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Dola Handley's avatar

Twenty years ago I was at Fort Campbell, KY preparing to deploy to Kuwait/Iraq with a combat support hospital. It was our final week of preparation and I only knew a couple of folks who were from the hospital where I was permanently assigned at Fort Stewart, GA. We then spent several days traveling by busses, planes and more busses to our Camp Udari base for a short period before moving on in to Iraq by tactical vehicles and helicopters. We saw many wounded soldiers, mostly marines who had been caught in ambush. By the time we got to Iraq we had mainly Iraqi civilians who had been injured — most by their own countrymen.

I honestly don’t think about that time very often but since you wanted to know where we were I thought I would write this. It was not political for me at all — it was about service and my promise to protect and defend. We spent a great deal of time running for bunkers in the middle of the night during scud alerts and donning full chemical protective gear — those of you who know realize how much fun that is. I tell this because, even as nurses “in the rear” we were not in a “safe” place. We saw plenty of suffering and suffered some ourselves.

If anything, it did make me hate war but I also believe that there are worse things - like living in fear or watching the suffering of others whom we might help.

Dola

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Bruno's avatar

Endings are overly hyped or at least over-rated concepts when it comes to things matter on a grand level. Children's stories are known for having the happily ever after ending; but does that child like expectation carry over into a reality that it doesn't fit?

Serving through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I often wondered if we (as a nation/or even better as a coalition of nations) would stay long enough to make the sacrifices really worth it. I also thought about the duality that the longer we stayed the greater the sacrifices would add up. But in contrast I in turn think about how long we stayed in Japan and Germany after WWII. Spoiler Alert - we're still there now; but for some reason we thought we could change the way of life in Iraq & Afghanistan in a single generation of our virtuous presence.

As a young Marine I learned about Commander's Intent, and desired End States: When we are done doing this what do we want to people, place, or problem to look like. There came a time where a school of thought emerged that said we needed to get away from End State thinking because imposing our will to achieve and endstate that exists in our own minds is unrealistic and ultimately leads to bad decison making. This school of thought doesn't seem to have stuck; I assume because it didn't offer an alternative that allowed for unity of effort towards a common goal.

I recently read a quote from a fictional character that went something along the lines of; 'The fight isn't over until you decide you've won.' (please forgive the innacuracy, along with my inability to attribute the specific book but it was in Robin Hobb's Assassin's Aprentice Trilogy) My point in bringint that quote up is that end states are just temporary way points in history. In so many ways, the End of WWI led directly to WWII, and the end of WWII led to the Cold War, which in turn ended in such a way that we ended up with the balance (or imbalance) of power that led to Terrorism, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars.

Instead of "How will this end?", I would prefer to ask "What will this lead us into?"

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