Ok, for those of you who don't know.

I'm a veteran. Operation Iraqi Freedom. 2007-2009. Worst year and a half of my life.

I bring this up for perspective. I know a lot of people have lived full lives doing good things and working hard for what you believed is right. I'm not here to denigrate your goodness, or your effort, or to tell you that what you did is wrong.

I'm here to talk about doing evil. Because I have done evil in my life, and at the time, it's very easy to get sucked into it. I haven't ever wanted to do bad things. I just did what I thought had to be done, in the interests of the time, without thinking, without reflection. I wanted to be a good soldier, and I have the medals that say I was one. Complete with the honorable discharge, good conduct, purple heart, and every other little piece of fruit salad a lower enlisted collects.

Now that I'm home, and a civilian, I can think about what I've done. And I am not proud of everything I did. For those of you who say "thank you for your service" I appreciate the thought, but the words ring hollow to me, for what I did for the people of this country, I sometimes wish I could take back.

Evil isn't big grandiose things, with twirled mustaches and gleeful chortling. Evil is the daily grind of doing ever more tiresome and ridiculous things, simply because everyone around you is.

The smallest evil was torturing a man. Oh, we didn't call it torture. I mean, when the entire platoon feels the same thing, it's not torture. It's just friendly ribbing. It's a rite of passage. It's shared hardship. It's not torture when 40 men line up and take turns punching you hard in the chest. It's not torture when you do that to another. It's to make you feel like you earned that promotion...

Watching a small child torture a dog to death and doing nothing was evil. But it wasn't my responsibility. It was their culture. I had to be respectful. Couldn't say anything, had to keep walking.

A larger evil was killing someone. Oh, it wasn't a murder. It was a warning shot that went wrong. Guy should have known to stop his car at the unannounced checkpoint. Did nothing wrong. No way to know there wasn't a bomb in the car. It was the right thing.

The line between an illegal order and following legal orders, and yet still doing evil is broad and deep. You can wade in it for months. It still will stain you when you finally get out of the moral muck and look back on what you did.

There's a lot more, and a lot of things that stick in my head and haunt me when I take time to reflect when I can't sleep. I don't like to mention them, or even think about them. I try to flip my mind to the nicer things. To the times when I practiced rock climbing on an adobe wall, for example. Or maybe the time I slept on the upstairs of a bombed out building, with half the second story floor gone, listening to the sound of the wind through the makeshift shelter.

I don't know why I'm saying these things. Do I think that Trump and all of his supporters are evil? No, but I see them heading down the same path. Hillary and her dead-enders are on the same road to hell. It's not well marked, and it's filled with twisting paths that always seem slightly less dim, but leading you ever onwards. Once you make it a life or death struggle, almost everything becomes acceptable, and almost everything becomes threatening. You make excuses, generalizations, and no longer think, just react in the way that you've been trained. For me, it's to see an enemy, and to judge based off what is in front of my face, rather than what might have lead up to it, or what might lie in the future.

So I guess... I'm just saying I feel guilty. I know that in my soul something is terribly broken by what I went through in the war. I just hit freaking 40, and my body is falling apart now, so I know it wasn't just my emotions that took hits. Pains in so many parts of my body, aches in my heart, and an earnest desire to never let anybody else follow that same path. Those so eager to fight against evil that they can't see that they will make choices which lead imperceptibly towards ruin.

So many stains on the soul. I knew exactly how much regard I was truly held in when my Disability was used as evidence against me in a court of law. (CPS, when I tried to get my children back after my ex left them in foster care while I was at war.) Many will say they support those who have done the hideous work, but will never truly know what was done for them, nor will they care to know. When the burdens finally become too much, they will happily cut and run, because it's not their responsibility. Hell, some will even MOCK you, just to try to get you to "Deal" with the problems that run through your brain.

When I see fools agitating for violence, or committing violence, all I can think of is the evil that will have to be done to end the violence. There is no "Good Fight", merely a fight. It's never a good thing. I never want to do evil again, so if I immediately say NO, not gonna do it, that's where I'm coming from.

Because I remember Mosul. And when I saw the pictures, almost ten years later, it hadn't changed. The evil I did, all for the greater good, had changed nothing. And all I was left with was a stained soul.