Why do people glorify soldiers when they are just merciless murderers?

Posted 6Aug2017.

94 Medevac missions and 718.2 hours over 24 months of deployments to Iraq.

Countless Iraqi police, army, civilians, and insurgents stabilized and transported to medical facilities for injuries ranging from eye injuries, gunshot wounds, blunt-object trauma, and shrapnel… sometimes in weather that was questionable, and always over territory where we were valued targets.

Was I a “merciless murderer”?

I served with men and women who looked beyond their own backgrounds and personalities and beyond their ideas of the why we were in Iraq and focused on what they were doing. We were on-call 24/7, and when one could tell the number of missions a crewmember went on by the rings of salt stains on our flight suits, we still launched, regardless of who the patient was, regardless of our strained personal relationships with our loved ones thousands of miles away, and regardless of anything other than our mission to provide medical transport.

Were we “merciless murderers”?

I have seen the look of fear, of desperation, and of frustration when the patient is not responding to every trick in the book to keep their vital signs going. I have watched a female medic straddle an Iraqi soldier as she continued chest compressions while the staff from the hospital wheeled the litter into the operating room, and I have felt the tears of other medics as they recounted every…single…step in a desperate attempt to keep someone alive.

Again, were they “merciless murders”?

Before my time with the Medevac, I was sitting behind an M-60D (pintle-mounted machine gun), loaded, off “safe,” and trained on an insurgent hiding behind a tree. The shot was not taken due to a lot of very important reasons, but namely because I could not guarantee that my rounds would not hit the women and children in the vicinity.

“Merciless murder” indeed.

Are there exceptions to the rule? Unfortunately, yes… but any example provided will be refuted as exactly that – an exception.