The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001, with about 80, 000 soldiers, policemen and rebels killed every year.
A Palestinian woman once told me, "It is not about the fear of one death, " she said, "sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day, " as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets.
It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations -- not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone.
And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real -- and leadership seemed important.
But one of the things that has stayed with me is when, during my Northern Uganda tour of the play, a man approached me and introduced himself as a former rebel soldier of Joseph Kony.
And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government.
Then in high school, I was gripped by the stories of the Allied soldiers -- soldiers who left the safety of their own homes and risked their lives to liberate a country and a people that they didn't know.
私は銃を手に取ることを 決意しました 私達を解放してくれた 連合軍兵士への 畏敬の念 それに ―
It was then that I decided I would take up the gun -- out of respect and gratitude for those men and women who came to liberate us.
And she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun, put her hand on it and lower it.
If a soldier sees his friend blown up, his brain goes into such high alarm that he can't actually put the experience into words, so he just feels the horror over and over again.
When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick, as they used to do up until about 2002, they now send the robot out.
And, in other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand.
So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, "Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us."
And trust me, if a room full of peace-loving people finds something compelling about war, so do 20-year-old soldiers who have been trained in it, I promise you.
It was a few plywood B-huts clinging to a side of a ridge, and sandbags, bunkers, gun positions, and there were 20 men up there of Second Platoon, Battle Company.
And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present.
And then he sat there for a full minute after they were finished and looked at us, so bedraggled in the rain, and said, "What you have said is true, and we must bow to the will of the people.
Abdirizak Bihi's studious 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan was recruited here in 2008, spirited to Somalia, and then killed when he tried to come home.
The soldier here in the commercial says, "I'm saving a place for you right here in this helicopter so that you can get out of this jungle and go enjoy the World Cup."
Not because it's monotone and concrete, but because of what it symbolizes: a monster that feeds off the rest of the country, where citizens are soldiers and slaves.
These women would get together over video conference from all around Afghanistan from their various bases, and they would talk about what it was like to be one of the only women doing what they were doing.
And they would talk about some of the lighter moments of being women out on the Special Operations front lines, including the Shewee, which was a tool that let you pee like a guy, although it's said to have had only a 40 percent accuracy rate out there.
There was the night another one of their teammates proved herself to a decidedly skeptical team of SEALs, when she found the intel item they were looking for wrapped up in a baby's wet diaper.
And while sitting in class learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, my mission to help service members who suffered like my grandfather began to take form.
We've had various names for post-traumatic stress throughout the history of war: homesickness, soldier's heart, shell shock, thousand-yard stare, for instance.
And while I was pursuing my degree, a new war was raging, and thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, service members were surviving blast injuries they wouldn't have before.
After working for a few years on a locked-in patient psychiatric unit, I eventually transferred to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, NICoE, which leads TBI care for active duty service members.
Initially, it was a daunting process for the service member, but eventually he began to think of BFIB as the mask, not his internal wound, and he would go to leave each session, he would hand me the mask, and say, "Melissa, take care of him."
Because when a child is kind to a Roomba, when a soldier tries to save a robot on the battlefield, or when a group of people refuses to harm a robotic baby dinosaur, those robots aren't just motors and gears and algorithms.
But we must ensure that the science, the energy level, the value that we place on sending them off to war is at the very least mirrored in how well we prepare them to come back home to us.
So they're going to put pressure on these soldiers, military police, to cross the line, give them permission to break the will of the enemy, to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up, to take the gloves off.
How do psychologists try to understand such transformations of human character, if you believe that they were good soldiers before they went down to that dungeon?
By 2006, there were more than 2, 500 of these attacks every single month, and they were the leading cause of casualties among American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
One of those things you just saw flashed before you was a raven drone, the handheld tossed one. For about a thousand dollars, you can build one yourself, equivalent to what the soldiers use in Iraq.
And now we have the fact that we're converting more and more of our American soldiers that we would send into harm's way into machines, and so we may take those already lowering bars to war and drop them to the ground.
Now, the psychological balancing of those experiences is incredibly tough, and in fact those drone pilots have higher rates of PTSD than many of the units physically in Iraq.
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