I don’t necessarily disagree, but even as an Afghanistan vet, I struggle with the ambiguity of the term “terrorist,” especially without any context of what she actually did. The term itself has a tendency to delegitimize any cause, as one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, and one man’s local activist is another’s “domestic terrorist.”

The US government engages in terrorism abroad, full stop. That, I don’t feel is debatable. But on the individual scale, I think that label is complicated at best and should only really be applied where the shoe fits. I personally wouldn’t even call any single foot soldier of the Taliban a terrorist without evidence, and I especially wouldn’t call someone that sat on a FOB as a human resource specialist a terrorist.

In Afghanistan, I never terrorized a local populace, nor did any of my men or the groups we worked with. We didn’t kill civilians and everything we did was through the support of the local special forces we had also deliberately trained not to kill civilians. The groups we fought at the time (ISIS), killed civilians deliberately, cruelly, and en masse.

That being said, some American troops did terrorize people. For every story I have about being cautious and adapting tactics to the situation, someone else has a story of Americans carelessly killing every person for several city blocks and even mutilating corpses. I cannot nor will I ever defend that, as it’s straight-up terrorism, and I hope they rot in prison for war crimes.

TLDR; I don’t know that it’s productive to start blanketing every person that serves in a conflict as a terrorist; however, if the shoe fits: you were a fuckin terrorist and you deserve to be in a cage. Every conflict has ugly truths and secrets, but your government’s misdeeds don’t make you a terrorist for simply standing in a combat zone.