ERIC SHINSEKI

More importantly, if you are in a position to hire, hire a veteran. They will be the best employees you have.

I am an armor officer. I grew up as a part of the team that helped to field M-1s and M-60-A3s to the army back in 1980s. It's still a magnificent tank, and we designed it for the Cold War and Central Europe.

No veteran should have to wait for claims. If there's anybody impatient here, I am that individual.

What I want veterans to know is that VA is here to care for them. VA is a good system - health care wise, safety wise - highly comparable to any other system out there. Our oversight reviews tell us that. I'm very comfortable in the quality of our system.

If you are going to make a change, make it big and bold. Walk up to the biggest guy on the block, stand in his face and get it started. Then go around, brigade by brigade, making it make sense.

I am an armor officer.

An army that fought and won a war decisively finds it even more difficult to undergo change.

Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq.

I do engage veterans. I meet with the veterans' service organizations monthly. It's a direct, no-holds-barred discussion. I travel to their conventions, where I speak to the veterans membership. I do travel. I've been to all 50 states. When I do, I engage veterans locally. So I get direct feedback from those veterans.

The magnificent army that fought in Desert Storm is a great army, and it still is a magnificent army today. But it was one we designed for the Cold War, and the Cold War has been over for ten years now.

It's important in any organization that if visions have any reality at all, it's because the organization believes that the vision is right and that they share in it. Otherwise, it becomes the good idea of one person, and that even more importantly contributes to the sense that it will not survive the departure of that individual.

It's tough never being right.

I spent five years working very hard to develop a relationship with the veterans' service organizations. We have together worked some major projects.

You don't get many do-overs in life.

I have spent a lifetime watching kids make mistakes because they were not trained or well led or properly motivated to do well. I never faulted the kids; rather, I saw opportunity to train, to motivate, to improve leadership - not to punish the individual.

In the army, we do two things every day. We train our soldiers, and then we grow them into leaders, because frankly, we don't hire out. We grow our own leaders.

I do not want to criticize while my soldiers are still bleeding and dying in Iraq

You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader. You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it.

You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader, you can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance.

I grew up as a part of the team that helped to field M-1s and M-60-A3s to the army back in 1980s.

Without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance.

If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more.

I can't explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our health care facilities. This is something I rarely encountered during 38 years in uniform. And so I will not defend it because it is indefensible. But I can take responsibility for it and I do.

It has been very humbling and gratifying to have these men as our role models. Your generation enabled America to close out the twentieth century as the greatest nation in the history of mankind, the only remaining superpower, the world's leading economy and the world's most respected and feared military force in the world - respected by our friends and allies, feared by our adversaries.

I would say that what's been mobilized to this point - something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.