S9E50
· 45:08
Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm so grateful to have you
with me today for another episode of the Self -Brain Surgery Podcast.
Today is Veterans Day. You're going to hear this a few days from now,
but it's Veterans Day in the United States, the day that we honor our folks
that have served or are serving in the military.
And of course, you know my story, having spent 14 years in the United States
Air Force and a big part of 2005 in a combat hospital in the Iraq war and how
much my service affects who I am today and the things we talk about on this show a lot.
And so today I wanted to have a guest that we could reframe our thinking about
veterans in the military and Veterans Day and some things you may not even know
about what's going on inside the military culture for the last 20 years or so
as we've been in this posture of being at war and now we've transitioned really
away from being in a war posture again.
And what the impact of that culture shift has had on people inside the military
and retirees and veterans and their families.
And we have an incredible guest today. Corey Weathers is a licensed professional counselor.
She's a sought after speaker, consultant and author of the award winning first
book, Sacred Spaces My Journey to the Heart of Military Marriage.
Her husband is a career military chaplain.
He's still serving on active duty. And over the past two decades,
Corey has focused her career as a clinical consultant that specializes in marriage,
military culture, special forces, and leadership development.
She's traveled all over the world with the United States Secretary of Defense.
She's been to Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf to visit troops
and report on deployment conditions.
She facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for service members and
families all around the world.
In addition to providing subject matter expertise on military culture.
She consults organizations and institutions on building trust,
creating impactful programming, and working within a multi -generational team.
Her advocacy has included White House initiatives and contributing to the passing
of a congressional bill for licensure portability. Cori is an expert.
On military culture, and she's going to give us some things to think about and
even help us change our mind about what we say to people on Veterans Day.
She's written an incredible new book, Military Culture Shift,
the impact of war, money, and generational perspective on morale,
retention, and leadership.
The book is available everywhere books are sold today, so get yourself a copy
if you're interested in this incredibly powerful and important look at what's
going on inside our military.
It's based on more than 15 years of research that Military Culture Shift offers
insights from the counseling office, as well as perspectives on the effect of
Department of Defense's budget decisions,
changes in generational views of authority, and emerging social trends within
the military community post -9 -11.
So friend, whether you're a military leader, a historian, a politician,
an educator, a counselor, a service member, a family member,
or just somebody who loves the veteran or people who have served,
military culture shift will encourage you to understand and embrace important
things like how past decisions have led to the current state of wellness.
How generational differences in motivation and views of authority impact the
military, ways in which learning styles impact training, why families aren't
turning up for in -person and social events, why communication shifts impact cohesiveness so much.
Information distribution strategies that help, and leadership strategies to
influence positive changes going forward. This is an incredible book.
And we had a great talk on Veterans Day with Corey Weathers.
I'm so grateful that Corey took the time. She'll be back on the show another
time to talk about some faith elements and some things that she's learned being
a military spouse for so long. I had a great talk with Corrie and she helped me change my mind.
Even me, a veteran of a foreign war, she helped me have a little different language
around what to say instead of.
Thank you for your service. I think it'll help you change your mind and change
your life about what's going on in the military.
It'll give you something else to think about today. It's a tremendous episode.
And I can't recommend her book, Military Culture Shift, more highly than I do.
And before we get started with Corey, I just have one question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place for the neuroscience
of how your mind works, smashes together with faith and everything starts to
make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self -Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready?
This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,
my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
♪♪ Friend, I'm so excited to be back with you for another episode of the podcast,
and I've got a really important topic and a powerful guest for you today.
I'm glad to introduce you to a new friend. Corey Weathers is with us today. Welcome, Corey.
Thank you so much for having me, Lee. I'm super excited. Absolutely.
Me too. Hey, give us a 30 ,000 -foot view of the work that you do and how you came to do this work.
Probably not a lot of folks out there who have dedicated their lives in this
area of supporting military culture like you have, so talk to us about that.
Yeah, so I'm a military spouse, and we have huge issues in spouse employment.
And so I'm a mental health clinician by trade. I started my career as a mental
health clinician and always knew that I wanted to do that.
And of course, as my husband joined the military, as we started to serve together,
at one point, fast forward, I had five different licenses in different states
trying to build this career and serve.
And really, I had transitioned to serving military service members and their families.
I'm really enjoying that work. I mean, it's just an incredible community to
work with and also live with.
And I started to hear all of these similar issues from counseling session to
counseling session. It was almost like I was on loop.
And what made me really sad is that the people that were coming in for those
sessions didn't know that someone else was also going through what they were going through.
And then fast forward again, And again, I found myself traveling and speaking
and teaching, whether it was leadership development or doing spouse groups or
working with events for couples in the military.
And again, testing out some of these trends and issues that I'd heard from the
counseling office across all branches, across all people. And that really turned
into a love for studying this culture, studying the people.
So I basically took my clinical background and kind of zoomed out to really examine,
this military culture that's a subculture of America,
and really get to understand the impact of war on the culture,
whether it was just war on the service member that tends to get a lot more attention
than how war impacts the spouse and the kids as well.
And so that has led to 15 years of collecting information and watching all of
these trends to finally put it all in a book and try to tell the story of how
we got to where we are today,
which is dealing with a new recruitment crisis,
retention crisis, and on the brink of potential more global conflict.
Wow. So give us a sense, if you will, of what, I was in a long time ago,
I served in the Iraq war and spent half of 2005 in a tent hospital in Iraq and
did 200 brain surgeries in the field and all that.
But it's not the same animal that it was almost 20 years ago now.
And what has 20 years of being in a war posture done to the military family and the culture there?
Yeah, such a big question, and it's one of the reasons why I knew I wanted to
take a generational perspective at looking at those shifts that have happened.
What you were just describing, coming in in 2005, serving in Iraq,
a lot of the families that were in that, you know, post 9 -11,
coming in after 9 -11, up till about 2010, 2011,
were a lot of Gen X, maybe a few very young millennials, but a lot of your boomers
and Gen X really were serving during that first decade.
And that first decade was a time where if you, if you serve during those years,
especially family members serving during those years, the community really took
care of them, took care of each other.
You know, my whole entire neighborhood was deployed at the same time.
We raised each other's kids.
We made meals for each other. It just was an incredibly cohesive community.
And there's a lot of variables that I really try to pull apart because there's, it's a wicked problem.
There's so many variables that have contributed to what it is today.
But the easiest way I could say is that the culture really shifted to an online culture.
And in many ways, that's really good, and that we can stay connected,
and we have access to resources and information.
And we found ways for it to be a good thing in our community.
It also has helped kind of contribute to breaking down a lot of the cohesiveness that we once had.
And so for those of us who have been in long enough that we experienced that
first decade, it is a completely different culture since especially 2011.
And what has that done to, let's say, mental health of the average soldier,
sailor, Marine, Air Force member and their families?
This is, you know, the military suicide and veteran suicide issue is a big deal.
What is that culture playing into mental health?
Yeah, so many contributing variables. It's, you know, you know,
the body and the biopsychosocial connection to issues that you see manifesting in the body, right?
And I think that's the same thing when we look at the systemic issues that we're
seeing in the military culture, when you have several variables happening at once, it's a system.
And so they all kind of play off of each other. So for example,
two decades of a global conflict was a very long time for a lot of our service
members and their families to endure that much stress.
And not every generation went through all of those 20 years.
You know, I would say Gen X and Boomer definitely did. And so they're coming
out of that two decades with burnout and seeing their kids dealing with mental health issues.
Those were the military kids that watched their parents go through that incredible
operation tempo that we went through.
And so there is a lot more loneliness than ever, and that's across all generations,
more loneliness, more isolation.
A lot of spouses, for example, when you're talking about mental health,
put themselves and their self -care, even their medical care on the back burner for 15 years.
And now we're seeing some of those issues come up more than ever.
Mental health is a huge topic across the board right now, And some people might
be listening going, I thought that it's always been an issue in the military.
And it has been, we've had suicide being a big topic that even Americans are
tracking for the veteran population.
But there is more significant mental health issues today than we've ever seen
before, as well as Gen Z coming in with some of the stressors that they went
through in their most formative years dealing with mental health issues that
are coming into the force as well.
So it's a very complicated question to answer that has many layers to it.
Yeah. And what do you think the, you know, the average person out there,
we hear on the news, things like, you know, recruiting's at an all -time low and things like that.
And so the natural question then is, well, who's watching the shop if we don't
have enough soldiers and sailors and airmen and what's gonna change?
And people are talking about things like the draft again.
Like, obviously we're not gonna let the military close for business.
So what happens and what are people talking about in that community,
about how we rebuild our fighting force and keep our country safe while also
protecting our people and their families.
Yeah, this is a huge passion of mine. Part of it is we're actively serving still.
We have about five years until we could retire on the 20 -year system.
And I also have Gen Z kids. One of them is 19 and considering joining the Air Force.
And I also have a 16 -year -old that doesn't want to join the military,
that if we were to have a draft, like you may have no choice, right?
So it's a very real important topic that we need to talk about.
In fact, I think it's really easy for Americans to hear that there's a recruitment
crisis and think maybe this is just dramatic language so that more people will
join and we'll plus up the numbers.
But this is genuinely an authentic crisis that we're having because fewer Gen Z are joining than ever,
and that cohort that I just described a few minutes ago that's burned out and
dealing with needing to take care of their family and their marriage and themselves
after two decades are discouraging their Gen Z kids from joining.
And compared to World War II, when one out of every 12 Americans was serving, that meant,
everybody knew somebody who was serving compared to today where it's one out of 200.
And so it's very likely that the average American citizen doesn't know somebody
that's serving and doesn't know what the cost of that service is and perhaps
is so far removed from the military culture,
but also so far removed from the knowing that we had from World War II that
it's easy to just kind hope that a draft isn't going to happen and the DoD will fix itself.
But to your point, the DoD and the defense isn't going to and shouldn't close
its doors. It will find ways to protect our country. That's what it's built to do.
And so I don't want to see a draft happen. And it's an incredible community to be a part of.
It can be an incredible career to be a part of as well. So it's an important conversation to have.
What do you think the moving parts are of The cultural pieces of what's happening
that's damaging and hurting recruiting right now. What are some of those elements that are going on?
Yeah, definitely. I want to keep like being on the same soapbox.
Definitely Gen X discouraging Gen Z.
We see a lot, in fact, I said this in an interview earlier today,
so much is online and that can be a good thing.
But people are now able to authentically share their stories,
share their feelings, share the behind the scenes of what's happening in not
just the military, but any job that they're at.
Yeah, they look behind the curtain more easily than they could.
Yes, and every institution, every business has to think about this.
It's really calling all of our
businesses and institutions to a place of transparency and accountability,
because there's really no way to push anything under the rug or to ignore it
until it goes away, or even what I think has happened in the past,
which is kind of just kind of waiting out a cohort until they retire out and
we start over fresh with some more troops.
Like this is something where it's a so much more visible than ever,
whether we get it right or whether we get it wrong.
And so I think that that is definitely creating.
A lot of stress for the Department of Defense as Gen Z,
not only is sharing authentically some things that, such as like mold and housing
and mold and barracks, that they're using these platforms to hold the institution
accountable to make sure that they're fixed.
But they're also, it can be a little bit confusing that Gen Z uses short form
video and uses memes and uses these platforms to also be creative in their expression.
And so some of those expressions can sound dark in their humor and not necessarily
be, they're not actually, for example, this morning I saw a TikTok of Gen Z
saying how much they hated their life, especially now that they joined the military.
And part of it was true, but also part of it was creative, dark humor.
So it's hard to tell the difference. Either way, it can seem like bad marketing
and really, but if it's true, it's also giving a look behind the curtain.
And that's something the DoD is having to take a look at now.
Yeah, I was thinking, as you were talking about when I signed up,
I received a scholarship from the Air Force to go to medical school.
And the recruiting interaction that I had about, hey, what's this going to be like, and what's the,
you know, what, I was concerned about things like, will I be allowed to choose
the specialty that I want, and will I be, have any, you know,
any say in where I go to train, and all those kinds of questions,
and the recruiters in those days were all you had.
Like, there was, you had to basically take somebody's word that you were going
to assign this contract and not get sent off to be an infantryman in South Korea
somewhere but actually get to go to medical school, right? Because once you
sign the contract, you're in.
But nowadays, it's like these kids know everything. They know a thousand people
on their favorite video game that have done the thing and they're chatting with them 24 -7.
It's got to be a real challenge for the recruiting environment.
It's just kind of a fascinating social problem, isn't it?
Yeah. They really are. In fact, there is...
Some talk about DoD actually embracing some of Gen Z and even Millennials platforms.
You know, in the past, you know, I even remember a time where there was a lot
of fear going online as a service member, especially, you know,
a lot of fear of like not being in uniform if I'm going to be on my Facebook
profile or Instagram or whatever.
And there was a lot of regulations trying to figure out how to control social
media and trying to protect the institution, if you will.
And now it's just expanded so much that in some cases, some of even the Gen
Z TikTokers, is that even a word? TikTokers? Yeah.
I made it up if it isn't. But the DoD is seeing that some of their influence
in a positive way is contributing to recruitment.
So it's kind of a very confusing time of how do we control a narrative from
an institutional perspective and make sure that there's some form of regulation,
which the DoD is known for, and it actually thrives really well in.
And at the same time, you can't control everybody's private, personal platforms.
And so the truth kind of gets out there in those ways. And so it's kind of a
very confusing time, even for the institution to try to figure out how do we mitigate?
How do we, hopefully, my hope would be that they would become even more transparent
and engage in dialogue and conversation with the community, with the culture,
to heal what needs to be healed, to address what needs to be addressed.
And be okay with the transparency that I think every institution is faced to embrace.
So you call your book Military Culture Shift. And so what's the shift?
What are you trying to get at here? So the average listener,
like, I'm thinking about reading this book.
What am I getting myself into if
I invest the time to get involved in this topic? What's your drive here?
Yeah, you know, it's such a deeply layered book. It's hard to answer it in one sentence.
But I will say there was definitely one big shift that happened.
I called it the great culture shift in 2011, where the culture mostly went online.
We had defense, our defense funding just tanked when sequestration hit around 2013.
So many variables all at once created a massive shift.
It wasn't just money going down. We were also entering into a to the second decade of the war.
It was also we are starting to get tired from the serving into a second decade
in the operation tempos. Our kids were starting to feel it all at the same time.
And millennials were starting to come in for the very first time and experiencing
a military that nobody else had ever experienced before.
And so while I can talk about having being in a neighborhood where everybody
took care of each other and everything was in person, that was definitely not
what millennials were experiencing after 2011.
So there was definitely a big shift, but there was also little tiny mini shifts
that happened throughout history.
And so I think the main goal that I wanted to do with the book is, number one,
whoever is reading the book to really ignite compassion in hearing the story,
hearing the story of our military culture, not just the history of it,
but the story of how did we get to where we are right now and why is that important?
Because it is so crucial to our national security.
It matters to, if you have kids, if you have Gen Z kids, and whether or not we can have a draft.
But it's also about how our American values have shifted over time.
Whereas people in World War I, World War II joined out of a sense of patriotism,
or maybe they didn't join, they just rallied around and all believed in something
similar, all had a common value system,
all had an agreement of what was right and what was wrong.
And even if you were a doctor, you found a way to support war efforts, right?
So we all had this common cohesive country, if you will, not perfect, right?
But there was more cohesiveness than there is now.
And so I really wanted to show how, you know, the military culture is,
it mirrors the American culture in a lot of ways.
But it is something that if we could just tell the story and bring all of these
news stories and all of the research and all the information together to help
people hear the story of the people that especially went through the last two decades of war,
my hope is that we raise compassion,
we raise empathy so that we have something more to say other than thank you
for your service, that we have something other to say,
even if it's just saying thank Thank you for carrying the burden on my behalf
or thank you for I see you, I see what your family went through.
I see what you're carrying every day and I appreciate it.
Just changing that dialogue just a little bit because it's really hard nowadays
to see a person, much less see a culture and how they've evolved over time.
Yeah, that's so that's so important and so powerful and resonate with everything that you're saying.
And I'm thinking about what we all watched on television when we pulled out
of Afghanistan And I had, on a personal level, and had conversations with a lot of friends.
My best friend is a ranger who was in Afghanistan 2010, 2011, silver star guy.
And he said, why were we there? What did we do? We just left.
And we just handed him all our weapons. So there was a lot of this sort of sense
of loss of purpose, right, of why did we do the things that we do if we can
just turn a switch and walk away from there. And that had to,
I thought, had to have impacted the people who are still in and their families.
What has the end of the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan,
what has that done inside the house?
Yeah, such a big question. And honestly, that season was, I think,
the catalyst of why I wanted to write the book, because I had been walking,
not only living with this culture as being a military spouse myself,
going through those deployments, trying to raise my kids, moving more times than I wanted to move.
Like I was living it, but I was also working with the community and doing whatever
I could to support them through it.
And I think that I was seeing this stress and the tension build the compounding
impact of stress over time just continue to build and escalate.
Meanwhile, service families, what's amazing about them is that they're gritty.
They will be resilient even if they don't want to be. They find a way to kind
of bolster themselves and push through difficult circumstances. They rarely complain.
The culture even kind of teaches them to not complain. And so I was watching
this build almost like a shaken up Coke bottle. And I was like,
we are going to either implode or explode.
And about that time, COVID hit.
And what I saw was almost a psychological breaking point for the community,
that it was just, I mean, it was too much for everybody to go through.
But when you put that on top of what the military culture was already carrying
a burden of, it was too much.
And then I realized COVID, as rough as it was, was a false peak.
Really, when the exit from Afghanistan happened, that was the culmination of
all of that stress. That was the imploding or exploding.
And so it was a combination of things that happened.
I got so many calls from spouses, both veteran spouses, they were retired and
out, and those that were still in that were incredibly worried about their service
member who was now reliving all kinds of trauma and was having reactions very
similar to what you were just describing,
of what did all this mean?
People who had lost friends, like what was it for the media was asking hard questions like that.
And it was really causing families to regress and all the work that they had done.
But spouses then were having to put their own feelings about the end of GWAT on their own.
They had to put their own feelings on the back burner to take care of their
service members and their kids. So that bottled up even more.
And then, of course, what we ended up seeing is mass chaos in response to that,
which is a very interesting topic in that for the first time ever,
the DoD was doing the best that they could to handle a very difficult situation.
And veterans found their, especially special operations veterans,
found their own way there to do what they had always been trained to do.
And so So everything kind of institutionally, the structure fell apart in some
big ways, in some ways, some beautiful ways.
And that it was an incredible just seeing everybody come together and do the
best they could to do the right thing.
And active duty service members who did really heroic things and really showed
their character of how to do the right thing, even when you're in difficult circumstances.
So there was so many reactions, but culturally, from a high level culturally,
the community crashed after that.
And that's, I think, contributing to the recruitment crisis and the retention
crisis that I think is coming up next.
It just really affected the community as a whole. Wow. I look back and I think about.
My own life, you know, the PTSD and the things I remember, the babies that got
blown up and the soldiers who died and the ones that didn't and the relationships
I have with some of the ones I was able to take care of there.
And what I recall happening to myself over the last almost 20 years is this
evolution of what it was for and what it meant.
Because all of us, I think, especially in regards to Iraq, I mean,
all of us came to some conclusions over time. We weren't there for why we thought we were there.
It didn't really turn out to be the same thing we thought it was.
But then you have to say, well, why was I there? And for me,
I came down on this place where I said I was there to take care of people who got shot and blown up.
And I was there to help other people navigate how to handle extreme stress and
to figure out what I was capable of doing in those moments.
And I worked around some of the best people in the world, right,
these people that we're talking about, the special forces community and the
line soldiers and the aircraft mechanics.
They are the most giving, dedicated people in the world.
And so I think when you look at what it was for, it was for joining together
as a team and in a community to accomplish a mission.
Yeah. The higher level people, right, can say what the mission was and what
it was for, but I think reframing that in my own heart, in my own mind,
really made a difference in my life of saying don't get caught up in what the
politicians were doing.
Get caught up in did you accomplish the reason, the mission that you were there
for And that's what helped me to kind of heal and move forward.
So I think some of the things you're saying are really going to resonate with our listeners.
So from the inside, what's discouraging to you?
And then what's encouraging to you about what's going on and what the future
looks like? Yeah, I love this question. Thank you for asking both sides. Right. Because.
Discouraging is really just,
you know, again, I think this is the reason why I wanted to tell the whole story, whether it's,
and I tried to include positive examples of leadership, positive examples of
where decisions were made that were right and good decisions,
as much as decisions that were maybe
not the best decisions that we saw consequences kind of unfold later.
And so I would say discouraging wise, I am discouraged by the DOT and I'm not
pointing fingers and I'm not trying to blow up things.
It's really just the reality of the DOD over time, once you understand the story,
over time trying to figure out how to take care of such an incredible,
incredible amount of service members and their families.
We're talking about over 2 million service members and their families.
They needed to privatize to do that. Who's going to help us with housing.
The DOD is in charge of winning wars, not maintaining housing.
And so whether it's medical care or housing or some of those other things that
families needed, they expanded and privatized.
And so now we're dealing with, I'm sure listeners have heard about the mold
crisis and mold in housing and barracks as an example.
And so we are a long way off from having that fixed.
And that makes me incredibly sad and discouraged to see that if their families
are still struggling with housing that is not fit for their families to be in.
There's definitely some huge issues when it comes to, we need more providers.
There's definitely a national shortage of medical providers and mental health
providers, but even more so providers that are willing to take TRICARE.
I myself am a military spouse and a TRICARE provider, and yet I abandoned the
contract to be in network because of just the bureaucracy. That's a part of
that. And so there's very few providers.
And so when we talk about suicide numbers, when we talk about telling service
members and their families to go get help, whatever kind of help that is,
the next question is, well, where do they go get help if there's massive wait lists everywhere?
And so that is something that we're working really hard to do advocacy on and
to really help people understand what the issues are.
And I'm really hopeful that we're going to make some progress on that,
but it's still discouraging to see when you see online and social media people
really still struggling with some issues that I wish would have been resolved a long time ago.
Um, but as far as what's encouraging.
You know, even though we talk about a recruitment crisis and people being burned
out, I will say the most encouraging thing to me still is this community is
an incredible tribe of people that,
like I said earlier, have this common purpose that are willing to save the person
next to them, to live for the person next to them, to sacrifice even their evening
to take care of someone else's kids.
Like it is an incredible community that has that shared value system that I
believe is strong still.
And I think that's the reason why those Gen Z that are joining,
I think that's why they're joining because they're seeing unity.
They're seeing common values and people wearing the same uniform and less division
and less polar opposites and arguments going on in the military community,
as well as potential for a great career and some provision for their family
and it being a smart financial decision.
And so I think those that are coming in see that and value what we're trying to offer.
And I was telling somebody earlier, in a lot of ways with so much division in
the American culture still,
and still so much, I mean, we're, as we're recording this, there's a a potential
government shutdown again looming, and it's all based off of those polar extremes.
And I would say, you know, the DOD and the community, the military community,
tends to be about 10 years behind on a lot of things sometimes.
But I will say one thing that we are still trying to hold on to is that cohesiveness
and that unity, and that's something I think people are attracted to.
Yeah, I've been noticing, I've always loved military recruiting commercials
and I've noticed over the last five or six years that they changed a lot.
The obvious group of who they were recruiting to changed.
And then over the last six months or so, I've seen some of the most powerful
and moving commercials I've ever seen, the ones that involve the parents.
And I think you address that in the book, I read the chapter where you talk about that.
But I think it's a fascinating insight that somebody had of if we're going to
get these young people to sign up, somebody has to say yes in the world.
Talk about that for a second.
Oh yeah. Thanks. Because I I'm fascinated by this topic too,
you know, it's really the psychology of marketing. It's the psychology of,
um, how do you find people that are wanting to serve?
And it, and it's an important topic that even if you are not in the military
space and you're listening to this right now, it's all about marketing.
And it's all about your internal team and how do you motivate your internal
team? And what there's a phrase of, um, what you catch them with is what you
need to keep them with, right? Like, and so.
When you look over history and you see how the military recruited over time,
and this especially started in 1973, when we switched to an all -volunteer force,
it switched from from the draft where we're just going to pull a name out of
a hat and you got to serve, right,
to we've got to actually go and convince people to join.
And so that's when the marketing strategy started. And so over the years,
we've seen everything from sign -on bonuses is to, I loved the 80s where it was,
yes, it was be all you can be on the army side, but really the strategy was,
um, let's be the family that, that these families need.
Like let's be kind of the father figure that we're going to provide for their every need.
We're going to give them childcare, we're going to give them housing and we're
going to be there for them when we really need them to.
Then that ended up creating a dependency.
And we find in the nineties they had to change that slogan. And now it's,
um, we're gonna take care of you so that you can take care of yourself and.
Distance that and so then you get to Millennials where there was a lot of marketing towards parents,
Because there was a lot of what everybody was talking in the culture about helicopter
Parenting and the parents really having the pulse on what their kids were doing
and there's a little bit of traces
of that still Fast forward to today Be all you can be is back again,
and it's really catering to Gen X in our childhood of playing G .I.
Joe in the woods and playing outside till the streetlights come on and really
that nostalgia of service.
But I don't have evidence for this, but one of the things that I'm watching
and one of the things I'm concerned about is that if we are marketing to Gen
X, Gen X is also that generation that's really tired and burned out and probably
not wanting their Gen Z kids to join.
And so now we're seeing some shifts in the way that the military is recruiting,
going back to bonuses, and maybe even talking to Gen Z kids who may have entered
college, but not sure if they actually want to finish college or are struggling to finish college.
So you can see there's always these, like, what do we do if there's not going to be a draft?
Who has, in the military, we say, who's the belly button? Like who's going to
be the one that makes that decision for that new recruit to come in?
And I think that's a huge mystery still to the DoD.
Wow. You finished the book with a story called Not Plastic Soldiers or Not Just
Plastic Soldiers, and it's really powerful and moving.
Give us a couple of minutes on this idea that you finished the book with,
and then we'll try to wrap it up.
Yeah. You know, the story, I was holding on to that while I was writing the
book because I had this vivid memory of being at a spouse event.
And, you know, most of the time spouses are, these actually was a group of chaplain
spouses and chaplain spouses, you know, we bounce all over the place.
We can be attached to armor and infantry and all kinds of different,
you know, one point we were with intelligence.
And so my husband was trying to explain the army and explain the military to this group.
And the best way he knew how to do it was to take a bunch of plastic green army
men and some helicopters and, you know, some toys basically.
And we had a cake. And he was like, okay, pretend that the cake is the mission.
Like that is what we are going to, you know, we're going to attack the cake is what we need to do.
And we've got to have air power and we've got to have tanks and you know,
and you've got your foot soldiers and your foot soldiers, the tankers call crunchies,
you know, which is really funny and everybody laughs.
But the objective is the cake, right? And I was watching everybody was laughing
and it was such a wonderful thing to laugh because it reminds you of the playfulness
that we all need in such a serious topic.
But the more I sat back and watched, the more I thought about these green plastic
army men who are, you know, are are molded into certain positions and and you
buy them in buckets of 100 at a time.
And and if you've ever played with them, you roll over them with bouncy balls
and lose them in the sandbox and you can always go and buy more.
And there are these disposable and they're less expensive than your tanks and
your helicopters and your planes and your airframes and all that.
And I just as I wrote the book, I thought about how much both on inside on the
military side, but also the American culture, how I just didn't want this amazing
group of people that I've served with that have served me,
that have served my family to be forgotten.
And so many past generations, so many past veterans and their families have been forgotten.
And the more we get distant from those wars, the longer that we get that distance
from the Afghanistan exit, the more it's going to be forgotten just how much
that our whole country went through during that time.
And I just wanted to have a visual to end the book to go, you know,
we are more than green plastic army men.
We need to be careful to not treat ourselves that way.
My hope and I believe the DOD doesn't see us that way.
But when when numbers you have to have numbers to win wars. you really do.
At the end of the day, that's the institution's job is to fight and win nation's
wars and deter future threats.
A lot of times it's going to come down to numbers, but I hope we as people,
whether you are in the military or not, can see the person in front of you as
a person, not as disposable, not as forgotten, but just be willing if we could
all slow down and hear each other's stories.
I feel like that's the place to connect. on a human level, having respect for each other,
and just listening to each other's story and being willing to meet those human
needs is really what I want people to come back to.
And that includes pausing long enough to read a book.
Which is not really done much anymore. That's right. I think that's beautiful.
Actually, zoom that out. That idea is good for our whole society.
I mean, slow down, get to know each other, hear each other's stories.
There's so much hope in that.
Give us some hope for Veterans Day today. Like as we finish this up,
this episode is going to play on Veterans Day weekend right before your book comes out next Tuesday.
Go get the book, folks. Give us a little bit of a message for Veterans Day for
those listening out there.
Yeah, just a quick reminder, not shaming anybody, but just remember Veterans
Day is not Memorial Day. We try to educate that a lot.
Veterans Day is a time to remember those who have served, not necessarily those
that have died, but you might see a mixture of both on social media and in the news.
But it's really just a time to remember. And I would say, reconnect.
Reconnect and find those service members in your community.
Be thoughtful of those families in your community.
Maybe you're passing through the airport and you see somebody in uniform, it's
just an opportunity to remember that there are people that are choosing to enter
this lifestyle on your behalf as an American citizen so that you can do your
calling and do and have the talents that you have and have the career that you
have and raise the family that you have. And it's our honor to do that.
But it's an opportunity this weekend to reconnect and remember those stories,
to ask about those stories.
And again, instead of maybe saying thank you for your service, can I just invite you to,
pause for a second, like we said a minute ago, and think about what does it
mean to you to have, you know, two million service members and their families
that are willing to put their families on pause, putting their marriages,
not necessarily on pause, but enter into that difficulty so that we have a country
that is safe, so that we have a country where we do have freedom to go about
our business, to do our jobs,
to raise our families, and so that we don't have to deal with some of things
that we're seeing in the Middle East today.
I would accredit that to the amazing military community that we have that's
protected our nation since 9 -11.
So it's a great time to just kind of pause and reflect on that,
to say thank you to someone, to maybe just invite them into conversation.
If you see a service member and they're clearly a service member and they're
with their spouse, tell the spouse thank you too.
They often feel invisible. The kids often feel invisible.
Pay for a meal. If you, last thing, if you're a provider, or think back to World
War II, maybe you had stories of your grandparents, of everybody pulling together,
the nation pulling together.
Think of how you can use your talents to serve this community,
to support whatever deterrence or global conflicts or war efforts that these
families are still enduring.
As a dentist, give back and serve more military families.
As a mental health provider, put it on your website. Maybe more than just a
discount, just kind of have those scripts, if you will, those words kind of
in your back pocket, metaphorically, to just connect with those families again.
It's beautiful. Friend, if you're listening out there and you've been concerned
about what's happening in our country and the military, you're worried about
the future, I'm just telling you there's good people working hard on the inside.
Corey Weathers is getting it done.
Thank you for the work that you do traveling the world, encouraging,
researching, learning, teaching.
And I pray that this book will be one of those that makes a difference in the
inside the culture and out.
And we're just praying for your success, Corrie, and thank you for your time
today. Thank you, Lee, so much for your time as well.
Absolutely. God bless you. What a great talk. Corrie and I had a great time,
and I hope you learned a lot as I did.
Hope you have something new to say instead of just, thank you for your service.
And I hope you learned something about military cultureship that would inspire
you to go out and pick up her book. It's incredibly valuable and important,
especially at a time like this when everything is changing so much.
And if you know or love somebody who is or has served, get yourself a copy of
Military Culture Shift and it'll help you have a new set of things to pray for
them about, converse with them
about, know about, about what's going on inside their heart and heads.
And I hope you had a great time with this conversation. Hey friend,
you can't change your life until you change your mind. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren. I'll talk to you tomorrow, but you can start today.
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