I guess you could say I’m a fairly curious person by nature. I don’t really have a lot of interest in what most other people think about any given topic because I like to figure things out myself and form my own opinions about things. Right now the world is a pretty tumultuous place. There are different conflicts going on throughout the world for various different reasons. This is nothing new as violence has been a means of solving problems for as long as mankind has been on this earth. As a curious person I wonder what makes people that way. People like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, or more recently people like Saddam Hussein.

I was in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, and I was stationed in Baghdad in December of 2006 when Saddam Hussein was executed. The day that he was executed there were no patrols or missions and I would assume that it’s because it was just best to stay out of it and let the Iraqi’s react as they may. I’m aware that the violence taking place in Iraq today and even when I was there was not so much a product of Saddam loyalists but rather by other regional and international terrorist organizations but it all ties together for me in trying to understand the motivations and irrational thoughts that go into such violence.

I always find it fascinating to hear or read stories about World War 2 and Vietnam veterans going back to the countries they fought in meeting and talking with former adversaries from the other side of the fight. Two people who at one time were on different sides of a war, people who potentially killed the friends of the other come together after a period of time because even though they were on vastly different sides of a brutal conflict because there was a mutual respect of the determination, dedication and resilience of the other side. I have thought a lot about those situations and whether such a thing would even be possible for myself or other veterans of the current conflicts. My money is on the ‘probably not’ side of it.

Adolf Hitler was most certainly a terrible human being who is responsible for some of the worst atrocities in human history, but the average German soldier during WW2 didn’t share Hitler’s views. They were fighting for Germany, not Hitler, so when the war was over and Hitler was dead they still had a love for Germany and took pride in fighting for their country after Hitler and his unconventional views were long gone. That is not the case with Al-qaida. They are not fighting for a country, for freedom, or for their homeland. In fact, most of them have no affiliation with the country in which they were born and now identify themselves not with a location, but with a cause. Not the cause of freedom, or rights, or moral rights, but the cause of death and destruction. They don’t care where they fight or when they fight or even who they fight. Their mission is the destruction of civilization and the people who partake in it. Car bombs and large explosions don’t discriminate between enemy fighters and innocent bystanders.

I would like to one day be able to face the enemy combatants that we faced off against. I think it would be important to me to see that there is some humanity in the people we fought, but I have my doubts about that ever being a possibility. We saw mass graves, decapitated and tortured bodies, children murdered for playing in the wrong part of town. We saw entire innocent families butchered and incredible amounts of seemingly aimless aggression towards everybody that I don’t think there is any sense of humanity within those we fought. Just like previous wars, we had some good fights with them, we saw very closely the conviction and determination that they fought for their cause with, and while their cause is unthinkable and irreconcilable to me, they fought and died for it which is typically thought of as an admirable action, but in this case I cannot bring myself to think that way.