Author’s note: This was the closing entry for my blog during the time I was in Iraq (2006). I’d grown to dread writing anything at all by this time, so I’ll let it speak for itself.

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As my first, but perhaps not my last, tour in Iraq is drawing to a close, I’ve decided that in the next few weeks or so, I’ll shut down this blog. There is really only one good explanation, and it’s something that’s been troubling me for some time.

I’ve had difficulty overcoming the feeling that posting anything on the internet about myself during this tour has come across as self-serving BS. I can’t really post much about my day-to-day job, as it involves the deaths of servicemen, and to use their sacrifice as fodder for my self-indulgent purposes would be the height of disrespect.

I’m no hero. I don’t have any grand tales of combat exploits to share with the world. I’m just an average Marine that happened to volunteer for a job that brings the reality of war home to a multitude of families across America. Every time I do my job, one of those families is only minutes or hours away from receiving that dreaded knock on the door. There’s nothing glamorous about that.

I suppose it all came home for me once and for all when U.S. Navy SEAL Marc Lee was brought to our facility by his fellow SEALs, who were escorting him on his final journey home. You can read more about him here, at Blackfive. War for those guys, and those like them, is not what’s written on the internet. It’s heat, sweat, exhaustion, gunshots, explosions, flesh, blood, life, and finally death. I couldn’t look them in the eye, knowing that my war and my sacrifices are something so much less. The credit lies with those men. As Teddy Roosevelt said in his famous speech, “The Man in the Arena,”

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

And so, the time is past due that I should bow out, and leave the credit to those who rightfully deserve it.

To all of the warriors, I wish you Fair Winds & Following Seas.

Semper Fidelis