Watching the news these days is usually a fairly somber thing because it would seem that our world is falling apart. The bad news would seem to far outweigh the good that gets reported. For me personally the news lately has been way more depressing than normal. Deploying to Iraq was a life changing event for me. It has changed my perspective on life and the world in general, and while I wasn’t quite sure what it would bring at the time, I left a lot of myself there. It took its toll on me both physically and mentally, and when we left I was convinced that we had done some good, or at least we did our part to make Iraq a better place. But now as I’m following the news it feels like it was all for nothing, which is a very depressing feeling especially since many of my friends were killed in our efforts to accomplish what we did.

In December of 2011 the last of the American fighting forces were pulled out of Iraq and the second Iraq war was declared over. Whether or not it can be called a victory I suppose is debatable though I don’t personally see any possible way in which one could call it a victory and I’ll go even further to say that what is happening now was highly predictable, but apparently those in charge don’t understand the concept of fighting a war, or the mindset of the people they sent us to fight. The bad guys currently going on a rampage through Iraq are not rational people. They do not care that the United States declared an end to the war, and as I learned while in Iraq, they don’t even care who they are fighting. They have no political or national agenda. Their only goal is to create chaos and kill and torture anyone who doesn’t agree with their jaded views.

Let me explain to you a bit about the character of the people responsible for the latest Blitzkrieg through Iraq. They call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS). When I was deployed they were the group that were operating in Baquba that we had some pretty wild fights with. They are the group we were fighting the day I was wounded, and one of the things that has vividly stayed in my mind happened the same day I was injured. When I was blown up we were responding to another explosion in which an American soldier was killed and several others were injured. The bomb that detonated under that vehicle was placed just outside of a playground next to a school, and when they detonated this bomb the schoolyard was full of kids, and when we arrived there were a few dozen kids strewn about the area, some clearly dead and others horribly maimed and disfigured, but this didn’t stop them from detonating the bomb or launching an ambush while medics and soldiers tried to save whatever kids they could. We discovered mass graves filled with people who’d been murdered by these people for no other reason than they didn’t share the same twisted beliefs. We uncovered numerous shallow graves of people who had their houses invaded and been tortured and murdered and half covered in shallow holes in their back yards. We found murdered bodies in trunks of cars that smelled up entire neighborhoods. We found torture houses where people had been hung from meat hooks and put in cages in which a human body can’t fit without being bent and twisted in unnatural ways. We saw children not even ten years old murdered in broad daylight for playing soccer with their friends in the wrong neighborhoods. They would also take every opportunity to steal whatever they could find and rape as many women as possible which usually led to suicide or the women’s family killing her because she had been disgraced by having the audacity to be sexually assaulted by criminals.

These people that call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq are an extremely dangerous and sadistic people. They will never stop doing what they’re doing because they’ve somehow justified their actions as a religious mission. They do not care that we have declared the war over, and they won’t stop until they are forcibly stopped and overpowered. I only hope this happens soon, and that it’s done with someone else’s soldiers.