Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990; hard to believe there were any good days in the two decades since. How could there be? I have told my war stories both as an embedded journalist and an Army veteran of Desert Storm. When I say “Iraq,” it is only violence that is remembered.

Robert Frost could have written his poem, “Acquainted with the Night” about these conflicts, and the recent veteran’s experience. “I have walked out in rain — and back in rain/ I have looked down the saddest city lane,” Frost wrote. “I have passed by the watchmen on his beat/ And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.”

Maybe not unwilling, but it is difficult for these new veterans’ complete memories to compete against ever-righteous narratives of established expectation and assumptions.

Like Chad SeBour, 26, said about his 2006-07 deployment to Bayji, Iraq, with the 82nd Airborne, “I only talk about civilian stuff with my friends; they have their own picture of how it’s like over there. They’re only going to look at Iraq as a bad thing.”

Nathan Webster

Kris Vasquez, another 26-year-old veteran of two deployments who is a college student now, tries to shrug off negative stereotypes.

“Society likes to put labels,” Mr. Vazquez said. “I don’t have a vendetta of trying to prove people wrong, I just move forward and try to look positively at life. That’s my ambition.”

But why should an audience of home-front civilians expect anything but damage and bad memories? Iraq’s horror and tragedy was not melodrama — it was real life. It is what happened.

So it is difficult, to try and remind a reader that for many recent veterans these wars cover much more ground than post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury. It can be hard to tease out a few fonder moments.

In June 2009, I talked with Sgt. Vasquez in a Combat Outpost Cahill guard tower. In both 2007 and 2009, I embedded with his unit: Charlie Company, 1st/505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.

We chatted about food — how the mess hall’s morning eggs were always lumpy and undercooked, the dinner’s ‘steak’ burned to a hard hockey puck. Snacks were more dependable. I preferred Pop-Tarts; Kris hoped for Gatorade shakes, but other soldiers snatched them up, taking more than their fair share.

That selfishness was not new. During the 2007 deployment, Kris remembered grabbing a half-dozen sticky-sweet Honey Buns at a time, stuffing them into his assault pack for long days in a Humvee. Charlie Company’s men earned their share of legitimate bad memories that year — three men killed over 15 months, others injured, their Bayji Joint Security Station attacked by a suicide truck bomb that killed two dozen Iraqi policemen.

In 2009’s quiet, Sgt. Vasquez happily reminisced about hoarded snacks.

“I look at Honey Buns now,” he laughed in the guard tower, “and I don’t touch them. They’re dead to me.”

Out of the Army since 2011, Mr. Vasquez currently studies criminal justice at Palomar Community College in San Marcos, Calif., not far from his hometown, El Centro. He has about two semesters left there before a planned transfer to California State University, San Marcos, with a long-term career goal of federal law enforcement. With its proximity to Marine bases, plenty of veterans attend Palomar, Mr. Vasquez said, and his own past comes up.

“All the great stories I have are from the Army,” he said. “In class introductions, they ask what interesting things you’ve done — I’ve jumped out of an airplane. That’s pretty interesting.”

Years later, Mr. Vazquez still remembers the Honey Buns and still has not eaten another.

“They’re not a bad memory, but now they remind me of a time when Honey Buns were all I ate,” he said. “That time was long enough.”

Myself, I still enjoy pecan pie – but I think of Iraq with every bite, of meals at the huge Forward Operating Base dining facilities that were a gift at the end of my reporting trips. Pecan pie is not sugar and nuts – pecan pie is relief.

In mom-and-pop convenience stores around Palomar’s campus, Mr. Vasquez sometimes sees cans of the high-sugar, high-caffeine Rip-It energy drink for sale, cheaper than Red Bull or Monster.

“I tell people I drank them in Iraq, and they say ‘Weren’t you worried about dehydration?’ like energy drinks were bad for us,” Mr. Vasquez said; but that misses the point, like telling me pecan pie will rot my teeth.

“Rip-Its were kind of a symbolic beer before a mission,” he said. “Everybody’s nervous, but we weren’t in any great danger or bad circumstances. We’d drink a few and laugh and talk a little bit.

“They remind me of that camaraderie, the people that I knew, the experience we went through.”

In Baltimore, Mr. SeBour now works as an investigator for Commercial Index Bureau; he sits for hours in a car, looking for proof of cheating spouses, or phony disability claims. His experience as a mortar crewman taught him patience; in Bayji, he would sit by the mortar emplacement on the Joint Security Station’s roof, spending shifts that lasted hours waiting for something to happen.

“Readjustment’s not that easy. I probably think about Iraq every 20 minutes. Like it was yesterday. Like it was 10 seconds ago,” he said. Post-traumatic stress is no joke; whether it is night sweats, or loud noises, he said there is plenty to keep him on edge. But, “even the bad stuff, it was bad, but it wasn’t that bad,” he said. “I kind of miss it, as long as nobody was getting hurt.”

Thanks to Mr. SeBour’s post-deployment brawling, drinking and fighting, he left the Army in 2008 the way he came in — honorably, but still a stripe-less private. “I’m not proud of that at all,” he says. Still, you cannot look back in bitterness. “I’m very glad I joined. Wouldn’t get rid of it for anything.”

Private SeBour and I were both on the Joint Security Station roof on July 29, 2007, a strange day — lots and lots of gunfire, but no violence. The Iraqi national soccer team won the Asian Cup championship, 1-0 over Saudi Arabia. It seemed everyone in the city fired celebratory gunshots into the air.

The sports connection’s stuck with Mr. SeBour — back home, watching a Steelers-Ravens football game with his parents, his father started in about the Steelers’ rabid fan base — Mr. SeBour responded, “You should see Iraqi soccer fans.” His father laughed, but “it was sort of an awkward laugh,” he said.

Anyway, the soccer game’s not the important memory, or the Rip-Its, or the Honey Buns.

“Everybody was kind of quiet,” while the Iraqis shot off thousands of rounds; Mr. SeBour paid attention for security’s sake, but paid equal attention to a bigger moment he was witnessing. “It was one of those times, you see something awesome,” he said. “Who else gets to be part of that?”

Even with Iraq still full of violence, I like to imagine men in Bayji today. I hope they sit around tables of chai tea and remember that 2007 soccer victory; remember in the way that “Johnny,” a Tikrit-born interpreter, had told me back then, excited in a roomful of unimpressed Americans watching the televised celebration — “I wished for us to win, to show the world what Iraq can do.”

Like America’s veterans, those Iraqis might — sometimes, definitely not always — be like the Vietnamese that Michael Herr wrote about in “Dispatches,” an answer of sorts to Robert Frost’s bleak silence:

“I knew that somewhere that night and every night there’d be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and that one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too.”

Nathan S. Webster, an Army veteran of Desert Storm, is an adjunct instructor of first-year writing and creative nonfiction at the University of New Hampshire. His photography is part of the “Conflict Zone” exhibition, and his book “Can’t Give This War Away: Three Iraqi Summers of Change and Conflict” is available from Blurb and as an e-book on Amazon. Follow his blog at “Can’t Give This War Away” and on Twitter at @nwembed.

