LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Today on this Veterans Day, my colleague Quil Lawrence has a new podcast out about an Iraq war veteran. It's a podcast years in the making. A decade ago, Quil first met Dave Carlson over a pay phone from prison where he landed after troubles adjusting to life after war.
AUTOMATED VOICE: You have a call from...
DAVE CARLSON: Dave.
AUTOMATED VOICE: ...An inmate at Waukesha County Jail.
CARLSON: Jail is the least therapeutic atmosphere you can probably ever imagine. Jail is you come in one way, and you leave three times worse.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
FADEL: When I got them both on the line recently, Dave Carlson was searching for a quiet place to talk.
CARLSON: I'm in the Milwaukee County Courthouse, just got out of court about 3 minutes ago. So I was looking for a spot to get a little bit of quiet.
FADEL: And you're in court as the attorney.
CARLSON: Yes.
FADEL: I start by asking Dave why he decided to trust Quil with his story in all its raw detail when he got that first phone call.
CARLSON: I think that one of my biggest strengths is also one of my biggest weaknesses, and that's been something I've done my entire life - is, I tend to trust people until proven otherwise. And so I think that it was just par for the course with me. He reached out. I thought it was impressive that a person wanted to talk to anybody in jail or incarcerated at that time about, you know, especially veteran issues.
FADEL: Yeah.
CARLSON: And so I went for it.
FADEL: Quil, why don't you tell me about what you were looking for? What were you trying to find out when you began talking to Dave?
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Yeah, well, it had actually just been a different story I was doing that led me to talk to some veterans who were incarcerated. And that's when someone told me this fact, which I - was kind of surprising, is that when you get incarcerated, you're a ward of the state. So in a way, it doesn't make sense for the VA to be taking care of you 'cause a different part of the government is taking care of you. How well they take care of you is another question, and that's sort of what I was going to ask. Like, what's it like to have combat PTSD and then be thrown into this environment where you can't let your guard down, where you can't really heal?
FADEL: A lot of this story, Dave, is about your reentry back home from war. And part of it involves your service in Iraq, a place Quil and I - actually, the place Quil and I met as journalists - and a sergeant who mentored you, Alwyn Cashe. Can you tell me about him?
CARLSON: Yeah, so I don't want to overplay Sergeant First Class Cashe and my interaction. I think that it's a special interaction for a private to be able to interact with a leader of that level. He had done the invasion. He was back again. He's a Bradley commander, a platoon sergeant. But in this case, he was absolutely willing to hear me. He was absolutely willing to put me on the missions that they were going on. He was a phenomenal leader, which obviously was shown to the world with that final act of heroism that he did on October 17, 2005.
LAWRENCE: Yeah, and I should add, Alwyn Cashe received the Medal of Honor...
FADEL: Yeah.
LAWRENCE: ...Posthumously for one of the most heroic acts I've ever heard of. He was pulling his soldiers out of a vehicle that had been hit in an ambush. He got seven guys out while everything was in flames. He died of his wounds later.
FADEL: Dave, there was also this part of you that came back with survivor's guilt.
CARLSON: Absolutely. That has been one of the hardest takeaways from the 2004-2005 deployment, was the fact that I went out with these guys. We went through, like, just insane situations - contact, firefights, RPG attacks, IED attacks, mortar attacks - all of these different things. But I'm segmented off in my own unit. These guys, not just Sergeant First Class Cashe's platoon, but other platoons also treat me like family towards the end. We're volunteering to go out, but then after, it's just done. We get taken off mission, and there is these casualties, and it's like I never had any way of reconnecting or anything.
FADEL: Quil, when you tell this story, you talk about this survivor's guilt and why it's such an important idea, especially to Iraq and Afghanistan vets, right?
LAWRENCE: Yeah. Sometimes people come home with this idea of, Oh, I could have done more, or I'm not over there, and my buddies are, and there's this feeling of guilt about it. But in this case, it was very specific - you can't go on this patrol - and within a couple of days, that patrol got ambushed. So it comes back more generally to a thing called moral injury. It's like a blow to the head and the heart. We all look back on our lives and think, if only this had been different, but I think this is kind of a torturous version of that.
FADEL: Dave, you spent a lot of your life in violent situations. You fought a literal war. You came back, and your instinct was still to react with violence. But you now talk about how your philosophy around violence changed. I just want to listen to a moment that really struck me when I was listening to the podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
CARLSON: There's a quote, and I don't - I'm going to butcher it, possibly, but it's about - it's a proverb about - I would rather be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. And I think that it really speaks to - for me, it speaks to being able to defend yourself, to be able to do harm, but then having the discipline, having the empathy, having the compassion to not do it.
LAWRENCE: And so that's who Dave Carlson decides he's going to be.
FADEL: I think the intimacy of this podcast is what makes it so impactful because we're with Quil finding out your story, and your relationship gets closer over 10 years. You guys have been talking for 10 years. What are you going to do now that this podcast is over? Are you going to keep in touch?
CARLSON: Yeah, I hope so. I already texted him asking about going hiking on the Appalachian trail. So that's probably the next thing, hopefully.
LAWRENCE: When you build this kind of trust, it's, I mean, impossible not to become friends, I think, and I'd love to do something that doesn't involve dragging up his worst memories to record. And I'd love to go on a hike. I'm just afraid he's going to make me go on, like, a thousand-mile hike into, like...
FADEL: Yeah. I think...
LAWRENCE: ...You know...
FADEL: ...Maybe go to lunch.
(LAUGHTER)
FADEL: Dave Carlson and his conversations with NPR's Quil Lawrence over the past decade is the subject of the podcast Carlson's War, which is now available in the Up First feed. You can also hear more of Dave Carlson's story on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED this afternoon. Quil, Dave, thank you both for sharing this story with us.
LAWRENCE: Thank you.
CARLSON: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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