Why I Write About Iraq

Read this. It's a post from a serving soldier in Iraq, recounting an experience that will haunt him for the rest of his days.

Then read this. It's a post on his own blog "A Soldier's Thoughts" from the same guy about his first time back home, after his first tour. Horrfying.

Like many others on the front lines, Sgt. Zachary Scott-Singley feels he was lied to by the current administration about the reasons for the war in Iraq, yet he believes fiercly in combatting the monsters he has seen there who kill without compassion based on warped religious ideology. On one occasion he reveals that he has been confined to base for writing stuff on his blog that the chain of commnad didn't like. (Start here for more on how the US military reacts to milblogs that don't show the happy giving-out-candy face of Iraq.) He fears for troops who return home and the post-traumatic stress syndrome that effects so many of them.

Those who have never been in the firing line can never fully understand what it is like, but it is right and proper that we all try our hardest to improve on what is being done right now, whether we think what is being done right now is good or bad.

That's why I write so often on veteran care, on tactics, on changing paradigms for the better, on incompetence in the chain of command where I see it. I am doing what I can, where I can, to help those troops who have to see things such as Sgt. Scott-Singley describe both while they are on the front line and after. It's got nothing to do with hating Bush. If he and his administration were doing so well that I couldn't think of improvements, I would shut up.

I will leave you for now with another eloquent thought from the good Sergeant:

So here I am again in Iraq for my second time and still happy, not because of war though. War, that can transform people. You may think that I don't know what I am talking about. You may think that I just write this stuff to keep my sanity (you may even be right about that), but I say this, you don't have the full picture. I remember getting all my letters from home, some would tell me to get those Arabs, those towel heads, those terrorists, yet it is fear that breeds this way of thinking. Not intelligence, but fear of differences. You want me to let you in on a little secret? Ok, here it is. It isn't me that is afraid, I know what my bullets have done to other men. It it's not those soldiers who have had to shoot, or those who have REALLY been shot at that are afraid. It is those who don't have to see that we are all human. Those who's eyes never have to see the blood, death, or casualties. They call it all collateral damage...