I remember the first day I entered Iraq when I was 19. I was in the infantry, it was about 127 degrees out, I had actually drank TOO MUCH water that day (not knowing you could) out of fear I’d be dehydrated, and the plane we were in was nosediving through Baghdad. Strapped in facing one of the port holes on the plane I remember only being able to see palm trees and some clay houses come screaming by randomly and we had no idea what was going on.
“F#@+#-$ great! We haven’t even landed and I’m not going to make it home!” Upon landing, I became privy to the fact that we were taking small-arms fire on our way in and had to dodge the bullets and this was normal…oooooookie dokie, “let’s unload our gear!” I heard Sgt. Thomas shout!
Then, like a ton of bricks it hit me, and I woke up on a cot with an IV on me. I’d flushed all the electrolytes out of my body and due to everything going on and adrenaline I passed out momentarily. All good and well, ‘cuz I didn’t have to unload a thing. Lol
Move forward a few days after acclimating and we had to go get briefed from our Master Sgt and get assigned to our duties. *BOOM* We all hit the deck. Master Sgt chuckled because he had been there about three months already and was used to it. I remember him saying “Welcome to Iraq”. (The chaplains assistant’0s Humvee had just taken a mortar about 70 meters away.)
I was assigned the .50 Cal[iber machine gun] on a QRF team (Quick Reaction Force) and our job was to protect the camp. When we took fire (mortars, rockets, or small arms, which was a multiple times daily thing) the sirens went off and everyone on base had to go to concrete barriers for protection, however, I had 5 minutes to be back with my team and loaded up to be out looking for the bastards trying to kill us.
“If you see all black with a gold or green headband you don’t ask permission or report! You are to shoot on sight!” This would be my orders daily. It was months and after more altercations than I could count, still no one wearing all black with headband had been seen. And then…there it was. All black, green headband, crawling in the grass about 100 meters away and downhill. Point the .50 Cal “I got all black and green headband Sgt!”…”what are you telling me for? Fire that fucking weapon!” I didn’t….Something wasn’t right. “DUBEAU!!! WTF ARE YOU DOING GOD? DAMMIT FIRE?!?!!” I didn’t….I’d learned to listen to my gut over there and it was holding me back. Thank God it did, and I listened because it was a 12-yr-old boy playing army in his backyard. That’s the type of shit that still keeps me up at night.
Since coming home, we have lost more of our guys to suicide than we did overseas.
I’ve watched families and marriages fall apart, including my own, drug addictions kill (almost me too at one point), as well as families or marriages not have the chance to because they never made it home. The one leader I had that was a father figure to me, we’ll call him Captain AwesomePants, actually took his life on the front driveway of his house only a week after we had been home and I just had dinner with him and his wife and two daughters.
I still am troubled by it.
When it’s not a movie or a video game anymore, when you can still smell the air in your dreams and avoid sleep at all costs so you don’t have to return to your most unwanted memories, when there are no restarts or redo’s…just “game overs” [you are killed] …and when you realize that the enemy is the same as you, in that they have a family and a job and a life, and they are working hard to keep their own best interests in mind and just defending their backyards like we all would because they don’t wanna be harassed going to work…it becomes a different beast all together.
(Not to say there weren’t bad guys…because there were…just not like you’d think. In fact, I never faced an enemy once in their uniform and was literally shot at every single day. 22 times was the most mortars fired in one day).
You haven’t missed out on anything that you will regret, and you haven’t avoided something that will make you more of a man at the end of the day. You actually just safely avoided a pot hole on the road or a cliff at a steep turn that you were fortunate enough to miss and in my opinion you should smile, shake it off and just be grateful it was a close call but nothing that drastically affected or altered your life.
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This is not how it was in our Wehrmacht. We were fighting the jews, not fighting FOR them.
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.https://johndenugent.com/wp-content/uploads/wehrmacht-1940-12-years-not-a-slave-triumph-parade.mp4
“Wir waren geboren um zu leben” — we were born to really LIVE!
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