YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger Carstens

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72
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2024-09-19
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2024-09-19
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  1. “And so knowing that and kind of giving you a sense of who I was at age 11, that's exactly the direction I wanted to go, to see human suffering figure out, okay, how do we address that part? What can we do to make this better?”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh, yeah. I think, and even afterwards, but maybe what helped me is I talked about preparation for my whole life. That's exactly what I wanted to be doing. So if I were in Bosnia and I'll say I'll start off in Kosovo, maybe Bosnia, Iraq, and then when I got out, Afghanistan and Somalia, it was always trying to help those that are vulnerable. And so I was actually seeking that human dimension. As an example, when I was in the country of Jordan as a civilian, I was the country director for a nonprofit that put food parcels into Syria. When I was in Somalia, I ran another nonprofit as the country director there. So I think I felt like I kind of understood how war is not just soldiers throwing lead at each other on a battlefield. But it's much, much, much broader. And that there is a civilian and human component. And those people at times are going to be”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “But I often wonder how much of that can be, there could be a shock absorber if we even do a better job of preparing soldiers for the environment that they go into so that they don't come back feeling like something wasn't done or they can't deal with what they saw or that they suffered a moral injury that then we on the backside have to account for.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And then later on, even as a civilian in Somalia and Afghanistan, you sometimes see that the war, especially in small wars, it's not as clear-cut. You're dealing with bigger moral issues. You're seeing people at their most vulnerable. And that's hard to prepare for. I mean, straight up infantry combat, you can train that. There are tasks, conditions, and standards. But seeing the human heart in pain and then trying to get a sense of how you can relate to that person. How much empathy you could, should, or must show another human being from another culture or another country that's suffering, maybe even someone who's the enemy or on the other side. These are things that I think we could do a better job too. So to my mind, I'm grateful for Congress giving us the military the resources to address these issues when people get back. I'm grateful that the military has put an emphasis on it. I'm grateful for the NGOs and the public support.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think, yes, I started off in the infantry, eventually went to the 1st Ranger Battalion, Savannah, Georgia, and after that I went into special forces. I changed my career change. It's called a branch transfer, then finished out the rest of my career as a green bra, a special forces officer. But I think Panama was interesting in that I think the Ranger Battalion is just so focused on war and combat and the tasks that make you successful that nothing was really incongruous. You know, when you parachute out of a plane, as I did in 1989, hit the ground, you know what to expect. You understand what the battlefield looks like, you understand the rules of the game. And so at the end of that, which is a short engagement, it's a three-week engagement, I felt that everything I saw and did aligned with what I was trained to do. I think as I went up in special forces and had the chance to see other wars and conflicts, whether it was Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And so I think, especially when you get away from, you know, you take an 18 year old who's playing basketball, going to the prom, and two years later he has a rifle. He's going to pursue his nation's enemies. And that's a big switch from a kid that's, you know, playing basketball to a kid that's playing a very different and violent game. And sometimes I think that's the way the army requires people to get haircuts and shine their boots and such because they're trying to remind people constantly in a world of violence that they adhere to certain values, that there's a nation that they represent. Because I think the military realizes if that goes wrong. And I think so far so good. But boy, it's something that I know keeps leaders awake. It did when I was a soldier. I always wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I agree. But I will say that that's probably the most important part, separating the policy from those that execute it or implement it. But I think you can lose it all if soldiers go off the deep end. Yes, for sure.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “People, there are definitely people at the four star level trying to think of not just how do we change the perception, but how do we ensure that who we bring into the army and then how we train and I guess inculcate might not be the right word, but how we put them into the system has a moral component and that there's a lot of work on your character. And you could go back and see those crazy things that used to make us wear on our dog tags where it had the nine army values or the things that we learned about West Point about moral challenges. And I think that's healthy. I think the public's perception since then has been pretty positive on the military and the trust that people have in the military.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “At art. And I think if West Point has anything that makes it really challenging, it's that the schedule so punishing that if you want to dig deeply into Aristotle or Heraclitus or St. Thomas Aquinas, you're really just trying to get in and get out of that text, get your good grade, and move on to the next thing that's coming at you. And that's the one thing I would say that as much as I thought West Point was amazing, actually strangely having a strong liberal arts program within this engineering college, I think I would have liked to have had more time to explore that. But I did enter at a time when the, I'd say the perception of the military was changing. I think a lot of it has to do with the Army's conscious decision. And I'll say the Army, but the military's conscious decision in the mid 70s to tighten up on some of the failures and weaknesses that they had that exhibited themselves during Vietnam. And they were pretty tough on it. I mean, there were definitely.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “No, I agree on your last statement, fully agree. And I'm grateful that we now recognize a lot of the mental health issues that visit themselves upon those who serve and that we're taking action against it, obviously more work to do. But I appreciate those comments. They're very real to me. But I think maybe leading in from that last question to this one, I think as a kid, I felt that there was a liberal part of me, the one that would want to go into liberal arts or studying acting or read philosophy. Then there was someone that was more practical that wanted to actually take action. I didn't want to think or speak about things. I wanted to do things. I wanted to walk my philosophies, my personal philosophies. And the one thing I can say is I decided not to go to UCLA and study philosophy or drama or what have you. Instead, going to the military, I was surprised to find the amount of study time that goes into reading the great philosophers and reading poetry and looking.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Have to smile because knowing a lot of your background, too, I can imagine at age 11 you were just as busy reading some interesting series. Yeah, noticed when I was a geek in my own right. Okay. We share that then. Let me...”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Me. And so while all these texts are beautiful, and as I, as you know, you kind of watch how people gravitate towards one or the other, the Bible's the one that hit me. And I would say I still try to read it daily. It doesn't always happen because, you know, the travel schedule and the press of everything. But yeah, it's been number one interesting from a historical standpoint. And secondly, it's not bad to kind of see what the right and left limits are on the morality and the things that a higher being would expect us to do.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “My family didn't really go to church much. We started off, but we just faded away for whatever reason. But I always still had a spiritual bent. I think I started reading the Bible when I was young, but then that fell away from that. But there was always this element of praying and trying to be thoughtful, wondering what the right thing to do was, to my mind, thinking that there's a moral being out there for whom I work. But it didn't become real to me until I was 27. I graduated from West Point. I wanted to go back and explore the philosophers and the religious text that we learned at West Point that I really didn't have time to dig into because it was such a frenetic pace. And so as I read like the Bhagavad Gita or I read the Torah or I read the Quran, I was trying to struggle to align who I am with those views. And they were all wonderful texts. And they all came very close. But when I was 27, that's when I finally really read the Bible for the first time. And it just resonated with me.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I wonder, I think I grew up in a military family, but it wasn't all around me. In other words, my dad was either gone or the house was not adorned with military paraphernalia. It was just like a regular house. And yet I knew what my dad was doing. I think that made me proud. But also, I think at times you're also maybe born to go in a certain direction. And I think I was playing Army when I was a young lad. I'd say I fired to quantify it probably 50% of my dad's example. And then the other 50%, just the way I was born and the things that I just naturally gravitated to.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Keep things in You know, I think the newer generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marine, marine, coast guardsmen, et cetera, and I should add Space Force now, they seem to be more extroverted, and maybe it's changes in culture that I personally think are better. But I know that when you walk down the halls of the Pentagon, at least when I was a lieutenant colonel, it was very, I would say, engaging. You know, if you're walking down some yell across the hallway going the other direction, asking, hey, how are you doing? What's going on this weekend? I wish you a good Friday. And you're like, I don't even know this guy. And yet they were, to my mind, there was a change in the force from maybe the introversion of when I joined and maybe a little more of an extroverted feel when I was going out. So there might be more of a cultural change in the military that's taking place.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think he mentioned that too. You got to wonder what makes someone read the newspaper at age 11 looking for that. It wouldn't shock me if I were to go back and explore further. I'd find it'd be a conversation with my father. And my father's the kind of the strong silent type. But when he talks, it's usually purposeful. And, you know, when he talked about his experiences, it was not necessarily in the weeds or the details, but about, I think to my mind, as I recall, the good that this country can do and should do.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “He was. Yeah, he spent many years in active duty and then reserves, and he retired as a full Navy captain. And I think when he looks back on his work life, he always says that was the most rewarding.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Sure, it would have dug in even harder. But yeah, for whatever reason, I gravitated to that. And I think it's the death and the suffering It just seems so wrong, and again, surely maybe it was in my day we used to watch John Wayne movies. And there should be some good person that rides in, tries to save everything. And I'm not saying I've ever ever really been the role to ride in and save something, but at least wanted to be a part of any effort to do something like that.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think I was probably too young to understand the politics, as I recall. But when you're reading reports that are fresh from AP or coming in on Newsweek and they're talking about the amount of human suffering, death, you know, at 11 years old, I think I have an 11 and 13 year old. And we don't try to shield them, but we don't necessarily throw that around the house. There's times when you should be protected, but for whatever reason.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I was reading the newspapers, news week and time It's funny. I did all that too before you know at night I'd throw the newspaper out on the carpet and I'd lay down on my stomach and just read. And, you know, as I read all this stuff, I thought surely someone is going to save the day here, that someone's going to stop this. And of course, you watch genocides and other things continue on. And so at a very young age, I decided what I wanted to do with my life is pursue a mission in which I could perhaps try to take care or leave the suffering of those that are most vulnerable. And strangely, I know this may seem incongruous, but that's what brought me to West Point.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I did. My dad worked for a trucking company out there. My mom worked for an air freight company. And I grew up living pretty much, you know, I would say an idyllic life, you know, middle class life. But I think when I was probably about 11 years old, I started to get a sense of that there was a lot of evil out in the world. And specifically, I was following the genocide that was taking place in Cambodia as an 11-year-old.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “David, it's good to see you too. I remember seeing you out at Sedona and first off, I've been following your work for years. It was an honor to chat with you, and I'm really happy to be here to talk to you today.”

    2024-09-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 594 — Amb. Roger Carstens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source