Emily Yates, Peak to Peak. One of the many things they don’t tell you when you join the Army is that as far as your brain is concerned, you will never get to not be a soldier again. Even if it’s been years since you got out, they don’t tell you there’s a strong possibility you will reach a point in your life when you watch The Big Lebowski and find yourself relating much less to the Dude and much more to Walter. Especially if you get home from your second Iraq deployment thoroughly convinced that your friends are dying inside and outside the combat zone explicitly for the benefit of a few big bank accounts. You come to anticipate the inevitable moment in a conversation when a friend exasperatedly hits you with, “Dammit, not everything has to be about Iraq!” Because you have a feeling everything kind of is about Iraq. And this makes you the least fun person at all the parties.

I enlisted in 2002, and became more certain with every year both in and out of the Army that my “service” served no one but the people who held the purse and puppet strings. My job title, “public affairs specialist,” was interchangeable with “print journalist” in the military. I was trained to make public relations look like news – cute, coming from a real estate firm (“Breaking News! Local Bungalow Absolutely Adorable!”) but coming from the most powerful military in the world, it’s just propaganda. As long I believed I was one of the Good Guys, there was nothing morally objectionable about that – helping the team! fighting the terrorists! – but once the veneer of heroism was scratched, conscience began to seep in. 

I saw children living in squalor in Baghdad because we had bombed the entire city, infrastructure and all, without rebuilding it. We were clearly in Iraq for many reasons, but none of them looked like “liberation.” By the time the military’s stop-loss policy went into effect, forcing many of us to deploy again who were scheduled to get out of the Army, there was no end to the war in sight. Nearly every soldier had deployed at least once or twice or more, coming home more physically and mentally changed every time, their disposable bodies often transformed into flag-draped caskets. We weren’t being liberated, either. If this was how we soldiers were treated, I mused, how could there be compassion for the plight of the Iraqis?

When I finally got my honorable discharge, I did my damnedest to become a civilian. I put on flowy skirts and rope sandals and went out looking for the weirdos in the world, but everywhere I went, the topic would always come up, “What do you do?” and all I could say was, “Uh, I just got out of the Army.” The other person’s response would always be either incredulous (“You don’t look like you were in the military!”) or inquisitive (“So what was that like?”) or oblivious (“But you didn’t have to, like, shoot a gun, did you?”) and after countless conversations, I realized there was no avoiding the fact that whether I liked it or not (usually “or not”), it was more difficult to avoid the topic than to embrace it. After six years as a soldier, I had no idea who else I was.

So I used the college money I’d been promised in my enlistment contract to learn about the history and politics of the Middle East and, specifically, Iraq. What I discovered was that my friends were killed there because the West won’t rest until it controls the Middle East. Saddam Hussein stubbornly wouldn’t open up his oil fields to American corporations. The U.S. needed a compliant government in Iraq to maintain a strategic presence there. The more I learned, the clearer it became to me that my job in the military – to help control the narrative of the war – which required restricting media access to soldiers, was contributing to the deception of every American back home about the way their taxes were being spent. Before I realized it, I actually had found a way to connect everything to Iraq.

But unlike poor Walter Sobchak, for me speaking out against the pain and suffering that the United States military causes both at home and abroad has been a source of healing. It helps me reconcile my veteran self with the self that wonders every day what it would have been like to go through life without being trained to kill. It gives me a chance to share the truth I’ve learned, and to make right some of the wrongs I’ve written. It connects me with like-minded fellow veterans in organizations like About Face (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War) and Veterans for Peace. It reminds me that even though 22 veterans a day kill themselves, I can’t be one of them – there’s too much work yet to do.

I enlisted because I needed an education and job training. I wanted to explore. After all, they say, “Join the Army! See the world!” But what they don’t say is once you do, you can never unsee it.

(Originally published in the November 7, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)