Translator: Delia Cohen Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
And up next,
we have another good friend of mine.
He's a former combat veteran of the United States Marine Corps.
He's passionate about helping veterans in distress.
Ladies and gentlemen, my good friend, Mr. Ron Self.
(Applause)
Hello. Thank you.
I've got to say,
I just got to pet a dog for the first time in 19 years,
and I'm feeling some kind of way about that.
Okay, here we go.
November 9, 2011.
A regular day just like any other day.
I walked into my cell.
Stepped up on the toilet seat.
Put a rope around my neck.
Attached it to the locker, and stepped off.
About an hour and a half later,
I woke up on the floor.
The rope had broke, which surprised me,
because I made the rope out of a sheet.
A four-grade rope
Soaked in water, real good tensile strength.
Probably made 100 of those in the Marine Corps,
towed Humvees with them.
But this one broke. Okay.
Initially what I felt was two-fold:
Shame for having attempted to kill myself,
and shame for having not succeeded.
And while I'm not a religious man,
at some level I felt the rope broke for a reason.
Or maybe I just wanted to believe it broke.
Okay, so I figured I'd sit with that for a while.
About two weeks later,
I was in a prison university project English 204 research class,
the end result being to produce
a 15 to 25 page paper on the topic of your choice.
It was the beginning of the semester and someone handed me a document.
Keep in mind, I didn't tell anyone tried to kill myself, nobody knew that.
And so someone handed me this document.
And what it was was a legal opinion,
filed by Judge Reinhart of the Ninth Circuit Court
September 2009, in response to a lawsuit
filed by the family of a veteran who committed suicide.
In his response, he cited a Katz suicide study,
which indicated that 18 veterans a day were committing suicide at that time.
Throughout the course of the semester, and in months to follow,
I went on to discover something that I found incomprehensible.
And that is, in the 14 years,
from the start of the Iraqi War to include the Afghanistan War,
6,855 American personnel were killed in action.
In that same period of time, 73,000 veterans committed suicide.
Now when I share these statistics, these numbers, with people,
they think I must be mistaken.
I'm in prison, we don't have access to good information.
But we actually, in the college program,
we have real good access to a lot of literature to do the research,
and that's an accurate number.
And I went on to discover a few other things.
And that is that I don't know why that number's so high.
I can only speak for a small percentage of it.
So that's what I'm going to talk about right now.
And when I explain that to people, what I ask them to understand,
is that the relationship forged between men in combat
is similar to that between a parent and a child.
And for a veteran, there's no greater loss than than that of a brother in combat.
To actually see him fall.
And the biggest lie of your life, you tell to yourself the rest of your life;
that being, you could have done something different to alter that outcome
And you simply couldn't.
And while you saw them fall, you know they're gone;
they're not really gone.
Because every night when you close your eyes,
you see their faces in the shadows of your dreams,
constant reminders of the brotherhood,
of the camaraderie, of the family you search for the rest of your life
but intuitively know you will never find.
Now friends and family,
they try to span that emotional divide.
They try to bridge the gap.
But it's pointless.
I mean, they may as well look to the stars and try and talk to people
in a distant galaxy as talk to you.
And that's because serving with men
that died by your side,
sometimes in your arms,
proving their worth to you
has rendered pre-war family and friends
untrustworthy, undependable.
Translation: there's a stranger among us. That stranger's the veteran. Its me.
So, clearly the seeds of suicide,
in my opinion, are planted on the battlefield.
And they remain dormant for the most part while you're on the battlefield.
Only now your tour of duty's up and it's time to rotate back home,
or you get injured.
Either way you're coming back home, and that's where they start to grow.
From the second you step foot on that plane
and arrive at the very same airports
that our brothers and sisters from Vietnam arrived at
and were greeted by people
calling them names, like, "Baby killer," "Murderer," "War criminal,"
"Go away," "We don't want you in our country."
I've got to say, America gave itself a good ass-kicking
in how it treated Vietnam veterans.
Only now it's 45 years later, and this generation of veterans
from the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan,
and a dozen other places you've never heard of
are returning home and they're arriving at those very same airports.
And it's become an opportunity
for those people that gave the Vietnam veterans
such a hard time to redeem themselves.
It's become an opportunity for America to redeem itself
in relation to how it treats its veterans.
And so, we step off the plane.
People are waving flags.
"Welcome home, you're a hero, we love you, we're so proud of you."
And while many of the Vietnam veterans
would have appreciated that type of reception,
they, and this is the hard part,
as this generation of veterans knows, there's some truth to those insults.
You see many of the things that happen in combat
simply do not translate into being a hero.
Yet you come back, and everybody's saying, "You're a hero. We're so proud of you."
So, we come back, and that's all we we ever wanted was to make it back.
And now that you are back, you've never felt so alone.
You never felt so much guilt and shame in your life.
Now you just want to go back.
And you won't have to worry about thanking people
for thanking you for your service.
You won't have to worry about feeling like you're alienating people,
and that's just what you do, you alienate everybody around you.
And there's a reason for that
because if you let anybody in, if you let anybody get close,
you might lose them.
And the thought of losing anyone else
just brings you back to losing your brothers in combat.
And for many veterans,
it's just that you can't go back to war.
And you can't go forward, or you feel like you can't go forward.
The easiest solution for many is just to chamber around.
And drop the hammer.
That's what many do.
Another option, clearly my option, is I came to prison.
Coming to prison is a different path to the same destination: death.
It's just a slower path.
Only for me, as you know, the rope broke.
And when the rope broke, a solution appeared to me.
And in 2012, I founded "Veterans Healing Veterans From the Inside Out."
And in it what I believe
is the solution to the problem of the high rate of suicides.
Now, it's really simple.
As some things in life are.
When you join the military,
it's understood that you have to graduate boot camp
to go on to be a member of that branch of service.
If you think of society as a branch of service, which it is,
before you can return to it from the military,
you have to complete Boot Camp Out.
To not implement Boot Camp Out,
and have veterans complete it, in my opinion,
is the equivalent of bringing a 60-ton Abrams tank back from war,
painting it yellow,
slapping some stickers on it, and calling it a school bus.
That's not going to work out too well.
Can you imagine a big yellow Abrams tank, cruising down the street,
leaving a wake of torn-up asphalt, crushed cars behind it?
It's not trying to do that, it's not trying to be destructive.
But it's a tank. It's a weapon of war.
When the veteran comes back from war,it's the same thing.
For that tank to be a school bus, clearly some changes have to be made.
And that's what Boot Camp Out's about; it's about making those changes.
Now, Boot Camp In,
first thing you do in the morning is strap on your combat boots,
put your rucksack on, check your weapon, make sure it's sighted and good to go.
Boot Camp Out's the opposite of that.
First thing you do in the morning is you put on your flip-flops,
your board shorts, baseball cap.
Daily exercise begins with yoga, meditation, maybe a few laps in the pool,
mountain bike riding.
Definitely not a backpack carrying an M16.
The heart of the program would revolve around narration therapy.
Now, most veterans, myself included, will tell you,
"I don't need to write my experiences of war down.
I lived them.
They're forever burned into my memories, etched into my soul."
But there's something about writing them down.
They're tangible now.
You can hold them, look at them,
relate to them in a different way than just thinking about them.
And when you share those experiences
with other veterans that have similar experiences,
something starts to happen.
Something unexpected, something you didn't think could ever happen again.
You start to feel a connection. You start to feel alive.
And you learn that it's okay
to take one step out of the shadows of denial and depression.
And that it's okay to share those repressed and subdued memories.
And every time you do that,
every time you share that with another group of veterans,
it gets easier.
It has for me.
Now the program I speak of will be unprecedented in military history
because it doesn't exist yet.
There is no Boot Camp Out. There never has been.
Now the powers that be will say, "We're doing plenty.
We're addressing the problem. We have programs in place."
And I would say, as evidenced by the high rate of suicide, the 73,000,
that those programs are ineffective.
Now in the military, it's all about the chain of command.
So, the orders come from the top down.
Being here in prison, San Quentin,
I couldn't be any farther away from that chain of command.
And that's why I need your help.
We need people of power and influence to help make this program happen.
Without people of power and influence, this program won't exist.
Now America claims to love and support its veterans.
I say, prove it.
We ask that you use your power, your influence,
to advocate for a change in how veterans re-enter society.
Advocate for this change.
I would ask you to contact "Veterans Healing Veterans From the Inside Out"
to find out what you can do, what more you can do,
to help us save our brothers and sisters,
your brothers and sisters, your sons and daughters,
from a fate that's undeserving of them and their service to this country.
And one other thing.
It's not often that people from all walks of life
can actually make history.
And this is what this is; an opportunity for everybody here, everybody in blue,
everybody that's come in from the street, everybody that hears this message,
to get involved and make Boot Camp Out happen.
We already have a version of it here at San Quentin Prison.
Of course, it's a smaller, scaled-down version.
I don't think I can convince the Warden to put a pool in.
(Laughter)
But it's a very successful program that we have here.
And we have several veterans
that have paroled from San Quentin and they're thriving.
So, we have a good idea of what to do and how to do it.
We just need your help to do it.
So, before I leave, all I'm going to say is,
I'm just asking for your help.
Thank you.
(Applause)