One Soldier's Testimony

I encourage everyone to read the incredibly moving, frank, and powerful piece written by this veteran and shared with his fellow Daily Paulers:

I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in September of 2000, at the age of 19. Two weeks shy of my 1 year anniversary, 9/11 happened. I spent the next two weeks keeping F-15 fighters fueled up in case they needed to respond quickly over the skies of Seattle. Then I was deployed to Spain for 3 months to fuel tankers that would go up and fuel the bombers that were flying from the U.S. nonstop to pummel Afghanistan. Another 6 months after being back at my home base, I asked for and received a 3 year tour to England, which required me to add 10 months onto my 4 year enlistment.

When the U.S. built up in preparation for an invasion of Iraq in early 2003, I was shipped off to an Air Base in Kuwait. It was an incredible feat of logistics watching the base build up from nothing to upwards of two hundred fighter planes and all the support that it required. I remember people writing things on bombs to be dropped, things about how this was payback to Iraq for 9/11. Once the attack on Iraq commenced, It was extremely busy for about 2 weeks, and then the "shock and awe" was over. It was on the ground troops (for the next 9 years) after that. I volunteered to drive a fuel truck up to a captured Air Base in Iraq, but I wasn't needed for that.

I remember at one point when I was out working, thinking about my principal in elementary school. After standing up to a bully once, he told me that violence was never the answer. I looked around at all the high tech machinery of death, and I started laughing hysterically to myself. Look around I thought. Sometimes violence is the answer. At the time, I had been very heavily indoctrinated with tribalism. Obviously those faceless unknown Iraqis were somehow of less value, and I believed in the lie that such a thing as a "surgical strike" existed.

I never contemplated the notion of human error, or that a child would only need to be in the vicinity of dropped ordinances to be traumatized for life. Thinking about such things in my immature mind would be unpleasant, logic was an inconvenience, no need for any of that.

Read the rest here. - you'll be glad you did!