Chapter+6




 * Perspectively Speaking**

7/26/04, I got an Honorable Discharge for my sudden, to their terms, “unexplainable deal” of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Today I take five different anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pills to help me deal with my PTSD. It is hard for me to keep things in perspective even to this day. I did what I could.

I was a proper man of courage and discipline. Friends would say there were none like me, Joe they would say. My name is Riley Johansen. I think of myself as a man of principle and as a fighter; I would die for my country. When I joined the fight in Iraq, I sought to protect my people from any menace, domestic or foreign. The reasons were simple; we were to stop terrorists from causing havoc and to protect the innocent in Iraq. Those are the reasons I believed in and thought those were the reasons his superiors sent them all, the U.S. soldiers, to go fight. For some reason I had doubts once we arrived at the battlefield.

My squad got orders from higher ranks to wipe out everyone, even the civilians. We shot a man with his hands up. We even shot women and children here and there; the number of people… is this why we’re here for? Firing on civilians and securing oil fields was not the duty I signed up for. Why are Marines learning to shut down oil wells – are we the Environmental Protection Agency now? I’m in the desert, ready to kill, putting your tax dollars to work. Unfortunately, your tax dollars went into a lot of civilians. I was there. I pulled the trigger. It made no sense to me.

__By:Irobles__

Works Cited:"Soldiers tell stories about Iraq", Information Clearing House, Natalia Muñoz http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6556.htm