foster: Proud of having deployed and served with you, sir. But certainly the number one thing is to stand as a 22 year old in front of a platoon of infantry. And lay them successfully and bring them all back home.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Serving along extremely courageous soldiers in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment and liberating a region of Iraq from Al Qaeda.

 

>> Megan Andros: So I hope that I change the lives of some of the people that I serve with, and that worked for me and my time in the service 100%, I think. But if I was going to pick one specific instance, I was the reset officer for first brigade, 1st Cav, to get them ready for their 2010 deployment.

No, sorry, 12, deployment to Iraq. And so I was in charge of getting 32,000 pieces of equipment through the reset process, everything from gas masks and weapons to tanks. And it's actually the last job I had before I left the service, and it made me feel like they were in a good position.

Their equipment was ready to go, it was safe. As I was leaving the door, I was sort of able to check that off and say I had done that one, took a job.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Great, very last, I promise. Megan, what is the one thing you want civilians to know about serving in the military?

 

>> Megan Andros: It's life changing, I'm absolutely a different person. I have a different level of empathy and understanding for people who have come from different places. I think that is completely true. I was exposed to people that I had never worked with or been around or shared goals with, and it has set me on a path, a different path than I would have walked otherwise.

And so I think the military is not all bad, and it's much of it is great and very sort of focusing for people.

>> H.R. McMaster: It's just tremendously rewarding, and you make amazing friends.

>> Dave Foster: It's a great foundation, no matter what you want to pursue in life.

>> Chrissy Houlahan: It's not a pause in your life, and you are welcome.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Stu?

>> Stuart Helgeson: Opportunity, you have, opportunity abounds to lead, to see experiences, see countries, test yourself. There are so many opportunities that you have in the military that you will not be afforded unless you try it.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So with that, I want to thank Valley Forge. Thank you all for taking your evening to sit here and listen to these veterans' stories.

Tomorrow's Veterans Day, and what I ask you to do is instead of just saying thank you for your service, ask a veteran, what'd you do? How'd it feel? Why'd you join? Sit and listen to a veteran story. And if you're looking for veteran stories, I recommend Sebastian Junger's philanthropy veteran town hall, I think it's called Vets Town Hall, you can go online.

There are vets' town halls all over the United States where veterans are simply standing up and telling their stories, and a lot of those videos are going online. So take a minute, listen to the stories. And thank you all for coming out to our second of our town hall series.