All right, y'all welcome to the Scott Horton's show.

I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute.

I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute,

editorial director of anti-war.com.

Author of the book, Pools Arren,

time to end the war in Afghanistan,

and the brand new enough already. Time to end the war in Afghanistan and the brand new enough already time to end the war on

terrorism and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003 almost all on

foreign policy and all available for you at

Scott Horton.org you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview

archive is also available at YouTube. YouTube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . in the U.S. Army and he's out now but you might remember he came on the show last year to talk about the aftermath of the Afghan withdrawal and the suicide attack at the airport in Kabul and all of that and wrote a great piece about it for the Libertarian Institute which we took down because he got in trouble with the bosses but now he put back up because he's out.

So you can find all that at the Libertarian Institute.

And then he's got a new article.

A veteran explains why people aren't joining the military.

Welcome back to the show, John. How are Hey thank you very much Scott for having me back on. Happy to have you here. Hey, so first of all tell us why you join the military in the first place and how many years you spent in and which wars you were in and so forth and what all it was like

Yeah, absolutely so I join the military right out of high school. I left high school and went to West Point or the United States Military Academy which is the service academy that graduates soldiers into the Army.

And so I kind of always knew growing up, I grew up in a conservative household in the south, south of Atlanta and was kind of in an area that had a lot of

veterans and I knew I wanted to join the military because I had kind of this patriotic duty that I felt and you know I was a kind of I was kind of the guy that you know I played sports and was athletic and competitive and I enjoyed that kind of

competition and physical competitiveness and really I mean frankly like you

know there's there's not a lot of places in the, you know, in the world where you can go and be physically intense and like do violence basically and besides being like a cop and I wanted to join the military so that I could fight and serve my country and do all of the above.

So after graduating from West Point, I commissioned as an infantry officer because I wanted to get out there in the front lines and do the do the fighting, but I graduated a little bit after the kind of major waves of the war on terror.

And I also went to a unit that didn't deploy to the combat zones so much an armored unit and so I went to Kuwait on a

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