Transcript

Mitch Lewis: This weekend, Duke University is hosting the After the Yellow Ribbon Conference. The event focuses on how communities, universities, and churches can help promote healing for veterans. Conference organizer Logan Mehl Laituri recently stopped by our studios to tell us more. Logan Mehl Laituri, welcome to North Carolina Now.

Logan M. Isaac: Thanks for having me.

Mitch Lewis: Now, Logan, you're a student veteran attending Duke Divinity School, and you served in Iraq. What do you see as some of the challenges that are facing student veterans?

Logan M. Isaac:Well, there's really two there's a number of different challenges. On the one hand, there's the administrative challenge and dealing with the VA, making sure that you have tuition that's promised to you.

And navigating that maze. But there's, there's also the personal challenge of particularly students with combat experience, but not just combat experience. I think service members in general, as they leave military service, have a particular perspective that is unique, but that also can be difficult to share at times. And so I think there's different angles at which student veterans are challenged. So it, it depends on what it is that that we're talking about that that would, that would matter most.

Mitch Lewis: Now talking about the, the personal experiences, you, you encountered a personal experience as you were getting ready for school. Tell us about that experience.

Logan M. Isaac: Well, I got outta the military in 2006 after I had spent over six years in an artillery unit that spent most of our time with infantry. And so I deployed in 2004 to Iraq, came home I was discharged and was looking forward to school. I got through my BA and I came out to the Divinity School to study theology. And getting ready at orientation, the campus psychiatric program that Duke offers had a representative that came to orientation and he was sharing about doctor patient confidentiality. And I think he was trying to lighten the crowd. He said about doctor patient confidentiality, he said “You can tell us anything. You can tell us that you kick your dog, you're cheating on your test, you're cheating on your spouse.” And he went on and on and he, he left the crowd with, “You can even tell us you've killed someone.” At which point the entering class in the lecture hall burst out laughing. And for someone who, who had a combat experience in Iraq, where that was something that I would need to seek a counselor for and that I have seen counselors for. It immediately set me apart from the rest of the class and created a, an estrangement that was very difficult to overcome.

It took me several weeks. But then even as I did, and I was able to see that, that what occurred, didn't occur out of malice. It was, it was really just a lack of understanding where I was coming from as a unique student in this, in this community. And as I continued, there was, there was something said that, that because of my experience, I had a heightened sensitivity to.

There's a number of people who identify as pacifist at the school. I, I myself identify as a pacifist. I was discharged after seeking status as a conscience objector, as a non-combatant, to return to Iraq without a weapon. But when, when somebody says or assumes that all soldiers go to war out of a sense of blood lust, that that affects me.

But in another sense as well, because the Divinity School is also a Christian community, training seminarians, training pastors. We also have to think about the theological ramifications of, of our training. And we were going over Lamentations one day in, in Old Testament, and one of the women said "I just don't get it, I don't know why this is relevant." We should just be clapping our hands and praising Jesus. And for someone who's gone through what combat entails. I don't merely go to church to praise God or, or I only do that through the knowledge of how sinful and, and, and horrible the world can be.

Like the things I've seen enabled me to have that joy and that that sense of praise and worship. And without it, I wonder if it, I wonder if it's, if it's somewhat hollow. And so there is a, a number of different things that as a new student I was facing, I was really trying to reconcile. And that's really what the event over Veteran's Day Weekend is about, is trying to equip particularly the academy and the church but also military families in engaging service members more meaningfully, more productively.

Because oftentimes things like that, like if I were to tell the class how difficult it was for me to hear someone say, well, we just go to church to clap and sing, or to tell the class that I, you know, that, that entered with me, that you laughed when something was mentioned that had a profound moral significance to me is difficult.

It's difficult to hear. It's difficult to say. But we're really trying to break down a lot of those barriers so that the, the church and the university as a whole can begin to really de-abstract war and those who conduct war.

Mitch Lewis: And the event that you're talking about is After the Yellow Ribbon conference. What well, tell us some of the folks who will be there, who will, who will talk during this conference.

Logan M. Isaac: We have gone out of our way to, to get a wide array of, of individuals. So our keynote on Friday night at 6:30 in Goodson Chapel will be Lieutenant Colonel Pete Kilner, who is an ethicist at West Point Military Academy in New York.

And he's written extensively on providing a moral framework through which to understand the justifiability of killing in combat. He's gotten a lot of heat from the Army for trying to say that no war is a moral act, and we have to instill our service members with a sense of what it means to be required to kill someone.

But on the other end of spectrum we've got Derek Webb, who's a Christian musician and activist who has, who has spoken and sung about how important it's to follow your conscience. He had an album put out in 2007 called Mockingbird at the end of which he, he described this, this event in, in Texas, I think where there was a near mutiny because he was trying to say, don't vote because you're supposed to, vote your conscience, and that may lead you not to vote. There's a professor of who holds a Catholic chair of theology at University of Dayton talking about liturgies for returning veterans. We've got people from the VA who will be speaking in an official capacity.

So we've really got a lot of different things kind of in the mix. We've got, like I said, Derek Webb who does music. We've commissioned a brand new icon of St. Martin of Tours, who is the patron saint of soldiers and chaplains, who is the first soldier saint in the fourth century, not to be martyred for refusing to fight.

And so we're really trying to pull in a very diverse set of, of backgrounds in, in the attempt to begin cultivating meaningful, constructive conversations about faith and service.

Mitch Lewis: And if folks want to find out more about after the Yellow Ribbon Conference, where can they go?

Logan M. Isaac: The best place to go would be sites.duke.edu/after the yellow ribbon. We also have a Facebook page for the student group, Duke Milites Christi. And that's usually where we've been posting most of it. But the schedule and how you register both on the site's webpage.

Mitch Lewis: Finally, a twofold question for you, because you have witnessed combat firsthand in Iraq. How are you dealing with some of the things that you have witnessed while in Iraq and what advice would you have to people when it comes to interacting with veterans, especially those who have been in combat?

Logan M. Isaac: Well, I think I've dealt with it. I think the church has been an incredibly important but troubling community in which to find reconciliation with myself. I tell people that families lose, lose people they love in war, and I did too. I lost a part of myself when I deployed. And I want to take very seriously the fact that war is a significant moral task, but that we, we need to get away from robbing people of the nuance of service.

I don't want anybody to villainize or venerate our veterans, because I think whether you call someone a monster or a hero, they, they prevent us from being fully human. Humans make mistakes. They, they make incredible successes. But if I'm a hero, I can't have made these horrible mistakes and I can't have witnessed this.

And if I'm, if I'm a monster, then I, I can't be capable of, of redemption. And I think the, the most important thing that you can offer someone who's been to, to combat or who has just been in military service and who struggles with that, is to just be a friend. And I mean that in the deepest sense possible when when people come home, we wanna, we want the details.

I found that people want to know if someone's killed someone, and that's the absolutely the worst thing you can ask because it immediately insists upon vulnerability. And if the real depth of friendship isn't there then they'll expose themselves to, to someone and, and they won't have anywhere for that experience to go.

And so I think we need to be ready to listen. We need to create something like what the church calls confession in public spaces and be ready to absorb the experiences that are valuable and that can help form both the university and the church, but that must be evoked in a way that does not compromise their, their moral or mental health.

Mitch Lewis: Logan Mehl Laituri, organizer of After the Yellow Ribbon Conference, thank you so very much for your service to your country and continued success to you, sir.

Logan M. Isaac: Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

Mitch Lewis: That's our show for tonight. Thanks for watching. Have a great evening everyone.