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Week 8 Kaiser

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This is Week 8 journal entry from Zachary Kaiser, who is a student reporter for the War: Through Their Eyes, Vol. 3, Warriors & Students multimedia project.
Week 8 Kaiser

This is a photo of an Iraqi man and his son.

I get frustrated most when I think back on the war now because we only discuss us.

This week was the ten year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Our class had to read some blogs from veterans talking about the war. They made me angry.

The biggest thing I deal with now, after spending almost two years in Iraq, is this constant feeling that I wasted my time. I read the news and hear about Shiite and Sunni conflict and realize we left them naked.

I used to think we need to leave and let them figure this out, we couldn’t prop them up forever. The day the last soldier left, there was a massive attack in Baghdad. That didn’t take long. A few weeks later, their vice president was accused of committing acts of terror. Their VP? Come on.

What I am getting to is that we helped people over there. We did something. There are Iraqis that would attest to this. I know it. But reading these stories, if I didn’t know any better, I would swear we went there to messed up a generation of young people through PTSD and amputations. We did something there, but you would never know. You don’t hear the stories about how our unit captured a man who stole a family’s car. You don’t hear about British EOD removing hundreds, maybe thousands, of unexploded mines, mortars and rockets that would have maimed, maybe killed small children. You don’t hear about our medic who patched up Iraqi citizens after a freak bus accident. How many lives have been lost in the Iraq War? How many have been saved?

The story is always the same. I am like this now, fill in the blank. I just want to know we accomplished something.

 

 Zachary Kaiser Weekly Journals

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