It has been eight years since I left for Marine Corps boot camp. Although I am proud of those I served with and thankful for the lasting friends I made, I am ashamed to have participated in the Iraq war. For me the conflict has become nothing but a blatant example of political aggression and imperialism. It accomplished nothing and achieved nothing. There was no political right to wage it and no moral superiority to justify it.

As for my motivations, they were largely absent of political beliefs. Instead, from an early age I wanted to go to war. As a phenomenon, war is something that still attracts me. War is a primordial demonstration of lived experience, life in the moment, as both crisis and wonder. It is lived irony.

But the most gratifying irony, is knowing, that, despite being sent to Iraq as a representative of a government that assumed it had a culture and democracy worth spreading, Arab and Muslim culture ended up influencing me more than I influenced it. I find consolation in knowing I was humbled by a culture distinct from my own, and grateful to have walked along the banks of the Euphrates river, in the land often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization.