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Moral Injury and the Marine Corps | Dr. Andrew Perera · Follow the Leighder

• Leigh/@followtheleighder: Howdy folks and welcome back to another episode of Follow the Leighder. I'm your host Leigh Larson and joining us from California today is Dr. Andrew Perera Andrew J Perera: Thank you for having me. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Absolutely. Folks, be humbled by this resume. ⁓ Dr. Andrew Perera served the United States Marine Corps as an infantryman and squad leader during the early global war on terror. After leaving the service, you went on to get your work maybe during you, but you have your doctor of law and policy and you're now a professor of global criminology. My goodness, are you a wealth of information, experience, expertise. And before we get too far into this, thank you so much for your service to our country and for keeping Americans safe. Thank you for raising your hand. Can you talk about this, sir? How how you got into the military service? Are you from a military family? What did that call look like for you? Andrew J Perera: Thank you. Yeah, thank you. On my mother's side, we've been in the United States since time began. ⁓ And as well as the side of our family that came over from Europe, was like the 1500s. And so we've been here for a long time. And as long as the United States has been around, there has been a generation of my family that served in the military. And so in every war that the United States has fought till now, we've had somebody from our family in the military. I will say that in the past that's Navy and Army primarily. So I'm a bit of a departure from tradition in my family. ⁓ But, you know, I grew up, you ⁓ My parents gave me comic books to get me reading. That's what got me reading books in the first place. And I loved Captain America. He was just like kind of my idol. The idea of standing up to bullies was always something that rang true with me. I grew up very small and weird and autistic. And so I was bullied a lot. And so ⁓ when I got older and I was physically able to... ⁓ to put myself in that same position to be able to stand up to people who would do harm to others. I wanted to do that. ⁓ And during my formative years, watching 9-11 take place and ⁓ being in school when that happened and then seeing the invasion of Afghanistan and then... Iraq immediately afterwards. ⁓ My history teacher, my high school history teacher was from, I believe it was second recon battalion of the Marine Corps. And he was on the expeditionary force that went into Afghanistan. I believe it was second recon. ⁓ anyway, he had a big influence on me as well. ⁓ And that's kind of what led me towards the Marines. I walked into a lot of different recruiters office. ⁓ and really kind of felt the draw to go to the Marine Corps. ⁓ And it's funny because, I mean, this is not really funny, but it's more like funny than funny, haha. ⁓ But, well, you know, in the Marine Corps, at least in my circles, we always said that two types of people joined the Marines, Captain America and baby killers. And that's like, Leigh/@followtheleighder: We welcomed our humor around here, that's fine. Andrew J Perera: the only two type of people that you have. There's no real middle of the road. There's no like moderate centrist of that ideology spectrum that joins the Marines. You know, they tend to join ⁓ the less culty esprit de corps type units like, ⁓ you know, the army or the Navy or the Air Force. ⁓ And so that was kind of always, always, always running. But I joined the Marine Corps. ⁓ And ⁓ after really severely injuring my back ⁓ in a basic recon course, I was dropped back to what's called a victor unit, so a regular infantry unit. ⁓ And so I was sent to the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines out in 29 Palms, California. ⁓ And yeah, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines is a very interesting case in terms of battalions because... ⁓ After every major conflict, the unit got disbanded and decommissioned, and those troops were dispersed throughout the Marine Corps. And then a new conflict would come up, and you'd have a need for a surge in troops. And so they'd reactivate the unit and bring people back. And so there was this break in case of war mentality in 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, where we purely existed to deploy. And 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines is also the most deployed battalion ⁓ in the global war on terror. ⁓ So that's kind of what led me to the Marine Corps and kind of where I was at the beginning of my enlistment right before we deployed to Iraq in OAS 5. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Well, yeah, sorry to hear that you hurt your back. ⁓ That is disappointing. But like you said, that ideology just is particularly for the Marines. Because I don't know that too many folks who are familiar with military service, they might think that all the branches are the same and the Marines aren't. And they never really have been. have a whole different. that's, branches all have different personalities and cultures and different ways that they work and operate. But The Marines is a bit different. Can you talk about why the Marines is different from the other branches? Andrew J Perera: ⁓ why? I'm like the psychology of life. Leigh/@followtheleighder: why and how or just why how like what that looks like like Andrew J Perera: ⁓ Yeah, I mean, the how would be the Marine Corps is always the underdog in their own eyes. Like we're given the hardest missions with the worst and oldest equipment. We make do with without batteries, we make do without the ammunition we need. And so there's always kind of this, ⁓ this quasi angst about being kind of America's abused people. ⁓ And so there's that, right? Where there's this extreme pride in being able to do more with less, right? ⁓ But aside from that, the esprit de corps on the inside of the Marine Corps is religious. know, like I say it's culty, but that's like a thing, you know, and that's a joke that we make. the United States has four branches of the military and one cult. ⁓ That's how it is. If you go against that esprit de corps, if you go against the very ⁓ monolithic understanding of what it means to be a Marine, you're an outsider. You're an outcast. You'll probably get negative counsellings and get pushed out of the Marine Corps. ⁓ They just tend not to want you there. And the people that are not really bought in don't want to be there either. ⁓ And so there's this weird... internal culture of a pretty toxic cult ⁓ where you're expected to act a specific way, you're expected to lead a specific way, ⁓ and then if you don't do that, you're ostracized. But it's also a love-hate relationship because we also know while you're in the Marines, you may wear like a school shirt, like School of Infantry or ⁓ ⁓ Infantry Squad Leaders course or non-commissioned officer school, things like that. And we always buy battalion shirts and company shirts to wear under our camis. But if you wear them, you're made fun of for being too moto. And so it's kind of like, if you're off on Liberty and you're wearing a USMC shirt out in town, you're either a boot or a master gunner sergeant. It's like, because it's not cool. You know, and so it's like, there's this, it's a weird, it's a weird dichotomy. but they breed that into you in bootcamp, right? Like the idea that Marine Corps bootcamp is different than the other basic trainings is, is very true, at least in my communication with folks that have been in the army, folks that have been in the Navy, some friends of mine. ⁓ but it's like when, when you're in bootcamp, they, they erase who you are, who you were raised to be is gone. They break you down to the absolute fundamental like operations as a human. They reteach you how to brush your teeth. They reteach you how to shave your face. Like put shaving cream on the left side of your face. Now shave the left side of your face. Put shaving cream on the right side of your face. Now shave the right side. You know, it's like they break you down to this absolute bare minimum. And then they build you up how they want. And the way they build you up Leigh/@followtheleighder: All ⁓ yeah. Andrew J Perera: is through the camaraderie of field training, ⁓ corporal punishment, ⁓ kind of trauma bonding together, ⁓ but then also through this inundation of Marine Corps history. You can't graduate bootcamp unless you pass our history courses, ⁓ where you're sitting in an amphitheater taking notes like you're in college, but you're learning Marine Corps history. ⁓ Tripoli, Montezuma, like the Pacific campaigns, ⁓ all of it. What happened to the different units during World War II? know, 4th Marine ⁓ Regiment was disbanded, you know, because they were forced to surrender to the Japanese, all of that stuff. And so you're raised again, they break you down on that first month, and they raise you again into the person they want you to be. And often that requires kind of like submitting the part of you that is inherent and natural, the person your parents raised you to be. You know, you have to push that down and bottle it up, which, you know, we know is terrible for a person's psyche. know, the ⁓ things that are bottled don't stay bottled forever. ⁓ And I do feel like that is an issue that the Marine Corps has to deal with or will have to reconcile someday the way they do that and then leave you to try to pick up the pieces and fix it when you get out, reconstruct who you are with pieces of all of those. And so that's what the Marine Corps is like. it's very... ⁓ I'm trying to think of an equal example. It's like being at a very fundamentalist Christian church, right? Where you go and there's like call and response. If someone says something, it's like, you know, Christ be with you and also with you. Like, he has risen, he's risen indeed. You know, like all of these types of things, it's everywhere in the Marine Corps. There's no turning it off. It's night and day, whether you're on duty or off duty. And so that's kind of what the Marine Corps is like on the inside. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Well, and thank you for sharing all of that insight. So I served in the Air Force Reserve Chaplain Corps and the Chaplain Canada program. So of course, I never touched weapons. I went through commissioned officer training in Montgomery, Alabama, and then turn right around and went to Chaplain Corps training. But I went through, there was a gal who went through chaplain training with me who served in the Marines. And she left and she talked about I don't know if she was injured. don't remember how she, but point being, it was just different. She was like, this is, this air force, this is light. This is almost like coming to college or something and getting indoctrinated with like school spirit. Like you said that a spirited court, like, but she was like, the Marines was a different, it was, also you get weapons like very early on, I think is what she said. Cause again, I didn't as a chaplain. So. Andrew J Perera: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think it's like day five in bootcamp or something. But that's, that is a funny comparison. I've recently was invited to the, the Air Force birthday ball. ⁓ my wife and I were invited. went and set up the table with them and I was so freaked out the whole time because Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew J Perera: It was just like junior enlisted, senior enlisted, and officers were having cordial conversations with each other. And people were, you know, taking off their dress jackets and stuff. If you took off your dress blues at a Marine Corps birthday ball, you'd either get, you know, NJP'd or punched in the mouth. know? And so it's just, so it was just like such a different culture. I spent the whole night just like in shock looking around at everybody. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Well, even to your point, yes, the Air Force culture is totally other thing. But my boyfriend and his stepfather, his stepfather was an Air Force para rescue jumper. And then my boyfriend at the time was training through it. And we broke up midway through his training. And it was wild to hear his voice change during the time that he was going through this PJ training. ⁓ I mean, it hollowed him out. like he was not this warm boyfriend and he like he was a different man that was flat toned, very much like, all right, I have to go with the boys now. And I'm like, well, wait, we were talking tonight. I gotta go. Right. And it was just like, we want to break and, you know, good luck to him. I harbor no ill feelings. But like looking at it, I'm like, I don't the public doesn't understand that the how much in the mind people get or the government military gets in the mind of our human citizens like you said that we now have to reconcile because how do you go from something like that where you can't take off your dinner jacket to something like American Airlines, Southwest Airlines where you can just wear whatever on the plane like that is a huge and to go from the number of like there's so much like you said the decisions that people make in their life you just don't have to you don't make in that marine setting. It's just made for you. You just do this and then getting into the world. It's just a lot of options. So I feel for you. I really hope that, ⁓ you know, you've been, I want to talk a bit about your experience with chaplains and just caregiving. What are the resources look like for folks who are going through exactly what you just said? my entire, ⁓ existential identity. was deconstructed and reconstructed. What did they do about faith, mental health? What does that look like in the Marines? Andrew J Perera: Well, it starts in bootcamp, God time, which is what they call church, is the only time you can break character. So it was like, you go to the big chapel and they're singing, you know, like, I don't know. I can only imagine like different songs from non-denominational Protestant Christian belief. And it's a, it's a, It's a theater filled with with young Marines and is the only place that you can really go. Yes, you can stay in your squad bay if you are Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Mormon ⁓ or Muslim and you can study together in your squad band and hopefully not be disrupted by your drill instructors, which is probably not the case. Or you can go to Christian church. And so a lot of guys started going to church just purely because that was the only place they could refer to themselves in the first person instead of this recruit ⁓ or the only place where they can break character and cry, right? Like I can't even tell you how many of these recruits would just be sitting there singing these songs in, know, wrapped ecstasy because it's a peak liminal experience for those young. young men at the time, but they're just in tears. And I'm sure that that's a catharsis that they need, especially in bootcamp, to be able to release those kinds of emotions. So that's where it starts. It's like you're either Christian or you're other, right? Even Catholic service was very sought after and people that were not Catholic would go to Catholic service as well. ⁓ And so Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: That's where it started. I've never had a chaplain that was not non-denominational Protestant Christian. I loved a lot of our chaplains, especially the chaplain that we had in 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. He was a fantastic person. Like I loved it when he'd come and hang out with us and like come to the shooting range with us and, know, kind of... A lot of these guys are former infantry or like former other jobs. And so they'll show up and they'll shoot on the rifle range. You'd be like, ⁓ damn, sir. I didn't know you could shoot a gun. And it's, yeah. And it's, but it's like, they're, they're, they're your counselor. They're not just a person that holds service. They're your counselor and they're the only counselor. They're the only form of therapy that you can get, or at least during the early, early to mid 2000s, what you can get in the, in the Marines. I grew up Christian. I grew up United Methodist. I went to Sunnyvale First United Methodist Church for my entire life. And I considered myself a pretty devout Christian with a pretty literal reading of the New King James Version of the Bible in my understanding of Christianity. So when I got to the Marines and I saw a lot of the same types of belief with this Protestant non-denominational expression of Christianity, it was pretty comfortable for me to step into it. ⁓ It was a little more like kind of like church summer camp was not really like how it was in my congregation back home. ⁓ But with regular advising mentorship, ⁓ counseling and therapy in infantry units, like first of all, it's super rare for somebody to request to see the chaplain. Usually it's Marines undergoing divorce, right? So if you do ask to see the chaplain, it's like, oh, okay, yeah, we'll get you over to the chaplain. Sir, can we, you know, and so it's like already seen as something that's kind of taboo. But fast forward to kind of the midpoint of my Marine Corps career, ⁓ because it has to do with this chaplain that we had. Like I said, I really liked him. I still, to this day, I don't really have negative memories of him and the advice that he gave me directly as a person. And even within the context, I understand what he did. ⁓ But when we were overseas in Iraq, I... ⁓ We fought for a long time against a specific group. did, we conducted raids. ⁓ every three nights we did security patrols. We did snatch and grab, ⁓ to, ⁓ detain people and, and collect intelligence. We, you know, cleared the Euphrates river of these islands because this is where the cell was supposed to be. We heard all about it and it was kind of something that we were consistently working against was the cell of guys that we were fighting against in Al-Embar province. And, you know, it was a normal deployment, regular combat deployment to Alhambra province in 2007, 2008. And so when we left, you usually spend about two weeks in Kuwait on your way back, at least our deployment schedule required that. And that's a decompression time. Your schedule's all whack. You have to do a... physical fitness test, you have to pass a psych evaluation, you take all these classes on how to reintegrate back into the peace loving world. ⁓ And at the same time, you get a lot of information debriefs, Like intelligence debriefs. ⁓ And it turned out that the people that we were fighting were not connected to Al Qaeda. They were not connected to the foreign Syrian fighters that were coming in. They were essentially started by this group of boys that had gone to college and then the invasion happened. They come home and they find that their families have been killed in the invasion. And so they got their friends together and fought back against the Americans. And I remember sitting in that and looking at my friend, John, to my right. And I was just like, well, I'd fucking do the exact same thing. You know, like if I was away at college instead of in the Marines and Russia or China invaded California and I found that they bombed my family homes. I would be like, oh, my life is forfeit. I'll just spend every day for the rest of my life killing those soldiers. And so I was like, well, I can't even fault them. And then we find out that they knew that information months ago and we weren't told. Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ yeah. Andrew J Perera: And I don't know if that's because they didn't want conflicted conscious, consciences ⁓ in, in country, but, excuse me, but they knew that information and didn't tell us. And so I felt very, very morally conflicted. That is the source of my moral injury. Part of my moral injury from the Marine Corps ⁓ was that. I felt lied to, I felt deceived so that they could take advantage of my war fighting. ⁓ And it was not a fun deployment, right? Like there were many situations where we either had to very, very, ⁓ traumatically having to decide whether or not groups of people were to be, you know, to open fire on these people. does this. categorize or qualify as contact, does it not? ⁓ well, they're shooting at us. ⁓ well, they're shooting over our heads. Should we shoot into the crowd? No, we shouldn't shoot into the crowd. Like a lot of these kinds of moral quandaries throughout the SOPs in ⁓ Iraq when we were there. And so then to find out that that's not a microcosm, it's like the whole thing, the whole deployment was that. ⁓ And so when we got back to the United States and we... Decompress I, you know, got, I moved over to being a squad leader and went to T-Solk's Tactical Small Unit Leaders course and got my own squad ⁓ and started leading people. ⁓ I very much was not the type of leader that the Marine Corps wanted. I didn't beat my guys. I didn't scream at people. I just set expectations and they either met them or they didn't. And if they didn't, they either got, I let them choose. Do you want pain or paperwork? Right. That's cause that's what my team leader did to me. He's like, do you want pain or paperwork? You left your gun at the armory unattended. Do you want pain or paperwork? I chose pain because I didn't want to ruin my career. Uh, and so I, I tried to be the best leader that I knew how, which was informed by the way my grandpa led our family, by the way that I learned from my faith growing up, how to be a leader. And I was non-recommended three times for NCO. ⁓ so I was a Lance Corporal as a squad leader, which is a, an E five billet and I was an E three. And this is pretty common during war. They just didn't promote people. but I was non-recked for not yelling at people. on my, on my counseling that said, ⁓ like doesn't display leadership behaviors or things of that nature. ⁓ but when other squads would have ship bags, they'd send them over to me and. to get straight and to get them functioning as Marines again. So very clearly what I was doing worked, but it was not being acknowledged because I was outside of that paradigm that they accepted. I, during this whole time of being a leader, going through Mojave Viper, getting ready to go back overseas again, this time to Afghanistan, I started to panic because I never wanted to be in a situation again where I was not in control of my own moral decisions. Like I, well, clearly they can't make them. They've, they've failed me. And so they can't make the moral decisions on my behalf. And I don't want to be in a position. where my moral decision is going to get somebody else killed, right? Because I may say, I don't have enough information to know whether that person should be killed or not. And you need Marines that'll just pull the trigger, but I need verification, I need information. So I'm not going to put myself in that place. I care about my fellow Marines. I don't want them to die because I have different standards than my unit did. So I went to my platoon sergeant, staff sergeant, Leon Lucas, who's one of the best human beings to date that I've ever known. ⁓ He was killed a year later in Afghanistan. ⁓ But I told him, you know, the whole story, everything about it. And I said, I need to talk to somebody. I don't know who there is to talk to about this, but I'm on the verge of refusing orders, but I want to talk to somebody because this is transactional. Like the reason why I don't want to go isn't because I'm giving up. or because I'm scared to fight. It's because I don't want my discernment to get in the way of mission accomplishment and for of my Marines, right? ⁓ So they sent me to the chaplain. They were like, okay, well, first things first, you need to get your brains organized. So go to the chaplain. I went to the chaplain's office, sat down with him, kind of told him everything. He and I had a good relationship at the time. And so he was listening to what I was saying. Leigh/@followtheleighder: All right. Andrew J Perera: And ⁓ I walked away from that meeting with a laminated card, about the size of a business card, that had every Old and New Testament Bible verse that justified killing on it. And it was laminated with a little cross and, you all the iconography ⁓ that you'd expect from a fundamentalist Christian ⁓ perspective. And he gave that to me, said, here you go, you're a warrior of God, God is telling you to do this, he's telling you to do that. And I was so disillusioned and just insulted and shocked when he handed it to me, that I just thanked him and I left. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: I don't know what I ended up doing with it. I probably threw it away. ⁓ But immediately realized that I was totally on my own in dealing with this. had one friend then who understood what I was going through ⁓ and didn't run away basically because I was now this outsider. ⁓ But once it came out that I had talked to the chaplain about that, ⁓ my entire platoon, the guys that I fought next to, some of my best friends, my literal best friends at the time, ⁓ Alex, Danny, ⁓ John, Thomas, some of the guys I'm still friends with today after years of trying to understand each other, ⁓ but I was dead to them. Over the next eight months, got, or over the next five months or so, I was jumped eight times by members of my platoon, just on my way to the chow hall or after hours. I'd have to lock my room, turn the lights off so that people didn't think I was home because then the duty would come and open the door and let them in so that they could get me. And so I was purely alone in dealing with this. And... ⁓ ⁓ I got called into my first sergeant's office, you know, because they were like, well, we got to figure out what to do with you. ⁓ They called me into the first sergeant's office and he asked what I was thinking basically. And I told him, and I said, you know, I'm considering filing for conscientious objection because from what I understand, this is the most appropriate application of that process, right? Is when there's a... a moral or ⁓ conscious conflict with what's going on. Not that you're not a Marine or not a soldier or not willing to fight, but as a matter of conscience. And so I told him that and he said, we don't have fucking any idea how to do that. I don't think anybody's done that since the seventies. And so he was like, well, we'll see what we could do. I get called back to the first sergeant's office, maybe. Leigh/@followtheleighder: That's right. Andrew J Perera: six or seven times after that. First Sergeant Ruiz, who now is Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Ruiz. And I still love the guy because he was one of the best leaders in the Marine Corps that I ever had. Obviously the Marine Corps acknowledges that as well. But I remember him, he sat me down. He's like, Prairie, just sit down. Like, we need leaders like you that are thinking Marines. We need leaders like you whose Marines... follow them. My squad at the time was like very loyal to me, even though I was telling them that I wasn't going to go on deployment with them and that they would be split up into other squads. They messaged me later. They emailed me later on in their careers or during deployment saying that they're glad that they were my Marines before and that they wished that I had been there. And so he was telling me like, we need guys like you, you know, you're style of leadership is exactly what the Marine Corps needs in this new era, blah, blah. And, you know, in my mind, I was like, well, you shouldn't have non-recked me then. You know, like I would be, I'd probably be at E5, you know, if you hadn't have negatively counseled me for not screaming and punching at my dudes. And so I just, I didn't believe him. And I was just like, it's too late now. But you know why I don't want to go. for Sergeant Major Ruiz, he understood and he said, okay, well we're going, we have to leave behind 120 or so, 111 guys anyway, because of the amount of troops in theater that we were allowed to have, right? We couldn't bring the whole battalion. So they had to leave some folks behind. So he said, I'm going to put you in charge of the remain behind element so that... you don't have to go and we could always tell everybody that it's because you don't want to extend your contract. And you know, you didn't want to reenlist just to go on this next deployment. So we'll just tell everybody that it's because of that, that, you know, we're leaving you behind. And that, know, which is kind of, which is BS, but it was the kind of, it was the cover and he was trying to do me a solid by, by, by allowing me that grace. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Right. Andrew J Perera: And so I was in charge of the remain behind elements, the legal holds, the, folks with alcohol issues, the folks with, with medical issues and stuff like that. And ultimately was, was separated from Marine Corps at the time I was supposed to get out. not having completed the process for conscientious objection, which I'm grateful for because that requires requesting mass to talk to the base generals and things like that. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: Just the thought of that is pretty daunting. I, regardless of what it's for, I don't want a court martial on my record. Like even if it's not for a criminal charge or anything like that, I don't want a court martial on my record at all. And so that's how I ended up ending my active service in the Marines, which was a very complicated mental place for me to be. Cause I was like, I'm out. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: This is the most beautiful thing in the world. I remember driving off 29 Palms with my windows down, listening to Bob Marley, like speeding off base as fast as I could. I was like, I'm fucking done. And then as soon as I was out, I immediately was trying to find ways to get back. But in a way that would satisfy my conscience. so I ended up signing a 18 X-ray contract with the army to go to Leigh/@followtheleighder: Right. Andrew J Perera: uh, special forces selection, kind of like a blue to green program type thing where I'd be able to pull over, um, rank and time and service and things like that. Um, God didn't want me to go though, because, uh, I ended up getting testicular cancer and type two, type one diabetes, like that year that I wanted to leave. Uh, so I remember waking up in the ER after I got diagnosed with type one diabetes and my doctor was like, you should probably call your recruiter. because this is the one thing we can't get a waiver for, for you to join. And so that stopped me and kind of redirected my life to where I am now, which for which I'm very grateful. I'd probably be dead. Like I know who I am. I know myself. I know that I would be in whatever situation I would be in and volunteer to do whatever thing I did. And it probably would have got me killed. I genuinely didn't see myself living past 26 when I was in my early twenties. And so, Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: I'm grateful for it now because now I'm, you know, what? Almost 40. I've got my family and kids and, you know, ranch that we live on and excellent line of work and education that I was able to get. And so I am grateful for it, but it is very much the most difficult thing that happened to me. ⁓ Bringing with it all of the traumas and complicated mental processes. I've done seven and a half years of therapy and I'm still considered disabled with PTSD. so it's like, that contextualized my life, that whole process. And I don't know anybody else who has had a similar experience, which is one of the exact reasons why I was on that post on threads. and why I commented that that was my experience, because I had literally never heard of anybody else having a similar situation. Leigh/@followtheleighder: it's unfortunately others have. And it's so compounded, like you said, you have moral injury, you have the operational strategic thing that happened and compounded by the one asset you're supposed to have, the spiritual caregiver. ⁓ like you said, and then like you said, your peers, the whole institution turned and... It really does go to show and prove your point that this is like you said, a cult. This is different. This is and I'm so sorry that you went through it. And like you said, you have your family, your ranch and twisted your turn. You change your whole life. It's but those are the things that we carry. And can you share a little bit when you talk about moral injury, you said that word phrase and then you've also Andrew J Perera: Thanks. Leigh/@followtheleighder: brought up the PTSD diagnosis. For those who are a little unclear, what is the difference between PTSD and moral injury? Andrew J Perera: Well, I would say that one can lead to the other, ⁓ but it's not mutually inclusive, I guess. So moral injury is when, ⁓ and most people have felt moral injury, we just call it betrayal or ⁓ being lied to. But moral injury is when you hold a specific principle or value. or ethic that becomes really ingrained in the way your epistemology, the way your world work, your worldview is built, right? And then you find out that either that's wrong, specifically, lied to, that you feel lied to, that things were misrepresented to you, or ⁓ somebody's actions showed you that that wasn't true. ⁓ And that causes a cognitive dissonance, where your brain pretty violently rejects the situation. ⁓ And that creates a pretty strong trauma. response for most people. It's why, you know, like, yes, getting beat up is bad, but getting beat up by your father who's supposed to love you is worse. ⁓ Somebody being raped is terrible, but somebody being raped by a law enforcement officer who's supposed to protect you is worse, you know? ⁓ And there's no, you know, trauma Olympics as to whose trauma is worse, but Leigh/@followtheleighder: Right. Right. Right, right, right. Andrew J Perera: Moral injury happens when there's a direct conflict with your ethos. ⁓ And so for me, that was, ⁓ the Marine Corps is there for me to be able to execute my life mission of standing up to bullies, of ⁓ protecting the people that need to be protected. ⁓ Being the person I would have loved to have show up on the playground for me. to protect me when I was a little kid. And then to have that reinforced and reinforced, yes, that's why you're here. You're protecting these Iraqi citizens. Look at all these children that you do these hearts and minds missions with and you're protecting them. And the reason why they're safe is because you're there. Amazing, brilliant. That made me feel so fulfilled. ⁓ And then to find out that they were just lying because it, and again, I understand why they lied. They can't have an entire battalion conflicted with conscience in the middle of a war. I get it. Right. but that doesn't make it better. ⁓ and so PTSD is a post-traumatic stress disorder is a natural reaction to ⁓ an extreme trauma that you experienced. And that this isn't necessarily just combat. It's not just. ⁓ abuse or, you know, spousal abuse or ⁓ child abuse, those things can cause PTSD, but it is in response to any trauma. So one of the young men that I mentor, ⁓ who's a student, ⁓ went through an extremely unnecessarily tragic and traumatic breakup ⁓ with his ex, and it was really bad. And he has PTSD. you know, and a very clinic, very, very classic ⁓ expression of PTSD, which is one of the reasons why, you know, I'm there for him. Cause I've dealt with this for almost 20 years now. And so PTSD, when you experience a trauma, the pathway in your brain that your mind would normally take to process that is reinforced. by the extremity of the trauma. And so it basically hard lines a reaction into you or ⁓ a train of thought or a perspective that your brain normally would have. so your brain would normally have that to a ⁓ lesser degree. And if experienced over time, that thought process, that trauma would strengthen. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: But if you experience a single severe event, it can do the work of years at once in strengthening that neurological pathway. And so when something triggers that response, your brain will dump the same amount and ⁓ combination of neurochemicals that it did. during that trauma to help you to survive. So if that gets triggered, then like when we say trigger, it's not just like an emotional thing, like, I feel triggered by something. No, it's like literally a trigger. It's a cue that your brain takes to release the neurotransmitters that cause you to respond as though it's happening. Leigh/@followtheleighder: you Andrew J Perera: And so, and so that's, that's what I mean by PTSD. I have PTSD from the moral injury. I have PTSD from, ⁓ you know, hand to hand combat. I have PTSD from, you know, being ordered, ordered to fire into a crowd of like 450 people, you know, like there's, there's a number of things that PTSD can be, can be earned from. so, yeah, yeah, I guess that's it. Leigh/@followtheleighder: And, and, and like you said, it just, it manifests differently. It's very subjective about what is going, and this is part of the hardship on the spiritual side. At least when I was thinking a lot about military chaplaincy is there is so much about war that happens that is random. And that's the stuff that keeps you up. Like, why did that thing happen to him? that, you know, you can't, those things will drive you crazy at 2 a.m. and go ahead. Andrew J Perera: No, no, I don't want to interrupt. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Well, and that was just something that like as chaplains that we would like wrestle with, like how come where I stepped, the land was fine, but where my buddy, know, like, and like, we don't, those aren't questions that we didn't really have the answer for. But the other thing that you're talking about where the institution itself has ordered you to do something. And then like you said, conflict, like how it kept compounding. is really like just so alarming and I just I feel for you and I thank you for sharing this because a lot of citizens just don't know they don't know what the inside looks like and how someone like you can just quickly I mean be so forced to the edge ⁓ for questioning about you are not the second year I know folks that served in the Air Force that like I said that the PJ Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: kind of group that I knew that had some real, real struggles. they were actually part of why I went into the chaplaincy ⁓ was in those conversations because they talked about how chaplains could just like you like they don't, they just go to almost like a manual, they treat the new they treat the Bible like a manual in the same way that we treat the military handbook like a man like just we'll just do this. And it's like, no, I'm a human. I'm a human being. Andrew J Perera: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: And you can, quote, weaponize me. You can make me into your military tool all day long. I've never, can't, you can't beat the humanity out of me. Andrew J Perera: Yeah, had mentioned the weirdness, the strangeness, the randomness. And for me, watching movies, like whenever I watch a horror movie, that's what gets it most. Right? Like if I watch Black Hawk Down, like, yes, of course, Black Hawk Down is like horribly triggering for me, especially like the run at the very end. There was ⁓ a time when my squad had to, I think we hoofed it like a mile and a half, two miles sprinting to get to contact. And it was like, Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm. Andrew J Perera: exhausting, 120 degrees. So that part of the movie always gets me. But the part of every war movie or mini series or anything that gets me most is the weirdness. Like the donkey and with no driver in the car, just like going across a road filled with bullets. Or ⁓ like you're behind a wall in cover and there's like a kid in the middle of the street making faces at you. And you're just like, It's just the, it's weird. ⁓ Hacksaw Ridge, this movie with Andrew Garfield plays a pacifist medic in the army. They get the weirdness right. It's like, it was so disturbing to me that I had to leave because it's like, you know, people walking and you could just like see their teeth through their cheeks, you know, and you're just like, ⁓ fuck, like your brain just doesn't know how to comprehend it. it's that, yeah, that weirdness often triggers me way more than the combat does. ⁓ But this, I can imagine that these PJs, especially folks like PJs or corpsmen or medics that are very focused on the preservation of life and their purpose there is as medical professionals, right? in the battlefield. I could only imagine the conflict that those folks go through as well. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Well, it's, yeah. And that's why I would, things like these sort of conversations, being able to talk about it, because I, you're not, I have followers that are messaging me stories, not identical to yours, but in the same vein that it's, and about two, three weeks ago, I interviewed the Quaker house, because they have been on overdrive in the past. Are you familiar with them at all? Andrew J Perera: Yeah. So when I was looking for assistance in filing Conscience of Subjection, did, ⁓ God, was the, the Veterans for Peace in Santa Cruz, California, those folks ended up helping me. But when I was looking around, yeah, the Quaker organizations were pretty prominent in that world. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah, the one of the guys that came on and was talking about just in the last year, how much they have been hit up like their rates, you know, they've been requested or contacted and ⁓ and it's a scary time. Another thing that another bit of stories, I feel like this is getting to a dark place, but was the I don't know if you've heard of this, but the combat to cul-de-sac effect that is happening with drone warfare where you have ⁓ Andrew J Perera: ⁓ god. Leigh/@followtheleighder: We saw in the Chaplain Corps where folks, you know, we're doing, we saw in Colorado where like folks were doing drone warfare or, you know, high intelligence, doing intense stuff, intense surveillance or intelligence work. And then would be at the, kids soccer practice at 5pm. And now you've done this weird cyber digital weirdness too. That is like, it's not, it's, I'm getting like chills thing. it's, it's, ⁓ warfare is just. Andrew J Perera: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, buddy and I were just talking about this the other day. We were like, well, at least when we were in, the bombs were in the ground and they didn't chase you. You know, like I watched some of the footage from Ukraine and it's just, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's like a horror movie. Leigh/@followtheleighder: It's not normal, people. Andrew J Perera: You know, like for us, it's like I'm driving down the road and I'm looking at plastic bags on the side of the road or freshly paved patches. Like, cause my brain's like ID, even though that was 20 years ago. But these guys, any high pitched whine, you know, that they hear could be a ⁓ drone, FPV drone that's going to just, there's no way to hide, you know? yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: is not at all. Well, I know that we're getting towards the end, so I'm not gonna go deep into your indigenous scholarship, but I do wanna kind of pivot and talk about upcoming works that you have been working on. I know that you, talked about you are a director, a professor of criminology and you are, let me pull up that title one more time. This folks, Treaties Trust. Andrew J Perera: You ⁓ Leigh/@followtheleighder: Doctrine and access issues within the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, a new methodology for evaluating statutes. Can you? Andrew J Perera: It's not an academic article unless the title is almost as long as the actual article. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Right. Go ahead and say the whole, make the title your thesis statement actually, just the abstract. Andrew J Perera: No. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's often the only way to do it unless you get recreative and come up with some like abstract name. ⁓ so the publication that is coming out on ProQuest in August is my dissertation. And so that is the primary research that I've been doing ⁓ in the last seven years, ⁓ which is ⁓ Statute Evaluation, obviously the title, New Methodology for Evaluating Statutes. ⁓ So in the United States, there's a field of law called Federal Indian Law. We use the term Indian because it's a term of art. So in all of our legal documents, it uses the term Indian to legally classify people. And so that's why we still use the term, just in case people are watchers or listeners are. Wondering why I'm using that term. An Indian specifically legally is a member of a federally recognized tribe in the United States. ⁓ And so a specific set of laws apply to those people and to those entities. ⁓ Cherokee Nation versus Georgia in 1832 ⁓ declared tribes as ⁓ domestic dependent states. ⁓ separate from the United States. And so the United States has treaties with these tribes and the United States Congress can only ⁓ make treaties with other states, nation states. They cannot make treaties with informal groups or sub states like counties and city and things like that. It has to be a nation state. And so the Supreme Court categorized them as kind of quasi sovereign states on their own, with varying levels of sovereignty given up through these treaties. And it is varying. There's as many iterations as there are treaties, I believe there's over 370 treaties or so, 575 ⁓ tribes total in the United States. ⁓ So there's laws that are variably passed throughout the years that make up different eras. of treatment of these people. So I'm not a member of a tribe, but my family's heritage comes from the Lakota tribe, the great Sioux nation in South Dakota and North Dakota. ⁓ My sister currently lives out there in Mission, South Dakota on ⁓ Rosebud Indian Reservation. And so it's always been something that's very... close to my heart and to my passions. And so these eras throughout time, like it started off in, you know, what we call the trade and treaty era, where the tribes were just generally seen as foreign nations that the colonists and or new United States had dealings with. And then that went into relocation eras where tribes were forcibly relocated. There were Indian wars. There was the termination era where the federal government just decided to pretend tribes didn't exist. Then that gave way eventually to what we are in now, which is the era of self-determination. And so the federal government decided that its job is to facilitate these tribes. self-determining their level of sovereignty and their level of behavior as a nation state. And a part of that, big part of that is the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. It provides funding for tribes to perform government services for their citizens. And it's a direct result of payment for what happened and what got them there socially. positioned the tribes on reservations where they are, but also in part because of what we call the trust doctrine, which, ⁓ God, it wasn't Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, was Worcester v. Georgia, 1831, the federal government recognized its trust responsibility to tribes. So basically as a ward to the state, right? So the federal government's legally fiduciary required to make decisions with the tribe's best interests in hand. And that's a legal requirement of reinforced through hundreds of Supreme Court cases to date. And so when I was in my late 20s, I was the tribal administrator for a small, very, very rural tribe. We lived three and a half hours from the nearest gas station and grocery store in the middle of the desert. there were 75 people living on the reservation. The tribe itself had 135 members. So was very small. But that tribe did not deserve, legally deserve less than any other tribe's support from the United States. So we ran into a lot of problems where... the Bureau of Indian Affairs was incapable of providing services to this group of people. And I fought hard. There was everything from internal to external corruption, to ⁓ erasure of files and documentation, to the Bureau of Indian Affairs directly telling me that I was going to have to commit. white collar crimes in cross-spending federal funds in order to satisfy a requirement for them, which is when I quit because they were legally maneuvering me into a liable position where I would have to do something illegal and I wasn't about to do that. I had just graduated law school at the time. I was like, I'm not going to do anything illegal. ⁓ And so when I left there, I knew that that was a problem. I know enough about the law from going to law school Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: that here lie the problems. But when I tried to research it, I was unable to find any way to make that accountability happen. The test just didn't exist. The lens to look at it with didn't exist yet. There are kind of tangent or adjacent methodologies that could work for that, but they were not put together in a way that accommodates these very unique situations that tribes had. So I went to Northeastern ⁓ University to their Doctor of Law and Policy program. You have to approach the program with a research project that you're already working on. So I was accepted and I had, I over the next three years, aside from the classes and you know, work with the State Department legislation that we had to do for the program, I was developing this methodology. And so I created a legal test, which is like a, what we call a three-prong legal test, which means that a circumstance or a situation has to pass through these three checkpoints in the test. And it has to pass all of them for that statute to be constitutional. and abiding by stare decisis of the Supreme Court. And so I had to create the test and then I ran the Indian Self-Determination Act through that test juxtaposed with the treaty of that tribe that I worked with. And the research found the Bureau of Indian Affairs liable for extreme financial hardship and the lack of services to those tribal members. And so that That was the answer that I was looking for seven years prior when I was trying to figure out how to hold the Bureau of Indian Affairs accountable. Now I had the language to do so. And so my dissertation was that evaluation. ⁓ so a big part of it is history and context because most of the United States doesn't know a lick about Indian law or history, ⁓ including judges and attorneys, which is concerning very frequently when I'm talking to judges and attorneys. then, so putting the law through the test ⁓ and recording all of the different ways that it violated the trust doctrine, all of the different ways that it violated treaties, which is ultimately a constitutional violation. And so that is being published in August. I borrowed it for two years because We are attempting to apply that in a case currently, and I can't name the parties involved because of that, because it doesn't look like the case is gonna get going before the publication happens, and I can only embargo it for two years. But we are hoping that that methodology can be applied in court, in federal courts ⁓ to yield what we need to. because the Indian Civil Rights Act, the trust doctrine, that's all very well established by the courts. And so it should be marrying those results with what the courts have already decided. that's kind of the research I'm waiting on coming out. It has nothing to do with criminology, but it's, yeah, I'm really excited for this to potentially ⁓ be used. Yeah, I want attorneys to have this tool, the test. Because if tribal attorneys had this access to this test that is being published, ⁓ they could do that for the Tribal Law and Order Act. They could do that for the Violence Against Women Act. They could do that for the Indian Child Welfare Act. These are all acts that, meanwhile, they're also some of the best laws that we have on books for tribes, but still not good enough. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Right. Mm. Andrew J Perera: And so if we want those laws to be good enough, we have to hold accountability. So yeah, that's what I'm hoping for that. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Okay. And I think it's so beautiful, your whole journey, you know, to take what you went through at the military and now you're seeing that same pattern in other systems and finding ways where you can fight back and you can actually contribute to, because the humbling thing that I think a lot of folks realize is you can't do a lot with the military. And I'm saying that also, ⁓ you know, how many folks, how many members I saw on the sexual assault side. Andrew J Perera: Thank Leigh/@followtheleighder: at our sexual harassment side where I'm like, I am here for you all the way, but it's not gonna go the way you think it's gonna go. He's probably either gonna get promoted, he's gonna get relocated, like getting, and that's a hard, hard pill to swallow because it's not, again, celebrate stars and stripes all over in civilian life and support our troops unconditionally and this, and you're like, actually, I support. Andrew J Perera: So. Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Defense, national security, I support the troops, but there's a lot that we need to unpack about what happens to serve an empire. Andrew J Perera: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's what it comes down to, right? Like, ⁓ you know, I grew up, I grew up on comics and sci fi and fantasy, you know, like, ⁓ Star Wars was my favorite movie, or my favorite series Empire specifically, but my favorite series my entire life, you know, and I grew up, I grew up with the rebellion and these desperate acts against Empire. And it was just like, I must've had some kind of cognitive dissonance in joining the Marines, thinking that I was the good guy, coming to find out that I was a stormtrooper, right? But there is no nuance, right? Humans are nuanced. The military and infrastructure has no nuance. So you either abide and deal with the conflict or you can't be a part of it. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. I had this conversation on Empire with someone who is not in the military and I know we got to wrap up but she did. Andrew J Perera: Just so you know, I'm clear for until 1, just so you're aware. Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ okay. Fantastic. Okay, I was stressed on my end ⁓ for you. But the ⁓ she and I had a really good conversation. She's a civilian, progressive Christian almost to the pacifist side, but was like, how the way if you how are you as a progressive Christian able to justify your military chaplaincy service? I just don't get it. And I said, it really came from that simple, you know, I thought I was serving a national security defense. Like same as in the good guys. thought we were the good guys. And, ⁓ in a lot of ways, 95 to 98 % of our military are like completely fine individuals that I would absolutely have no problem serving and defending and being shoulder to shoulder with. And then you've got those baby killers. You've got the rapists. You've got the people that are there for all the wrong. You've got chaplains there to on some sort of conversion mission. They're not even there to care for anybody. They just want to convert and like, Andrew J Perera: Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: It brings out some real nasty personalities and people just get so hurt. And again, it's all in the taxpayer dime. Andrew J Perera: Yeah, yeah. Not that we see many of those times while we're in, but yeah, yeah. Rocky and Haliburton, Raytheon. ⁓ so one, just this discussion around Star Wars is ⁓ reminding me or just brought this up. ⁓ So I joined and I became a very different person my first three-ish years I was in. Leigh/@followtheleighder: No, Lockie does, but somewhere they did. Yeah. Andrew J Perera: said a lot of things, did a lot of things that I'm not proud of, ⁓ just because that's the world I was in, the language that I was using, ⁓ and how I related to my fellows. I was also young, 1920. I see my 19 and 20 year old students now, and I'm just like, I was a child, like a child. My context of the world was minuscule when I joined. Right. I knew nothing. And so when I think about people that join and like I have, I'm, I'm a part of the leftist community, right? I was, grew up in the punk community and I made my way back there. Right. And so a lot of my friends just blanket hate service members. And I have to remind them, I'm like, so, okay, at least a third are, are in the service purely because it removes them from a poverty situation. And that's a social issue. Another third are there because they were young and believed in morals that don't exist. So you have to look at at least two thirds of these young Americans that are in the service are there for reasons that are totally justifiable and excusable, right? I think about who I was. I was just this, you know, I was, I was, the least wise person. And my nickname in my platoon in that last year was the Warrior Monk. I was like, now I can, I think of who I was and I was like, Jesus Christ. But, excuse my language. So I graduated bootcamp and I was this Marine. I was very typical. And then I went to Iraq, ⁓ fought in the war, came back, had moral injury and extreme revulsion. Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ it's... Andrew J Perera: to the Marine Corps. it was, I'm grateful in the way that it returned me to who I was before. Like I remember I had a conversation with my mom because she was, she, I grew up extremely progressive, like extra, I was not allowed to have toy guns growing up. And so my mom in trying to deal with this just kind of dove straight into this ⁓ Blue Star Moms. group where she was with a bunch of other moms who had kids that were in the military and deployed and really lived into that to support me. And I'm very grateful. But the day that I came home and told her the truth about our deployment, not just the, yeah, no, mom, I'm super bored. Like nothing's going on here. You know, okay, I got to go talk to you next week. And then I go on a raid, you know, like I came home and I told her all of the stuff. in real life and I told her this moral injury issue and my experience and why I reacted that way. And my mom told me that like she's grateful for it because she was now talking to the boy that she raised again. Like I was not this marine person. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Andrew J Perera: I was that boy again. And it's because that extreme revulsion from everything that I was a part of returned me to that version of myself that I was before I went to bootcamp. So then I see my brother, Peter, and we're, you know, I'm back home, I'm EAS, and we're out of a pub and we get a drink. And he's just like, he says, man, I don't know how you did it. Like, you didn't change at all. You're just the same guy. I know so many people that joined and they're so different now and you never changed. And I was like, ⁓ man, yeah, I did. I'm back, but I took a couple of years in a different mind and it took an extreme trauma to get me back to where I was. And I am grateful that it undid a lot of that work because de-brainwashing myself was pretty quick. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew J Perera: when I got out, fell right back into who I was and had conflicts with my memories and my intentions and missing combat. It's the weirdest thing in the world is missing, missing it, missing carrying your gun, missing the power, missing the relationships. And you're like, God, that was the worst times I could remember. Like I was exhausted, scared, terrified, ⁓ confused, but I miss those... Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: these parts of it, right? Every now and then I'll get the smell of Bulldog aftershave, right? That'll bring me right back to some of most nostalgic positive memories of the Marine Corps. I'm like, what the fuck am I doing here? And so, I'm grateful that it threw me back into my own mind, my own brain, kind of like shocked me out of what I was becoming. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Wow. Andrew J Perera: but to the point where my brother just thought that I had never changed in the first place. It would be interesting to see what he would have thought of me if he had spent time with me while I was in. ⁓ Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Well, and it's interesting you say that because the gal I mentioned earlier, who was the Marine and then went over to the Air Force Chaplain Corps, talked about how when she got out of the Marines, her sister pulled her aside and was like, I don't know who you are. Like you have to do something like you're a shell of yourself. You got to do something. And she had not processed or done at that point. Now she has. It's been years. But she talked about how she, because she missed it, she went into the Air Force, like where she should have processed that. And I, and she went, no, I'm going to go back in. I'm just going to go in a different way. And then she got to the Air Force Chaplain Corps. She got under the leadership of an evangelical and got her shit rocked, you know, I, because nothing physical, but very verbal, very unprofessional, very discriminatory. And she's, I, she's looking to leave now, but, ⁓ Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: this stuff, doesn't, it's institutional. Like it's deeper than, and it needs some real storytelling and honesty and light showing on it. And I really appreciate again, like your service and for your sharing your story, because like I said, this year alone, we're gonna see more stories that are unfortunately similar to yours. And... Andrew J Perera: Well, we, you know, we, we as a society over the last three months have watched, well, I mean, over the last year, but over the last three months specifically, we've seen the secretary of defense giving prayers and motivational speeches to the masses about being warriors of God and like referencing the crusades and all of this stuff. everybody's terrified of that. Right? They're terrified of the bringing faith into public schools. They're terrified of the Ten Commandments being put up in judicial halls and state capitals, which they should be. But the rest of us that have been in there, we're first of all not surprised. It's just the same rhetoric. It's just that it's now not part of the cult. It's now everything. But also we're more terrified. Leigh/@followtheleighder: All Andrew J Perera: because we see what it has looked like. We know what an institution looks like that has fully implemented the Christian nationalism, ⁓ which is a far cry departure from the Christianity that a lot of people across the globe celebrate and practice. I talk to my kids all the time. I have a degree in religious studies and so they always ask. cool questions and I always answer them as deeply as I could from as many perspectives as I can. But we always talk about the cool Jesus. Like, what do mean the cool church? I was like, no, no, no, real Christianity is cool. Right? Like sell all of your belongings and give the money to the poor or give your belongings to the poor. Give them to people who need them. Come with me with nothing but faith in our ability to protect and care for each other. ⁓ Like the whole Leigh/@followtheleighder: Alright. Andrew J Perera: the whole early church has been left behind, right? ⁓ And that's like up to and including the Pauline era, right? ⁓ But, you know, I love reading the Book of Acts because you see these people like acting in total fellowship with their direct communities that they're in and just giving everything they have for it. That's, you know, that's Christianity. This this idea. Not what we're seeing now, not this mass institutionalization, which Paul. Granted gave a lot of that language that we use now. Which I'm not a fan of the epistles anyway, but. But you know, even down to the fact I was like, ⁓ well, Archer, did you know that that the early church wasn't monotheistic? They they worshiped one God, but they didn't believe in one God. Did you know that? Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: Like what about Ashura and Baal and El and all of the other gods of the Southwest Asian ⁓ Semitic Pantheon, right? Like all these gods existed up until 500 years after Jesus' death, right? Like you want to talk about a cool Jesus, that's the world that they were living in. So like what we see now, this bastardization of all of that that I grew up believing in ⁓ is weird. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: it's like I can like look people in the eye while they're saying that stuff. And I'm just like trying to find some evidence of the cognitive dissonance that they must feel when they read that versus what they see in their communities. Even interviews with folks at these rallies, these Christian nationalist rallies ⁓ or speeches and stuff, even the things that they're saying. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: I'm like looking for signs that they know of the conflict, of the hypocrisy. And it's just, it's weird. And I'm not trying to proselytize them. I get too far into that side of things. I don't follow that faith anymore. I love it. I think it's awesome. there's fantastic lessons. And those are the ones that I choose to teach my kids. Not the Crusader Cross version. Leigh/@followtheleighder: No. Well, and there's so much to... It's... I... I love what you're saying. I just, I wrote so much on the quote unquote early church, because it's not a monolithic at all. mean, everybody... The same way, everybody was down with Jesus. Jesus was never the problem. Like, it was the institutions. It was the rest of it. Andrew J Perera: Yeah, yeah. Which is really cool to see ⁓ Pope Leo and his very vehement adherence to this early version of Jesus. Well, we know that him and Benedict were both ⁓ liberation theologists in the first place. But it's really cool to see one of the historically worst institutions at representing that now being this vocal champion of it in the modern day is really interesting. I think that that's a healthy development that I've really enjoyed watching lately. ⁓ Give and take. have an in-law who has recently become Catholic and so it's been some fun conversations with her about everything that's been going on. Leigh/@followtheleighder: I recently listened to a really good speech by a Christian pastor. And she was talking about just progressive Christianity does such a great job of liberation and social justice and like really focusing on gospels. We are so also academically minded that we're not taking, I don't want to say taking advantage, the one thing that the conservatives she argued had right was the personal relationship with the divine. And it really hit me. I was like, that's so true. I will sit there all day and either with ⁓ social justice advocacy or just finding ways. And then I'll forget to pray, meditate, journal, or just, and not even necessarily with Jesus and whatever that means for you or my listeners, but just that thing that I forget, like, ⁓ yeah. The comforting part, the thing that started the whole thing to begin with. Andrew J Perera: of them. And through the. Yeah, yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: And I was like, that's a good point. You're right. I should just be meditating, journaling, praying, whatever that looks like. Andrew J Perera: And that so kind of tying things back to the PTSD side of things. ⁓ like intellectualizing a relationship or a feeling or a behavior versus understanding it and living it, right? Like I recently did ⁓ another year and a half of ⁓ prolonged exposure therapy. ⁓ And we just would spend this time going through these memories and I'd have to retell the story like 12, 14 times a week and then listen to myself tell the stories in my off time. And so I'm just inundated with this. And, my therapist, what's, mean, my psychiatrist would say over and over again, he's like, you can't heal it unless you feel it, you know, like just kept driving that home. And I was like, yeah, my biggest issue was that I was really good at intellectualizing my experience. I could explain why watching my friend Joe Ray getting blown up impacted me the way that it did. I could explain it in very academic details, right? Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mmm. Andrew J Perera: but it still fucked me up every anniversary. Still fucked me up anytime I get reminded of it on social media. And so clearly intellectualizing wasn't the extent of what I needed to do, but we do that with religion as well, especially like seminarians, like theologians, scholars of religion. We do this all the time. And I say we because it's like sociology and all of that stuff. But it's like you intellectualize it and you're like, Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ yeah, yeah, ⁓ for sure. Andrew J Perera: analyzing how it impacts society, analyzing how the individual responds to different nuances within the religions. And then we totally neglect sitting with it ourselves and like actually feeling it because we humans, can't learn something truly unless we contextualize it, right? Like that our brains have to do that. We always make a little attachment so that we can find the tab while we're looking through the Rolodex and our brain of memories. But ⁓ but we just forget to dive into it ourselves. And when we do dive into it ourselves, then often that will inform our scholarship and we go, ⁓ well, I was looking down this way, right? And I actually, that's not important whatsoever. Like I'm gonna be diving back into this, cause that's where my heart is. Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: That is, I love that you said that because, yes, that has been my experience with ESD is that it felt like you opened up the file cabinet and just threw all the files everywhere. And occasionally one would like hit on the windshield and I would panic at that file because I couldn't put it in its right place. And like. Andrew J Perera: Okay. Yeah, and it may or may not have had a due date that's already passed. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Right, right. It was just in there. And now I'm like, And mine's not combat or military related, but I was thinking that too of just like, yes, you're talking about healing as a human being, as an individual, you have to feel it to heal and move forward. But it does, it really does impact your professional development. Andrew J Perera: Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Like you are a strong, you're a more whole person. And when you come in to advocate, to write, to speak on whatever it is, Christian nationalism, here you are doing it with Indian tribal statutes. Like that's huge. You now, because you, you, me, anybody who has walked through it, you got the language back. And that was one way that they described what PTSD was, was when you're experiencing something like that. Andrew J Perera: Okay. Leigh/@followtheleighder: the half of your brain just shuts off so that the other half, the like rectillion part of it can just like do what it needs to do. But things like language, logic, time, gone. That's, you don't have that because you don't need it in the moment. You don't need to know what time it is to get out of a situation. You don't need to have words. You can just yell. you, like there's a lot that is very cool. Andrew J Perera: Okay. Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: When you look at how the body responds to combat, not even combat, but just a high stress environments, but if you don't get that cleaned up, that coolness is not cool for very long. ⁓ It's not a... Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. in context of military service or just warrior ethos in general, ⁓ my theories, this is not verified or any kind of fact, but what we have right now in Western society is a complete breakdown of right and ritual, right? And so like we see it in people Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: our age who are still going to the clubs and they're still going out. They're still and it's just like, why won't you leave adolescence behind? ⁓ well, because they never transitioned. You know, like as a child, you never had a rite of passage into adolescence. As an adolescent, you never went through a rite of passage into adulthood. You know, like... ⁓ Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm. Andrew J Perera: I think it's Paul that says it like when I was a child, I did the things that a child does. But now that I'm an adult, I do the things like I'm a man. do the things that a man. ⁓ But we don't have that. We have some things like that with like Boy Scouts, Junior Rangers, like some ROTC things, Greek life at colleges. ⁓ All of that stuff. No offense to folks that are part of frats and sororities. I just it's not for me. ⁓ But we don't have those rites and rituals. And so in the past, we look at things like, why didn't ancient Spartans have this problem? Why didn't men at arms for the Holy Roman Empire out of France feel this way? ⁓ well, it's because the entirety of their identity and experience, lived experience, informs that place for them. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Andrew J Perera: it informs and contextualizes their experience, right? Here in the US, we just like want that performance. We want the combat performance, that warrior performance with no surrounding culture because we see culture as a soft thing, a soft science, right? We don't see it as something that's actually helpful as a society. And that's because in the 1970s, they stopped employing sociologists ⁓ in... politicians' offices, by the way. Politicians used to have sociologists that would inform them on how things were impacting culture and the fabric of society. And so they knew some form of that ethical conversation as they go into lawmaking. But with the military, right, we have those rites of passage while you're in. We have no rites of passage while we're out, right? Tribal people since the beginning of time have had ceremonies for warriors returning from combat, from battle, right? In some societies, that version of you has to die. You you come back with your face painted black and hiding yourself from God and the society until you can kill that part of yourself that did that. Because being a killer and being a fighter is inconsistent with our identity as a people. So you have to be gone. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: If you go and kill, you have to get rid of that and you become a new person. You get a new name. You have a new way of living in a new life and a new society that you're a part of. Right. Or if you're a part of a warrior society, those societies have strict behavioral rights and rich rituals that they go through to contextualize your experience as you go. So you, your, your moral injury is circumstantial and not institutional. And. If you have a circumstantial moral injury, that can be discussed and helped. You can have a mentor who's been there, who's done that, who can listen to you, give you advice, or give you a prescribed thing to do, right? Kind of like how my chaplain tried to do with me. But because it's through the context of the life that you live and the society that desires that of you. that requires that of you in order to be a part of it, it's useful. And without right and ritual, we don't have that. You see that in breakdowns in marriages and statistics in faithfulness in marriages, ⁓ whether people are willing to have families, their dedication to different careers, their ability to maintain consistency in their life, their pursuit of education or knowledge, all of this stuff. The breakdown is because somewhere along the way, we humans as tribal people have lost track of the bit of our culture that was supposed to support that. And because of that, we have things like PTSD, right? Where there's no way out of it. If it was okay to have PTSD, if it was truly okay, it wouldn't be a problem. We'd still suffer from it, but it wouldn't be a dis-ability. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: it would be a part of who I am and a part of my strengths as who I was in the community, not something that I have to manage. And so that's, know, these long-term solutions to issues that are, you know, unfortunately very acute, we're losing friends to all the time who take their own lives because there's no support that they leave and they go, I guess there's nothing. I guess the only part of me that exists is that version of me. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Andrew J Perera: So I might as well die. But if we had that, warrior society support, that right and ritual, the knowledge that when you leave, the impact of your traumas on you will benefit the people. You know, that that's missing. And, and some of us, sorry, I know it's a long rant, but some of us find our way to that, being able to apply that. and for the benefit of society. when we see it in the public, we go, and it's like almost like a beacon, shining light, right? Like people like Pete Buttigieg, regardless of what your politics is, he is somebody who has metabolized his own service into a catalyst for him giving back. Leigh/@followtheleighder: All right. Andrew J Perera: Right? And so when we see that, we're like, wow, Graham Plattner, ⁓ some of these other, like John McCain even, right? These people who have contextualized what they went through to be a better person in the community. But we don't as a society know how to facilitate that. It's kind of like on your own. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. But even like you're talking about connected to the ritual, there is or not having the ritual or they wanting the performance. It really like you look at and you talk about the warrior ethos. I remember watching a few months ago when Hegseth called in all those generals, told them they were fat, told them like, I don't know what else did he say? He said a whole bunch, but the big thing that stuck out to me was that he was going to be rolling back sexual assault and harassment protocols, no more walking on eggshells, and you won't have to put up with complainers anymore. And there's already like the talk on women who serve, but there's not enough noise talked about, about like male rape in the military. And when I heard that I went, you just created male prison conditions when you talk like that. When you talk about hyper masculinity, when you talk like, and you've now rolled back protocols, you've now started pulling back a lot of the type of people who would advocate against that, who would, you know, like now you've got in people who are gonna be like, yeah, don't complain. then, ⁓ and I was thinking about how it is, that is such a teenage. boy thing to do. You talked about how when you were a child, know, Paul says when a child thought like a child, like that sounds like a Lord of the Flies teenage boy thing to do, not a grown wise sage man. Like that you're so worried about being this performative military masculine GI Joe that you forgot to like, you're so worried on being a warrior that you're not a protector anymore. You're, something else. Like, and Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, dangerous, Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah, now you're dangerous and there's not a lot of nobility in it. There's that it feels feverish and call and reckless. ⁓ It feels like it just feels like young teenage boys are calling the shots and it's a for so many people who aren't in the military watching this. I cannot stress enough how many people inside the military or who look at this with shock because We were not trained that way. I wasn't trained that way. I saw it, but there was so much emphasis, especially in the officer training, of calm, of decision-making, of making sure that you know that every word matters. I'm using knife hands. like, I see it's all coming back. But I'm like, there was so much emphasis on communication. And so to know that this is, it's not just like, Andrew J Perera: Mm hmm. Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ fringe cases happening. These are very intentional and there's an audience that is receiving it and that's a very scary place. Like you said earlier, we know how strong this institution and its power and its grip is. This culture is real and it's dangerous if you don't abide by it. Andrew J Perera: You know, the the Higgseth and his ilk. ⁓ You know, you you'd mentioned that it feels feverish, it feels manic, it feels like like it feels like this, like what you would expect an eight year old to a rule an eight year old would make in creating a club with no girls allowed. know, like that's what it feels like. But, you know, for for for. listeners or for watchers, the podcasts, like I know a lot of people hold different political opinions and a lot of people that I've spoken to really value Pete Hegseth's leadership. And for those people, I try to find common ground, right? And one place that I can usually find common ground with, with people of the warrior ethos is through Marcus Aurelius and meditations. especially nowadays, everybody is obsessed with his teachings. I've been a stoic for a long time. ⁓ And I challenge you to read a Pete Hegseth speech or post or whatever it is that he's giving side by side with meditations. And you tell me if that's representative of a leader or of a just and wise person. Marcus Aurelius was no stranger to war. He was proconsul twice before he was Caesar. He was in charge of the armies. He had imperium. He was the guy that made the wars happen, as well as being an emperor. And in his own journal to himself, checked himself on every single fallacy that Hegseth lives into. And that's one of the things that we connect over because they will say like, ⁓ yeah, actually I do view Marcus Aurelius as this paragon of leadership, right? And his quotes and things, they sample his quotes. But a lot of people don't realize that the meditations were not written to be read by other people. He wrote those, those were his journals. He's writing to himself when he says like, don't complain. Don't take things for granted. Don't be full of yourself and don't be a Caesar. He's not telling you not to complain. He's telling himself not to complain. He's telling himself not to be caught up on who he was and what his titles are. And so when we see him saying those things to himself, it's non-performative. And so you put that side by side with Hegseth or any of these toxic leaders that we have right now. and you tell me the similarities because they're going to be few. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. I did a video a few weeks ago with Art of War and it was talking about military generals. I went to University of Texas and Admiral McRaven gave our commencement speech, or was one of, but my point being like if this rhetoric was what ⁓ American military was always supposed to be, we would have this from Washington. We would have this from MacArthur. We would have this from McRaven. It would be consistent with military, Andrew J Perera: ⁓ well. Leigh/@followtheleighder: heroic leaders of American past and it's not. It's like this is that, I mean yes, please use Marcus Aurelius because those are like pivotal when we come to leadership but even just if you pull out speeches from our own military generals that we idolize, that is not, or Pentagon just, it's not consistent. Like that's how. Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. And the private overheard conversations too. It's not just what they projected to the state and to the country. It's what they believed. And that's what made them so incredible. And obviously historical people are not perfect. Like every person has their problematic aspects. I'll be the first to admit. But that part is true. Like they, whether or not they lived it, they believed it. And the decisions they made came from that place non-performatively. Leigh/@followtheleighder: It is funny you say I talk about the founding fathers often because I'm often talking about you know, if if If at any point and I'm not talking about the quote founding fathers the big five that everyone I'm talking about the 55 the whole like gang and I was like if at any point it wanted to be a Christian nation They had the numbers you had very wealthy Christian pastors elected officials in the room it could have had and they chose not to Andrew J Perera: the capital F. Yeah. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Like, and this was before they were even looking at existential threats of Islam and Judaism and Cephal. I mean, they were literally within Protestant Christianity. They're like, we're not doing this. This is a nightmare. Yeah. Andrew J Perera: they would have been safe to do so. ⁓ The book, Summer of 1787 is a book that I recommend for anybody who wants to know the whole process of the writing of the Constitution. But it was discussed, like it was talked about. It wasn't just like the elephant in the room that everybody decided to ignore. They brought it up and they're like, hey, should we be basing it off of this? And the ultimate consensus voted on by pastors and men of faith. No, we shouldn't. And here's the reason why. It's like, it's not us making assumptions. These are, you could read their words. Leigh/@followtheleighder: So it is. I'm glad I just wrote that down. Summer of 1787. I have a few books behind me, like Godless Constitution and other stuff that goes deeper too for other women. Because it's, like you said, these things were discussed, nuanced, and they chose not to. And because of that, because of creating a secular government that was friendly or religiously pluralistic in society, we got to advance way beyond Rome could ever dream of. Andrew J Perera: Thank That's good. Leigh/@followtheleighder: And that's really cool socially. I mean, I think about that when people say like, why do you still love America? I'm like, because of these things. Like that is amazing. Civil rights movement. That's crazy that Rome never had that. So just like there's really beautiful things that I don't want us to forget about the United States. Like there's so much amazing beauty, amazing goodness. And no, this leadership or just Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: The last really few decades have been really gnarly ⁓ in terms of having to deal with that as a citizen ethically. ⁓ But we just have to keep reminding each other that this is, it's, is worth fighting for, people are worth fighting for and securing. ⁓ And that we should question imperialism. We should always question these massive things. Andrew J Perera: . Leigh/@followtheleighder: It's not fair ⁓ to American soldiers that you're not just raising your hand to join a military. You're not joining New Zealand's military or like someone who doesn't make it. Right. This is just that ⁓ there are different ethics when you're an empire and you may not know them as a young kid. Maybe you don't maybe you don't even get to have that choice of nuance. Maybe you're like, yeah, the empire is bad, but I'm still poor. Like that doesn't change anything. ⁓ Andrew J Perera: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Definitely, finally. Yeah. Yeah, this is the only way I'm going to cover it. So, yeah. This is an area where I kind of depart from a lot of my friends on the left. Like I said, I'm hyper. I'm hyper progressive. I think that what we have is not working and that we should be working together to build something else. ⁓ Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah, like, I've got kids. Andrew J Perera: I don't want people to confuse my position with ⁓ a hatred of what the United States is. I recognize the evils that it has done and currently does. I recognize the nuance in how it's treated us, people. But at the same time, I... And it's like the romanticism, right? Like you don't want to romanticize what America could be, the American dream, but the morals and principles that went into it, right? And it's unfortunate that the term principles over politics was co-opted by this hyper-libertarian movement, but that term, like principles over anything else, like that is okay. I think that that's healthy to romanticize. Like for me to say, Like right now the American dream is not true. It is not true. It never has been true for the majority of Americans. But that's still a good goal. know, like that's still a good thing to want. Self-determination, individual responsibility, ⁓ contribution to the whole, living for the herd, right? Like these things are... are incredible and as a part of it, we can become something greater than what we are. Right. And so I love America. In fact, the reason why I criticize it so much, the reason why I like my poor students, when I teach international human rights, it's like, go to town in that class and I sound like I hate the United States and I don't. It's because I love what it is. Right? Like when your kid does something that disappoints you or upsets you or even makes you angry, you don't not love the child who they are, the essence of who they are. You may be upset and disappointed with what they've done. But if you didn't care about them, you'd let them. If I didn't care about the United States, I'd let burn. for all I care. I can see the policy window you're going down and it doesn't lead anywhere. ⁓ So if I didn't want what it could be, I would just let it burn. But I actually have two and a half jobs and I fight with every ounce of my freaking energy and morality to fix it. And so it's like... And it's the same with a lot of the like, like I mentioned Graham Plattner's name earlier. ⁓ God, I love listening to that guy. And not just because he's a former Marine that saw through the Kool-Aid too, but the fact that that he can love the country so much that he wants it to be the best that it can be. If I didn't love the country, I would be okay with it mistreating people. I'd be okay with it stealing. I'd be okay with it. bullying, but I'm not okay with those things because I care about its, its self. It's the same reason why my mom supported me when I joined the Marines. Right? That was a departure from how I was raised. It was a hundred, a hundred and eight, like 180 degree turnaround from what I was raised. I had my mom in the office with the recruiter and we were signing my contract cause I was 17 and I was like, mom, you need to sign this. said, I don't want to sign it. goes against everything that I've taught you. And I said, if you don't sign it, you'll either sign it now and support me or tell me that you're not supporting me and I'll sign it in six months and do it anyway without you. And that was probably one of the most hurtful things that I could say to my mom. And she signed it. because she loved me and she had faith in me and my ability to come back from whatever it was that I needed to experience or was mistaken about. ⁓ And if we as citizens have this country, our child, this thing that we're caring for and we're incubating and teaching and making it its best, if we are to be that same force, we have to say, you know what? You're doing some shit things right now, but that doesn't mean I don't love you. So I'm going to show up and contest everything that you say. I'm going to show up and I'm going to show you the truth so that you don't wander around in lies. And so I'm going to allow you to be a good person on your own accord, not because I'm forcing you. And that's how it is with this country. I could grab it by its neck. and guillotine anybody I want and whatever to force it to be the nation that I want it to be. But that'll fall apart too, because it needs to be fostered. It needs to be cared for. It needs to be loved and changed through the process of loving it so much that you can criticize it. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Mm-hmm. I have enjoyed this conversation so much today. hope that you come back once your publication is out so we can talk about it. I know we hardly talked about it today. was kind of two different topics going on. But I really appreciate you using your voice as a veteran to speak when others can't because they're still in active service. They cannot speak out of what's going on. But your testimony, you're certainly... unfortunately not alone and I hope that you find others in your community and I hope that you would consider coming back because this was a really wonderful conversation and I really appreciate your perspective. Andrew J Perera: Thank you for listening. Just know that by bringing a professor on to a talk show, you're gonna have him talking the entire time. And so it would be longer. If I could, I would talk more, which I'm sorry for. But before I go, I do wanna, if I can, I have no idea if anybody I knew will be listening or watching this, but I do wanna say, Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ yeah. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ my gosh. Andrew J Perera: that this is just a blanket statement to everybody that I served with. Some of you I'm in contact with and you know me, you follow my life. Some of you I haven't talked to in almost 20 years. ⁓ But I still think about all those times and I still very nuanced, very, ⁓ very cautiously think about those times positively and that my relationship with you all was tragic in that I lost good personal relationships with people over a misunderstanding that could have been solved without any of the toxic environment that we were in. So if you see this, if you disagree with what I'm saying or it brings up frustrating emotions ⁓ or memories or it makes you angry, just know that That's what I was going through. And ⁓ I hope that what I was saying and my reaction to what I went through is helpful. And I hope that I get to talk to you again, even if we're not friends, so that I could see that you're alive and that you're doing okay. And that's like Alex, ⁓ I don't know if I would say Danny, ⁓ John, Thomas, if you guys are listening, then just know. Still love you guys, even though we haven't talked in a really long time. thanks for the, let me do the shout out. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Absolutely, absolutely. Do you, is there somewhere that I can send listeners to follow you for more? Or what is, ⁓ what does it look like to learn more about you? Andrew J Perera: I'm on. ⁓ gosh. I keep almost everything ⁓ private profile, closed profile. ⁓ But if people wanted to just like know what's going on or when publications like this do come out, my LinkedIn profile, I'm searchable, Andrew Perera, LPD, ⁓ should be easy to find. ⁓ If people find my socials and they request, I'm not going to approve anybody that I can't see your profile as well, because I need to know you're not a bot. But no, I'm not public in the public world, and I find that very liberating. Leigh/@followtheleighder: All right. It's alright. Yeah, no kidding. Alrighty, well, absolutely, folks, that was Dr. Andrew Perera joining us from California this afternoon. As mentioned, United States Marine Corps veteran and now ⁓ professor and advocate for ⁓ Indian or tribal ⁓ advocacy. Thank you for your service in so many different ways. Thank you for your story. Andrew J Perera: Thank you. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Folks, let me know what y'all thought of this interview. We covered a lot of ground. I know I have a lot of veterans listening, a lot of clergy folk too, as well as therapists. So definitely interested in hearing what y'all have to say if y'all have seen this in your own fields. This has been another episode of Follow the Leighder. I'm your host, Leigh Larson, and until next time, see ya.