Even Iraq war veterans find out what’s happening in Iraq on Facebook. A couple months ago, when the terrorists formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) re-invaded Iraq, the group’s greatest-hits videos started flooding my feed again.  Recreational beheadings, cold-blooded mass executions, Sopranos-esque executions, 2Pac-style drive-by’s: the “Isis Gone Wild” YouTube videos are impossibly horrifying, yet somehow impossible not to watch. You can’t believe what you’re seeing because you saw it coming – because you saw it before – and so you click play anyway.  Many of the videos are posted by my disgruntled former platoon mates. They’re the same veterans who wondered, a couple months ago, whether it was all worth it 10 years earlier, what with it all going to hell again. We’re the same vets wondering today, what the hell took so long to do bomb the hell out of these guys?  So on Friday morning, I logged on to the usual nothingness of Facebook, and between the emoticons and selfies, the check-ins and the inspirational memes, there it was – and I actually couldn’t believe what happened next: US begins air strikes against Isis targets in Iraq.  About fucking time, I almost posted in a comment underneath.  Of course it’s not our sword fight, and of course more death and destruction and a war with initials and maybe even a number three after it could follow. And I’m no general, but as an Operation Iraq Freedom veteran who spent most of his 2003-2004 deployment with his boots on the ground, I think I might know a little bit about this enemy. As someone whose job in Mosul, where Isis took control of a dam and started this whole damn thing again this week, was to win hearts and minds while “punishing the deserving”, I know that these guys deserve to punished.  When I watched those Isis decapitation videos on my Facebook feed this spring, I put down my tall boy and I thought of the Iraqi citizens.  I thought of the 16-year-old kid who volunteered to translate on a mission in his neighborhood, who told me he learned English “from watching American movies! Leonardo DiCaprio! Julia Roberts! Tom Hanks!”  I thought of this one lady who wore the traditional dress, who always carried a book under her arm and a smile on her face, who taught me Arabic and read Dean Koontz. When she first heard that the Americans might invade Iraq, she prayed that we would. She even jokingly told me that if we didn’t, she would fly herself to Washington and beg George W Bush: “Please invade Iraq now!”  I thought about all of my Iraqi friends.  And I thought about how they’re all dead. Murdered. Every single one of them.  The brand-new Isis videos are back in my feed today, between headlines about Pentagon decisions and thousands of Yazidis and Christians trapped on a mountaintop, and I no longer think of the dead. I think of the living.  I think about all those living Isis fighters dressed in black – the same kind of black they wore almost exactly 10 years ago, when they fearlessly ambushed my entire platoon, pointing their AK-47s and RPGs and pulling their triggers.  I think about these guys dressed in black now and I think to myself: Why the fuck are these guys still alive? Why isn’t somebody – anybody – murdering them instead?  After the initial “shock and awe” bombings of 2003, my unit went in to figure out what happened next. I wonder what would have happened if we had never bombed Iraq in the first place, and never sent in ground troops. I wonder what will happen now that we’ve bombed Iraq again, and I hope President Obama sticks to his promise not to put boots back on the ground.  Our boots are a little too beat up for that.  I hope we don’t start another war, or continue the one we’ve started. I know bombings alone can’t win or finish a war, but I hope to god my Facebook feed fills up with videos of Isis getting the shit bombed out of them, without the heavily armed infantry ground troops cleaning up the aftermath. Because I don’t know too many friends and family of US soldiers who returned back home in a flag-draped casket from that ground war who wouldn’t want to press play on that.
Colby Buzzell: Iraq war veterans like me don’t want airstrikes to lead to boots on the ground. But we know the evil that is Isis, and it makes America’s return easier to watch