All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
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We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today Lieutenant Colonel US Army retired Lanny Snodgrass
who is more importantly I should say is Dr. Lanny Snodgrass, a respected psychiatrist.
Lanny, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you.
Now this is a real pleasure to talk to somebody with your experience and your expertise in
the field of psychiatry and your time in the Army.
So let's start with this.
You earned your PhD in psychology from the University of Oregon.
You went out and got your MD degree.
And then you went off and did residency and training and all of that and then worked for
almost 20 years I think with the Veterans Affairs doing psychiatry.
And with the department, well, yeah, well, it'd be also with the Department of Defense
because I volunteered to leave the Veterans Service and go into the Gulf War and be assigned
to the Narnia General Hospital in Germany in Nuremberg.
You developed through all of that experience and expertise if you will in PTSD and military
psychiatry.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
And somewhere along the line later in your life and years you said, hey, I want to get
off the sidelines.
I actually want to join up and serve.
Talk to us about that process and what some might say is an advanced age.
Well, for decades, I had witnessed the profound impact of war upon veterans and active duty,
visible and invisible scars only I was dealing primarily with the invisible scars.
Although we know that certainly psychiatric problems can lead to also somatic problems
or disorders, medical disorders.
That's all integrated, the mind and body.
But after listening to these soldiers, these service members, soldiers, airmen, all of
the different branches of the service and hearing the problems of depression, anxiety,
and post-traumatic stress that they were dealing with, I felt like there was something that
I had to do to feel this void that I had.
Not having ever joined that Sanctisville and this group of people known as the Battle
Buddy, I felt that fraternity was something that I had to become a part of.
I just had to become a part of it before I died.
This just nodded me like a discomfort that chased me through most of my career.
Until at age 63, I dove in and in spite of the fact that having waited three years after
my physical examination for the military to give me a pass from my age, I had developed
a heart condition.
I had a base rate of 43 and I skipped and beat about 3.5 seconds between weeks.
I was very marginal to go into any kind of basic exercise of training.
But I said, you know, this kills me, okay, but I'm going to do it and you can load my
license.
Well, this is an amazing part of this story.
A guy who's 60 years old, professional, accomplished, has done so much, still has this burning desire
of saying, hey, I want to serve and really the name of your book that we're talking about
is the Ageless Call to Serve, Rethinking Military Service for a Changing World.
You go in, as you say, it takes some three years, you're 63 when you go into basic training.
The average age is probably down in the 20s.
Talk to us about the physicalness of this.
Yeah, I was a bunch of with the grandchildren.
They were like, I mean, I was like another planet, so green in so many ways.
It was a, I had no real free orientation.
And so getting down there, I remember meeting one of the, one of the enlisted coming in
and she said, well, where is the head, where are we having our meetup?
I said, I don't know.
I'm trying to find it myself, the building.
And she said, well, I said, what do you do in the military?
And she says, well, she says, well, I pass gas.
And what she's a man is.
Right, right.
Yeah.
And I'm thinking, whoa, they got some new nomenclature.
I'm going to have to really, you know, bone up here to find out what this culture is all
about.
Well, it is an interesting culture to be in the military and certainly most of us do
it at a young age, but you got yourself through basic.
And this is 2003, the Iraq war started.
There's a huge shortage of military doctors.
That's probably why the standards on age got relaxed in your instance.
And I know some other doctors who went in around that time, again, added a more advanced
age because they have the specialty and the services that are needed.
And I found your book interesting because you tell us a lot about some history.
I wasn't paying any attention to, I guess, on the age of those who fight or those who
get drafted in the Civil War.
The draft was up to 45 in age.
World War II was up to 35 in age.
In Britain, World War II, they had a home guard that if you were between 40 and 70 years,
you can serve.
And even today, apparently in the Russian army and the Ukraine war, if you're up to
70, they still may pull you in.
So the American model, which is just focused on youth, is not necessarily used all around
the world, is it?
Not at all.
It isn't at all.
It's been very inflexible.
And over the century, we have not changed the limits or the age restrictions in the
military.
The upper or lower.
That is, I mean, okay, the last two years, I think the Navy changed the upper limits
of enlistment for those that were 39 to move that to 41.
But other than that, I mean, there has been virtually nothing done.
And I don't think that there's any mandate out there by the upper echelon to even give
serious thought to this.
Well, let's admit young recruits have to be a whole lot more malleable than an old
crusty guy like you, who's been around the world before and said, I don't know if this
makes sense.
But the reason this is important, this age issue is important, is what you write about
in the book too, on how, and I'd like to expand on this, how younger recruits, younger enlisted
folks are more likely to find themselves exposed to and suffering from PTSD in the long term.
I found this discussion on age really interesting.
Could you talk about that?
Yeah, well, a recent study that's come out by people like the researcher, Dolan, and
his associates have discovered that if you send a person into a war zone into combat,
underage 25, that person has way more than twice the risk of developing post-traumatic
stress disorder, as those are 25 and older.
The prefrontal cortex of young people is not matured until around age 25.
But the recruitment objectives are to go and recruit these young men, these young men or
women, and to have them be the bulwark for the grunt work in the line of fire.
Now why are they so attractive?
Well, because they have virtual, they believe they have this virtual vitality, which they
have a lot of.
They also have naivety.
And the other element is fearlessness.
They have fearlessness.
So they will take an order even though they know that this order by the commander is going
to result in total annihilation.
They will still follow that order.
Well, and our young folks don't have the same level of responsibility at home, maybe.
Maybe they don't have a family yet or a wife or a mortgage or a spouse and kids.
I mean, it's a different, whole different way of thinking when you're unburdened by
all of that than somebody who's 60 years old and says, okay, I've paid off the house,
I've paid off the bills, but I got these other responsibilities.
It's very interesting to think about should you do something different on the age of combatants,
because this is a long-term implication.
If I'm sending folks, young folks in less than 25 years of age and I'm increasing their likelihood
of PTSD, on the back end, the nation has to pay for those folks for their healthcare,
their treatment, their disability when they get out over on the VA side.
Not on the DOD side.
I'm taking those young guys in.
But if you're looking at the total cost of this, and this is probably what you saw when
you worked at the VA is, hey, these guys come out and they've got this problem for a long
time.
Absolutely.
The chronicity is what you really worry about.
It's the one third that never gets really much better.
And I doubt so much of this over the years of how this leaves such scars that cannot
be healed and they suffer the rest of their life.
And then what we've seen is the children of those with PTSD of how this affects them.
There was some program here not long ago that was addressing this and had several fathers
and children together and talking about the impact that PTSD has left on the lives and
how the children tried to in some way be a healing force, but not knowing how to do
it, but wanting to care for the father that was dealt this horrible disease.
And it created lots of anxiety, even some suicidal thoughts.
Well, there's a good point I want to jump off from because, again, there's this long-term,
you know, you want, the book talks about we really should rethink this strategy a little
bit.
And then area where you make some interesting observations is the recruitment or enlistment
screening that is or isn't done for things like suicide and generational trauma.
Can you talk a little bit about that so people can get your get a thought of what your ideas
are here?
Well, I've been on the other end of this course dealing with those that probably should have
never come into the military in the beginning.
And the front loading, I call it the front loading, where you have a history of trauma,
you have a history of abuse.
And I mean, some people are able to overcome that, but not all, not all.
I think there should be a psychological test.
We have a pretty good arsenal of psychological tests that can be given to detect those that
are really on the on the marginal line survival as far as psychological survival in the military
and those that aren't.
And I just don't think enough attention is given to that.
You know, the pressures are really pretty heavy on the recruiter.
And he's he's obligated, you know, to keep his promotion moving forward, get and his
pension to get that quota met every month.
He has he has mandates.
And I think that there have been a lot of misgivings about not wanting to do they'll
be into the history further, not willing to want to get good screening techniques in order
to not allow some of these that really don't have the resilience, they don't have the
capabilities to adapt to this kind of stress.
Now there are some some of these young people that go in the military that they could be
salvaged if there was a mentor that they could identify with a sergeant, perhaps that that
they could identify with it would that would, you know, give attention to help reinforce
the right positive attitude and emotions towards stress and dealing with stress.
But they don't have time for this.
They don't.
And it's very rare you find some exceptional sergeant or supervised position of a person
that's going to take that kind of care and responsibility and time.
So I think screening is very valuable, very important.
It would, it would certainly spare a great number of these young people from disappointment
from from failure and inability to adapt and continue the fulfill their obligation in the
military.
The burdensome problems of this are great when you consider the resource that has to
be mustered in order to take care of those that that now have decompensated and their
psychiatric condition is such that they require a great deal amount of care and intense work.
You can really see that.
Stabilize.
Yeah, you can see that tension, right?
The tension between the recruiting needs, but in the long term tension then of there's
going to be a problem here that's going to take, you know, years and years of treatment
because this person was maybe a little more susceptible.
Maybe they had generational trauma their age.
There really is sort of that tension.
Well, we know that the acceptability that increases the chances of PTSD.
We know that especially those that are abused along that study studies, you know, bring
out this in terms of that age group that is most susceptible to PTSD when they are in
a war zone when they're in combat that given given those facts of their mal development
and not having the resilience.
The percentage for PTSD goes up 97% for those individuals.
It's just, you know, it's really amazing and it gets you back to where you have to really
think about this better psychological screening tools would be so important.
But you also talk about a concept that I want to get some of your thoughts on and that is
resiliency.
Talk to us about what resiliency is and how the military could be a do a better job at
helping it exist in its service members.
Well, I think resiliency if the military has some preparatory program before basic training
before basic training ever starts.
And let's say it's two weeks.
I would say at least two weeks minimum of how to adapt to stress and how to approach stressful
events, issues in your life that you're going to be confronted with in your service and
your duty assignments for the military techniques.
I mean, you know, in this orientation, what you need is role models.
You need some good resilient role models to give them the kind of approach of mental approach
to dealing with stresses and perceiving those not as problems, but as challenges.
And that's a whole different mental shift when you look at a stress point and an issue
that you have to confront as a challenge rather than as a problem.
But people that really have resilience, that's exactly what they do.
They perceive those, they say, bring it on.
You know, I'm here to resolve these things.
I'm here to grow from this.
And I think that's the, you know, the approach has to be for all, I think, going into the
military for all of these young people, you're talking, we're talking about 18, 19, I'm not,
I'm not, you know, opposing for the military to not take 18, 19 year olds into service.
It's just, I don't think that, I think it's a flawed concept.
Well, we ought to prepare them.
We ought to prepare them right, right?
We ought to put them to put them into line of fire at that age.
Now, you know, you know, 21, older, I don't know what the magic age is.
That would be the really prime age, the appropriate age to go into a war zone and combat.
I don't know if we, I'm not, I'm not capable of, you know, prophetically saying what that
is, except that I think that that age group, I mean, we look, I mean, just based on the
history, you look at Vietnam, look at, you know, what was the average age of a combat
soldier in Vietnam?
18, 19, that's what it was.
They come back, there's 30% of them over PBSD.
20 years later, they're 15% of that group, that's half of them, they have still PBSD
on their head with the rest of their life.
I think that, you know, we really have to look at that clearly and say, what can we do to
make any kind of adjustments here for mental health of our precious service members?
What we're talking to Dr. Lenny Snodgrass, who is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel,
served in the early 2000s, and it's his observations, his experiences, his expertise that's rolled
into this book called The Ageless Call to Serve Rethinking a Military Service for a
Changing World.
This is put out by casemate publishers.
It's really a fascinating book talking about some issues you don't normally think about,
and what I liked about it is you offered up fixes.
We've talked about a number of them.
But in those fixes is the recognition that in today's environment where there is telehealth
and computers do so much, our professionals can, there certainly is a role for older
professionals, those with experience in mastery, to join and serve.
They don't have to be the frontline combat troops, but you offer up a number of fixes
that I think are very interesting.
Well, the comparative model for that is the VA.
When you look at the 60-year-olds that come in and work at the VA, they've retired from
their practice, they've been in practice for, this knows at least 30 years.
They have all these skills and everything to offer, military won't take them, but the
VA will take them, and they've proven to be some excellent, excellent resource for the
medical needs of the veterans.
The military could use them on an active doing basis.
Just like you mentioned, telemedicine, oh my goodness, we've had an explosion of telemedicine
during the pandemic, and it now has been accepted in many areas and disciplines and in industry
and medicine to continue onward because it's been very effective.
I mean, you take a radiologist, he can read these films anywhere it works in the world,
and be as effective as if he were there in person reading them and sending the data and
results and so forth.
Well, as your subtitle says, it's a changing world.
We're talking to and we appreciate the time that Dr. Lanny Snodgrass, Lieutenant Colonel
Retard out of the U.S. Army, gave to us today to talk about his book, The Ageless Call to
Serve.
Lanny, first off, I'm glad you got a sense, you got the opportunity to quench that thirst
that you had to serve even if you had to wait until you were 63 to do it, but I think it
also gave you some unique perspective and insights and they're certainly captured in
the book.
Well, thank you, and I'm going to say that I would do it all over again.
This opportunity ever occurred, it's not something that I regret in any sense, I regret
never.
It was a wonderful opportunity for me and I grew from it and I feel that I have been
of help and it's been a life-changing experience for me.
Much of what I've written in the book is about what came out of that experience.
Well, we really appreciate your time today.
Thanks, Lanny.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity here, it's been a moment.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawson.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
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