I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent individual. I try to learn new things and understand the world around me. Some might say that causes me to not pay attention to what’s going on around me, but thats neither here nor there. I am also smart enough to know that I do not know everything. There are things that happen throughout life that are just too complex for people to understand, not for lack of trying. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about most of these questions but one has remained with me since my time in the military and my deployment to Iraq. The question that I’ve thought more and more about has to do with ethics and morality. Can someone act and consider themselves moral if they are participating in an immoral action?

I should mention that while deployed with an infantry unit there was always the option of acting immorally. It would have been extremely easy to steal something from someone, or shoot somebody that didn’t deserve it and get away with it. I could have done it every day, but because I have a conscience and because I hold myself to a high moral code I did not do this, nor did the guys I served with. During my deployment I did shoot and kill a number of people, but I can say with 100% certainty that I never once intentionally shot and killed an individual who wasn’t an enemy combatant. Had I done so I really don’t think I could look myself in the eye ever again.

The older I get the more I think about the bigger picture, and less about myself. I’ve come to realize that there is a whole lot more to the world than just me and what’s happening in my life, and as much as people don’t like to think like this. But should I meet my untimely end tomorrow the world would keep right on spinning without me in it. It’s this line of thinking that has caused me to wonder about the overall morality of the entire war in Iraq. I know that our objective was to find and eliminate the bad guys that were making life difficult for the people that lived there, but at what cost? The initial reason for the invasion of Iraq was to find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Well there were none, so then our mission became to find and kill the bad guys who were largely inactive until we showed up in the first place. I wonder why that responsibility fell on us? There is most definitely no shortage of other places in the world where people are killing each other, so why there? I cannot even begin to count the number of buildings that were leveled by bombs, or the number of people we killed. An unpleasant reality of war is that there is always going to be collateral damage. Bombs are accurate, but their explosions do not make the distinction of good guys and bad guys. When I shot at a bad guy and missed, that bullet didn’t just stop and fall to the ground. It kept right on going until it hit something that made it stop and it would be unrealistic for me to think that I didn’t at some point hit somebody with a stray bullet.

I’m not a conscientious objector, nor would I consider myself to be anti-war, but when I think of the bigger picture I can’t help but think about the destruction we caused compared to the good things we did. We were very efficient at finding and eliminating bad guys who had made it their mission to kill people that they disagreed with, but again, at what price? If the whole situation was immoral, then does me acting morally make any difference at all?