Before I begin, please give this a quick listen:

I served for just over 9 years.

I spent about 2 years of that in training of some sort or another.

So, the ‘useful’ part of my service lasted around 7 years.

Not counting field problems, where I was sent with my own unit to do get better at my job and to train others, I spent about half of that seven years deployed, attached, or on temporary duty, usually by myself. “Individual augmentee” was used to describe me on five continents.

Every time CNN would broadcast video of someone having a rough time in some third world country, the folks around me would start a pool on who would go and how long they’d be gone. By the time I left the Army, I hated the sight of Christiane Amanpour.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I got to go places, meet people, and do things that I never would have imagined, much less dreamed of, because of these times. Heck, once or twice I even volunteered to go.

But the one thing I can say is that all of that time away from home and family made little to no impact on the situations we were trying to help. Peacekeeping missions only lead to peace, for some definitions of peace, for a little while. Countries we were trying to forge ties to after decades of animosity still hate our guts. People are still manufacturing drugs and smuggling them into the United States. Let’s not even start about the number of people who cross our borders unmolested.

But, hey, it was the Clinton administration, and a foreign policy and military lacking a defined, cohesive mission had to find something to do with its soldiers, so off I schlepped to one shithole after another.

In the end, the birth of my daughter and the warning that I was about to spend most of the next two years away from home gave me the push I was looking for to get out and start over as a civilian.

Was my time in as hard, dangerous, and gut-wrenching as what the rest of the military had between 9/11 and the fall of Afghanistan? Not even close. What those folks did was amazing, and I will never take away from that. The fact that I could not pass a physical to reenlist in 2002 will always be one of the things in life that I regret.

I guess my point is that if we are to continue to push our military to go, come back, go, come back, then go again, we have to provide them with the support they need and missions that matter. Otherwise, all we are doing is spending blood and treasure to make it look like we’re doing something.

Our nation, especially the people who protect it, deserve better.