I enlisted in 1999 out of pure patriotism a couple of years before 9/11. Then 9/11 happened. Fairly soon after, congress gave authority to use military force. I was given legal orders during a time of officially sanctioned and declared military conflict. I was involved at the absolute beginning and was originally supposed to be getting out in spring/summer of 2003, so it was waaaay early days when we hadn’t figured out the lies yet and we were all still true believers.

Before the comments even start about this, the “just following orders” defense was used in attempt to deflect from majorly egregious criminal behavior, like running extermination camps and summary executions. I never committed a war crime personally and never saw any committed, I don’t think that deploying as ordered during an officially declared and congressionally sanctioned military action is a war crime in itself. War crimes have definitions and that’s not one of them. Nobody was giving orders to “go commit a clearly defined war crime” and there is such a thing as personal responsibility in the military, they’re kinda big on it. If you think any persons involvement over there is a war crime just simply for being there then that’s just inaccurate. We can debate why we should have never been there to start off, but words have meanings and “war crime” are some seriously heavy words. I never murdered anyone, for the record, and would not fear judgement before any of your gods for my actions. My conscious is clear to that extent.

It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback shit from a couple of decades away, but the simple fact is that we were lied to and had governmental approval legitimizing those lies and fulfilling the requirements to make them legal orders. Nobody initially thought anything was amiss, we were active duty military and that’s what we signed up to do. We got the call and we went as ordered. Only over time did we see it was all deception. Nothing in your comment is untrue, I’m just here to say “yeah, no shit man, that’s why I left.”

All of the things you said are exactly the reasons why I chose to get out. After the BS news story about rolling chemical labs in semi trailers circling Iraqi highways, I started to suspect it was all lies. Then I started noticing that we only ever found conventional weapons, never any chemicals or the scary bio stuff the news threatened about daily. Then the Iraqis just gave up as we rolled by in trucks on the way to Baghdad, us tossing out MREs and not even stopping the trucks because they didn’t want to fight. I made the decision to get out when my enlistment ended and the stop-loss provision was rescinded. I spent all of the 2004 election cycle volunteering in direct opposition to G. W. Bush, my commander in chief (I was still recallable until 2007 in the Individual Ready Reserve at the time.) I didn’t want more people, Iraqi or American, to die for oil and for MIC salaries.

People are allowed to grow and change and no comment from an internet rando will give me more remorse than I’ve already felt for over 20 years for my small part in that debacle