Stanley McChrystal: disagreement

Transcript context

…Maybe it’s hard to generalize, but if a young man, say, has been through extreme traumatic stress in combat — emotional, psychological stress — are you more in the direction of “Well, they need a lot of therapy. They need to talk it through”? Or do you think just suppression is better? Because after World War II and the Korean War, it seems to me, we, as a nation, mostly practiced suppression. What do you think about that issue? I don’t agree with suppression because there are some people who have real trauma. But I will be honest with you, I also think if you go looking for trauma long enough, you’ll find it — meaning, whether it’s there or not, you can almost create it by looking for trauma and telling people, “You must be traumatized because you went through this. ” Then after a while, they go, “Oh, I must be traumatized,” and it almost becomes self-fulfilling. Having said that, I think that a lot of people have gone through a lot. What they need to do is understand that anyone who goes to combat comes out differently. They don’t come out worse. Trauma doesn’t always produce weakness. It doesn’t produce flaws. It may produce a little bit more resilience. It may produce a little bit more maturity. There are competing things. I don’t like the idea of suppression because that’s unhealthy. But at the same time, we don’t want to look at every veteran as a victim or a casualty. If you think about the numerous Afghans who fought with the United States in Afghanistan, how is it you think they understood America? What did they value in their picture of America? And how accurate was it?…

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