MARCH 11, 2015
Once a year the streets of Philadelphia overflow with Marines, both active duty and veterans, celebrating the Marine Corps’ birthday on Nov. 10th. And it was in the “City of Brotherly Love” that I met a fellow Marine infantry veteran, Patrick Maxwell, last fall. We didn’t speak with each other much, but he knew my wars were over. What I didn’t know was that his weren’t.
Patrick didn’t share his plans with me then, but it wasn’t long before he contacted me from a village near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. He’d just come back from patrol with the Kurdish peshmerga forces. Patrick, honorably discharged in 2011, had returned to fight alongside the Kurds against the self-proclaimed Islamic State just weeks after our conversation. Not as a Marine, but as a civilian volunteer.
The full story of Patrick’s journey is told here. But his story began long before he traveled to Iraq to fight a second time.
In 2006, Patrick deployed to Iraq’s deadliest province, Anbar, in the south. But he never fired his weapon and I could understand his disappointment. I had spent the first months of my deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan anxious and saddened because I hadn’t pulled my trigger – the very thing Marines are trained to do. So I knew what he meant when he said he “felt robbed.” And so I understood why he went to fight alongside the peshmerga.
Even though I carry the weight of the lives I’ve stolen, some of them innocent, I was jealous of him and it upsets me that I don’t fully understand why. A part of me wanted to fight beside him. The other half despises the very thought. My desire for war is something I believe I will always struggle with even though my longing for peace is much stronger.
The first time I killed someone I was not under fire. A scrawny man with a Kalashnikov lurked toward our position in Falluja, Iraq. I watched as he fell to the ground with one slow, steady press of my rifle’s trigger. At first, all I felt was recoil. But I kept looking back. I couldn’t believe I had killed a man. And I did so with a smile. Because he could have killed one of us.
When my battalion fought in the siege of Falluja in 2004, the images of the World Trade Centers and Pentagon burning that drove me to enlist were no longer on my mind. The American lives lost on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, weren’t what compelled me to squeeze my trigger. For me, combat had nothing to do with America or Old Glory. All aspects of my wars forged a brotherhood of Marines that cannot be replicated; an impenetrable circle of riflemen fighting to live, killing for each other. Perhaps I have been missing that.
Yet when you live life knowing that you’ve killed someone, it is scary. When I reflect on what it took for me to end a person’s life, I cannot recreate my mindset. To spill blood and end a life, I forced myself to rationalize that another human should die. And power over life is addicting. Very addicting. You miss it. You daydream about it. Nothing is more petrifying than being aggressively hunted by another human. And there is nothing more exhilarating than when you kill them first.
There is another motivation that drives veterans of the Iraq war to want to return to the fight there: Seeing Islamic State celebrate victory in the villages where our friends bled or died fighting the insurgency. It makes many of us wonder if our war was for nothing, that perhaps we failed.
So that is the jumble of emotions I felt when I heard Patrick’s story, and that I’m guessing other veterans of the Iraq war feel as they watch the battle against the Islamic State rage on. We know that there is nothing easy about killing. We know the hardships and heartbreaks, the guilt and pain of combat. And yet, we think of going back.
Thomas James Brennan is a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He was a sergeant in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He was awarded a Purple Heart and is the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention and the 2014 American Legion Fourth Estate Award. Follow him on Twitter: @thomasjbrennan
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