It Better Be Worth It

A non-expert opinion on Iran, Israel, and America

As I write this, US naval ships are steaming towards the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf as Israeli missiles and air strikes pummel Iranian military infrastructure and nuclear targets. The argument presented to the world is that Iran, on the threshold of finally developing nuclear weapons after pursuing them for decades, had to be prevented, militarily, as diplomacy had failed. For the state of Israel, which has heard the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, call Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be destroyed, striking now may be in their strategic interest.

I’m not going to argue the geopolitical wisdom of assisting an Israeli attack, or even becoming directly involved with attacks on Iran’s Fordow nuclear labs, buried below 90 meters of rock. I am not an expert on nuclear weapons, proliferation, or geopolitics. I am biased towards action, yet jaded by my wartime experience in Iraq, another country with supposed WMD’s in which 4492 Americans died. But as I said, I am not an expert.

What I am an expert on, alongside tens of thousands of my fellow American combat veterans, are the irreparable, profound, and permanent ways in which going to war, in my case three times (for some of my generation it was upwards of a dozen), has affected my life, which may not be fully representative, but I hope is illustrative. And, to be honest, I have had it easy compared to some. I don’t have nightmares, I don’t have a startle response, I don’t have suicidality, I can hold a job.

What I do have are memories.

I remember a bagpiper in Army camouflage walking north along the Bagram tarmac playing “Scotland the Brave” as we loaded American caskets onto a C-17 transport, and the music fading. I remember the time I saw an American die from a gunshot wound in a dimly lit stairwell. I remember bodies smoking in the street after an IED blast. I remember an Iridium satellite phone, covered in dried blood from a man who would later be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously. I remember months of boredom, of feeling that the world and life were passing me by. I remember funerals in Arlington, I remember writing letters for children of my dead friends to open one day, to hear what their father was like. I remember some of our best, back when they were alive, and I grieve all of the good that should have come from them that will never be. And I remember what it feels like to kill someone.

This is what we are asking of those we send to war. Not the military of parades and salutes and flyovers to a 100-decibel Kenny Loggins riff. It’s the military of boredom and dirt and tinnitus and carrying lifeless bodies to a waiting CASEVAC. It’s a military of forever asking yourself why, when it mattered, you made the choices you did?

I’m not an expert on the Persian Gulf or counterproliferation (and neither are many ex-military purporting to have credibility on geopolitics, so be aware). Maybe, asking those currently in uniform to carry the weight of memories such as mine is worth it. Maybe it will prevent untold death and destruction down the line. Maybe it will save my life, or my children’s lives. Like I said, I’m not an expert in these things.

But I am an expert in realizing that the young men and women in uniform will head off to do those things if the word is given. Because we did, not so long ago. And if our nation is going to cash that check, it better be worth it.

Maybe it is. I hope so.