Anniversary

Standing Over the Tigris River in 2005

Ten years ago today the campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from his regime began in Iraq.

I was just a naive Captain at the time in an Army Reserve Drill Sergeant unit in Ithaca, NY.   The thought of war, for me, was a far off notion.  I used to joke that "the Soviets would need to be landing on the Jersey shore before they mobilized my unit, and even then we might still give them New Jersey."  That's how insignificant my old unit was to a "deployment".

Ten years ago I hadn't even met Lisa yet. 

I can't remember what was going on in my life the night the war began in Iraq.  I am not even sure I watched on TV - although I must have at some point.  I am sure I watched with interested detachment.  Little did I know I would be in some of the same bombed buildings I saw on TV 18 months later.

There are a lot of remembrances today.

The war changed me.  And not for the worse, in my own opinion, sorry to say.  The war changed a lot of people's lives, and many of those lives - unlike me - were changed in horrible ways. 

There is no epiphany all these years later.  If you went to Iraq you have to draw your own conclusion as to what it all meant.  If you had a loved one in Iraq you too have to draw your own conclusions.  For those of us who served and those who loved and supported us Iraq is inextricably part of our past, present, and future.

It is what is it and will forever defy a simple explanation.