I wouldn't have become a voluntaryist if not for being in the US military, Part I

I have been on Active Duty for almost eighteen years now. used to be a die-hard Reagan-esque conservative. I was in love with the idea of going to war, and thought that killing people who didn't live by western cultural norms was the most noble calling. This was drilled into my mind by my parents, and by republican politics and media.

Upon enlisting in 1998 straight out of high school, I had no clue the places I would go, and the thing I would see. When war came in 2003, and it was made known that Iraq would be invaded, I was so excited that leaving my wife and first daughter for an indefinite amount of time didn't even faze me.

My first clue that things were fucky was in the invasion's aftermath. We were walking around mostly Christian neighborhoods in central Baghdad, just passing time while TPTB worked out how the next decade of occupation would be managed. There was a guy in my platoon who hated kids, and hated foreigners. He was a redneck from Arkansas. He would pull out his pistol and point it at the kids who wanted candy or pencils or food. I brought the issue quietly to our company First Sergeant. He told me to stop trying to make trouble, and he moved me to another platoon. I didn't do much after that except think a lot about what the fuck was going on and where this invasion was really going.

I went back to Iraq three times following that. Saw a lot of people I knew blown up, and a lot of people I didn't know. Saw a lot of Iraqi soldiers blown up. Cleaned up blood and body parts out of trucks. Enforced policies that amounted to martial law had they been enacted in my own country. Saw a lot of officers turning a blind eye to huge caches of weapons from Saddam's military mysteriously disappearing. Later, I changed jobs and on one deployment, I managed construction contracts, and I saw the massive amounts of money being wasted and siphoned away by wealthy benefactors of the puppet regime.

In 2011, I came home to my girlfriend (I divorced in 2010), and she had a friend she worked with who knew I had a lot of questions. She pointed me to some guy named Ron Paul, whom, in my ignorance, I thought was just some guy who liked weed.

to be continued.....