I have come to the end of my third deployment to Iraq. I am lucky both in that I am going home and that I have survived three tours here even though serving three tours in Iraq is not unusual. After my latest tour, I have come to the following conclusions:

1) I am tired. I’m tired of this war and of seeing young men and women die in this wretched country. I’m tired of waiting for the Iraqis to get off their asses and do something for themselves.

I’m tired of hearing about how great I am and how America really appreciates my sacrifice when so few Americans are willing to shoulder the burden- whether it’s volunteering to serve or agreeing to conserve gasoline. In the last year, San Francisco banned JROTC from all of its high schools. We all know that (federally-funded) JROTC is just a program to keep kids who are too fat for sports and not talented enough for the marching band out of gangs. Why would you object to something like that? Do you really think that this is a productive way to object to the war?

2) I am older. This autumn, my high school graduating class will have its ten-year reunion. I will not be there because I will be attending an advanced flight-training course. There are many things that make me different from my classmates. Among them, I regularly sleep through .50 caliber machine gun fire and every time I hear a loud thump I have to stop and ask myself if its incoming fire and if I need to take cover.

3) I don’t care about Barry Bonds, or anybody else, hitting baseballs. Last night on a MEDEVAC flight, a Marine bled to death from a gunshot wound. Likely I will never know his name- only that his life was extinguished by a sniper somewhere in Al Anbar Province. I will pray for him and his family instead of worrying about the sanctity of a sports record.

4) The Marine Corps is showing substantial results and is thus getting tasked with more by the Army because we have cleared out our sector and all the terrorists are now in the Army’s sector.

Our personnel management is now doing what the Army has already done: bleeding ourselves dry with too few Marines for the mission. The Marine Corps’ leadership has lost touch with the Marines who are upholding the traditions of the Corps and are doing the fighting. I will not be accepting the flight pay bonus to stay in.

5) The Bush administration has succeeded in doing what it said it did not want to do: divide Iraq by sectarian boundaries. Likely this is the only way that the violence will actually stop, and now that this has happened, the administration is taking credit for it. The Bush administration is running a propaganda machine the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Kremlin closed its doors in the 1990s. The only blessing is that the Bush Administration doesn’t control all the news and cannot keep the truth from eventually getting out.

6) I used to hate hearing people say that they didn’t support the war but supported the troops- I never believed it until I saw the singer/actress Cher testifying before Congress about how the Marine Corps needed a better helmet liner to prevent brain damage from IED blasts. The Marine Corps has now mandated that all troops have the new helmet liner because she got off her ass and did something. Cher, you’re all right in my book. The new helmets are great.

7) American veterans must get into politics quickly. I am a devout believer that civilian control of the military is one of the essential pillars of American democracy. Harry Truman rightly fired MacArthur at the height of his popularity as MacArthur set himself up to become an American Napoleon. But Truman served in WWI and knew what it meant to lead men in combat. The winner of the election will hold absolute power over 1.4 million American troops. Our next president must understand what this responsibility fully entails, and be able to employ the military correctly, instead of doing so haphazardly.

8) American blood and youth are worth more than Arab blood and youth. Americans are dying for something greater than themselves, no matter how empty the cause that got us here, and the Iraqis refuse to fight for anything at all. That math doesn’t add up in my book.