This post is my attempt to expand and reinforce @jakemccauley’s thoughts about the military. Jake, I agree with virtually everything you said, but I saw two problems:

1) Your’s was more rant than argument.

2) You said it yourself, these are not your personal experiences.

I’d like to try to back up your piece by sharing my story…

I joined the U.S. Army in April 1997 at age 18. I spent the first two and a half years learning my job and the Arabic language. I spent the last six years in 5th Special Forces Group at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky… and war.

MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE BOY

I had a great childhood. I had two parents that loved and supported me, two younger sisters that I got along with as well as any boy does, and a dog. I was never abused in any way and my parents, still together after almost 40 years, always supported my interests. They even backed me up when I made stupid decisions.

I loved everyone. Even the bugs. The idea of hurting something was anathema. When the local bully would pick on me I would take the hits and still walk away. The thought of hurting him scared me more than the fear of pain. And when a neighbor boy stepped on a frog just to see what would happen I was mortified. The kid crushed its guts right out of its mouth. I tried to nurse it back to health all night, but it died the next morning.

I was born with a natural empathy and genuine curiosity about the world. When I looked at other people I was never biased. All I saw were different versions of myself.

REBELLIOUS

By third grade I was placed in the gifted and talented program at school. With few exceptions, I was head and shoulders above my peers academically. I learned everything faster, but didn’t realize it at the time. It actually took many years for me to understand that what came easily to me left most others struggling. I quickly surpassed the school curriculum.

But it often felt like this wasn’t allowed.

By high school I was so bored I skipped regularly. My grades plummeted because I just didn’t care. To me, it was the knowledge that was important, not what others thought my grades should be. But this didn’t go over well with the school. The school counselor (the one who’s supposed to help kids work through their problems) threatened that if I didn’t go back to class I’d go to jail. I was a 17 year old junior. I quit school on the spot.

BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE

My best friend was always a trouble-maker. I didn’t blame him, his step-dad was a local cop and used to beat him regularly when he was just five years old. No, I’m not exaggerating, the piece of shit retired with honor from the local police force a few years ago.

So around the time I was dropping out of school, my friend was talking to Army recruiters. He was a bit nervous, so like a good friend I tagged along.

The picture the recruiter painted was pretty awesome. Tanks, planes, guns, explosives… what boy doesn’t like the sound of that. Hell, I’d been playing video games and watching G.I. Joe for years. Plus, soldiers are honorable, right? It was my chance to defend the little frog before it got squished.

I signed up 15 minutes later.

IN THE BEGINNING

My parents were pretty pissed. I look back on this with regret, but I was kind of fed up with everything in my life at the time so I basically just packed my bags and left. I barely said goodbye. It wasn’t fair to my family.

I got over it a few days later in basic training. Talk about a shock! The lifestyle was unlike anything I’d ever experienced… it sucked, but strangely in a good way, like a really hard summer camp. It was a great learning experience and I felt like I emerged a stronger person, physically and mentally.

EARLY CAREER

I had trouble relating to most people almost my whole time in the Army. The common mentality reminded me of the adult version of that little bully down the street. After a while I started to jokingly say that my life was abnormally normal. More than half of everyone I knew was either beaten, raped, abandoned, or Christmas-shopped from a dumpster as a kid. Apparently I had lived a sheltered life.

But after a while this culture began to seep in like a self-reinforcing feedback loop. It reminds me of Lord of the Flies in a way – a bunch of boys thrown together on an island competing to be more foolish and more violent than the next. Almost every disagreement about a perspective or idea would quickly turn into a physical challenge. The entire office would pick up and move down to the padded training room. The two people who couldn’t agree would settle it in an MMA-style match with the rest of the office cheering them on.

The winner got to be right.

TOXIC ATTITUDES

But not everyone was dumb and blood-thirsty. There were others that tended toward my more empathetic view of the world. But like me, time and pressure to integrate with the common culture encouraged them to adjust their perspectives to fit in.

A teammate of mine, who I otherwise thought of as a well adjusted guy, developed a penchant for a kind of mild psychological torture. He would lay a razor blade on the nightstand of his roommate who he didn’t like and say, “I’m not telling you what to do, but if you ever feel like you need to kill yourself, here’s a razor.”

He used to laugh about this, and sadly, I eventually thought it was funny, too.

Now take that kind of attitude and multiply it by every asshole in the military and government, face it off against the same mentality in another country, and you get war.

TEST YOUR METTLE

In the weeks leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom the U.S. forces gathered in numerous bases and camps throughout the Middle East region. My unit was located at Camp Doha, Kuwait. We trained and performed operations out of the intelligence facility there. At this point it was unclear whether there would actually be an invasion.

I usually kept a pretty close eye on the news because of the ongoing international coalition-building effort. I remember watching Gen. Colin Powell lay out the arguments for invasion to the U.N. Security Council. When he got to the part about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction I wondered what he was talking about.

Don’t misunderstand me, Saddam Hussein was an evil dude. But here I was, an Arabic linguist and supposedly one of the specialist on the Middle Eastern. I held a Top Secret, SCI (Special Compartmented Information) clearance and was read on to multiple classified missions. And yet, I didn’t know what WMDs General Powell was referring to.

But here’s the ugly part… I didn’t care.

I just thought, “I hope they believe this lie so we can go in and kill people.”

Let me repeat that...

“I hope they believe this lie so we can go in and kill people."

Of the tens of thousands of people on Steemit, there is absolutely no one here who understands better than me how shamefully dishonorable that statement is.

But we were soldiers, and that was our job.

INVASION

Praise be to Allah! They bought it! We rolled in.

The strategy was a full-on sprint to Baghdad in a pincer attack from the north and south. The main force was split in two, one from Kuwait, one from Turkey. They covered most of the ground during the night before the main logistical push set to happen the following day. Our forces simply skirted around every city and went straight for the head of the snake.

Saddam’s air defenses had already been neutralized in the days prior. Our PsyOps Units (Psychological Operations) had flown over the enemy positions and dropped fliers written in Arabic giving specific instructions how to surrender to the American troops – and live to tell the tale. Their troops were supposed to face their tanks and heavy equipment north toward Baghdad and walk south toward our assault forces with hands in the air.

My unit was assigned to protect the supply units arriving behind the main force. As we drove north into the country I saw many enemy tanks facing north with no soldiers defending them. I also saw the Iraqi patriots who tried to defend their country. Their charred bodies were still smoldering.

WINNING THE HEARTS AND MINDS

The main mission of U.S. Army Special Forces is to act as a force multiplier by gathering intel, training indigenous forces, conducting Unconventional Warfare (Guerrilla Warfare), and generally attempting to get the other guys to come to our side. Sometimes they build nations, sometimes they destabilize them, depending on what is needed.

They’re also badass door-kickers.

I didn’t witness this next part, but the mission debrief was common knowledge and the command staff made a statement to the unit, so everyone knew what happened.

One of the operational teams was on a mission to either capture or neutralize a target. It involved raiding a small village which was home to many families. Anyone who’s seen movies like American Sniper is basically familiar with the process of systematically clearing buildings for threats. SWAT teams do this type of work daily.

But this time things went wrong. The team accomplished the mission. They acquired their targets and had them in custody. But more than just “bad guys” were in the village. Apparently the daughter of one of the enemy combatants was involved at the scene. Whether she ran out of fright or to get help was unclear. But it didn’t matter. One of the SF team members shot her in the back.

She never got up. She was 9.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE

I don’t remember his name, but I won’t forget his face. He didn’t seem upset about the ordeal. His rational argument was that she could have been going to alert reinforcements and then the SF team might become overwhelmed. The command staff agreed. As far as I know the issue ended there.

Our forces put out a notice to the local communities that from now on when U.S. forces are conducting operations in and around their homes they should cooperate fully and not fight or run. This, they said, is the best way to prevent accidents like this from happening again in the future.

When the commander addressed our unit about the incident, his statement included no small amount of self-praise for how quickly we returned the child’s body to her family. This, they thought, was a great step forward in improving our relationship with the locals.

REDEMPTION?

Sometimes people ask me if I ever killed anyone. The answer is no, not directly. That wasn’t my job. My role was to hunt them down and pass the information on to people who would then go kill them. As far as I’m concerned, that makes me just as responsible.

A nightmare scenario for me would be a foreign invasion into my own town. As a father, I would swing and claw and bite and do absolutely whatever I had to do to fight back against the kind of terror we inflicted on those families. Killing innocents, even women and children… raiding homes while a mother huddles in a sobbing mess holding her three children outside in the dirt, absolutely terrified they were all about to die. I did that, and felt righteous.

Is it evil to join the military? It’s never evil to defend yourself or your family and friends.

When my contract finally ended and I left the Army, I was still proud of my service. I felt special because a great many powerful people told me I was special. But still, I resolved to do something useful with my life. Even though I hadn’t yet shaken my former persona, I still had a sense that I never actually accomplished anything important. It was as if a little truth was trying to shine through a tiny crack.

Something drove me to go back home to Texas and study biology. The further away from military life I got, the more a sense of wanting to help people began to return. Ultimately, I decided to become a paramedic. I’ve since seen thousands of patients over a medical career that has lasted about as long as my military one. Of those thousands, literally hundreds are walking around on this planet right now because of me. I sleep well at night when I think about it.

But then, every time I get thanked for my military service I feel a little sick to my stomach. Sometimes I tell a bit of my story to those people, sometimes I just say thank you. I still struggle with it to this day. It seems no amount of doing good can really erase the bad. The two just continue to exist beside each other.

Kwai Chang Caine, from Kung Fu, once said, “To be damned by the Devil is truly a blessing.”

So I ask you, what does praise from the Devil mean?

After all, I have a discharge paper from the Government that says…

...I’m Honorable.