Reflecting at Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier was a painful week for me. Now, I've never been ashamed of anything that I did in Iraq. I wasn't happy with some of it, but I wasn't ashamed of it; I did the best that I could in the situations that I got dropped into. There are times that I still feel dirty about, but occupying a country is a dirty job and a lot of times there's no good way to do it. I spent a lot of time thinking about those things when I was in Iraq, but generally it was kind of an AAR because those kooky Iraqis came up with some really odd ways of behaving. You couldn't predict much.

An AAR is a very focused way of looking back and it's great for helping you prepare to deal with similar situations in the future. But it's not reflecting. I never actually looked at what I had done through anything but the narrow lens of a soldier in an occupied land and an NCO with a mission to perform and soldiers' lives at stake. Then I went to Winter Soldier.

Three years after I got home and settled back into civilian life, I finally looked at my time in Iraq from a perspective that didn't have to get out there tomorrow to do it all over again. I was sitting in the hearing room watching other veterans tell their stories of pain, for the first time feeling my own. I don't regret anything I did, but that doesn't mean that it was good.

I was an emotional wreck while I was at Winter Soldier and for a couple of days afterward. I drank way too much and cried a lot. Sure it hurt, but it was a good hurt and it was something that I didn't even know that I needed to do. I just wonder if it would have been easier if I had gone through it a few years ago.

It's a great system the military's got for mental health- nobody needs to sit down and talk with somebody about what they've seen and done unless they check off "I'm going to kill myself and/or my wife" on a questionnaire as part of redeployment. Of course, from what I read they aren't going to actually get any treatment even if they do check it off. But everyone supports the troops, right?