Mixed Feelings Watching the Latest Troop Deployment

Watching troops from the 1^st Brigade at Fort Stewart, GA prepare to deploy for a third time since 2003 has brought on some unexpectedly mixed feelings for me. I was an Infantry Medic with the 1^st Brigade (3^rd Bn., 7^th INF) from 1991 to 1994. I joined during Desert Shield, but the first Gulf War ended the day I finished Basic Training, and I was out of the Army long before the latest Iraq War started.

Let me be clear that I oppose both the reasoning for going to war in Iraq and the handling of the mission by the administration in the nearly four years since we soundly defeated Saddam's army. And I have grave doubts that the latest plan for a troop "surge" will be any more successful than any other strategy we have employed. But I wholeheartedly support the troops there, as well as the families they are forced to leave behind.

My mixed feelings are much more personal in nature. As I watch these men and women load up at the same places in Georgia that I knew so well, I sometimes feel guilty that I'm not with them. Logic tells me that I did my duty; I joined during a time of conflict and was only spared making that same trip myself because of fate or luck or Providence. I'm also at an age now that prevents the idea of re-enlistment from being a factor. But the guilt still gnaws at me, telling me that rather than typing this I should be packing my rucksack with extra pairs of socks and packs of cigarettes.

I wonder if this is how all soldiers of any age or time feel when they see young men and women go off to war. Do men who fought in Germany and the Pacific and Korea and Vietnam struggle with these same thoughts as they watch the evening news? There is a bond between soldiers that endures throughout our lives, something that to some extent gives me more in common with an 80 year old veteran of World War II or a 20 year old veteran of Afghanistan than it does with people my own age who never served. It is, in fact, one of the best things about having been a soldier.