It's been said by many that war changes men. Hemingway knew it and suffered through the changes. Orwell, before his involvement in WWII claimed, "…it is better to die with your boots on." Currently I'm somewhere between blind valor and healthy apprehension. In exactly a month I'll board a plane bound for Iraq. Little of what I've heard is good. It's hot, there are an excessive amount of IED's, huge sandstorms, and many bad guys there seriously want us to die. I've watched the horrible video of a journalist beheading and have seen too many clips of army vehicles hit by Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP's); I've seen what those wicked devices do to even our toughest reactive tank armor, and the results are bad. I've also seen men who have returned. I've talked with them, careful not to ask too many details of their potentially painful stories. You can sense something about them is different, somber in the effect it has on other people. But it's hard to put that sense into words and explain sufficiently and with the proper respect. It's hard not to wonder how I'll be once I'm back home, and if people will see me differently. Will they feel pity on me for overreacting to loud noises or saying something way out of line without noticing? Maybe, but I would like to think I wouldn't want their pity. Instead I'd rather them just understand and accept that war is an individuals' burden to bear and that in due time a man will make his peace. The difference between Hemingway's and Orwell's war and ours is that there's no glory in this war. There is only the valor of a brotherhood of soldiers protecting each other, and all are just trying to make their way back home.
Despite my reservations, I'm only a month away from going to war and I'm anxious to get there. Now, since the march to the Iraq War began I've understood it as a hoax, a trumped-up excuse for some other goal. Maybe it was for Bush's legacy, or to gain a strategic foothold in the Middle East; but gross incompetence on the part of the entire intelligence community? Not a chance. I believe it was Roosevelt that stated, "Nothing in politics happens by accident." I am of the same opinion, and it makes me mad that the American people were so blatantly lied to. Worse, it confounds me that so many Americans were so naive to believe all of the media's putrid tripe. Nothing upsets me more, though, than for my fellow soldiers to be lied to. But here I am, and I'm surrounded by soldiers who've already been and who are going back…soldiers that already understand this dilemma. Even if we know better we're drawn, I suppose, by the allure of danger, by the embarrassment of not wearing a combat patch, by the chance to prove our valor, by the extra pay, by the jobs available to us afterwords, by helping the good people of Iraq, and by taking care of our own. But for all those reasons, and despite all we stand to lose, we've still gone to war based on lies. Many deal with it as I have- we go despite our reservations. This moral dilemma, although not openly discussed, is well understood by many in my field. I guess the conclusion I've come to is that I'm not happy about the manner in which our government duped America into this war, but the damage is done and we would be fools not to finish what we've started. We have to hold our ground and fix Iraq.
Wrote this about a month before I left for Iraq....
-Cyrus
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