TAH in Politico

Sunday night I did an interview with Austin Wright of Politico. For some reason, he’s a lurker at TAH he says. Austin writes an daily early morning column at Politico called “Morning Defense“, which he explains is his work reporting on soldier- and defense-related issues.

Today’s column includes portions of our chat on Sunday night, mostly about the media’s mistreatment of veterans in regards to the SSG Robert Bales’ investigation;

MD INTERVIEW — We chatted over the weekend with Jonn Lilyea, a combat veteran who runs the blog “This Ain’t Hell.” Over the past week, Lilyea has written a series of posts blasting media reports that suggest PTSD as a possible explanation for the killing spree that left 17 Afghan civilians dead, and he expanded on his views during our discussion.

“People say these things without a minute’s research,” Lilyea said. “I think they should just shut up until there’s a medical professional that tells them that this particular person has PTSD and whatever they did was a direct result of PTSD.”

Lilyea, who started the blog in 2006 and now has a loyal following, describes himself as “more conservative than Mitt Romney and less conservative than Rush Limbaugh.” He added that he’s concerned the media’s portrayal of PTSD will lead the public to believe that all combat veterans are capable of horrific acts.

“You can talk to most of the people who are regulars on my blog, and they will tell you that they have some level of PTSD,” he said. “Even in my workplace, I’ve had people tell me, ‘All veterans are crazy.’ And it all stems from that perception of PTSD.”

Scroll down for additional excerpts from our interview with Lilyea.

Scrolling down from there, you can read Quotable Lilyea;

AND, AS PROMISED, MORE FROM OUR INTERVIEW WITH JONN LILYEA —

On blogging: “I don’t know a thing about blogging. I’ll spend hours researching and writing and put something up and nobody will respond to it. And then I’ll just pull something off the top of my head, and it’ll get a million responses.”

On the media: “There are not very many people in the media who were veterans. That’s probably a big piece of the disconnect.”

“And journalists have this perception of themselves that they’re the experts on every subject, and they just prattle on and mostly they just spew out the same kind of stuff that the popular culture spews out, and to me that’s very irresponsible.”

And more on PTSD: “When you look at the number of people who are suffering from PTSD, especially from the most recent wars, there are hundreds of thousands of them, according to the VA and DOD. These guys aren’t killing people. There are some of them who are committing suicide, but not a whole host of them. They are not beating their wives and not driving their cars off bridges and things like that.”

“I went to the range today and shot off 400 rounds of ammunition, and I didn’t shoot one person the whole time that I was out there.”

Austin made me sound smarter than I really am, but then he’s a combat veteran of sorts. His bio says he taught middle school in Southeast DC, so that counts a little bit, I suppose. And he really does read the blog because he mentioned some of our posts during the interview. Don’t ask me why, I can’t even figure out why you guys read it.

And before anyone else says it; I am more conservative than Mitt Romney, but at this stage of the campaign, I think Obama might be more conservative than Romney.

Category: Media, Veterans Issues