Question for the boys about 9/11.

I’ll tell you, I didn’t join the army to intentionally do any of that. I was born in 1980 and like many here I watched the sterilized version of the first gulf war unfold on television when I was 11. I played with GI Joe as a kid and watched what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo and I saw our military as a tool being used to stop genocide and to make the world a better place. As a naive 17-year-old kid, I enlisted the Army believing my service would make the world a better and safer place and fully believing that we had learned our lessons from Vietnam. There is a lot more to my own personal journey that this, but I found myself serving as an Infantry Platoon Leader in Iraq for 13 months in 2004-2005. I saw first hand that the war on Iraq wasn’t the type of military conflict that I expected to find myself involved in. Even at the time, I didn’t think we belonged in Iraq. It wasn’t my intent to slaughter civilians and, despite me not believing that the war was justified, I did my best to limit civilian casualties and to work on improving the conditions for the Iraqi people. For the most part, the officers and NCO’s I worked with generally had a similar mindset as myself. We weren’t bloodthirsty killers let hellbent on ravaging the Middle East. The majority of civilians back in the states might have wanted that, but I sure as hell didn’t. After all, I believe bush had almost a 90% approval rating immediately before the invasion of Iraq and, if I’m not mistaken, about 70% of Americans supported the invasion in march of 2003.