Jason Kander on politics and PTSD

Once a rising star in the Democratic party, veteran Jason Kander’s post-traumatic stress disorder forced him to withdraw from public life. Kander joins Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart to discuss this experience in his new book “Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD.”

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Highlights

“He wants two different groups. He wants people two generations up from him, and I, and he wants those people to look at him and say, Now there’s a nice young man who understands what a man does is he gets married, and he doesn’t smoke pot, or whatever the heck he’s talking about”… He wants those voters. But Josh Hawley also wants people who watch the UFC and who has a friend who acknowledges they’ve had an abortion and work with a gay person who they happen to really like… We have to make it clear that what Josh Hawley is talking about is not masculinity, it’s intolerance and it’s judgment of them and their way of life.” – Jason Kander (Video: Washington Post Live)

“The folks at the Veteran’s Community Project said ‘Hey, what if we could do anything for our fellow vets?’ And they said, ‘What if we had a walk-in center that any vet who came in, we could deal with any issue that is confronting them?... They opened that and were treating thousands of vets a year and making a huge difference… Most transitional housing programs, if they can reach like a 40 percent rate of getting people transitioned back into the community in permanent housing, that’s considered really good, VCP operates at an unprecedented 85 percent success rate of doing that.” - Jason Kander (Video: Washington Post Live)

“My brain got stuck in that simpler combat environment and didn’t really trust the idea that I was out of danger… I got to the point where if anything was out of place, if I didn’t have control over something, my brain couldn’t triage that… That, while you’re pursuing the presidency, is pretty exhausting… I was using my very ambitious and very active career to avoid myself.” - Jason Kander (Video: Washington Post Live)

Jason Kander

President, National Expansion, Veterans Community Project

Author, “Invisible Storm”