sirloins

I think it was after my first firefight in Iraq, I've forgotten the exact time and date but it was after midnight one day in April 2004, that I first asked myself, "What, exactly, did we almost die for?" It seemed to me at the time that there was never a plan. What was our mission exactly? What was our goal? What, exactly, were we there to accomplish? Why were soldiers dying?

I had joined the Army in March 1998 as an Infantryman and served with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York from July 1998 until December 2001, or about four months after the events collectively known as 9/11. I had already been accepted to a community college near my hometown and was working on getting a "college drop" from the Army. That had been my plan for a while and, after almost four years, it felt good to finally be seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

Still, we had just been attacked.

I asked my family whether I should stay and go with the 10th Mountain to Afghanistan (though at the time they were at an airfield in Uzbekistan) or proceed to get out of the military. There was no "stop loss" in effect for your average soldier (I think only special forces and pilots fell under "stop loss" then) and the soldiers sent from a sister infantry battalion were being rotated back to Fort Drum in order to clear and process out of the Army. I talked to some of them and they said that the 10th Mountain was only pulling security for the airfield and that Rangers and Special Forces were doing all the fighting. That didn't sound very fun so I got out, which is what my family encouraged me to do. No surprise there.

But sometimes people leave the military thinking they could have done and/or been more and I distinctly remember talk of another war with Iraq coming up in my unit before I left.

So, I went back to school and studied Journalism. That meant having to watch the news and hear talk about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and how much our way of life was in danger. My feelings that I had run away when my country needed me combined with the White House's panic-mongering-like certainty that Iraq was going to succeed where no country before could and wipe America clean off the map led me to signing back up.

Fast forward to where I began.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that all the reasons for us going into Iraq were false. Weapons of mass destruction were never found, and if they were, so what? I didn't know how many countries were nuclear powers at the time, but I was pretty sure if Iraq did have WMD that the United States had a lot more. It seems to me that countries use nuclear weapons more to gain credibility in the international community than to actually use them. After all, only one country has ever actually used nuclear weapons against people.

And I thought back to high school history and tried to remember... wasn't it the United States and the Soviet Union who were on the verge of destroying half the planet (and some say the whole planet) with the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) policy during the Cold War? It seemed silly that America should fear a small, third-world country with barely any control over its own resources. Who, in all honesty, is more threatening? A dictator trying to acquire a few WMD in order to give his country credibility or a military superpower with thousands of nuclear weapons, the ability to target anywhere on the planet, and a nuclear "first strike" policy? And if Iraq was such a threat, why weren't Iran and Kuwait (two countries that Iraq has actually attacked) afraid? Wouldn't Israel have done or said something?

So then I figured that this war was justified because Saddam was an evil man, he killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and had to go. But then I wondered what made him so much more of a priority than, for example, Kim Jong II of North Korea? North Korea has been a known enemy of American interests for half a century.

Also, if we were there just to oust Saddam, why did we wait? Saddam killed these people over the course of 23 years. Where were we and our moral high horse a quarter century ago when we could have maybe stopped him and made a difference? And what were we now saying to the international community? Were we setting precedent? Was America going to clean house and get rid of all the planet's "bad" governments? Just how long are we going to be at war?

I had already come to the conclusion that the reason wasn't to establish democracy. My unit in Iraq fired shots at drivers that wouldn't get out of our way, ran vehicles off the road, conducted cordon and searches looking for "military-age men" who could maybe be guilty of something. Just a note, I like to tell soldiers to put themselves in the average Iraqi's place. What would we, as Americans, do if the our police engaged in any of these activities against us? Would we take pot shots and set traps and, in effect, become "insurgents" too? We're lucky to be citizens of a country where we will probably never be occupied, but speaking hypothetically, if we were to be occupied, would we react any differently?

Were we liberators or occupiers? This was back in 2004. The war had been going on for a year, which is not too long, and we were told we were liberating the people of Iraq. How? By getting rid of their dictator and replacing him with about 150,000 troops who were not trained to handle insurgencies, who are ordered to fire if they feel threatened, who are put in situations where their lives are going to be threatened, and who want nothing more than to just survive their deployment? We can certainly call ourselves liberators, but if the Iraqi people call us occupiers, then we're occupiers. Only the citizenry can make that judgment.

Like I said, I was an infantryman, but I was in charge of my battalion's ammunition. I was in the Support Platoon and was on the road almost every other day and it seemed to us that all we were doing was sustaining and defending ourselves. We would drive to FOB Warhorse, pick up roughly two days worth of food and anything else we needed and head back to FOB Normandy and, in two days, repeat. We got shot at and had improvised explosive devices go off quite regularly, though some months were quieter than others.

Now, at the time I did see a difference for the better. It did end up getting quiet - not through diplomacy, but through use of force. We were told to "make a statement" every time we were fired upon or exploded. That made us happy. As long as they weren't shooting at us, our odds of making it home improved.

But! Were the Iraqis focused on the same fact that the troops were? That in roughly a year we would rotate back to civilization? Were the "insurgents" being good, but just biding their time until a new unit would rotate in and then renew their fighting? The violence definitely seems to be highest during troops rotations which lends credibility to this idea. It's the cycle of violence. We get shot at, so we shoot any and everything, thus creating more people with a vendetta against us and who, in turn, shoot at us giving us a reason to shoot everything all over again. We can repeat this cycle until either 1, everyone is dead or 2, we wise up and realize that we're not entirely without guilt and end the cycle.

Some soldiers, myself included, say that the media focuses on the bad and doesn't report the good. For example, Iraq had their first democratic election in January 2005... and has since collapsed to the verge of civil war. Oh, and here's some more democracy, 70% of the population of Iraq wants us out. I know it's easy to point out problems and not offer solutions, but that's going to be another essay.

Now, this may entirely just be my own experience, but the pro-Iraq-War people I meet seem to fall into two major categories, 1, those who think that all Iraqis are automatically guilty for 9/11 or 2, those who think all Muslims are guilty for 9/11. I remember seeing cartoons depicting a body of water labeled "Lake Afghanistan," though the sentiment seems to be that you can easily substitute Iraq. Actually, both of those categories can be lumped into one "kill them all" category. When I first got to Iraq, I felt that the quickest way to end the war was to do just that. Kill them all. Remember, the Iraq War was my reason for going back on active duty. I bought into the fear, the hype, and the propaganda hook, line and sinker.

I'm not going to waste any more time on those arguments. Anyone who speaks in absolutes like that is completely self-diluted. I'm only going to say that the war was described as a "crusade" ever so briefly in the very beginning and that the "kill them all" mentality is called genocide when other countries do it. I'm just saying.

So I had one person say something to me, and this was the rationalization I finally decided on for the remainder of my tour. He said, "We have not been attacked since the Iraq War started." I'm going to say true but add that it's not due to lack of trying. I seem to remember a shoe bomber being stopped in an airplane in December 2001 and something about a plot to use liquid explosives being uncovered just this past August, so it certainly seems like terrorism is being thwarted in other places. Imagine if the Department of Transportation was getting the money that is, instead, going to cleaning up our mess in Iraq. Maybe we could have that security at airports, seaports, borders, and what have you.

But hey, if all we need for perpetual safety in the United States is perpetual war in Iraq, well, all I want to say to the parents reading this is that you can sign a waiver and have your son and/or daughter in the military at age 17. That's worth it, right? Hell, the Army will take them without a high school diploma, such as yours truly.

I work every day with soldiers and a lot of them want to see this through because it's hard for them to think of their buddies as having died for nothing. This is a noble way of thinking and I empathize, I really do. But again, going back to that cycle of violence. We went to Iraq to avenge the 2,948 who died on 9/11. Three-and-a-half years later we're still avenging those 2,948 plus the additional 3,145 (as of today, 26 October 2006) troops who have died since in the war on terror. Meanwhile, the "insurgents" are trying to avenge the unknown (estimates between 45-50 thousand, same date) number of dead they have sustained. Again, when does it end?

Finally, I know we weren't there for the oil. Our government told us so.

It's too late to say we should have never started this war and I can only appeal to one's sense of humanity when I say that if we don't start making changes, we will never stop running out of dead to avenge.

Will the future judge the war in Iraq as one of the biggest mistakes in our country's short history? We can only wait and see. The past has already judged the war to be a mistake, but the future must wait until the present is done judging the war as a mistake. When will that be? Hopefully soon. Soldiers are dying while we try to figure it out.

I've heard Iraq being compared to Vietnam. I'm 28 years old and have no idea what Vietnam was like. I hear it was a quagmire which seems to be the consensus regarding Iraq. I'm still in uniform and talk to soldiers every day and one thing hasn't changed, what you can and can't expect a soldier to be willing to die for. Unfortunately, the only ones qualified to tell us whether Iraq was worth dying for will never be able to do so.

I'll be back in Iraq before Christmas of this year and I still haven't found the answer to my question. If anyone can shed any light on if Iraq is worth dying for, please tell me at shocked.awed@gmail.com I know of a precious few soldiers who could use some reminding.

Feel free to distribute this to anyone. We need all the motivation we can get!