One night one of my buddies came up to me and said “Hey! Want to see a dead body?” I said sure, why not. We walked up to a truck that just returned from a supply mission. There was a dead man in the back of the truck who looked to be in his mid 30’s, and sitting beside him was the soldier who killed him. I asked him why he shot the man. He said that the man was on the side of the road holding a bag in his hand. He thought the bag could be an explosive device that the man was intending to plant on the side of the road. Well it turned out that the bag was just a bag of fruit. And ironically, the body in the back of the truck was still clutching that bag. The soldier was very proud of himself and was driving the truck around the base and showing off this man’s body like it was some kind of trophy.

Of course I knew that was wrong, but we often did things that were wrong. I remember being out on line missions and searching through people’s homes, through people’s underwear drawers, looking for god knows what. I guess weapons of mass destruction. I remember waking up little children in the middle of the night and scaring the hell out of them as I brandished a fully automatic machine gun. I remember asking myself what I had become.

Question:  Now that you have returned, what does peace mean to you?

The world has been and always will be violent, but there can be peace for the individual. I can achieve peace, I now choose not to participate in violence.