Welcome to Home of the Brave.

I believe that sometime in the future, sooner or later, people in the United States will admit and accept that we have lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and demand that our troops come back home.

And I hope it happens soon before we start a new losing war with

Iran. I know this is an un-American belief that we have lost the war, any war, because America can't lose. It's not

possible. We have the biggest military in the history of the world and God is on our side. He wouldn't let us lose. But when you

look at the facts, the evidence on the ground, we don't control any of the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq,

and we've lost the hearts and minds of the people who live there.

After 19 years of war on terror,

we've spent $7 trillion to kill half a million people, most of them poor civilians,

and yet there are only more terrorists who pose a greater threat. Using military force to fight terrorism

has been like pouring gasoline on a fire.

These are the facts,

but we don't think about them because we're in deep denial.

And when you're in denial, you keep making the same mistake over and over again.

We need to change the way we respond to the threat of terrorism.

And I think the change starts with talking and thinking hard about the things we've done, the mistakes we've made, the crimes we've committed.

It's difficult to talk about these things, so I've been interviewing some experts, veterans of our wars who came home broken

and traumatized and then went through a process of recovery from denial to acceptance and then figuring out how to find meaning and purpose in their

lives.

Perhaps they can be our role models.

The first interview I'm going to play is with Garrett Repenhagen. He served as a sniper

in Baccuba Iraq in 2004 and is now the executive director of Veterans for Peace, an organization dedicated to finding alternatives

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