A Letter From My Friend, A Soldier/Medic in Baghdad
intended as a letter to the editor

"As a soldier I can see how absurd it is to expect American combatants to be peace keepers in a country whose peace they themselves disrupted. We have the duty of enforcing ill-defined laws on a people who we can't distinguish from those who would kill our comrades. Now that we've taken Saddy H. out of power, it's time we take the US military out of power.

"Every day I feel I have to keep my mouth shut or risk being cast out, because people I work with make racist and offensive jokes at the expense of a people we're here to protect and free. And in many cases it doesn't stop at jokes. It's not uncommon to see a small convoy of people in gun trucks who fire slingshots at children. These "peacekeepers" start fights with the adults who tell us to stop.

"If a force took over our country and told us they were here to make things better, and at the same time kept pushing our family members around and shooting rocks at our children, would we sit back and do nothing? Absolutely not. We'd be constructing makeshift bombs to take out as many of them as we could just as some Iraqis are doing. If anyone out in TV land thinks Iraqis are killing our soldiers for no reason at all, she is sadly mistaken. We've all lost sight of who the enemy is, and every day we're told to remember that there is still a war going on out there. In all likelihood, innocent civilians are dying more frequently than the U.S. soldiers we've been mourning over. There's a chance we could prevent further casualties on both sides if we eliminate this obvious source of hostility-the soldiers that provoke these attacks."