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In conversation with Terry Shepherd, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author, a deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.
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In the jungle, an order can arrive in an instant.
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Living with what you do next can take a lifetime.
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Fresh out of college, Costa is drafted into the army and sent from Buffalo to Vietnam, where survival depends and demands on decisions that no classroom could prepare him to make.
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But what happens when obeying an order means betraying everything he believes is right.
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Our guest today, Mark Rubenstein, brings an extraordinary depth of experience to that question.
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An Army veteran who served as a field medic, caring for the 82nd paratroopers, he later became a forensic psychiatrist, examining human behavior in both the consulting room and the courtroom.
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An award-winning author of 26 books, he has spent a career exploring what people do under pressure and what those choices leave behind.
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His new novel, Costa's War, confronts the distance between military authority and individual conscience and the struggle to survive with your humanity intact.
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Mark Rubenstein, I've been looking forward to this.
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Thanks for the conversation.
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Thanks for having me, Terry.
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That's the best threes I've ever heard of the novel.
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What made you decide to become a psychiatrist?
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There's an old saying that everyone who becomes a psychiatrist is really looking to understand his own pathology.
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So I guess that to some unknown extent at the time, that's what motivated me.
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But I always found that the drama of human relations was far more interesting than the drama of medical pathology.
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And I also was struck by the fact that every patient in psychiatry tells you a story.
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And there can be 30 different people who present with the same diagnosis, let's say depression, and yet on the other hand, they have 30 different stories that led to that final common pathway of depression.
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And how do you, as a professional, guide them towards recovery?
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You do the best you can.
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You meet with them with some frequency, so that you begin to see patterns emerge in their behaviors, in their histories, and then you begin to point out what is an insightful way of having them understand themselves.
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And hopefully, insight can lead to change.
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Nobody comes to a psychiatrist because they're happy or they're doing well in life.
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Freud's definition of mental health was to be successful in love and in work.
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And that pretty much encompasses it all.
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And people usually come to a psychiatrist or a psychologist because they're unhappy with either love, work, or in many instances both.
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Who was Costa before the draft?
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And what did you want readers to understand about him before he reached Vietnam?
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He was, at the time he was drafted, he's 21 years old.
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He's a upper middle class or a lower middle class kid.
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Basically, he's still a kid from Buffalo, New York, comes from a working-class family, has his friends who are mainly, they're mainly Irish, Polish, and Italian, living in a working-class neighborhood of Buffalo.
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And I had to do a lot of research on Buffalo because, frankly, I'd never been there in my life.
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And the the Lackawanna Railroad is right nearby, and the Lake Erie is right nearby.
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And it's a real working, it was at that time a real working class city.
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And he was in business school, which he didn't particularly enjoy at the University of Buffalo, and really didn't like the fact that most of the kids who were attending school at Buffalo looked down upon what they called the townies, the students who lived and came from Buffalo.
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So he has a sort of all-American lower middle class background where his expectation was he possibly could go to work for his friend's father, Jan Kowalski, who owned the furniture store.
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But of course, he gets drafted, and that throws a monkey wrench into everything.
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Mark Rubinstein is our special guest.
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We're talking about his fascinating book, Costa's War.
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His website is Mark Rubinstein-author.com.
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How did you become a field medic in the Army?
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I was pre-NAM.
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In 1964, I joined up and had a choice.
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I could pick the MOS, military occupational specialty that I wanted, and medicine fascinated me.
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So I was put through after basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I was assigned to Womack Army Hospital in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the 82nd Airborne.
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And while I was there, I attended to paratroopers who were injured, sick, who required either surgery or medical treatment or whatever.
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I was basically on a surgical
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ward and took care of paratroopers who were really either seriously injured or who had problems with hernias or other internal difficulties.
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And that experience was so seminal in my life that when I got out of the army, I decided I wanted to go to medical school.
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But of course, I had none of the pre-medical sciences under my belt.
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I myself had been a business administration student with a degree, a BA in business administration.
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So I went back to NYU and took all the preclinical, the pre-medical sciences, embryology, biochemistry, et cetera, physics, chemistry, and applied to medical school.
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And lo and behold, I was accepted and went into medicine and medical school.
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And as though I, although I liked it, when I was exposed to psychiatry in the third year during my clerkships, I said, this is fascinating stuff.
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It's as though every patient is telling you basically a novel.
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And I had always loved reading novels, so I decided to go into psychiatry.
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This book grew out of your award-winning novella, The Foot Soldier.
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What remained unfinished for you, and what did the novel allow you to explore?
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The Foot Soldier was a 10,000-word novella that I just conjured up out of my own imagination and partly from my own experiences having been in the Army.
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And I was absolutely amazed because it was not only nominated for an award by the Benjamin Franklin Award judges, but it took silver, it took the silver award.
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It won second place, even though it was up against full-length novels.
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I was absolutely amazed.
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Then when I began to read the Amazon reviews, they were uniformly the novella, but almost everyone wanted to know more.
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What happened to Costa?
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What happened to him after the army?
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How did Vietnam affect him?
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They wanted more of the rich flavoring of what the Vietnam experience did to him.
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And I and here I am almost ten years later.
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I went back to it and it gave me the opportunity to really flesh him out and to see what happened after he leaves Vietnam.
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And that's where the novel it's done.
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It also gave me the opportunity to expand upon the experience in the jungle, the smells, the sights, the sounds, everything, to immerse the reader in the experience and the horrific nature of jungle warfare.
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Costa goes to war soon after college graduation.
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How does that abrupt transition shape his response to military life in combat?
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He had never been exposed to anything like that, for sure.
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And at first he was quite frightened and almost overwhelmed by the sudden by being thrust into the jungle and into basically the threat of death, virtually every waking moment, and even when you're sleeping.
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As he says at one point in the novel, it's written in the first person, he's lucky if he ever got two hours of sleep at one point in time, because they had to be on guard all the time for the Viet Cong.
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He also said that my rifle was cleaner than my teeth.
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And he was just he was both appalled and mystified by the sense of displacement that he had in the jungle.
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As he says at some point, we could be walking through, we could do 10 clicks or kilometers or two clicks, and I'd feel as though I was walking through the same jungle terrain that I'd walked in three hours ago because it all looked alike.
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There was such a sense of dislocation, of displacement that he'd never experienced in his life.
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After all, he had graduated from high school, went to college for four years, and had what we would probably describe as a routine, ordinary civilian's life, and suddenly thrust into this hellish environment.
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Mark Rubinstein is our special guest.
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He's written a fascinating story, Costas War.
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The website, Mark Rubenstein-Author, don't forget that dash, dash author.com.
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The novel asks what happens when an order violates a soldier's conscience.
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How do you make that conflict feel immediate and personal on the page?
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He's given an order that not only violates his conscience, but violates everything he ever believed about the human soul.
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And he's basically asked to commit a war crime.
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And he's asked to do this under extreme duress.
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I'm not sure if I want to get into the exact details of what that duress is because it'll give away a certain high tension point in the novel.
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But he he there's an unreality to it.
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There's a a sense that this is unreal, a derealization that occurs when this is when he's commanded to do this and when he's been singled out of the entire platoon because the commanding officer, a second lieutenant, had something against him.
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I don't want to go into all the details, but the his experience with this particular lieutenant in this platoon was basically horrific.
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It was equal to the horror of the leeches and the mosquitoes and the sense of the enemy waiting, lying in wait, and of the snipers and of what could potentially await him.
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Even to relieve himself in the jungle was something that one would never even think in terms of the ordinariness of one's regular life.
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Without getting too graphic, there there's a point where he has to relieve himself, and also there's another point where they go through a bog filled with leeches, and what they have to do just to get the leeches off themselves strains not just credulity, but it strains every thought you could have about your own bodily integrity.
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These parasites sucking your blood can be an overwhelming experience, especially when you have a number of them on your legs and on your private parts.
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In combat, a soldier may have only seconds to decide what's right.
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How much can we fairly expect of someone acting under that kind of fear and pressure?
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Aaron Ross Powell It's very strange.
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I've also treated certain veterans who have seen combat, so I'm somewhat familiar with that.
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There's a point where you're not thinking, you're just reacting to the threat to the sound of automatic weaponry, where you're seeing tracers fly overhead, where you feel and hear and see almost the percussion blasts of the 16s or the AK-47s and of the tracer bullets, and where you see death and dying all around you.
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It has a surreal quality that is very difficult to explain in in in terms of writing a novel or a scene.
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It's filled with terror and confusion, and over overall the need to survive.
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I think every soldier experiences above all the need to survive.
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It's an individual mandate to just get through this one firefight and you do what you have to do.
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And there's an interesting component of that in the in in Costa's war.
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There are some soldiers who are close to being discharged.
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The rule was you had to do one year in combat in the jungle, in in country.
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And some soldiers are a couple of weeks away from having served there one year.
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They're known as short timers.
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Or they're short.
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That was the army lingo.
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They're short.
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And when you're short, you don't want to go out on another mission because what a shame, as a presidential candidate once said, I didn't want to be the last guy to die in a war that was just about over.
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So it's an interesting
kind of take.
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After that one year, assuming you have a two-year stint after you've been drafted, you go behind the lines, you go to the rear echelons, and every man fantasizes about surviving long enough to go to the rear.
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And that becomes your be all and end all just to survive, to go to the rear, to live to see another day, another week, another year, and to go on with your life.
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You have to remember that all of these guys are young.
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They range in age from late seventeen through eighteen, nineteen.
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Maybe the oldest one was Costa, who was twenty-one.
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And the lieutenant is maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
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These are all young men in the prime of life, and the farthest thing from their minds until they've been drafted was the notion of death dying and injury.
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And they're thrust into this environment in which that is all that confronts them.
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Death, dying, injury and the horror of things such as bouncing beddies, various kinds of ordinance that are were arranged by the VC that would pop up on springs that were made out of leftover American ordinance that could cut a GI in half.
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Walking point, which is the unfortunate man who has to lead the platoon out in front of them, and Costa, of course, is chosen to walk point.
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And typically that's done that that's left to a very experienced man who's done this before, although there's always a first time, as the lieutenant says.
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And it was it's just a an horrific kind of situation in which nobody in his right mind would want to find himself, but as a draftee, you're conscripted into this, and this becomes your life.
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Did writing this book change any of your own beliefs about courage, obedience, or responsibility?
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I think it did.
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I think, although it's funny, when you think about conscience and obedience, when you're in a situation that's so demanding and that's so life-threatening, many people, perhaps the majority of us, will drop their s their moral code and do what needs to be done just to survive.
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In combat, you can be shot by your commanding officer for disobeying a lawful order.
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And what is lawful can depend on various circumstances.
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Obviously, what happened at Milai in in the Vietnam War was not lawful, yet many of these soldiers went along with it and did what they did, and they shot innocent civilians, men, women, and children, even infants, because it was just the the convenient thing to do if they didn't want to incur the wrath and the and the consequences of having disobeyed the Lieutenant Cali.
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And of course that that was a very striking situation that is very different from in in certain ways from what Costa has to face.
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But it did make me think about what would I do if I were faced with that kind of an order.
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And also it depends on how frustrated one is.
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When you've seen your comrades die, when the enemy has taken its toll, when your kill numbers are low and you're being constantly pressed to have higher kill numbers, and then a order comes down to do something that is, let's say, borderline, what do you do?
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How do you come to terms with that?
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And I think I questioned myself, what would I do?
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And I have no easy answer because it's easy for me being an armchair writer to make a judgment, but when you're when you survive the leeches and the bouncing beddies and the snipers and the mud holes and the deprivations of the jungle, of the bush, your thinking changes and you no longer think in the rational, logical way that you did prior to that time.
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Was there a scene that was especially difficult to write, either emotionally or because you struggled with Costa's decision?
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Aaron Powell I think the struggle for Costa and his decision was difficult to write, because I when I write, I am in the head of the protagonist, especially if I'm writing in the first person.
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I am him.
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And i I don't know if that's a an asset or a liability, but I find myself thinking and feeling what he's thinking and feeling.
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And when Costa is given this order and he has to make a decision about what to do, that really it strained me.
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It took me to the edge of my own believability if there's such a thing.
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Can I believe in myself?
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Do I know what I really would do in this kind of situation?
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So I gave him an easy out.
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You've worked in medicine, the courtroom, and fiction.
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How has each changed your understanding of human nature?
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Medicine made me very aware that life is a limited thing, that we are, we we all know this.
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No one gets out of this life alive.
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We all know that it's when I turned 60, a woman said to me, You're in the youth of old age.
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So I said, I'll take it.
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Anyway, medicine taught me about the vulnerabilities of being alive and about the limitations of life and the fact that it really it ends for every one of us.
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And the
courtroom made me somewhat cynical because I saw the worst of human behavior, not the way someone in Vietnam would have seen it, but in in terms of what I expected to be sophisticated, logical, law-abiding scenarios.
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I saw plaintiffs and defendants lie.
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I saw plaintiffs' attorneys exaggerate and guild the lily.
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I had one situation where a woman had been lying in her bed and part of the ceiling had dropped down on her face and had resulted in terrible scars all over her.
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She was only 28, 29 years old.
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And as an attractive woman, this was devastating for her.
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So I evaluated her on the at the behest of the plaintiff's of her attorney, or plaintiff's attorney, and I testified as to how depressed she was and how the scarification was as much emotional as it was physical.
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And I could see the j just as you're doing now, Terry, I could see the jurors shake, nodding their heads that this was absolutely on the money.
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So then the judge called for a recess, and the plaintiff's attorney, a guy named Ivan Sinclair, that's a fake name, okay?
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He grabs me, moves me into a stairwell that was just adjacent to the courtroom.
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He says, Look, part of the ceiling fell down on her head.
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And I want you to tell the jury that she had post-concussion syndrome, too.
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So I said, That's bullshit.
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He said, Life is bullshit.
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And I said, Excuse me, my life is not bullshit.
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I can't say that.
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He never sent me another case.
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So I learned to be cynical.
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Psychiatry taught me that everybody has problems.
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Everybody on some level is somewhat insecure, especially a guy like Donald Trump, especially the people who are in love with themselves, who are narcissists, that at rock bottom they have an abiding sense of insecurity, that they have to shore themselves up by collecting, by making more money, or by collecting people or accoutrements.
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And certainly nobody gets out of this life alive, and nobody gets out of this life without having to endure very significant intrapsychic problems.
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There is a mantra that has been at the center of my mind for the last few years, and that is the reality that all of us are carrying burdens that other people don't know about.
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What advice do you have as a psychiatric professional of how we could cope?
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Absolutely.
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Not only don't other people know what we're
carrying, but to each of us, our burdens seem immense, perhaps the greatest of any burden that could ever inhabit a human being.
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It's that sense of self as being burdened beyond anything that anyone else could even understand.
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And I've seen this in patients over the years.
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I've seen this, I've felt that in myself.
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And again, I repeat that I think every person who goes into psychology or psychiatry as a specialty, as a profession, is ultimately seeking to learn more about himself or herself and is trying to understand those burdensome issues and problems, which can never be done completely.
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That's partly what's so frustrating.
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And no matter how much insight you develop into yourself, there you are at age 65, and you find yourself falling into the same emotional trap you did when you were 25.
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It just happens that way.
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And if you're lucky, you catch it.
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You catch it before it has severe consequences, and you make another mistake.
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And life is filled with mistakes and with regrets.
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And nobody gets out of this life without some regrets.
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I know that Edith Piaf on her deathbed said, Je regrette rien, I regret nothing, but I don't believe that.
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The sparrow, she had to regret something, a lost love, that she wasn't taller.
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Who knows?
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We all have regrets.
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What do you hope readers will take away from their encounter with Costas War?
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I hope they'll appreciate what our veterans of the Vietnam War went through and what they endured.
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And of course, so many of them were spat upon when they returned, and they were called baby killers and went through terrible times, and there are so many of them that are still dysfunctional and homeless, although now they're in their 60s, 70s, and some of them are even in their eighties.
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I also hope that it just gives readers a good, exciting read and something that they can think about and assess their own moral conscience, their own moral surety.
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What would I have done had I been in Costa's shoes?
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And maybe give the reader an opportunity for some self-reflection.
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Maybe that's asking for too much, but above all, I just hope the reader will enjoy the read, despite the fact that there are times in the novel where it's trying and a bit difficult.
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The book is Costa's war.
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The website, MarkRubinstein-author.com.
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It's a fascinating book.
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It will trouble you, but it will also enlighten you.
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Mark Rubinstein, this has been wonderful.
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Thanks for the conversation.
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Thank you, Terry.
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I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you, and you have a wonderful smile.
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Thank you.
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Years of therapy.
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Years of therapy that hasn't changed.
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In Conversation with Terry Shepard is a copyrighted presentation.
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All rights reserved.
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I'm Lisa Davis.
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Join Terry Shepherd next time in conversation.