Goodnight Baghdad: US troops leave Iraq after 23 years

The Iraq War was already four-years-old when I walked down the ramp of a C-17 at Al Taqaddum Air Base in April 2007. The fact that I am writing these words is proof that I survived that deployment and a subsequent one to Afghanistan in 2013.

In the years since, I transitioned back into civilian life, established a new career, and saw my kids grow up and escape the nest. During nearly all of that time, there were still American troops on the ground in Iraq.

I have a son serving in the military today. He has never been to Iraq, but I can absolutely sympathize with the Iraq veterans who came home from the war only to see their sons or daughters deploy to the same war zone. Because American military service has increasingly become a family affair, there must be a quite a few Thanksgiving conversations where a father listens to his son’s Iraq stories and then retells his own adventure tales that begins with “back in my day in Iraq…”

Had anyone told me while I was dodging IEDs in the summer of 2007 that I would be asked to write a column at the age of 48 about the last American troops leaving Iraq, I would have rightly questioned what the United States was doing there. I believed at the time that we were fighting terrorists and helping to create a free Iraq. Two decades later, I have no idea why we were really fighting there.

I do know that my Marines and I survived some close calls. I also know that nearly 5,000 Americans did not survive their Iraq deployments since the 2003 invasion, along with several hundred thousand other casualties between US contractors, our allies, and the Iraqi people .

A question I wrestle with today is if I had been killed in Iraq, what purpose would my death have served? I don’t have a good answer for that question and the mere fact that the last Americans are coming home from Iraq 19 years later leads me to believe I never will. My grandfather fought in Europe during World War II. He could say that he had helped defeat totalitarianism because his war ended when he was still young. I watched people continuing to deploy to mine after I entered middle age.

At this point, I don’t really want an answer to my question. But I would like to see all that was lost in Iraq: the people who were killed, the broken lives of those who came home, the resources, and even a bit of our collective innocence transform from the waste it is today into a sacrifice. People and societies make sacrifices by relinquishing something of value for some useful purpose. The best way to turn all that was lost in Iraq into a sacrifice is by learning the right lessons from the experience and then properly apply them moving forward.

One such lesson is the limits of military action. The Iraq War began under, to be generous, questionable circumstances and then meandered through a variety of strategies that all shared the same vague goal of a stable, democratic government in Baghdad. Military power wiped out Saddam Hussein's government in a month. Then it took the military supported by all elements of national power more than two decades to get even close to that goal. Baghdad today is less one dictator but still oppressed in so many ways — economically, socially, politically . It is more pro-Iranian and sectarian, with factions that are largely glad to see us go.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran are all cautionary tales. It is hardly a novel observation to note that it is relatively easy to start a war. Ending one is another matter entirely. The United States is pretty good at starting wars. It has a pretty lousy track record at the other end. One of the best things we can do as a society for those we lost in all our recent conflicts is to avoid the messy business of concluding a war by not starting them in the first place.

During stroll through my Arlington neighborhood on Sunday, I walked around the Marine Corps War Memorial. The names and years of all the campaigns in which Marines fought are inscribed around the black granite base of the monument. The inscriptions for Afghanistan and Iraq both have the starting year inscribed, but neither commemoration has an end date. The memorial is currently surrounded by a chain link fence while workers refurbish the iconic statue. It is my earnest hope that this project includes carving the end dates to both of those wars as a tangible sign that they are well and truly over.

It is my earnest prayer that it is a long time before another campaign is added.