Being in combat is a funny thing; at least it was for me when I look back. I think I have always been a fairly even keeled guy, when things go bad I don’t freak out and when things go good I don’t react much differently. But when someone starts shooting at you and there are bullets hitting the ground or building around you, or you can hear them snapping as they fly past you, some strange things can go through your head. When that shooting results in your friends being shot and killed a whole new set of emotions goes through your head. I’ve written before about an incident in which one of my good friends was killed very near to me, and it was one of the few times that I was so completely consumed with so much anger and adrenaline that I abandoned my better judgment and became completely focused on killing the person who shot him and anyone around him and nothing else, not even my own well-being. And then if I could, I wanted to kill them again.

When you’re in the military and you’re sent into harm’s way you always hear words like mission focus, and liberating the people in your area and other phrases that talk about the bigger picture. The reality is, at least in my opinion, is that none of that crap mattered one bit to us. What was important to me was my buddies around me. Our overall mission may have been to go to a certain place and face off against a certain enemy to make the city a safer place, but that was trivial because while the mission was to go to a certain place, the motivation behind it was not to make Iraq a safer place, it was to take care of each other while we went to wherever we were going. As a machine gunner the guys depended on me to be accurate and effective when under fire because I could deliver a lot of fire power in a short amount of time which allowed them to move forward in a fight. Because of the equipment I carried with me I couldn’t move very fast so in the initial moments of an ambush I very much depended on them to cover me until I could get set up and return fire. Protecting each other and taking advantage of the opportunities to eliminate or capture the people trying to kill us is something we were very good at and something we never passed up.

This recent prisoner exchange for our soldier that has been held captive for a number of years is something that baffles me and most certainly something that I do not agree with. The very reason we are fighting in Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq was to get rid of an enemy that is so filled with hatred for us as Americans that they’ve actually shown us that they are willing to kill themselves just for an opportunity to kill some Americans. These are extremely dangerous people and there is useful purpose for people like that on this earth. I also feel like it completely contradicts what we have been sent to these places to do in the first place. Those men didn’t surrender, they were captured during missions in which fighting took place, and it’s entirely possible that American soldiers died in efforts to capture them and now we’ve let them go. Not only is that a big slap in the face to the soldiers who risked their lives to capture them, but we’ll most certainly have to deal with them again when they return to the fight and pick up where they left off.