Something a friend shared with me.....

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It snuck up on me this year, dogs and cats have kept me busy as they are wont to do, until suddenly I looked up and here it is, four years ago today, and the news is full of replays. CNN showed the footage from Shock and Awe Night for the ten thousandth time, and for the ten thousandth time I marked each missile I knew for mine as it exploded in the midnight streets of Baghdad.

For those of you who are tuning in late, on this day four years ago I was onboard the USS Higgins (DDG 76) in the Northern Arabian Gulf, and launched more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles for the infamous Shock and Awe Night that failed to shock or awe anyone in particular. I launched a couple dozen more over the first six weeks of the war, until finally our ship left for Singapore and a crew swap. i

I came home on an airplane the day President Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq, which was a big laugh even then. Since then, my personal year has revolved towards and away from the 19th of March. It is my own Ash Wednesday, a Yom Kippur that I mark with no one but myself. It is Not Done in military circles to speak of regretting your part in a war, and feels disloyal besides. I know, I'm brainwashed. It happens.

Looking back, this spring has been full of Iraq stories, it seems. Insurgents using first IEDs, then shaped charges supposedly imported from Iran, and the latest, chlorine bombs. We escalate, they escalate. We learn to counter the IEDs, they produce shaped charges and chemical weapons. Does anyone still believe this is winnable under the definition the neo-cons originally gave us, that of turning Iraq into a democratic paradise, a beacon on the hill for the Islamic countries around it? At this point, ''winnable'' means ''getting out of there without leaving more of a mess than we have right now.'' According to a story I heard on NPR before switching off the radio and turning on a CD, 51% of the Iraqi public now finds violence against Americans acceptable. I'm not surprised. Under Saddam Hussein, they had no political freedoms but they had electricity, clean water, their children could go to school and they could find medical care.

We've given them civil rights and political freedoms, but what does that mean in a country where the economy is in shambles and violence racks any neighborhood that isn't patrolled on a minute to minute basis by one militia or another? And our military, what can I say? The USMC has given up any pretense of normal rotations and put out a message stating that if you haven't been to Iraq yet, you're going.

The Army lies to itself and its soldiers and the public, but puts troops on a punishing rotation for deployment that doesn't allow time for rest and training between stints in the war zone. The Navy and Air Force have been forced to reduce their manpower in order to funnel more money to the burgeoning ground forces, resulting in deployments and operations schedules so unpredictable that retention is becoming an issue.

I am not overwhelmingly depressed this year, thanks be to God for small mercies that I probably don't deserve. I am mournful, I am contemplative. I wish for forgiveness from myself, I wish I could feel right with God again, but these things may take a while and for the most part, I am at peace. Less than a year from now I will finally take off my uniform for the last time, and be out of it all for good. Next year on the 19th of March, I can go to one of the protests marking the anniversary of the start of the war, and not feel like a damned hypocrite or a spy

. Next year when I renew my membership in Iraq Veterans Against the War, I will check the box that says ''I am willing to speak publicly'' and if they ask me to speak, I will go, and I will tell the audience about how all members of the military carry wounds and scars and scabs on the soul, not just the ground forces. I will speak of the choices you make, the things you do to stay out of prison and earn that honorable discharge and the benefits that come with it. I will speak of the nights I have woken up in a cold sweat, clutching a worried dog like a lifeline, with nightmares of the people I have killed arriving, one by one, at my front door in a line that stretches longer than I like to admit. I am angry, more than anything else.

If, for instance, Hilary Clinton does not cough up the words ''it was a mistake'' in reference to her vote in favor of giving Bush the power to invade Iraq, I will not vote for her if she is the last goddamned Democrat on earth. Senator Clinton, don't you dare try to campaign on an anti-war platform without those words. You voted in favor when it was expedient, and now that it's expedient to go the other way, you've gone. Fuck off. I hope like hell Mr. Obama gets that nomination.

I wonder, sometimes, why I ended up like this and other people on my Tomahawk team did not. Firing Tomahawks is a triumph of military engineering, designed to kill a maximum number of the enemy while causing the least amount of potential trauma to the firing team. It includes any number of factors that will make it easier for a person to kill, including the extremely long range of the weapon (more than a thousand nautical miles, or 1200 statute miles), the shared responsibility (an average Tomahawk team includes two officers, a plotter, two engagement planners, and two launch controllers), and lack of decision-making (targets are selected for you by the regional command).

All of these factors should have buffered all of us, kept us safe from accepting personal responsibility for our choices. Why did my brainwashing, so firm in other matters, fail me when I most needed it? I mean, I complusively check to make sure the buttons on my shirt, the buckle of my belt, and the overlap of the zipper on my pants are neatly lined up throughout the day. My military bearing is rather impeccable when I'm in uniform, if I do say so myself. Bark at me in an authoritative voice and I am liable to follow the order first and think about it later. All the basics are there, but somehow the higher functions didn't install. DOS works, but the Windows-level brainwashing just failed to take, and while on the one hand I'm proud of my ability to retain some level of independent thought, on the other hand entirely I wish like hell I could just buy into the party line and not ... not think, not wonder, not accept that I made the choice to kill rather than to go to prison, even though I thought in 2003 that our reasons for going to war were complete rampaging bullshit dressed up like truth and sent out to walk the halls of the UN.

And yet, the brainwashing was enough to get me to move up a set of orders so that I could participate. Why did it fail to protect me afterward?

It's a different 19th of March this year, at least, and for that I am grateful. This afternoon I played in the sunshine with my dogs, and came in and snuggled the kitties in a sunbeam in the library. I must pause, periodically, in my typing to massage the ears of a grey dog who keeps shoving her head in my lap. I have explained to her that I am a mass murderer in the service of the government. She doesn't much care and wants to know if more ear rubbing will be forthcoming.

She doesn't understand why her doomed attempt to be a lap dog made me cry a little today. But maybe this is where being ok starts: with the two creatures in this world who will forgive me any human failing at all. I'm not right with myself and I'm not right with God, yet, but I am right with Dog and that's a start, isn't it?

I thought it was very moving and wanted to share it with you.