I forced myself to rationalize that another human should die. When I reflect on what it took for me to end a person’s life, I cannot recreate my mindset. Yet when you live life knowing that you’ve killed someone, it is scary. All aspects of my wars forged a brotherhood of Marines that cannot be replicated an impenetrableĬircle of riflemen fighting to live, killing for each other. For me, combat had nothing to do with America or Old Glory. Weren’t what compelled me to squeeze my trigger. The American lives lost on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, Images of the World Trade Centers and Pentagon burning that drove me to enlist were no longer on my mind. When my battalion fought in the siege of Falluja in 2004, the At first, all I felt was recoil.īut I kept looking back. I watched as he fell to the ground with one slow, steady press of my rifle’s trigger. A scrawny man with a Kalashnikov lurked toward our position in Falluja, Iraq. The first time I killed someone I was not underįire. My desire for war is something I believe I will always struggle with even though my longing for peace is much stronger. The other half despises the very thought. I’ve stolen, some of them innocent, I was jealous of him and it upsets me that I don’t fully understand why. So I knew what he meant when he said he “felt robbed.”Īnd so I understood why he went to fight alongside the peshmerga.Įven though I carry the weight of the lives Iraq and Afghanistan anxious and saddened because I hadn’t pulled my trigger – the very thing Marines are trained to do. I had spent the first months of my deployments in But he never fired his weapon and I could understand his disappointment. In 2006, Patrick deployed to Iraq’s deadliest province, Anbar, in the south. The full story of Patrick’s journey is told here.īut his story began long before he traveled to Iraq to fight a second time. Not as a Marine, but as a civilian volunteer. Patrick, honorably discharged in 2011, had returned to fight alongside the Kurds against the self-proclaimed Islamic State just weeks after our conversation. He’d just come back from patrol with the Kurdish peshmergaįorces. Patrick didn’t share his plans with me then, but it wasn’t long before he contacted me from a village near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. We didn’t speak with each other much, but he knew my wars were over. That I met a fellow Marine infantry veteran, Patrick Maxwell, last fall. And it was in the “City of Brotherly Love” Once a year the streets of Philadelphia overflow with Marines, both active duty and veterans, celebrating the Marine Corps’ birthday on Nov.
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