Veterans’ Voices

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In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

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War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors were my comrades' incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine ones pride is the last bastion of self-respect for the combat soldier. It is the fierce, tenacious determination not to let down my comrades that kept me going. I was a 'muddy' infantry Marine — a rifleman who lived in the dirt, got rained on, and just wanted to survive.

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The war was so serious it befuddled and defeated language. The real war will never get in the books. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel — the spiritual texture — of a great fog. The truth is that the ordinary soldier does not know what is happening, and can barely tell friend from foe. What he does know is that he is afraid, cold, hungry, and wants to go home. The idea that war is heroic is maintained only by those who have never been in one.

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I swore to myself that I would never speak of this war again. No war is really over when the last gun has ceased to fire. Its consequences carry on... The wounds of the mind are so much harder to heal than the wounds of the body. At night I'd wake up and find myself reaching for my weapon. I can't sleep without a loaded pistol under my pillow. I'm a fugitive from the law of averages. I have no politics. I just fought because my country said I should.

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I enlisted in the Air Force. I was an eager bombardier. I dropped bombs on Berlin, on Czechoslovakia, on Hungary. I was doing a righteous thing, fighting the good war. Then I began to think about what I had done. War corrupts everyone who engages in it. The bombs I dropped on European cities killed thousands of innocent people. I came to believe there is no such thing as a just war. Once you accept the idea that there is a just war, you can justify any war.

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They called Korea the Forgotten War, and they were right. We came home and nobody knew where we'd been or what we'd done. No parades, no protests — just nothing. Fifty thousand of us died over there and the country just shrugged. At least Vietnam vets got anger. We got silence. The men who froze at Chosin Reservoir, who fought hand-to-hand in the snow — nobody remembers them. We were caught between the Greatest Generation and the Vietnam generation, and we disappeared.

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It was twenty below zero at the Chosin Reservoir. The wounded froze to death on the stretchers. Your weapon froze. Your food froze. Your blood froze. We weren't retreating — the Marines called it 'advancing in a different direction.' That kind of gallows humor is what kept men sane. When you're surrounded by 120,000 Chinese soldiers and you're outnumbered eight to one, humor is all you have left.

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When I got home from Korea, I went to the VFW hall. The World War II guys wouldn't let us in. We weren't real veterans to them — our war didn't count. The public didn't care. There were no welcome home parades, no GI Bill fanfare. We served, we bled, we died, and America moved on to watching television and building suburbs. Korea was an inconvenient war for a country that wanted to forget about fighting.

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The worst part wasn't the Chinese coming at us in waves. It wasn't the cold or the hunger. The worst part was coming home and having people ask, 'Where were you stationed?' as if I'd been at some base in Germany. When I'd say Korea, they'd look blank. Tens of thousands of Americans died there, and civilians couldn't even point to it on a map. That indifference — that's the wound that never healed.

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A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

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I am the living death, the Memorial Day on wheels. I am your Yankee Doodle Dandy, your John Wayne come home, your Fourth of July firecracker exploding in the grave. I gave my dead dick for democracy. Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis. Oh God, I want it back! I want my body back! I gave it for the whole country and now the country doesn't give a damn.

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How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here to say that it is not patriotism to ask Americans to die for a lie. Each day, someone has to give up their life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows — that we have made a mistake. We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?

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In combat, you are reduced to the level of an animal. You can feel the beast inside you. There is a dark beauty to it. And that dark beauty is what no one wants to hear about when you come home. They want heroes or villains. They don't want to hear that killing another human being can feel good — and that this feeling haunts you for the rest of your life. The warrior's journey home is harder than the journey to war, because you have to integrate that darkness back into civilian life.

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We went to Vietnam full of illusions — the Kennedy mystique, Camelot's crusade. We were going to save the world from Communism. I believed it with all my heart at twenty-one. By twenty-three, after wading through rice paddies and counting bodies and watching friends die for hills we'd abandon the next week, I didn't believe in anything anymore. Vietnam was a betrayal. Not just the government's betrayal of us, but our betrayal of ourselves — of what we thought we were.

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I spent my eighteenth birthday killing people in a country I couldn't find on a map before I got there. I was a good Marine. I followed orders. I did what my country asked me to do. And when I came home, my country spit on me — not literally, but through indifference, through the VA hospitals that were warehouses for broken men, through a government that denied Agent Orange was killing us. The war didn't end when I left Vietnam. It followed me home and moved into my house.

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The Marines I have seen in Vietnam are the finest people I have ever known. They gave everything. And the country that sent them there owes them more than it has ever paid. The men who went to Vietnam and fought — most of them draftees and working-class volunteers — did their duty. The moral failure belongs to the leaders who sent them without the will to win and without the honesty to explain why they were really there.

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The biggest casualty of the war is the truth. They told us we were fighting for democracy and freedom. What we were fighting for was the defense budget and the careers of politicians. Every veteran who came home broken was just collateral damage in someone else's ambition. The ones who sent us never had to look a dying nineteen-year-old in the face and explain why he was bleeding out in a jungle ten thousand miles from home.

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Every war is different. Every war is the same. We were the first generation raised on Vietnam War movies, and we watched Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to pump ourselves up before deploying to the desert. The irony was lost on us then. The Gulf War was supposed to be the war that erased Vietnam. Quick, decisive, surgical. But wars are never surgical for the men fighting them. We came home after a hundred hours of ground combat to ticker-tape parades, but the nightmares followed us just the same.

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We were told depleted uranium was safe. We were told the chemical alarms going off were false positives. We were told the oil well fires wouldn't hurt us. We were told the vaccines were necessary and harmless. Then 250,000 of us got sick. Gulf War Syndrome — chronic fatigue, joint pain, memory loss, cancers. For years the government denied it existed. We fought a war in 100 hours and spent the next 30 years fighting our own government for healthcare.

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The Highway of Death was not something you could prepare for. Miles of destroyed vehicles, burned bodies still in their seats, the smell that gets into your clothes and your skin and never really leaves. They were retreating. They were leaving Kuwait. And we destroyed them anyway — thousands of them on a highway, from the air, like shooting fish in a barrel. That image — charred corpses reaching for door handles — that's what I see when someone calls the Gulf War a 'clean' war.

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Pat turned down a $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist after 9/11. He believed in something. But the longer he was in, the more he questioned it. He called the Iraq invasion 'so fucking illegal.' He was reading Noam Chomsky. He was planning to meet with a prominent war critic when he got home. Then he was killed by friendly fire, and the Army covered it up. They used his death as propaganda — the very thing he despised. They burned his diary. They lied to us for five weeks.

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The men at Restrepo didn't fight for their country or for the flag. They fought for each other. That's the dirty secret of combat — it has nothing to do with politics. The bond between men in a firefight is the closest thing to love that most of them will ever experience. And then they come home and lose it. The loss of that brotherhood is, for many veterans, worse than the trauma of combat itself. They miss war not because they're broken, but because nothing in civilian life replicates that intensity of connection.

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You can't spend twenty years in a country and then leave overnight and pretend it was worth something. I watched the Taliban roll into Kabul on TV and I felt every emotion at once — rage, grief, futility. Twenty years, $2 trillion, 2,400 American dead, 70,000 Afghan civilians. For what? For the Taliban to walk back in wearing our equipment? Every veteran who served in Afghanistan asked the same question that day: What was it all for?

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I was a rising political star. Secretary of State at 29. Almost won a Senate race. I looked fine on the outside. Inside, I was dying. Afghanistan followed me everywhere. I'd scan rooftops for snipers while walking my kids to school. I slept on the floor. I drank to stop remembering. It took me eleven years to admit I had PTSD — eleven years of performing 'I'm fine' for a country that needed me to be fine so it could feel good about sending me.

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I have a translator who saved my life in Afghanistan. His name is Janis Shinwari. He killed two Taliban who were about to shoot me. We spent years trying to get him a visa to the US. When Kabul fell, I had a list of hundreds of Afghan allies trapped behind Taliban lines, begging for help. We abandoned them. We abandoned the people who fought and died alongside us because we told them to trust us. That betrayal will haunt American foreign policy for generations.

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I served five tours between Iraq and Afghanistan. When Kabul fell, I spent seventy-two hours on the phone trying to get Afghan friends out through the airport gates. Most didn't make it. One texted me from a Taliban checkpoint: 'They are searching phones. If I die, tell my family I tried.' The twenty-year war ended not with honor but with desperation — Marines at the gates, Taliban at the checkpoints, and twenty years of promises burning in the August heat.

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The war tried to kill us in the spring. We didn't die. But we were changed. We had been afraid and we had not been killed and that was enough for now. We were all just trying to live through it, and the fact that we were turning into different people while doing so — harder, meaner, more frightened — was beside the point. The point was survival. Everything else could be dealt with later. Except later never really comes.

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People always thank me for my service. I never know what to say. You're welcome? I'm not sure what I did that you should be thankful for. I helped occupy a country based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction. I don't know how many people died because of decisions I was a part of. 'Thank you for your service' is a way for civilians to close the conversation. It's a period at the end of a sentence they don't want to continue. It means: I support you, now please don't tell me what really happened.

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If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the ration of salt, the body's treason... Believe it when you see the footage. Believe it when a man falls from a building in flames. This is the war. This is what we brought to their doorstep. And here is the thing no one tells you: the dead follow you home. They sit in the empty chair at dinner. They stand in the corner of your children's bedroom. The dead never leave.

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We were told there were weapons of mass destruction. We were told the Iraqis would greet us as liberators. We were told the war would last weeks. Everything we were told was a lie. When Abu Ghraib came out, I wasn't surprised. That's what happens when you tell soldiers that the people they're occupying are less than human. You create the conditions for atrocity and then act shocked when it happens. I refused to go back. They court-martialed me. I'd rather be in prison than complicit in a lie.

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I joined the Army two days after 9/11. I was sent to Iraq, not Afghanistan — not to fight the people who attacked us, but to fight a war for oil and Halliburton contracts. Five days in, a bullet severed my spine. I came home paralyzed. To George W. Bush and Dick Cheney: I write this letter on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow veterans. You sent us to fight for a lie. My body is a monument to your war. I am dying. You will not be forgiven.

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They come home and the war comes with them. One soldier's wife found him standing over her at 3 AM with his hands around her throat — he was dreaming of Iraq. Another sits in the closet for hours because small spaces feel safe. Another drives 90 miles per hour on the highway because slow driving means IEDs. They are among the 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans diagnosed with PTSD, and the hundreds of thousands more who won't seek help because they believe asking for help means they're weak.

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I operated a Predator drone from a trailer in Nevada. I watched people through a camera for hours, days, weeks — learned their patterns, saw them play with their kids. Then I'd get the order and press a button and they'd become a heat signature that slowly went cold. Then I'd drive home and pick up milk at the grocery store. The disconnect broke something inside me. I killed 1,626 people. I know the exact number because the Air Force gave me a certificate. A certificate. Like it was an achievement.

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When the bomb went off, I lost my face. That's not a metaphor. I lost my left arm, my ears, most of my nose. I had over fifty surgeries. The VA gave me a disability rating and a check. My wife left. My friends didn't know how to look at me. People stare or they look away — both hurt the same. America puts yellow ribbons on their cars but can't look a burned veteran in the eye. Support the troops is a bumper sticker, not a commitment.

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I did twelve deployments in twenty years. Twelve. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Niger — places most Americans can't find on a map. Each deployment I told my kids I'd be home soon. Each time, 'soon' got longer. My oldest daughter stopped hugging me because she said it hurt too much when I left again. The War on Terror was supposed to last months. It lasted my entire career. I joined at eighteen and retired at thirty-eight, and the war is still going. What was it for?

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I worked as a drone imagery analyst. I watched the footage after the strikes. I saw the bodies. I saw the first responders arrive and then sometimes we'd hit them too — a 'double tap.' I saw children wandering through rubble looking for their parents. The official reports called them 'EKIA' — enemy killed in action. But I saw them. They weren't enemies. They were people. And I watched them die on a screen in high definition. When officials say drone strikes are precise, they're lying. I saw the footage. I know what precision looks like, and it looks like dead children.

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They told us Iran would be like the Gulf War — quick, decisive, air power does the work. But Iran isn't Iraq. The terrain is mountains, not desert. They've had decades to prepare. The Strait of Hormuz is a shooting gallery. Within the first week, we lost more sailors than we'd lost in twenty years of the War on Terror. And the guys making the speeches back home, talking about 'resolve' and 'freedom' — none of their kids are here. None of them ever are.

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I'm treating burn victims from anti-ship missile strikes. These kids — and they are kids, eighteen and nineteen — they signed up for college money. They didn't sign up for this. One of them asked me, through his burns, if we were winning. I didn't know what to tell him. I don't even know what winning means anymore. We said we'd be greeted as liberators in Iraq too. I've been a corpsman for six years and I've never seen casualties like this. The Navy wasn't ready. Nobody was ready.

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My recruiter told me I'd never see combat. 'It's a peacetime Army,' he said. That was 2023. Now I'm staging in Kuwait, waiting to cross into a country of 85 million people who don't want us there. I'm from a town of 3,000 in West Virginia. Everyone in my unit is from a place like mine — small towns, no jobs, military was the only option. The senators' kids are in law school. The congressmen's kids are in finance. We're the ones going in. Same as it ever was.

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Iran's air defenses are nothing like what we faced in Iraq or Afghanistan. We lost four aircraft in my squadron's first week of operations. Russian-supplied S-400 systems, Iranian-built radar networks — they knew we were coming and they were ready. We're used to total air superiority. We don't have it here. Every sortie is a coin flip. And back home they're still arguing about whether this is even a war or an 'extended military engagement.' Call it whatever you want. My friends are dead.