The gates of hell are open in Iraq.

’The gates of hell are open in Iraq”-

Amr Moussa, Arab League’s Secretary General, September 2004

In the next few minutes, as you’re reading this, a mother will give birth in Fallujah. There is a 33% chance because of U.S.-used depleted uranium that the child will be born with a life-crippling birth defect, or dead; a young man will forge through piles of trash for food to feed his impoverished and displaced family. There are over 5 million displaced Iraqis, high estimates of over 1.3 million killed and an entire country with no secure future. Food, water, power, housing, education, safety, freedom of speech—all words absent from America’s “liberated Iraq.” Most of these events are rarely reported.

People often spend their entire lives fantasizing about war, or vicariously living through the proud stories of soldiers who have experienced war first hand. Often in American culture war is glorified and sold to the almost 307 million civilians in the United States without ever hearing, seeing or realizing the costly effects war has on those that survive it all the while forgetting the names of those lost in it.

I remember this day like it was yesterday. I often become queazy and physically ill when I think of it. It was at our JSS in Mushada which is North East of Baghdad. I was only 22 years old at the time and it was my second consecutive deployment to Iraq. Friends my age were in graduate school and I was in the middle of a war that I could not understand. We received a call that multiple Iraqi civilians had been killed or wounded in what I remember as an American air strike. It’s very confusing to myself how Iraq seems to all blend into one massive chaotic pile of undesirable shit in my brain. I often have difficulty pointing out dates, times and often even locations when traumatic events happened. This day, this day will forever be in my mind and wear heavily upon my soul.

After we threw our gear on, grabbed our weapons and headed out to provide medical evacuation to the wounded Iraqi civilians our stryker paused about a half mile down the road from our JSS ( joint security station. American soldiers and Iraqi police live together in a botched attempt to hand over security to the Iraqis) and came to a halt. I was in the air guard hatch of the stryker with a fellow soldier and friend Pedro Rios. We were watching people carrying a woman on a stretcher to a helicopter that hand landed about 200 meters from our location kicking up dust and rock. As the soldiers from my platoon were carrying the women one of them slipped and dropped her lifeless corpse into the dirt. It was as if time froze. Her frail, limp body had landed in the dirt of the road and dust had kicked up like smoke enveloping her lifeless body. I looked at Rios as the ramp to our vehicle had begun to lower. It was our turn to try and save a life. A small boy no older than the age of 5 years was pushed into our Stryker until another helicopter could land to evacuate him for medical attention.

The small boy had holes in his chest that were crudely attended to. I remember completely being consumed by this childs face and eyes. As i watched him struggle for breath and life I felt powerless. As the child drew his final breaths of life I wondered and still do wonder what his last thoughts were. His eyes were fixated on mine and I couldn’t find a word to say that could possibly consul this young boy. A child much like my own son. Someone who probably loved sweets, music and hated his homework like most boys his age. At this very moment in the war in Iraq I saw a face I would never forget. In the wreckage of a job well done I watched a boy die and could do nothing to help him. These are the types of stories Americans never hear about. How airstikes go wrong, mothers die, children lose their fathers and sisters and soldiers are reduced to our human factor. Empathy.

The ramp lowered and the corpse of what was once a smiling child was hauled from our vehicle. It seems the world lost two people that day. I found out later the woman who was dropped was also the boys mother. I had mixed feelings, I was broken by the loss of human life but I was almost relieved that the boys mother would never know her son was dead as she had met his same fate. I never really had an ill bone in my body for the Iraqi people. I would have happily died in Iraq if it had meant legitimate liberation for their people. I could no longer blindly look at the war as if it was something necessary or good. War in Iraq is something so abstract to civilians that at times it becomes frustrating.

For the remainder of my life on earth I will remember this boys face. The child who’s body is buried in a country I didn’t belong in. There’s something intimate about watching someone die. I wanted to help but there was nothing left to do. The last images of that boys life is of my face and I had nothing to say to him. I couldn’t say anything in Arabic, I couldn’t smile at him...how could I? His life was draining from his body before my own eyes and here I am, deployed to Iraq in the great and “noble” mission of “Liberating an oppressed people” only to find out that the United States military was the leading cause of Iraqi civilian deaths. 1.3 million Iraqis died in a similar manner. I learned something about US foreign policy that day. That that childs death may have been an accident but the war against the Iraq people was not an accident. That hundreds of thousands of children have met similar fates. That if we as soldiers remain silent and do not paint a lucid and accurate picture of what war is really like, what war means to the people in a country that it’s waged on, we may find our own children staring into the faces of other peoples children as they exit this world in a violent manner.

Americas greatest danger does not come from the lips of a small boy in a foreign place that most Americans cannot point out on a map. Americas greatest enemies are those who promote a perverted culture of death that rallies endlessly for war. I often wonder what that child would have became if not for the war in Iraq. I do not even know his name yet I see him almost every night. I don’t blame them for hating us. I hate us for not stoping the war in Iraq.

That night I could not sleep. I lay awake listening to music trying to organize my thoughts. I wondered if my friends and family at home knew what was happening in Iraq. I wondered if they even cared. I decided that I would never support a war like Iraq again.

For many Americans the wars we wage are far and foreign. We almost never think of war as an actual material condition. Our friends and loved ones we send to die or kill are always and never at the tips of our lips.