This year marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War when our country chose to invade Iraq.
I was recently talking to one of our neighbors who lives just down the street from us. She told me her son was in the Iraq War but he is now blind. Apparently in Iraq he was living too close to one of burn pits that our military set up there to dispose of waste plastics, rubber, chemical mixtures and medical waste. The burn pits produced dangerous toxic smoke, which wound up having a drastic effect on that young man’s eyes. Now this young man is blind.
The neighbor right next door to us told us about his son who has a major post-traumatic stress syndrome from his experience with the military in Iraq. He was involved in the house-to-house operations our military carried out in Fallujah. And now he has become an extreme loner who doesn’t want to talk to even his family.
Just on our street, that’s two lives hurt deeply. Was it worth it? War’s never worth it. And that war? Not at all.
We need to apologize to all our servicemen (and their families) who took part in it and to the Iraqis, who lost 250,000 of their own in it.
Andrew Mills, Lower Gwynedd
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