With the news reporting the beheading of another American citizen I’ve read a lot of news stories and heard reports about some people calling for American soldiers to be sent back into Iraq and the surrounding areas to help exterminate the people calling themselves the Islamic State. I along with everyone else in America and most of the rest of the world think these people need to be stopped, and further, there is simply no place in this world for people who commit the kinds of acts that these people do. I hear a lot of people saying that we should do to them as they do to others and do horrible things to them when they are captured, but it’s my opinion that we have to look at the bigger picture. It’s not as easy as just capturing them and cutting their heads off, that is not how you solve this problem and would only make it worse.

My biggest concern with that is that it’s very easy to sit at your kitchen table or at the coffee shop and say how we should capture these people and cut off their heads. It’s another thing completely to look at a living breathing human being, regardless of what crimes they’ve committed and do something like that to a defenseless person. And once they are captured, they are defenseless. Guilty as hell, but defenseless. And who is going to be cutting off the bad guy’s heads, the soldiers? I wouldn’t have done that when I was a soldier, and I was fighting these people every day. I have never cut off an enemy fighter’s head, but I have killed a number of them. There is no great sense of satisfaction or accomplishment that comes after you kill a bad guy. It’s not like TV or movies where you triumphantly win after you kill somebody. In reality after you kill a bad guy you don’t get to be done. You get to be there and see a dead or dying person spurting blood and laying in a puddle of their own blood and waste. I wouldn’t cut off another human beings head regardless of who they were, and because of that I could never ask the same of someone else. And just as important as that, it wouldn’t solve our problems anyway.

It’s a horrendous thing to see a human being be decapitated, and unfortunately I saw a lot of them. During my deployment I was a machine gunner which meant I was part of a squad that moved with the platoon leader. The platoon leader always had with him a dossier on high value targets that were on the wanted list and in our area. More times than I’d care to remember these people were killed because they were high profile people that put the rest of the group at risk so it was easier to kill them for the bad guys then to risk being caught because of them. On several occasions we’d go to the city morgue and have to identify their bodies, and it’s not very pleasant to walk into a hot, smelly, and overcrowded morgue and find a body with its removed head sitting on its chest and having to pick up the head to try to identify it. When we would do a raid and capture one of these targets a surprising amount of them had pictures and videos of Iraqi Police or citizens having their heads cut off.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, ISIS needs to be stopped, but looking at the bigger picture it can’t be solved by us. As long as American resources and American soldiers are being used to combat them, we are strengthening their resolve to fight. The terrible things they are doing are aimed directly at us and as long as we’re the only ones fighting back they’re able to recruit more and more people to help them. If we kill one, two more will join in his place. Even if we killed every last one of them, the ideals of ISIS are still out there and it’s only a matter of time before it pops up again. The way to solve this is for other people in that region to fight against them, and I believe they want to, but I would guess everyone is gun shy about going at it alone since working together is not a strong suit of the Middle East, and getting support and help in that region hasn’t worked for us either.