I really don’t care what people think of me. I’ve got my family. I’ve got my friends. Yes, I have been trained to be a little more aggressive if I need to be, but I don’t go around thumping people.
You’re not just going out there, maybe sacrificing your own life. There’s also sacrifices still going on at home. You can serve in the military and have a good marriage, but you just need to be aware of it so you can take those steps to take care of it.
Every person I killed I strongly believe that they were bad. When I do go face God there is going to be lots of things I will have to account for but killing any of those people is not one of them.
Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I’ve done. I find it strange, but I also feel it’s my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.
I’m just trying to be the me that I am and not all of this other crap. I just want to be the family man, and if somehow I can make the money to get my ranch and get the hell away from everybody else, that would be awesome.
But in that backroom or whatever it is when God confronts me with my sins, I do not believe any of the kills I had during the war will be among them. Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.
In the end, my story, in Iraq and afterward, is about more than just killing people or even fighting for my country. It’s about being a man. And it’s about love as well as hate.
I don’t have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally – I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people.
But real life doesn’t travel in a perfect straight line; it doesn’t necessarily have that ‘all lived happily ever after’ bit. You have to work on where you’re going.
