Even The New York Times has gotten in the act, suggesting that Harvey forced us to give the president “a starring role” in the movie. The paper seems to imply that Obama’s role should have been that of a background extra. I can say with total conviction: President Obama was part of “Operation Neptune Spear” long before he knew Harvey Weinstein was going to be part of a movie about the mission. And no, Harvey didn’t make me re-edit the movie so that the president, in full combat gear, fires the kill shot.  

It’s true. We do have news footage of the president. I considered hiring Jay Pharoah from Saturday Night Live to play the president, but he wasn’t available. So I had to go with the next best thing—the president himself. But even with Harvey Weinstein aboard, we got no cooperation from the White House. The president refused to cooperate or re-enact anything. Nothing! All we had was the same photo everyone has seen of Hillary, hand over mouth, gasping at something offscreen, presumably the helicopter crashing.

Perez is one of the 250,000 post-9/11 soldiers and veterans nationwide that the North Carolina–based nonprofit Student Veterans Advocacy Group estimates have been forced to pay an average of $10,000 each in out-of-state tuition costs as a result of a cost-cutting change to the GI bill last year.

Perez, now 26, enlisted in the Army in 2005 not because she couldn’t get into college or find a job but because she felt like it was her turn, she said. She spent 14 months patching up U.S. soldiers and Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca, then a detention facility in southeast Iraq.

Perez left the Army with an honorable discharge in 2009. Later that year, the Army sent Jose to Texas, and she went with him—the couple leaving their house in North Carolina behind. The couple didn’t apply for residency there, and petitioned the Army to return them as quickly as possible to the Tar Heel State, where they have paid property taxes since 2008 and where they’re still both registered to vote.

The most prominent argument used by defenders of the status quo is that women spoil the cohesion and unit bonding necessary for troop effectiveness. Supporters of the ban speculate that women distract men and that they may even “feminize,” or weaken the military. These assumptions prioritize male bonding as an essential military activity and imply that the goal of the military is to enhance masculinity, not protect national security. Moreover, there is significant evidence that male bonding and troop homogeneity can actually hinder group performance. In her analysis of gender integration in the military, Erin Solaro, a researcher and journalist who was embedded with combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, pointed out that male bonding often depended on the exclusion or denigration of women and concluded that “cohesion is not the same as combat effectiveness, and indeed can undercut it. Supposedly ‘cohesive’ units can also kill their officers, mutiny, evade combat, and surrender as groups.” The mechanisms for achieving troop cohesion can also be problematic. In addition to denigrating women, illegal activities, including war crimes, have sometimes been used as a means for soldiers to “let off steam” and foster group unity. In sum, there is very little basis on which to link group cohesion to national security.

Further, the military has actually been strengthened when attitudes have been challenged and changed over the past century. Despite claims in the 1940s that mixed-race units would be ineffective and that white and black service members would not be able to trust one another, for example, integration proved to enhance troop trust and cohesion. Similarly, a 1993 RAND Corporation paper summarizing research on sexual orientation and the U.S. military’s personnel policy found that diversity “can enhance the quality of group problem-solving and decision making, and it broadens the group’s collective array of skills and knowledge.”

Of course, it should come as no surprise that elements of the military want uniformity in the ranks. The integration of new groups always ruffles feathers. But the U.S. military has been ahead of the curve in terms of the inclusion of most minority groups. It was the first federal organization to integrate African Americans. And with the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy, the military now has more progressive policies toward gay employees than many other U.S. agencies. In September 2012, one year after the repeal of DADT, a study published by the Palm Center found that the change “has had no overall negative impact on military readiness or its component dimensions, including cohesion, recruitment, retention, assaults, harassment or morale.” The research also found that overall, DADT’s “repeal has enhanced the military’s ability to pursue its mission.” Previous claims about the negative impact that gay service members might have on troop cohesion mirror those currently used to support the female combat exclusion.

Why was there evidently no effort to publicize these new PTSD numbers? Josh Taylor, a spokesman for the V.A., would not directly answer that question, but told The Daily Beast that the agency still estimates that the overall PTSD rate is 20 percent across the entire population of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, not just those who have come to a V.A. facility and are reflected in the report that shows the rate at 30 percent.

Taylor says the 20 percent estimate comes from reviews of “current literature” regarding Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. But the most “current” piece of literature Taylor cites is a 2008 RAND Corp. study. titled Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. The report was a collection of existing data on PTSD that was collected from April 2007 to January 2008 that also included a population-based survey of service members and veterans who served in Afghanistan or Iraq to assess health status and symptoms.    

Now, with the surge done and withdrawal planned for 2014, Yewazi has found himself alone in a nation where, he says, many see him as an infidel, a traitor to his people, a “piece of shit” for working with the occupiers.

“If I try to go to my home town (in the Kunar province) I’d be killed,” he wrote in an email, “and beheaded because I have worked for coalition forces and everyone knows that in my area.”

So he’s in Kabul, where it’s easier to be anonymous. The treatment for his injury included four surgeries over a period of a year and a half, and his right hand still hasn’t regained its full functionality. Late last year, he was finally able to work again, and he went back to translating—this time for Czech troops. But he didn’t feel safe, and so he quit six months later.

A study released this week by the Center for a New American Security (PDF) separated independent and undecided voters into two groups. The first left their votes entirely unchanged when told that most military and veteran voters are pro-Mitt Romney. The second group’s support for President Obama shot up by 9 points when told that military and veteran voters are pro-Obama. The implication seems to be that these voters assume the military backs the GOP, which in turn means a Democrat has much more to gain among those voters if he can claim the military stands behind him.

Despite the many efforts Obama has made to appeal to younger soldiers and veterans, Romney has maintained a 66–26 lead among military voters. Does this explain why both sides have been content to keep our foreign engagements, and our returning troops, at arm’s length? Even as the war in Afghanistan slogs toward a close and our troops return home, polls show most Americans won’t cast their ballots on the issue this year.

We are vaguely claiming victory in this unpopular war, having announced that the last scheduled troops will be home by the end of 2014, a schedule both would-be presidents seem to agree on. “Al Qaeda’s leadership has been devastated, and Osama bin Laden will never threaten us again,” Obama said at the Pentagon recently. “Our country is safer and our people are resilient.” It’s a nice statement but says nearly nothing to the men and women who are still fighting in a war we’ve written off even before ending.

Lionel Hamilton is doing something else, too. He is answering a key question in the debate on how we build a growing and sustainable American economy. That question is not whether companies are hiring again. Manufacturing companies, large and small, are ready to hire. The question is: where can these companies find the qualified, skilled workers required for the high-tech jobs that define advanced manufacturing today?

It turns out that many companies are looking, with great success, at veterans like Lionel, both those just transitioning back to civilian life and those who have made that transition but are still looking for meaningful work. That is why the Manufacturing Institute, companies like GE, Alcoa, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, community colleges, veterans organizations, and others are launching a coalition to bolster the manufacturing talent pipeline by training veterans for jobs in advanced manufacturing. Our reason is not patriotism alone.

Manufacturing currently employs about 12 million people, and both the pay and benefits in those jobs exceed the national average. Approximately seven out of every 10 dollars of our country’s R&D investments support manufacturing. The point is that while the methods of manufacturing have changed, it remains a critical component of our country’s economic future. We know that there are 600,000 open high-tech jobs, just waiting to be filled. With transition support and training, vets can succeed in these jobs.

Let’s give the soldiers from our post-9/11 wars a prompt welcome home in 2014.

After consultation with Congress, we decided that the Education Center about to be erected would also honor our veterans who have served as part of the War on Terror. We will accomplish this through a dramatic display of Photos of the Fallen to honor all and to remember the more than 7,000 U.S. service members who have sacrificed their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.

We plan to begin this year, on Nov. 28, with a ceremonial groundbreaking for the Education Center at the Wall. America has lost about 7,000 men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 30,000 have been wounded. Along with the photos of the 58,282 Americans whose names are on the Wall, the Center will house a dramatic display of the fallen service members from our most recent wars, with their faces on large screens and new ones appearing every hour.

I should know. I was an adviser deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. My occupation as a Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class (a combat medic) had me working side by side with Afghan National Army soldiers, training their medics, mentoring their battalion surgeon, and helping to stand up their troop medical clinic. Early in my tour, I was well aware that any of the soldiers we were training could at any time turn their weapons on me and my fellow advisers.

The first indication that the Afghans we were training posed a potential threat came on a fiercely cold morning in early 2007 in Darulaman. Before we set out on a routine convoy with our Afghan counterparts, we had to line them up shoulder to shoulder and collect their cellphones one at a time. We did this—it was already standard operating procedure—because our leadership feared that the Afghan soldiers might give away our position to enemy fighters.

I was shocked, and conflicted, when I first learned of this policy.

On the Wednesday before each show, we invite readers and a special guest to participate in a Twitter chat with @HeroSummit at 3 p.m. ET, which can be followed via #vetchat and from which compelling questions and answers will be reprised on the upcoming episode.

Hero Project TV is the latest addition to The Hero Project, The Daily Beast’s channel dedicated to military and veterans’ stories. And on Nov. 14 and 15, Newsweek and The Daily Beast will debut The Hero Summit: An Exploration of Character and Courage—an annual, two-day live journalism event at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., that aims to examine the essential elements of moral, political, intellectual, and physical courage, resilience, and selflessness. Speakers will include Adm. William McRaven, Bono, Madeleine K. Albright, Garry Kasparov, Aaron Sorkin, and Steven Spielberg.

It was an exposed feeling. And where were my machine guns? I found my old pistol and kept it around like a rabbit’s foot, but I missed my 240s and my .50-cals something awful. It seems weird, I’m sure, but I really just wasn’t buying it that there wasn’t some enemy about to come over the green hills, and I felt so unprepared—I wouldn’t be any good to protect anybody.

I was set to soon go off to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, for PTSD therapy (posttraumatic stress disorder, of course). Maybe that would settle me down and let me get some sleep and stop feeling so depressed and angry at every little thing.

Some guys really go nuts when they come back, and I wasn’t in danger of that, but I could feel the kinds of crazy things that maybe got the better of them. As for me, I was a hunter before I went over there, and I was a hunter still—but now I was all nervous about it, like I needed a machine-gun fix. You are over there long enough, and under such constant battle stress, that it resets all your settings way into the red, and they are very hard to set back. The main thing gnawing was that I didn’t get my friends out as I had promised. I had spent a good part of my twenty-one years being pretty critical of other people who failed at their responsibilities, and now it was all coming back on me in a big dump truck.