My confession....I was once Hillary or Bust...

[Victor_c3]

84. Speaking of hatred and vitriol for a fellow human....

You have no idea what was unleashed in Iraq and that was facilitated by her. John Kerry and Joe Biden are just as culpable and they are also in hig level positions but they aren't the ones running president, are they? Actually, they aren't even running for public office - the same goes for bush and his buddy. This thread had nothing to do with them to begin with. The OP was clearly about Hillary Clinton. I fail to understand how calling out a female on the same thing I call out a male for is misogyny.

If hate and vitriol is what I'm spewing, then what did people like Hillary Clinton enable to be done to the people of Iraq? It must be nice to be able kind of waive your hands at the whole Iraq mess and point out that it was "so last decade" and that it should reinterpreted or forgotten. The people of Iraq or those who have served and actually were on the ground and participated first hand in the violence aren't so fortunate.

Just the day-in-day-out routine patrols were filled with one thing after another. My battalion (and as far as I could tell my brigade) saw contact about once every 12-14 days. Much of the time it was just a few shots fired or a half-assed IED incident in which things were over before we even realized they started but responding to and seeing the Iraqi on Iraqi violence was crazy. These are some of the larger incidents I remembered, but they just never stopped. A group of gunmen intercept and stop a bus full (48 people) of new Iraqi army recruits and slaughters then all on the side of the road and I get to deal with the cleanup. A car bomb blows up at an ING checkpoint and kills 10 people (and we're stuck filling up garbage bags with the pieces). Three police stations in our area are simultaneously raided by militants, nearly every officer is killed and the buildings are blown up with explosives (and I get to be the first responder to the scene). A group of 20 kids are playing soccer and a carful of militants shoot them all. A ING (Iraqi national guard) checkpoint in our sector is raided during prayer time / shift change and 13 Iraqi army members are slaughtered in cold blood - some of them didn't even move from their prayer position while they had their throats slit. A series of car bombs blow up in the middle of the town that was central to my area of operations and kills more than 50 - we couldn't even figure out exactly how many people were killed. Those are just the stand-out events that I responded to and I'm not mentioning the combat that I was actually involved in. Seeing what people can do to each other is one thing and doing it to people yourself is something totally else.

Do you have any idea what it is like to fire a weapon at a fellow human being and watch them fall in your sights? The democratic nominee doesn't. It's one thing to see it from a number of meters away, but then you get to assess the casualties after the firefight and see precisely what you did. That is hate and vitrol. What a bullet does to a head (the way even a shot above the face caves in and squishes their face or the distinct metallic smell of brains) is hate and vitrol. Finding a kid someone in the platoon you led shot and responding to his frothing sucking chest wound as you wait until your medic is done working on another casualty on is hate and vitrol. Coming "home" from a year of hell in Iraq and being told that you did a good job and being thanked for your service - the very things you are filled with shame and guilt for doing - is hate and vitrol.

I joined the army as stupid and naive kid. I was 17 in 1997 and my parents had to even sign a waiver for me to join. I foolishly thought that our military would be a part of a force to make the world a better place. I was eager to fight to protect our nation and to save people less fortunate than us from exactly the sorts of violence I was sent to perpetrate. Our politicians and government manipulated and betrayed me and people like me. Anyone who had anything to do with allowing that war to happen is complicit. What they did is hate and vitrol.

It's insulting to see that the very people who allowed the war to happen aren't nearly as ladened with the guilt and remorse a soldier who served in that war deals with. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kerry, et al get to deal with the occasional nuisance their support for the war has brought to their political careers - but at least they got careers. Do you have any idea what it is like to live day-to-day realizing that the only reason it matters that you stay alive is so your wife and kids can continue to subsist on you disability benefits? That is hate and vitrol. As I mentioned above I'm 36 years old and o had a hell of a lot of potential ahead of me when I was 24 and in Iraq. The war that was enabled by our politicians took that from me. What do I get to be now? I'm shaking wreck of a person. I can't even take care of most of the things a normal person can do for themselves. Going shopping in a big store like Kohls or Target? That is a sight worth seeing. Trying conduct a transaction with the guy behind the cash register and shaking and fumbling with my words like I'm retarded in front of my kids is humiliating and embarrassing. Having a complete meltdown in public after your 7 year old daughter asks you "what's the problem? You're only shopping. It's not that hard." Is hate and vitrol. On Father's Day a few weeks back after receiving a slew of loving cards and gifts from your kids you realize that you aren't anything like a father should be is hate and vitrol. Drugging yourself with handfuls of your pills and alcohol so that you pass out in the basement instead of cutting the shit out of your wrists or going for your own neck this time in the house with your kids in it is hate and vitrol. Getting locked up in the psych ward - yet again while your family struggles to understand what is happening to you and wondering why you can't just get beyond something that happened more than a decade ago is hate and vitrol. Fearing the moment that your 5 and 7 year old daughters realize that your military service specifically involved you killing people and then realizing that you are a monster is hate and vitrol.

The hate and vitrol our politicians bestowed on people like me is unfathomable by those who haven't experienced it. Letting anyone who enabled that war to happen to not have be held accountable to the fullest extent possible is immoral and a huge disservice to the Iraqis that were murdered over there, the dead and wounded I served with, and all veterans.

I know this is the internet and you never know who you are dealing with or if they are full of it, but I can (and have in the past) posted the citations I've received which show exactly who I am, the unit I served with, and the dates I was there. If you want, I'll share it here.