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To see the devastating effects of the psychological sequella of war is one of the best cases against
war you can imagine. The devastating effect on young men's lives, on young women's lives--being
in combat and not only seeing the destruction and the death and the devastation, but also
the types of things that people do when they're in combat. Things they would never do in peacetime
and that they have to live in their conscience for the rest of their lives. The brain is
a social organ and when you're in combat, you're really going against some fundamental
instinct that we have to, in a sense, protect and preserve not only ourselves but other
people. So I think combat is devastating and we're gonna be paying psychologically the
price of this war for generations. Because it just isn't the soldiers, it's their children
and grandchildren. I work with many children of holocaust survivors and it's as if they
were in the war. Their biochemistry mirrors their parents' biochemistry and their parents'
terror and suffering and depression affects every part of their lives. The experience
not only in childhood but also in combat, changes the shape and the nature and the functioning
of the brain and that brain, then, interconnects with other brains when people return from
combat and in a sense traumatizes all the people around them. And a lot of combat vets
and holocaust survivors have an intuitive understanding about that and that's why they
tend not to talk about it to other people. I think it's very difficult for people to
talk about these experiences because it activates so much pain. Simultaneously, people see the
pain in other people's eyes when they're telling the story. And so in a sense, they have to
then try to protect the people around them from their own experiences. Which is why it's
so important to whatever degree they can get help for anyone returning from combat to,
you know, get involved in treatment. �