Andy Mink: My name is Andy Mink, I’m the vice president for education at the National Humanities Center. I’m with Ina Dixon, who is the program coordinator at History United, which is part of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and located in Danville, Virginia.
I’ve asked Ina to share with us her Humanities Moment. I know the last time you and I talked about this, you said something that stuck with me. I’ve been trying it out in a couple of places. That was the sense of interacting with something that makes you feel less lonely or more connected to others. I’d love to hear your Humanities Moment, maybe to get your thoughts on what a Humanities Moment might be, both as a process, a way of knowing, as well as a moment itself. Then share with us what you brought today.
Ina Dixon: Great, thanks, Andy. Well, I’d love to share with you a letter that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother. He was in World War II. In 1944, he was in the Battle of the Bulge. We have all of his letters—his name was Richard Smith Dixon—to Madeline Dixon, his wife, my grandmother. She was living in Kentucky at the time. She saved all of his letters and he didn’t save any of hers. She was always very angry about that. We have really one side of the story.
But my cousin transcribed all these letters. There’s very many that I love, but I’d just like to take one as a particular instance of a Humanities Moment and read a little bit of it, then explain why I found my Humanities Moment in this letter.
This is a letter dated on Christmas Day, 1944, somewhere in Belgium. It’s a very long letter actually. He’s complaining about the conditions, how cold it is, how he hates going to meetings. But at the end, he closes, “Remember, I’m thinking about you always and wondering how long it will be before we can be together again. I love you, sweetheart. Sometime we’ll crawl into those good old clean, white sheets and slumber off.”
Early in the letter, he’s talking about how dirty it is and how cold. If you think about the Battle of the Bulge, they’re fighting in the mud and in the cold winter. The idea of him thinking about clean, white sheets, it really humanizes my grandfather, who I didn’t really know. It humanizes a war that I didn’t live through.
But the fact that I can feel that same sense of the kind of relief and security that he must have been wishing for at this time, I think that is really what a Humanities Moment is all about. This letter provides that sort of connection for me.
...on December 8th in 1973 when school officials in Drake, North Dakota, burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut, of course, had served in World War II. He was captured by the Germans, held as a prisoner in Dresden when the Allies bombed the city.
For years, he tried to find a way to tell his story. And meanwhile, he went to graduate school in anthropology. He worked at General Electric. He got married, had three kids, adopted three more, and struggled to find his voice as a writer. But he finally wrote his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969, and it was extremely popular, and for the most part, it got great reviews. But it was banned many times for being obscene, for being violent, for being unpatriotic.
In 1973, there was a 26-year-old high-school English teacher who assigned Slaughterhouse-Five to his students, and most of them loved it. They thought it was the best book they’d ever read. But one student complained to her mom about the obscene language, and the mother took it to the principal, and the school board voted that it should not only be confiscated from the students, who were only a third of the way through the book, but it should be burned. And many of the students didn’t want to give up their books. So the school searched all of their lockers and took them and threw the books into the school’s furnace, and while they were at it, the school board also decided to burn Deliverance by James Dickey, and a short story anthology.
Now, Kurt Vonnegut got wind of this, and he wrote a letter to one of the members of the school board, and the letter said, “Dear Mr. McCarthy, I’m writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I’m among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school. If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It’s true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That’s because people speak coarsely in real life. If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books—books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.”
Vonnegut’s letter, to which the school board did not respond, I want to argue stands as a humanities moment. These are profound moments that reveal the depths and the aspirations and the enduring human truths in a democratic culture. They stand against the cartoonish fears, the threats, the Mickey Mouse moments and appeals to our worst natures, that often pervade daily information flow and discourse.
Today, of course, we have people running for president who don’t believe in evolution, who don’t believe in global warming, who say they support gay people as long as they don’t practice being gay. They might as well also say they support squirrels as long as they don’t gather acorns for the winter, and trees as long as they stop shedding leaves for the fall.
When I was chair of English at the University of South Carolina in the late ’90s, I used to schedule myself routinely to teach freshman composition, and I would say to the other full professors, if I can do it, so can you. And one semester, I was using Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus as one of our texts, and it’s a very powerful story, as you probably know, in which Spiegelman discusses his relationship with his father, who was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and in which the Nazis are depicted as cats and the Jews as mice.
On the first day we began discussing the text, I soon realized that many of the students only had a vague understanding of the Holocaust and were unable to place it precisely in history. And they lacked knowledge of its politics or its consequences. And like a truly hip instructor of the era, in the late ’90s, I asked them to research it on the Internet for our next class meeting and to bring in a couple of sources that they investigated. And in the next class, I was absolutely stupefied that literally half had brought in Holocaust denial sites as their sources of information. And they had trouble understanding my consternation when I denounced these sites.
So I want to be clear that I don’t fault the students for this so much as to point to a prevailing and growing issue that we’re all facing—of information literacy—that I believe it’s incumbent upon us to address. We witnessed the democratization of information. We witnessed its prevalence, its accessibility that’s unprecedented in history. But many have difficulty validating or effectively utilizing the information available to them. To extend the computer analogy, it’s as if we had an enormous hard drive, and there is no processor for it.
Through teaching, and citing, and recognizing, and creating humanities moments, we elevate both information and ethical literacy. These are the cornerstones of social justice and of a truly democratic culture. And such education is the backbone of our defense against the terrorism of cartoonish ignorance and the lackadaisical acceptance of it, which is a slippery slope to the barbaric erosion of healthy questioning and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
U.S. Representative David Price: I wouldn’t exactly describe it as a moment but I can tell you about an intellectual experience that really did transform my way of thinking and influences me to this day. It has to do with when I first went to Yale Divinity School. I never became a clergyman, obviously, but I certainly got a good liberal arts education at Yale Divinity School and feel that was a time of great intellectual development for me.
One important part of that was being introduced to the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, who at that point was a very influential theologian, but he had a wide influence way beyond theological circles. He used his theological understanding—essentially understanding of human nature—to elaborate the way “small-d” democratic politics can and should work.
There’s an aphorism—which I can’t quote exactly—that’s associated with him but it sums this up rather neatly. He said once that our positive understanding of human nature makes democracy possible. Our negative understanding of human nature makes democracy necessary.
In other words, our understanding of human nature has a lot to do both with the positive possibilities we strive for in our society, the kind of aspirations that we have for a more perfect union, for expanding opportunity, for a just society. At the same time we understand that even the best intentions in politics can become distorted, can go astray by virtue of self-interest and the will to power. Therefore, it’s important that no one’s power be absolute and that we have the kind of checks and balances that, of course, we aspire to anyway in our American system.
He also understands power in this vein. In other words, we’ve always had a preoccupation in American political thought with power, and that comes partly from the Calvinist tradition, from some of the theological roots of our culture, but that, too, can lead us astray because we’ve tended to concentrate on political power as the most potent danger. Of course it can be extremely dangerous but sometimes we’re oblivious to other kinds of power. Economic power, let’s say. We don’t have a full appreciation for just how oppressive and how limiting that can be.
Moreover, we don’t always appreciate how political power can check other forms of power—as it goes back to the Antifederalist position we were discussing earlier. You don’t ever suppose that you can do away with, or have the luxury of, a totally libertarian society. Power is going to be exercised. There are going to be disparities in power. Power is going to be organized in some way, and the way we do our politics is going to have a profound influence on this. It’s much better to be intentional about that, deliberate about it, than it is to make glib assumptions about power being benign or, for that matter, power being completely dangerous.
There has to be a balance between a notion of using power, utilizing power, and checking power. Niebuhr argued very, very persuasively that our understanding of human nature, particularly coming out of our religious traditions, was an important resource. Not just Enlightenment optimism about human nature. Not just the classical liberal assumptions about natural harmonies in society. No, no. There are real conflicts and there are real abuses that are possible. At the same time, sometimes coercion is necessary. So, it’s that understanding of power, theologically rooted, that just transformed my way of thinking about politics.
Robert D. Newman: Can you give us an example of a Humanities Moment for you, where you became a vessel for the tradition of the humanities somehow, that it flows through you and enables you to create something new and wonderful?
Jonathan Lethem: Well, I’m going to pick something that may seem a little odd in this context, because it’s normally regarded as a sort of disposable item, but there was a comic book when I was a kid that I was obsessed with called Omega the Unknown. And it was a very strange and awkward comic book, in some ways it was unfinished. It only lasted for ten issues, and it started to map out a really marvelous, ambitious story, but it ground to a halt almost as if it didn’t know how to continue.
Of course, it was also a commercial flop. And at this time, there were very few people working seriously with the iconography of superheroes to make anything that anyone regarded as particularly worth preserving or talking about. They were sort of dime-store items. And ten, fifteen, twenty years later, you had creators like Alan Moore come along or Art Spiegelman, really remarkable creators, Lynda Barry and Dan Clowes, who renewed the sense—or in some ways opened up for many people for the first time—the sense that actually graphic literature could be literature, that it was of lasting value, and that the form had innate properties that were not only interesting, but they conveyed a unique power, and in the right hands they could become true art.
And I guess I was primed, I was predisposed to respond to this assertion. And so I was very welcoming, I was very excited at the way that book stores and librarians and critics began to embrace the power of this form. And so, then, in a kind of wonderful—I won't call it ironic, I guess I will just say, kind of sweet full circle opportunity—Marvel Comics came to me and asked me to write something for them. The people working in the traditional comic book industry had read Michael Chabon’s novel, and they read my novel, and realized, well, novelists are kind of warming up to us, what if we try to bring them in, into the fold? And so I was asked which character out of all of Marvel’s would I like to write, and I think they might have been expecting me to latch on to Spiderman or some other totem in the culture, some other major figure, but I said, “Well, what about Omega the Unknown?” And I got to go back and sort of reconstruct this lost character who had been more or less forgotten, even by the tradition that had given rise to him.
And so I wrote a limited series that was bound and published in hard cover as a kind of graphic novel about Omega the Unknown, who had spoken to me and stirred me in this way that was sort of ahead of its time, because I felt that what those issues had suggested to me was the kind of artistic possibility that I’d seen fulfilled in these later examples, and so I tried to bring Omega and his awkward little story into a kind of fulfillment in turn.
Here’s the code they used. It breaks the alphabet into five lines, each with five letters in it. So any letter (forget about K) can be conveyed through two sets of taps. A is 1, 1; Z is 5, 5 (K is either C or 2, 6). The code’s five lines are:
Captain John Borling was one of those captives, and the poems he composed as a P.O.W. were shared and memorized by his fellow prisoners. And, after Borling returned to the States after the war, his poems were pubished in Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton.
Borling’s poetry, composed in the most oppressive of conditions, demonstrates how the arts and humanities are essential to the human spirit and give evidence to the shared human impulse to make sense of our lives in words and through creative expression.
In the Hanoi Hilton, the place where the North Vietnamese imprisoned and often tortured American captives during the Vietnam War, the US prisoners used a tapping code to communicate with one another. But they didn’t just send conversational messages, they tapped out poetry, reciting from memory some of the favorites they remembered from school and composing new poems to lift their spirits. Their captors would not allow them to speak to one another. But they didn’t notice the tapping — or didn’t understand what it was about.
Here’s the code they used. It breaks the alphabet into five lines, each with five letters in it. So any letter (forget about K) can be conveyed through two sets of taps. A is 1, 1; Z is 5, 5 (K is either C or 2, 6). The code’s five lines are:
Captain John Borling was one of those captives, and the poems he composed as a P.O.W. were shared and memorized by his fellow prisoners. And, after Borling returned to the States after the war, his poems were pubished in Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton.
Borling’s poetry, composed in the most oppressive of conditions, demonstrates how the arts and humanities are essential to the human spirit and give evidence to the shared human impulse to make sense of our lives in words and through creative expression.
I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.
In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.
]]>About seven months ago, our son was in a tragic ski accident, and was in a coma for close to a month. And during that really painful time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he ever going to wake up? Was he not going to wake up?
I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.
In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.
I did not love Latin before Catullus. I was proud of my success with learning the language, and I dutifully memorized decks of vocabulary cards and recited declensions, but I worked through it without any real joy. Then, in tenth grade, Catullus’ mini-epic poem 64 seduced me and I never recovered. Catullus uses gorgeous, rich language, stunning imagery, and brilliant humor in all of his poetry, but these were not what initially hooked me. No, I fell in love with, of all things, his grammar, and at the same time Latin as a language. In poem 64, Catullus frequently employs what is called “the golden line,” a five word line usually arranged as adjective adjective verb noun noun. Writers in English cannot do this as our word order is too rigid. The precision of Latin grammar is what allowed him to use this rhetorical device and add another layer of nuance to his poetry. Latin writers were freed by the rules and structure of their language.
My life at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.
First century Latin poetry may seem like an esoteric subject, especially one far removed from the concerns of a teenage girl in late 20th century America, but my exposure to Catullus and a learned appreciation for the elegance and beauty of Latin poetic grammar helped forge my life’s path — through college and into my career as a research librarian.
Experiencing the power and nuance of expression created through word transpositions in Latin grammar also opened my mind to the possibilities inherent in other languages and cultures, ideas and realms of feeling that were not only new and exciting — but that were nearly impossible to approximate in any other way.
]]>I started learning Latin in seventh grade because I decided it was the most difficult course I could take, and I had something to prove. I was an economically disadvantaged student in a wealthy private school, and all of my classmates knew it. I would never live in their mansions, or wear their expensive clothes, or go on their exotic vacations, so I set about making myself at least academically equal. Like most grade school students who read Latin, the poetry of Catullus was some of the first “real” literature I encountered. After the dry, contrived passages in my textbooks, the sensuous love poems and harsh invectives were a welcome change of pace. Catullus’ writing is the rare combination of accessible and beautiful — a perfect entry to Latin poetry.
I did not love Latin before Catullus. I was proud of my success with learning the language, and I dutifully memorized decks of vocabulary cards and recited declensions, but I worked through it without any real joy. Then, in tenth grade, Catullus’ mini-epic poem 64 seduced me and I never recovered. Catullus uses gorgeous, rich language, stunning imagery, and brilliant humor in all of his poetry, but these were not what initially hooked me. No, I fell in love with, of all things, his grammar, and at the same time Latin as a language. In poem 64, Catullus frequently employs what is called “the golden line,” a five word line usually arranged as adjective adjective verb noun noun. Writers in English cannot do this as our word order is too rigid. The precision of Latin grammar is what allowed him to use this rhetorical device and add another layer of nuance to his poetry. Latin writers were freed by the rules and structure of their language.
My life at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.
First century Latin poetry may seem like an esoteric subject, especially one far removed from the concerns of a teenage girl in late 20th century America, but my exposure to Catullus and a learned appreciation for the elegance and beauty of Latin poetic grammar helped forge my life’s path — through college and into my career as a research librarian.
Experiencing the power and nuance of expression created through word transpositions in Latin grammar also opened my mind to the possibilities inherent in other languages and cultures, ideas and realms of feeling that were not only new and exciting — but that were nearly impossible to approximate in any other way.
These differences in language, like reading, reveal different ways of seeing the world, and by learning about and seeing them, we create possibilities for ourselves.
Quillen says, “This insight — about the relationship between words, and rhythm, and sound, and meaning — has been important to me over the years, especially as it has encouraged me to consider the variety of ways in which ideas are expressed in different contexts and across time and to recognize the distinctions those differences create in my view of the world. The value of theological, philosophical, literary inquiry — humanistic inquiry — is that it helps us to make sense of things in ways that were not available to us before.”
“It is difficult to translate the beauty of Latin easily into English. There’s something about the relationship between Augustine’s words and the meaning of what he’s saying that is more powerful and profound when read in their original language.
“This insight — about the relationship between words, and rhythm, and sound, and meaning — has been important to me over the years, especially as it has encouraged me to consider the variety of ways in which ideas are expressed in different contexts and across time and to recognize the distinctions those differences create in my view of the world.
“The value of theological, philosophical, literary inquiry — humanistic inquiry — is that it helps us to make sense of things in ways that were not available to us before.”
Carol Quillen describes how, growing up, her initial insights and perceptions came from what she calls promiscuous reading — reading anything and everything and then finding connections among these very different texts. She consumed Augustine’s Confessions, in the original Latin, which captures and conveys meaning differently than English and enabled her both to grasp and question the complex ways in which language represents reality.
These differences in language, like reading, reveal different ways of seeing the world, and by learning about and seeing them, we create possibilities for ourselves.
Quillen says, “This insight — about the relationship between words, and rhythm, and sound, and meaning — has been important to me over the years, especially as it has encouraged me to consider the variety of ways in which ideas are expressed in different contexts and across time and to recognize the distinctions those differences create in my view of the world. The value of theological, philosophical, literary inquiry — humanistic inquiry — is that it helps us to make sense of things in ways that were not available to us before.”
As she notes, however, “I became positively besotted with The Maid of Orleans. I could do nothing but think about Joan. That’s the way she is. She grabs you, and no matter how well you know the story you keep hoping — I keep hoping — that it will turn out differently.”
]]>In this video, Joan Hinde Stewart recalls the first book she ever checked out of a library — a biography of Joan of Arc — a memory triggered by an experience in her sixties. She describes the fascination she felt about Joan of Arc from an early age and the conflict she felt about reading this biography, as it was unsanctioned by the Catholic church.
As she notes, however, “I became positively besotted with The Maid of Orleans. I could do nothing but think about Joan. That’s the way she is. She grabs you, and no matter how well you know the story you keep hoping — I keep hoping — that it will turn out differently.”
He notes that at the time he encountered the character he and Stephen were about the same age and describes how he identified his own struggles as a young Southerner with those Dedalus experiences as a young Irishman. He goes on to discuss how the figure of Dedalus has become iconic and is used repeatedly to help discuss the struggles of young artistic spirits.
Beyond personally identifying with one of Joyce’s most well-known character, William Ferris points out how “Joyce keeps renewing his presence in our lives.” The continued circulation and appreciation of literature helps us draw parallels between our experiences and concerns and those of others, across time, national boundaries, and other differences.
In this excerpt from a conversation with William Ferris, former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, he shares how he came to see himself in Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who declares that he will fly from the nets of “nationality, language, and religion.”
He notes that at the time he encountered the character he and Stephen were about the same age and describes how he identified his own struggles as a young Southerner with those Dedalus experiences as a young Irishman. He goes on to discuss how the figure of Dedalus has become iconic and is used repeatedly to help discuss the struggles of young artistic spirits.
Beyond personally identifying with one of Joyce’s most well-known character, William Ferris points out how “Joyce keeps renewing his presence in our lives.” The continued circulation and appreciation of literature helps us draw parallels between our experiences and concerns and those of others, across time, national boundaries, and other differences.
In discussing Carson’s influence as a writer and activist, Williams notes the use of metaphor—the absence of bird song—as a means of conveying the profound impact of the widespread use of pesticides.
She further goes on to describe Carson’s ongoing influence on her own work as a writer and activist: “Her synthesis of science and art and lyrical language... she really set the bar for me as one who could never reconcile my love of the sciences and the humanities, and what Rachel Carson showed us is there is no separation.”
]]>In discussing Rachel Carson’s influence as a writer and activist, Williams notes the use of metaphor — the absence of bird song — as a means of conveying the profound impact of the widespread use of pesticides.
She further goes on to describe Carson’s ongoing influence on her own work as a writer and activist: “Her synthesis of science and art and lyrical language... she really set the bar for me as one who could never reconcile my love of the sciences and the humanities, and what Rachel Carson showed us is there is no separation.”
In discussing Carson’s influence as a writer and activist, Williams notes the use of metaphor—the absence of bird song—as a means of conveying the profound impact of the widespread use of pesticides.
She further goes on to describe Carson’s ongoing influence on her own work as a writer and activist: “Her synthesis of science and art and lyrical language... she really set the bar for me as one who could never reconcile my love of the sciences and the humanities, and what Rachel Carson showed us is there is no separation.”
For centuries philosophers like Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it—from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.
As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the rollout of an agency-wide initiative, Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War, which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.
]]>For centuries philosophers like Glenn Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it — from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.
As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the roll-out of an agency-wide initiative Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.
National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William “Bro” Adams shares how philosophy professor and World War II veteran Glenn Gray and his book The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle helped him come to terms with his own experiences in Vietnam.
For centuries philosophers like Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it—from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.
As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the rollout of an agency-wide initiative, Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War, which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.