Victor_c3
Victor_c3's JournalI'd be worried about the potential lack of tan on the taint
An untanned taint is almost as unacceptable as dick-sideburns among the circle of people I associate with. You’ve gotta keep things looking pretty down there!
I was just going to write that
It’s alright to outright murder them, but you can’t show affection to your food?
I have mixed feelings on this
No doubt war crimes should be accounted for, but who would be held responsible for the crimes? Solely the Soldiers that perpetrated the crimes or would it include the entire chain of command?
Yes, Soldiers do awful things in war and actually perpetrate the crimes, but everybody from the top down is responsible for creating an environment which allowed these crimes to happen. Would these Soldiers have been the monsters that they turned into if they had not been exposed to multiple combat deployments?
I personally did one year in Iraq as an Infantry Platoon Leader in 2004. In school I never once had detention for a behavioral issue. I was the band / music geek, I was a total nerd by any other measure (with the exception that I worked out a lot), and I never had my first taste of alcohol until I was in college. However, when exposed to combat at the level that I saw in Iraq in 2004, everything about me changed. War, murdering people, and losing Soldiers under your direct command and whom you’ve really gotten to know on a level of intimacy that spouses never experience does a hell of a number on you.
Towards the end of my deployment I became numb to the killing. It didn’t bother me anymore to deal with the dead, the dying, and the wounded. My total psyche changed. When I went on patrol, I began to actual yearn for combat and got excited about. I had no intention of returning home alive and just about nothing bothered me.
All of that was result of just a single combat deployment for me. War completely turned me into a murdering monster. I certainly was nothing like that before I was sent to fight in a war that I even thought was complete bullshit in 2003 during the buildup. Just imagine the change that happens to the kids that we as a nation send to kill for multiple year-long deployments? Culpability goes all the way up the chain of command and sits right in the lap of everybody who ever supported these wars and who allowed them to happen. What’s incredible to me is that when a video of Soldiers urinating on the bodies of the enemy that they murdered emerges, public outrage ensues. Most likely, the people who are outraged by this never experienced a year in a combat zone as an Infantryman and actually been in many firefights themselves. You don’t kill people that you like and respect. Getting comfortable with combat and murder sent to perpetrate means that you have to hate the people you’re fighting against. Otherwise, you’d never be able to pull the trigger over and over again - just like the American public sent you to do. The only reason my platoon and I didn’t urinate on those we killed was because the thought to do so never crossed our minds.
Yes, the guys who perpetrated these war crimes are responsible, but so is the chain of command and the American public that supported these wars.
As a result of my exposure to a war, combat, and murder, I have been ravaged by guilt and shame for what I did. PTSD has been destroying my life in slow motion since I got out of the Army in 2007. I’ve lost two great careers, my ability to work, a large piece of my ability to function in public places, I’ve lost any friends I ever had, my marriage has been destroyed, people and my own family view me as a “Murder-Suicide” threat, the ability to ever get close to people (my ex-wife would use pieces of my military service against me and even call me a killer and a coward), I’ve struggled with alcoholism, and I struggle to not attempt suicide on a daily basis despite the fact that I attend counseling almost daily. My oldest daughter has a host of issues as a result of my PTSD, suicide attempts, multiple psychiatric hospitalizations that happen like clockwork on yearly basis, and the nightmares and screaming that happen nightly. I’m very concerned about my oldest daughter and what my PTSD has done to her. For years my 10-year-old daughter has been dealing with nightmares and constant thoughts of her own about dying in horrible ways and of me murdering people. A kid shouldn’t have to deal with that. Would any of that be the case if bush hadn’t had more than 80% of the American people behind him when the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan started?
My oldest daughter was 5 when she stepped out of her bedroom and stumbled on to my ex-wife screaming at me and calling me a murderer and using my military service to destroy me in an argument. As a result of my ex’s constant berating me for years with my military service, I grabbed a razor and slashed my wrists multiple times and sprayed my blood into my ex’s face - totally covering her in my blood. I then walked around the house and covered everything with blood and ranted about the war to my ex-wife as she called the cops - that’s when my daughter stepped out of her room right into what was going on. The only regrets I have about that incident was that my daughter saw parts of it, I didn’t die as a result, I actually listened to my wife and didn’t keep a gun in the house and that I hadn’t done it years earlier. Would any of this have happened if I wasn’t sent to Iraq to murder?
Though I lament the killing that I did, at the same time I have become comfortable with it and miss it terribly. Would that have happened if I never was exposed to war?
I attend all sorts of groups and counseling that is filled with guys just like me. We all have had multiple suicide attempts, deal with the guilt, memories, and nightmares that play over and over again in heads and never stop, then at the same time, even more than a decade later, we yearn to return to the combat. Who and what turned us into what we are? If we hadn’t been exposed to war by the American public, would we have turned into the monsters we are? Keep in mind that bush’s approval rating at the beginning of the war was over 80%, so a vast majority of people were in favor of sending us to murder Iraqis and Arabs.
Yes, send the ICC to investigate war crimes, but everybody from the Soldiers who perpetrated the crimes to their complete chain of command up to the President and the American people that supported these wars need to be held accountable for these crimes. It’s not just the lowest guys on the totem pole who made these crimes happen. Over 80% of the American public and their bloodlust, their desire to murder Arabs and Iraqis, and their subsequent demand that those of us who served in the military endure multiple combat deployments that destroyed us Soldiers mentally and spiritually are completely culpable too.
In the end, who will pay for these crimes? It will be poor kids that the American public turned into soulless killers. People like me join the military with the intention of making the world a better place only to be betrayed by America, sent to fight bullshit wars on America’s behalf, completely destroyed mentally and spiritually by the bloodlust of America, then we return to people who say “thank you for your service” while at the same time they think “...but your PTSD scares us”. Well, we wouldn’t be what we turned into if it wasn’t for the wars that we were sent to fight by America.
A lot of it has to do with family, culture, and the section of society some of these guys come from
I was born in 1980 and I grew up in a family that leaned right. I had no relation with anyone who actually served in a post WWII war in an Infantry function. My one grandfather was a WWII Infantryman, my other grandfather was a typist/clerk assigned to a unit in Japan during the Korean war, and my father narrowly missed being drafted to Vietnam based on his birth date.
I grew up watching and idolizing G.I. Joe (the real American hero) and I saw conflicts such as Panama, Desert Storm, Bosnia/Kosovo as justified use of our military and as proof that our military was there to be used by our leaders as a force to spread freedom, opportunity, and democracy to the world. Our military might was used to stop genocide and to free the oppressed. Hell, I idolized the Green Berets whose motto is "De oppresso libre" or liberator of the oppressed.
I joined the Army in 1997, received an Army ROTC scholarship in 1998, and graduated college in 2002 and voluntarily sought an assignment as an Infantry Officer in the Army. Afghanistan, in my mind and at the time, was completely justified. I never dreamed that we would enter a war like we did in Iraq. I was finishing up my training at Fort Benning, GA in March 2003 when the war in Iraq started. Even at the time I thought the war was stupid and I had no idea why we went there. I never bought the arguments from bush (even though I supported him and even voted for him in 2000). I had no idea that I'd find myself in Iraq in February 2004 serving as an Infantry Platoon Leader.
Even though I never believed in the war and never bought the rhetoric, I was going to do my best to "do the right thing" and to treat everyone with respect of dignity. I was there to help make the country a better place. I wanted to work with the Iraqi people and I truly wanted them to live in a better country.
I was brainwashed by my upbringing before the Army even got a hold of me. The only brainwashing the Army did to me was to make it easy for me kill someone.
If you are interested in learning about this, read the book On Killing written by Dave Grossman. To give a four sentence summary, data gathered from WWII and wars prior indicate that only %15-20 of people who have actually seen an enemy in combat could bring themselves to kill that person. Upon realizing that statistic, the Army instituted a variety of techniques to train people to be more willing to kill. By Vietnam, data indicated that 95% of Soldiers who saw and enemy were able to and willing to kill them. As a result of this, we see many more vets suffering mental health issues after war now than we have in previous wars.
I would have used these photos...
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Oh wait a second. The last one is a picture of me. 1st Lieutenant Glitter-pants, Infantry Platoon Leader extraordinaire while I was conducting a sweep through a farm field in Iraq in 2004. I was 24, but I sure had a baby face (and I still do 9 years later).
I'm getting off on a tangent here, but looking at pictures of the young guys in Iraq and Afghanistan really makes me think about the Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse 5 (or The Children's Crusade).
Damn, I love Kurt Vonnegut. It is a shame that I never had a chance to meet and talk to him in real life. If I could meet anyone in history, he would be on the top of my list.
I used to do roofs all the time when I was in college.
I loved it. I used to work for a small time general contractor during my summer breaks for about 4 years. If money wasn't an object, I'd still be doing that job. I loved digging holes, driving around a piece of shit job truck, slugging bundles of shingles up a ladder all day, moving piles of cinder blocks from one side of a jobsite to the other, and doing the bidding of my severely overweight boss.
The shortest time I ever held a job was 1 year and 10 months. It was hell. I was working for Amazon.com as a production manager and it totally destroyed my life. The only reason I hung on so long was because I had a new family and a new house and I needed the money. I just got out of the Army and I figured that I would give the corporate job world a shot. They paid me VERY well, but the job sucked the life out of me and the stress severely aggravated my PTSD issues. I got suspended for 5 or 6 weeks after I freaked out a work really bad. When I returned to the job I lasted a few more months before freaking out again and then I lost my job.
I would walk from the front to the back of my production line at Amazon and suddenly find myself on a dismounted Infantry patrol in Iraq. I could feel the heat of the air, the weight of my body armor, and the rifle in my hands. I'd get all light headed and feel like I was completely disorientated and drunk, start shaking and stuttering, and crying uncontrollably. It was awful and I completely scared the shit out of the people where I worked.
Now I work as a chemist for the federal government and I love it. I kind of bumble around the lab all day confused and in a half-daze. As long as I get the priority work in our lab done right away, I can take my time doing everything else and work at my own pace. I'm still a freak and I'm still completely crazy, but with this job I can hide out a little bit better when I need to get away from everything and my coworkers are very understanding when I start rambling on about something that happened to me almost 10 years ago.
The waste in war sickens me too
I read something a while back stating that 5% of all people on our planet who died between 1900-1999 died as a result of war.
I love your comment at the end of your post
It is just like the reasoning for tallying and publishing the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.
This should be front and center on the homepage of DU. It is a shame an article like this is buried in the veterans section. You post a lot of great articles and it is sad that most of them hardly get any visibility.
Thanks for your time and effort 
That wasn't what I joined to fight for, though that is what it seemed like it ended up being about
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I believed the stuff that was fed to me that the American military fights for freedom and to make the world a better and more equal place for all.
I was 11 during the first gulf war and I was 15 in 1995 when the Dayton Peace Accord was signed and NATO sent its operation into the Balkans to unscrew the failed UN operation there. During my much younger years I watched and played a hell of a lot of G.I. Joe which, in hindsight, probably impacted me more than I thought. I hung onto the words thrown by the Green Berets as their motto "de oppresso libre" or liberator of the oppressed and I believed that we had learned our lessons from entangling ourselves in a war like Vietnam. I truly believed that our military was a force for good and would only be used to that end. I wanted to join to make the world a better place.
I was a fat kid and a nerd in my youth (I'm still a nerd, but I've come to realize that being a nerd isn't a detriment). When I turned 15 I got into weight lifting and even started to compete a little bit. Although I never had any aptitude or interest in sports like helmet touch or ball-pass, I realized that I could push my body and endure a certain amount of pain. I may not be the strongest or the fastest, but I could always endure more pain and just drive myself further than my peers.
I joined the Army when I was 17 and I went to basic training between my junior and senior year of high school. My parents had to sign a waiver to let me do this at my age. Granted, I didn't do "real" basic training with the grunts at Fort Benning, GA like I had hoped to, but I went to Fort Leanardwood, MO and, after completing basic training, I spent my senior year of high school in the Army Reserves. I had a blast at basic training and I loved the Army and the people I was with. I was mildly disappointed with how easy basic training was and I wanted to do more.
During my senior year of high school, I applied for and received and Army ROTC scholarship. Since I would be "double dipping" if I remained in the Reserves and, due to my college schedule I wouldn't be able to attend my AIT (job training) the following summer as was stipulated by my contract, I was discharged from the Reserves and thrown into a track that would put me into Active Duty as an officer when I completed college.
In college I continued to drink the koolaide and I continued to fall more in love with the military. Due to our proximity to Fort Drum, a lot of guys who were in my ROTC program were former enlisted people on ROTC scholarships. I hung out with a group of guys who were former enlisted Infantrymen. One used to be a Drill Sergeant and two spent some time in the Ranger Regiment and were all "tabbed out". I was one of the "PT studs" in my ROTC group and I actively participated in a competition they had called "Ranger Challenge" where they put a squad sized team together from all colleges offering ROTC and competed against eachother in various military competencies (like calling for artillery fire, first aid procedures, shooting, physical fitness test, land navigation with a compass, obstacle courses, forced march, etc). The team that I was a part of finished 3rd out of roughly 270 schools). I was in love with the Army and I wanted nothing more than to hurry up and get active duty and to serve as an Infantry Officer. I had grandiose ideas of going to Ranger School and, when the time was right volunteering for Special Forces Selection with the hopes of making it to Special Forces.
I was a college senior when September 11th happened. In fact, the morning of September 11th, we had just submitted our functional branch request. Infantry was my first choice followed by Armor as my second. I eventually got my first choice - Infantry and I graduated college and went to Fort Benning, GA to complete about a year of training before I would make it to my unit. I completed 16 weeks of Infantry Officer Basic Cource, Airborne School, Ranger School, and Mechanized Infantry Leaders Course. During my last few months at Fort Benning, stuff was heating up with Iraq. I didn't have the time to follow the news, but I remember thinking to myself about how messed up going to war with Iraq would be. I never saw or understood our reasoning to go into that country. But, that didn't really matter. I figured that by the time I actually got to my unit that the "war" part of the war would be over and it would turn into another Kosovo-type of deployment.
I got to my unit in June 2003 as they were returning from Kosovo. They got orders that they were going to deploy to Iraq in Feb 2004. I was given a platoon in January 2004 - just in time to deploy with them to Iraq. None of us had any idea that Iraq in 2004 was going to be as intense as it was. We all thought that maybe we'd see an IED or maybe a small arms ambust (if we were lucky) but we would probably be doing the same thing in Iraq as we did in Kosovo.
I ended up spending 13 months in Iraq as an Infantry Platoon Leader. To make a long story short, it really shook up my core beliefs about how I thought that the military was and should be used. After seeing what combat was really about, I dropped my dream of seeking our Special Forces Selection and the plan I had for my life completely changed. In a deployment that I thought would maybe result in a singe IED strike or maybe a single small arms ambush, I found myself fighting in numerous small and large combat operations. I got lucky in that my platoon was attached to a different battalion during Fallujah in November 2004. The rest of my company went on to spearhead the marine operation there, but I still managed to find more combat than I wished for.
On 18 June my platoon was involved in a 24 hour firefight in which we were credited with kill 26 and on 24 June we were part of an operation in Baqubah and were credited with killed 14 there. After a small-arms exchange on another day I had the privilege of combing a field and finding a young boy that had been shot in the crossfire. It really made me feel like crap to deal with him and his family. After another incident, a van filled with candy was misidentified and hit. Our weapons ripped the middle of it open like a can, set it on fire, and spit candy and soda everywhere. One guy was running around with a big hunk of his head missing and brain spilling out while another guy burned to death in the drivers seat. The combination of his fat burning and the fabric of the seat melting stuck his body to the seat and we had to actually get a scraper to remove him. There was another incident in which 5 Soldiers in my platoon were killed when I lost a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. There is a lot more, but that is the stuff that is just sticking in my head the most right now.
I remember sitting in a palm grove on the side of the road just chilling and eating some lunch when some guy thought it would be a great idea to throw a hand grenade at me. It blew up 15 feet in front of me, but nothing actually hit me (I don't know how that happened). I remember just being pissed and angry that I would have to 1) stop eating my lunch, 2) get off my butt and react to it, 3) and, the worst part, write an after action report about the incident.
None of this had anything to do with the image and ideal that was fed to me during my childhood that the Army was there to liberate and help people. My actions and the situations that I found myself in have disturbed me deeply and I feel even worse when I realize that it was all for nothing.
It is a shame was bush did to our Army. It is filled with good people who want to do the right thing and who care deeply about the values our country was founded on. Unfortunately it keeps finding itself being used the wrong way and used in situations contrary to our core beliefs. I loved the Army and the people and I miss it deeply.
Great article
Thanks for posting this.
I've started to want to talk about the war more and more to my family, the people I work with, and the people I know, but it seems that most people don't want to hear anything about it. It makes them uncomfortable and, in the end, it makes me feel awkward. I know at some point that I should move on with my life, but that is much easier said than done. It has been about 9 years since I was still in Iraq and much of it is still constantly on my mind and my thoughts even though I'm far removed from any previous associations I have with the military and the people I knew at the time.
There is so much I want to say, but nobody I know seems to wants to listen which in the end just makes me feel even more isolated.
To quote one of my idols and favorite authors (Kurt Vonnegut): "So it goes."
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