They sent us to occupy and kill people who did no wrong.
They sent us with outdated vehicles, unsuited to the region, and without body armor. We depended on our families and charities to buy or donate protective gear.
They had us focused on nonsensical areas while the infrastructure went unprotected.
The Iraqi army surrendered, one of the only stable realms of employment for a great many good young men just wanting to support their families, like us, and they turned them away with no job, no hope, and only resentment.
They fired the general Shinseki, who tried to tell those assholes Cheney and Rumsfeld that we needed more like 600,000 personnel to provide security and stability to even give a post Saddam Iraq a slim chance of moving on without immediately deteriorating into sectarian violence.
They did not understand that the Shiite groups were all too familiar with our worthless promises after we left them twisting in the wind 20 years prior. Rise up against the Baathist Sunni, we told them, only to let them be slaughtered.
Our 'shock and awe' broke power plants, water treatment facilities, hospitals, etc, only to rebuild them far too slowly, at absurd profiteering costs.
Most of us, certainly at the state and command levels, never bothered to understand the history of the country, and how it was artificially drawn from imperial maps to be a self-destructive mess in order to be less capable of resisting outside manipulation.
The boredom. The grime. The heat. The smell of dead animals and burning vehicles. The terrible rations. The vomelette. The faulty water supplies. The men who wore no unit markings. The overriding fear and unease, like a white noise that colorlessly drones the entire time until it becomes part of you. The damage we did to them, to ourselves. Irrecoverable, shattering experiences. Faces that show up in crowds or dreams, the witnessed and the witnesses to the absurd death carnival that was sold like a fast food advertisement on the news. And we were relatively lucky, as wars and warriors go. This stupidity is as old as mankind, and usually even more grim. Individual days with 30,000, 50,000 dead. Individual battles where millions perished in tiny areas. Counties who lost so many people that it's beyond comprehension.
War games, are not realistic. We shouldn't pretend that they are, and aiming for such is questionable, certainly claiming that the experience is even remotely comparable is a sad joke.
For anyone who hasn't read Bill Mauldlin's famous 'go dig a hole' reality check, please do so.
