Victor_c3
Victor_c3's JournalI really wished that you wouldn't have posted that
I read this thread before I went to work today and it really hit a cord with me. Like was mentioned above, I knew exactly what photo was being discussed without even having to click on the link.
I really wished that you wouldn't have posted that. It is a remarkable picture, but it is VERY tough for me to look at. By the way, I'm not looking for any type of apology. I'm just saying...
Look at the blood on the Soldiers boot and on the ground. I can't even look at the girl's face.
If/when (unfortunately) we approach another war in the future, we need to get this picture out and talk about the true cost of war as much as we can in public. I found this figure a few weeks back. In the 20th century the ratio of civilians to Soldiers killed in war is 10:1. (I can find the source if anyone wants to reference it).
While I'm typing this I'm also running around my house making my two daughters dinner. My oldest daughter (she is 4) is telling me what she wants to eat for dinner and I just look at her and I really have a hard time keeping it together.
I was an Infantry Platoon Leader in Iraq from Feb 2004 through March 2005. On 20 June 2004 I had to escort my boss and provide security for a weekly meeting he had with local Iraqi town leadership. We were in the outskirts of Baqubah, just a few miles north of Diyala University when an IED on the west side of the road blew up on the third vehicle in my patrol (we patrolled with a minimum of four HMMWVs and 12 people - more depending on the mission we were doing for the day). The vehicle was messed up, but nobody was hurt. I was in the lead HMMWV and my gunner identified who he thought was the trigger man. The guy stood up, ran, then ducked behind a sand berm and the IED blew up. After the explosion, the guy stood up to run and my gunner cut him down with machine gun fire. Some other guy in my rear HMMWV got out and open fire one someone else.
Immediately after all vehicles stopped, I dismounted and ran to the disabled vehicle. I saw nobody was hurt. My boss (the company commander) was dealing with our headquarters and he called for a vehicle recovery and for the QRF (quick reaction force, i.e. backup) to launched immediately. Given the distance, it'd be about 30 minutes until they arrived. Since we were only running the minimum number of people at the time, I grabbed my platoon medic, my M249 (light machine gun) gunner and my 1SG and the four of us walked on foot in the area surrounding where we fired on what we suspected was enemy.
The area was kind of bare dirt with a little bit of grass and a few large trees (not what you really picture when you think of Iraq). There were a few square cinder block/concrete houses about 500 meters away and people were out and about doing their daily business. We were stopped on the side of a four lane road. About 200 meters off of the road I came across a guy kind of in a little sunken hole in the ground by a tree. He had a beard, was wearing what I called a white man-dress, unarmed, and covered in blood. He was just rolling on the ground and scrunched up quietly bleeding to death. I left my medic and M249 gunner there and I continued with my 1SG towards group of three guys I saw sitting on a log about 50 meters away.
There were two men in the 20s-30s and a 6 year old boy sitting down. As I got closer to their position I saw that there was a boy that I'd guess was 8-10 years old lying face down in the dirt. There wasn't much blood, but he had a pretty formidable hole in his lower back. I yelled for my medic and told him to let the other guy die. He ran over and began to apply first aid to the kid. We turned him over and saw that he was still alive. His breathes were shallow and he had a very blank look on his face We tore off his shirt and found that he had a small entrance wound in the top left portion of his chest. It was obvious that he had what we would call a "sucking chest wound" in which the lung is punctured and you become unable to breath. He was cold and sweaty and very responsive.
The two guys sitting on the log were the kid's uncles. They were holding a little tuxedo wrapped in a plastic bag and they were on their way to a wedding. The boy just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't know why I did this, but I had the guys zip-tied (hand cuffed with plastic zip ties) [I'm yelling out loud to myself while I'm typing this]. I have no idea why I thought they were dangerous or a threat. I really regret the way I treated the adults. I should have brought them over to hold the boy's hand and to comfort him.
The little boy's house was just a few hundred meters away and the boy's father and mother saw that something was up and came running to my position. My translator (who was a local Iraqi civilian) came running to my position and told me that the father wanted the mother to be kept away from the boy who was shot. The father had missing teeth, was wearing a white man-dress and had a light beard. He looked completely harmless and was very distraught. I pushed the mother back (on the father's request). She had some sort of crazy blue tattoo on hear forehead (I don't remember exactly what it was). A crowd began to gather about 100 meters in the distance and I had one of my HMMWVs come to our position to provide a little bit of over watch on out position. The crowd saw our weapons and gave us space.
When we first saw that a little boy was shot we immediately called for helicopter MEDIVAC. While we were waiting for the helicopter, my medic was trying in vain to get an IV started on the kid. As you go into shock, your veins and arteries constrict and they become harder to find and it become very hard to start and IV - which is a vital first step in applying first aid. We weren't able to get an IV started on the kid. The guy who we first found finally stopped breathing and died and the helicopter MEDIVAC showed up after about 15 minutes to pick up the kid.
About that time the QRF arrived on the scene and was working on recovering the the damaged vehicle.
I was told that the kid was going to Ballad (a large air base about 40 minutes from where we were) and, the kid's father started to cry. He hugged me and kissed me on the cheek when he found out that he was going to an American hospital. I felt so ashamed.
The kid was cold and sweaty and looked half-dead when MEDIVAC arrived. I didn't even mention how the boys little brother stood by his older brother who was shot and held his hand why we tried to give him first aid. I don't know what happened to the kid and I don't know if he even lived.
I came to my senses and cut the zip-ties off of the two uncles. Again, I don't know why I cuffed them.
After the whole incident was over and the kid was taken away, We drove back home and pigged out on a huge lunch. The local Iraqi translator who we had with us that day kept saying "he was just a boy" and was really shaken up by the event. At the time, I was mostly numb to it and it didn't bother me. Since I got home from Iraq and since I've had kids, the memories and the images have come to really haunt me. So much so that when I play with my own children (who are 2 and 4 years old) that I frequently have flashes of what I saw that day and I have a hard time interacting with my own kids. I couldn't imagine losing my kids to the errant actions of some foreign Soldiers like that dad in Iraq lost his son to.
I hope this whole post makes sense. In the course of writing it I downed 3 beers and my two kids are going crazy running around the house while I'm mentally back in Iraq. They just want to play while I'm on the verge of a meltdown.
I almost don't even want to post this, but I hope someone can pull something worth reading out of it.
I always say that patriotism and religion are tools used by the ruling elite to control the masses
The republicans and their beliefs totally support that. By the way, there is no way I believe that if you are a democrat that you aren't patriotic.
The hippies that protested Vietnam were labeled traitors, communist, etc. Why? They weren't true patriots becuase they didn't want to throw their lives away in a pointless war? How does blindly following the ruling elite into mistakes in which you pay with your life patriotic? The hippies were the true patriots. Their vision of America had something to do with freedom.
I said it before and I'll say it again. If our founding fathers and Jesus were alive today, I bet they'd all be living on a commune and smoking pot.
thank you
I've mentioned this in other posts here, but I spend a fair amount of time in/out of the VA. I hit some low points from time to time, but I'm actually a pretty easy-going positive person. Not that I don't have my issues and bad times, but I know what is important to me in my life (my two little girls) and I devote myself completely to my family.
Writing and talking about a lot of the war and Iraq is something I want to do, but a part of me holds back. There is a lot of it I don't want my friends or family members to know. My parents know I've shot people, but I never told my wife or my brother about it (although I'm sure they probably can figure it out). I'm scared out of my mind about my two daughters one day figuring out that I was in a war and asking me questions. I don't want them to think that I was some sort of a monster. Posting stuff about it on a semi-anonymous forum makes it easy to vent or at least partially clear my mind.
I really love this forum. I used to (and still go back a little bit) spend a lot of my time on a conservative forum, but you need to have thick skin to throw yourself out there like I do here over there. It's funny. I grew up believing that republicans where the only people loved the veterans - but that has proven to be further from the truth based on what I've seen in recent years. I hate how republicans somehow have the picture in their heads that they are the "true patriots" when, if you take a step back and really look at it, the democrats/liberals I believe are much more in line with the fonding father's notion of what America is and should be.
Anyways, I'm starting to ramble. Thanks again.
Victor
I don't know who to reply to
but thank you all for your kind words.
My military service was rough on me. It's kind of weird for me to look back on it now. Some parts seem like it was so long ago, but other parts seem like yesterday. I loved much of the military (well, all of it except for the war). Would I do it all over again? I don't know.
The pain of the loss has faded quite a bit. There are other things that I did/happened to me that are much more troubling to me about Iraq. When my unit returned back our home base, the military paid for the families of the deceased to visit us at our base in Germany. I had a chance to meet and speak with 4 of the 5 families of the deceased. One of the families was very angry at me and asked me some tough questions and some of the things really troubled me, however they deserved to have that opportunity to speak with me. I hope that I was able to provide them some closure and a better understanding of what had happened. The other families were very warm and happy to be able to meet me and the rest of the Soldiers in our platoon.
More Romney Americans...
I was an Infantry Platoon Leader in Iraq and I lost a Bradley Fighting Vehicle on 24 JAN 2005, killing 5 of the 7 guys in it. This picture was taken during a memorial ceremony on our base after the event. 47% of these guys also had an entitlement mentality...
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I'm probably just a whiny bitch, but I took real offense to this
I already had a lot of disdain for Romney after hearing about his "service" in France for his church while the rest of his "peers" (as if you could call yourself a peer to a rich privileged guy) faced Vietnam. This thing really got to me - and I made sure that anyone who I knew who was likely to vote for Romney knew it.
My war was different than yours. Many guys in Vietnam were drafted and had no choice about service (I know that you mentioned you enlisted). I too volunteered for my military service. I didn't know what I was getting myself into and when I joined (1997) I thought that we'd never see a war like Vietnam again. I believed in the causes I saw in Iraq in 1991 (to a moderate degree) and I fully believed in our mission in the for country of Yugoslavia in the mid 90's. I think I drank too much of the koolaide and I fully believed that the Army would only be used for good and to spread justice to the world. Then I found myself going to Iraq in 2004. I came home broken and a shadow of what I was.
Without repeating my story yet again, the war and what it did to me is very personal to me. I have no tolerance for anyone who attacks or criticizes me and my service in any way. Like the title of my reply says, perhaps I'm just a whiny bitch. But unless you've served, you probably will never really "get it" like a veteran does.
Yeah, actually I'm getting a lot of help from the VA
and my wife got me into a meditation program that is helping too.
PTSD is PTSD. It doesn't matter where it comes from. Everyone thinks that it only aflicts people in war.
Anyways, thanks.
thanks
Even though I loved the military and the people I worked with, I hated the war. Granted, I did completely volunteer for military service. However, I had no idea what I was getting myself into or what war was really all about until I experienced it first hand. I'm appauled by what I saw in Iraq and I want to do everything I can from preventing something like this from happening again. And that is the reason I post stuff like I posted above.
It also doesn't hurt that I was drinking a little last night and that helps me get the words out... 
People need to know the truth and how much war affects you after you make it home. They need to abandon the idea that war is glorious and the only people who are killed are the people who fight in it. I like how we acknowledge and remember our veterans with memorials and monuments, but at the same time I hate seeing monuments because I see them as a tool used to present war as glorious. Instead of building monuments to the Soldiers, we should build monuments to the widows and children of the Soldiers as well as the civilian victims of war. Memorial day and Veterans day should be days of national mourning for the pain of wars inflicted on both sides of battle.
I don't want to see a memorial for the war in Iraq with statue of a bunch of American Soldiers holding weapons looking proud and ready to kill. I think it'd be much more appropriate to have a woman in a burqa holding her child and crying at the side of her dead husband and/or a statue of an American woman and her child standing next to a shattered and decrepit veteran. We need to be shown that wars break people in our memorials. Not immages of strength and power. In a local town around here there is a memorial that I love. There is a Soldier standing next to a big granite stone (with names on it) stooped over and crying. It's very powerful to me and it chokes me up most times I drive by it.
I think you're mostly right, but I disagree with a few conflicts
Just shooting from the hip, I'd argue that the first gulf war in 1991 was justified. Sadam Hussein invaded Kuwait and was getting ready to invade other neighboring countries after that. We defeated his military quickly, pushed his forces out of Kuwait, and ensured that he wouldn't be able to ever conduct offensive operations again. If I remember right, we destroyed something like 4-5,000 of his tanks! We didn't keep pushing the war and we didn't get ourselves mired into a 10 year long occupation where we attempted to build a half-assed democracy.
The whole mess in the Balkans was justified in my opinion too. I hate for our military to be used as a police force for the entire world, but some aweful stuff was going on there in the 90s. Seeing what Clinton was using our military to accomplish there was one of the major driving factors in my decision to join the Army when I was 17 in 1997. i honestly believed that we had learned our lessons from Vietnam and that we'd never fight another war like that again. I also believed that the military was a tool used only for good and to help people.
In 2001, I believed Afghanistan was justified as well. Then we got ourselves mired into a failed attempt of nation building for 10 years. We should have never attempted the nation building thing.
2003, Iraq, total waste. I spent 13 months there and I don't even want to talk about it right now.
Obama's 2011 deployment of 100-150 Special Forces operatives to Africa to assist local forces in defeating the Lord's Resistance Army is exactly what we should be fighting too. Do a quick read on Joseph Kony and you don't have to make it too far into your reading to figure out that this guy is a sinister evil person. His militia goes to local villages, abducts children, and forces them to fight in his militia.
Another disabled veteran here
I receive a pension for a 70% disability rating for PTSD from the VA. It's worth about $1,520 a month tax free plus medical care relating to my PTSD is covered.
I made the mistake of joining the Army when I was 17 years old thinking that I would actually be doing something good in the world. I went to basic training between my junior and senior year of high school and served in the Army reserves while I was in college. I received an Army ROTC sholarship and switched over to active duty in 2002 as an Infantry Officer. I busted my ass in the Army and gave my all and went through Airborne School and Ranger School. I arrived to unit a few months they were getting ready to deploy to Iraq in Feb 2004 and I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Infantry Platoon Leader. I went on patrol and gave everything I had for a war I never agreed with at least 6 days a week. In fact, There were only 2 patrols that my platoon went on without me the whole time I was in Iraq - and one was because I was sick as hell and the other was because we had a standing policy in my platoon that you weren't allowed to go on patrol the day before you go on your two week leave (bad luck). I led my platoon through numerous large and small scale combat events resulting in a confirmed 46 enemy killed (which appauls me, but that is the topic for another thread).
I honestly don't know how I came home alive. In one incident I had a hand grenade blow up no more than 15 feet in front of me and in another incident I had bullets hitting the ground next me while I was crossing the street (the rest of my patrol ran for cover, but I was crazy and kept walking because I was looking to die rather than come home). 5 of the 46 Soldiers in my platoon were killed on 24 JAN 2005 when I lost a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
I've never told anyone in person this, but I almost commited suicide while I was in Iraq. I felt hopeless and the last thing I wanted to do was come back home. To this day I still don't know why I'm still around. If I didn't have kids and I didn't know that they'd be devastated if I weren't around, I probably wouldn't be alive right now. I'm completely stuck in the war even though I've been out of it for almost 8 years. I just can't move on and it pervades itself into every aspect of what remains of my life. Honestly, other than my kids, there isn't a thing I give a f**k about or live for.
I go on periods of time when I get fired up and I just want to get back to the war. If I could drop everything and be back in Iraq tomorrow, I would. I miss the feeling of holding a rifle in my hand, the danger, and ther murder. As aweful as it sounds, fighting in war is a feeling that you can't beat.
I hate being a shadow of what I was when I was in the Army. I was capabe of leading a platoon in combat! Now I can hardly even go to public places like McDonalds without turning into a bumbling idiot. I can't get around to paying my bills on time (even though I have the money) and I can hardly hold a job if it wasn't for the charity of my boss and my employer and their sense of duty for helping guys like me.
I work for the federal government. If I didn't have a huge veteran's highering preference, I would have never gotten the job that I have now. Basically, you need to be really messed up to one-up me on the hiring list. Not to sound sorry for myself, but I'm pretty bad off.
Yup, I'm a mooch and a drain to us all. I should have died in Iraq like I wanted to.
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Sorry for posting immages of my awards from Iraq. I'm not that full of myself. I just like to prove that I am who/what I claim to be. I'm not looking for sympathy or thanks for my service. It's just more of a point of the type of scumbag that makes up the 47% that Romeny despises.
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