An essay about my opinion of my deployment everyone was required to submit for the battalion newsletter.

I joined the Army for very selfish reasons. Besides needing an income, putting my life in danger to see what it was like seemed like a learning experience. I might even discover what the Middle Eastern bogeyman truly is, this political piñata so different from the "Krauts" and "Japs" of World War II yet hated so similiarly. It is sadistically amusing to me how a war on a word can be fought with bullets, bombs, and, ultimately, itself. This war at its core is not about oil, freedom, or mutually assured destruction; it is an explosion of huge cultural tension. This war was unneccessary but inevitable, I think more appropriately called the War of Terror.

A year ago I could not bear to make eye contact with a passing man, dark skinned and wearing a turban. Everything I knew about the war came from the media. Siding with the left did not diminish the haunting of 9/11, very real and ever present. Meeting security-cleared Iraqis at the fuel point and watching them from the guard towers, I see human beings. We never exchange more than a few words, but everywhere they wave and smile to us; whether out of respect or a sense of self-preservation, life must go on for these people despite being in the middle of a warzone.