This past week an Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seized significant swaths of Anbar Province in Iraq. I spent my early twenties there, fighting in Anbar’s streets. In the years since, those streets have never been far from my mind. I am, and forever will be, strangely an expatriate of places like Fallujah, Haditha, Hit, and others that barely dot a map. Like any expat, I’m defined by a place I might return to someday, the idea that somewhere on my life’s horizon is a time when I’ll again walk those streets knowing my war is finished.

After any war, a chorus always wonders about the cost. Was it all a waste? That chorus has been particularly loud this week, especially among those who shed blood wresting Fallujah from Al-Qaeda in 2004. I’ve had a hard time pinning down my emotions about this. Instead, a story keeps running through my head like archive footage.

It’s about 8am in the morning, almost ten years ago, in Fallujah, the second day of the battle. The platoon of Marines I lead, forty-six of us, fight rooftop to rooftop in the middle of the city. The night before, we’d snuck behind the insurgents’ main defensive lines to seize Fallujah’s Government Center, a five building complex. The sky is perfectly blue. We’re crouched behind a wall on the roof. Between machine gun salvos, rockets, and grenades, the Marines snap pictures of each other with cheap disposable cameras. No one’s been hurt yet.

In front of us is Highway 10. Its four lanes bisect the city. Back in March, the bodies of four Blackwater contractors were dragged down this highway. For three days, their corpses hung from the crossbeams of the Euphrates Bridge, starting the first battle, the one we’d been sent here to finish. By around 9am, all hell is breaking loose. Rocket-propelled grenades sail overhead regularly, like trains passing through a station. One slams into the wall above us. Everyone is okay. A piece of steel, jagged as a shark’s tooth, embeds into a grenadier named Pratt’s groin protector. Smoke rises from the Kevlar flap. Pratt waves it way. He’s fine. We all laugh, sort of.

We fire our rockets back. We throw our grenades into the street. I shoot my rifle, but its pop-pop-pop seems inconsequential as the morning battle now includes Abrams tanks and Howitzers. Overhead that perfect blue sky now swarms with attack helicopters and jets. Like herons taking fish from the sea, they swoop down and gulp whole buildings from the city. When their bombs drop close, we crouch behind the roof’s wall and open our mouths so the overpressure won’t burst our eardrums.