To the People of Iraq

My name is Jason. I was a soldier in the United States Army, and I deployed to your country twice—first in 2003, during the initial invasion, and again in 2005–2006. In fact, my unit was credited with firing the first shot that officially started the ground war.

I participated in the war that arrived at your doorstep uninvited, and I have spent the years since then trying to come to terms with what that truly means.

This letter is not written on behalf of any government or institution. I write only as one man—once armed and uniformed, now older, quieter, and far more aware. I write this as a son, a father, a husband; simply, a human. And I write this to say something I should have said long ago:

I am sorry.

When I first set foot on your soil, I believed I was there to help. That’s what we were told—that we were liberators, protectors, that we would bring freedom, democracy, and peace. I was young, and like many others, I believed we were doing the right thing. I swallowed the propaganda. I wore the flag. I marched forward into your sacred land.

But what I witnessed, what I participated in, and what I came to understand in the years that followed tells a much different story.

We did not bring peace. We brought war.

We brought fear, destruction, and death into your neighborhoods, your schools, your places of worship, and your homes. I saw with my own eyes how ordinary people—families, elders, children—were swallowed by a nightmare we created. Families devastated. Lives shattered. Entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble.

And now, more than twenty years later, I carry those images with me every day. They are burned into me. I see them when I close my eyes. Sometimes it's a sound. Sometimes it's the silence. Sometimes it’s my own son’s voice that triggers the sudden, unbearable thought of a child who never got the chance to grow up.

These moments don’t leave. They only deepen with time.

Something in me broke, and it’s never truly healed. The man I thought I was—the protector, the helper, the good American—didn’t come home. I finally understood:

I was not the hero. I was the storm that swallowed the light.

I’ve spent years trying to rebuild the person I thought I was. But I don’t think that person exists anymore. Maybe he never did. The war didn’t just break my heart—it dismantled the illusion of who I thought I was.

It stripped away the story I’d told myself. It left behind a version of me I didn’t recognize. It forced me to ask questions I didn’t want to face—questions I still carry.

War doesn’t just destroy cities. It erodes conscience. It wears down the voice inside that tells you something isn’t right. It replaces clarity with instinct, empathy with efficiency, doubt with obedience. It teaches you to stop feeling.

It scrapes away your sense of direction and leaves silence in its place. A hollow kind of silence—not peace, but numbness. Not healing, but distance.

And when the noise of war finally fades, you’re left with yourself—and the terrible knowledge of what you did and didn’t do. And that silence—that turning inward, that numbness—that became its own kind of violence.

There are things I will never forget:

A child frozen in terror as our convoy rolled by. A father shielding his family with nothing but his body. The desperate eyes of people watching us pass through their streets like we owned them. The weight of walking through someone else’s city with a weapon in my hands. I can’t pretend that I fully understood what I was part of at the time. It’s much clearer now.

The war we brought was not noble. It was not clean. It was not just. It was brutal. It was clumsy. It was arrogant. It was a war of choice built on lies—launched without cause, without accountability, and with a staggering disregard for your humanity.

While I may not have made the decisions, I was part of the machine that carried them out. I moved its gears. I made it function. I helped it do what it did. And for that, I carry shame. A deep, choking, corrosive shame.

Shame that I followed orders that never should have been given.

Shame that I helped enforce a lie wrapped in the American flag.

Shame that I was part of something that shattered so many lives.

Shame that I didn’t walk away.

Shame that I didn’t speak up.

Shame that I ever let myself believe we had the right.

Sometimes people here thank me for my service, and I don’t know how to respond. They see bravery. But I remember confusion. They see honor. But I remember fear and silence. To the American people, please don’t thank me for what brought so much suffering. There was nothing noble in what we did.

I can’t speak for other soldiers. I can’t speak for politicians or generals. But I can speak for myself.

I regret my role in the invasion of Iraq. I regret the arrogance with which we believed we could reshape a nation through force. I regret the blind obedience. I regret the silence. I regret the way I let myself become numb. And I regret the pain we caused—pain that I now understand more clearly, though I will never fully comprehend it in the way you have lived it.

I carry that regret like a scar that doesn’t fade. I feel it in my bones. I feel it when I see rubble and flinch. I feel it when people thank me and I have to fight the urge to scream. I feel it when I wonder how many of you still lie in unmarked graves while we moved on, never fully facing what we did.

To every Iraqi who lost someone they loved…

To every child who grew up too fast under the shadow of bombs and foreign soldiers…

To every person who lived in fear, who was displaced, humiliated, hurt, or silenced…

To everyone whose life was changed forever by what I did…

I am sorry.

I am deeply, completely, heartbreakingly sorry.

You didn’t deserve what happened to your country. You didn’t deserve to have foreign armies tearing through your streets, dismantling your institutions, disrupting your culture, dividing your people, and leaving behind chaos that still echoes today. You had the right to your sovereignty. You had the right to safety, to dignity, to self-determination.

But it is not only my shame that I carry. It is the shame of a nation that never fully admitted what it did. A nation that moved on while you were still mourning your loved ones. A nation that rewarded those who lied, who invaded, who profited, who cheered. A nation that still holds its head high, as if nothing happened. As if the cost was only ours—not yours.

In America, people speak of Iraq like a chapter that closed. A war that ended. But that’s not true. It didn’t end. It simply faded from view. You suffered long after the world stopped looking. You kept rebuilding homes. You kept living with what we left behind. And we never stood before you and said: We were wrong.

That silence—ours—is a second wound inflicted on humanity.

This letter is a small thing. A whisper, maybe. A scratch against the enormity of the damage. I know it won’t bring back what was lost. I know it may be too little, too late. But it is honest. And it comes from a place of real humility, real grief, and a deep desire to be accountable. It is all I have to give now that the rifle is gone and all that remains is memory and conscience.

And if I may go beyond the surface of apology…

If there’s one thing I wish the world would understand, it’s this: Iraq is not a battlefield. It is not a failed experiment. It is not a backdrop for American power. It is a country. It is a land of poets, scholars, farmers, engineers, parents, children, and dreamers. It is a place of ancient beauty, culture, and resilience. And it never should have been made to suffer for the ambitions of others. I don’t know if forgiveness is even something I have a right to hope for. But I do hope that someday, the people of Iraq receive truth, justice, and peace—not from soldiers, but from the world that failed them.

The truth is, I think about Iraq almost every day. Not in abstract terms—I think about you.

The people whose lives were upended by my presence.

I wonder if the boy with the wide, frightened eyes ever got to grow up. If the family whose home we searched ever slept soundly again. If the shopkeeper who looked at us with hollow desperation ever rebuilt what he lost. If his mother ever slept without fear.

I don’t know their names. We never asked. They were ‘civilians,’ ‘contacts,’ ‘noncombatants’—labels that stripped away the lives behind them. People became shadows. Statistics. Debriefing points. But they were people. With names. With birthdays. With stories. And in doing that, we erased you, even while standing in front of you. I am ashamed of that. We should have known your names. We should have honored your lives.

But I also remember something else—something that has stayed with me just as deeply: your kindness.

In the midst of chaos and destruction, I was shown generosity and grace by people who had every reason to hate me. Some of you shared food with me. Some of you sheltered me, protected me, spoke to me like a guest instead of an invader.

You cracked jokes with me, offered stories, music—small moments of shared humanity in the middle of an inhuman situation. You treated me like a human being, even when I was part of a force that treated you like less than one.

I formed relationships with Iraqis that changed me. The resilience I witnessed—the way you endured, adapted, hoped, and resisted—was humbling beyond words. It forced me to confront what we really were. It made it impossible for me to go home unchanged.

I remember feeling fear—but I know now that my fear was only a shadow of yours. I had armor, weapons, and the force of the most powerful military behind me. You had your families, your homes, your prayers, and the unimaginable weight of survival.

That kindness—the way it clashed with the violence around us—stayed with me. It haunts me. There is something unbearable about that contradiction. It makes the shame sharper. More personal. It makes it impossible to pretend this was ever okay.

There were moments I wanted to scream. But I stayed quiet. Because silence was safer. Because conscience was inconvenient. And because I was afraid—afraid of being seen as weak, or worse, disloyal. I swallowed my questions and buried my doubt. And that silence became part of the violence.

I think about the way I justified things at the time. How I told myself I was just doing my job. How I shut out the voice inside me that questioned whether this was right. That silence—the one where I didn’t ask, didn’t challenge, didn’t stop—haunts me just as much as anything I did.

And I think about what it did to me, too. Not just in the ways soldiers are told to expect—but in the deeper way, the quiet spiritual wound. The erosion of conscience. The hardening of empathy. The slow realization that I helped harm people who never meant me any harm. That I crossed oceans to invade someone else’s home. And for what?

I’ve had to learn how to live with that question—how to carry its weight without looking away from it. That’s why I’m writing this. Not to be forgiven, not to be redeemed, but to speak the truth—out loud, and without excuse.

To the Mothers of Iraq—

You raised children beneath helicopters and warplanes. You hushed crying babies while tanks passed your doorstep. You endured grief in silence. You held your families together with nothing but willpower and love.

You are braver than I will ever be.

I mourn what you lost. I pray for your healing.

And I am sorry for the pain we brought to your door.

To the Fathers of Iraq—

I saw you—trying to protect your families from something no one should ever have to protect them from. You stood between us and your children. Not with weapons—but with your bodies, your dignity, your silence.

How many nights did you lie awake, trying to keep your loved ones safe in a world on fire? You should have been allowed to raise your children in peace.

And I am sorry for the unimaginable fear I helped bring into your life.

To the Children—

You are the ones I think about the most.

You didn’t choose any of this. You didn’t ask for soldiers, for checkpoints, for loud machines and frightened adults. And yet, you grew up surrounded by fear.

Some of you played in rubble. Some of you never got to play at all.

We looked at you through armored glass. We destroyed any sense of normalcy—and then we drove away.

I hope you grew up. I hope you’re alive. I hope you found light beyond the smoke.

And I am so, so sorry we took your childhood from you.

To the Iraqi Soldiers—

You fought on your own land. Some of you were conscripts. Some were defending your neighborhoods. Some laid down arms. Some picked them back up. You didn’t ask for this war either. But you bled for it.

You were not the villains. You were men defending your homes, trying to survive, trying to protect what mattered.

And for what we brought with us—

I am sorry.

This war didn’t just scar Iraq. It scarred all of us. But you didn’t choose that. We did. I will carry that weight for the rest of my life—not to be forgiven, but because it is mine to carry. I am not asking for redemption. I don’t believe I deserve it. But I do believe in the power of truth. And I believe in facing what we’ve done—no matter how painful it is. Especially when it’s painful.

So this letter is not the end of anything. It is a beginning. A long-overdue act of recognition. A confession. A reckoning. A wound laid bare.

To the people of Iraq: You deserved better. You still do.

May your future be brighter than the past we gave you.

May the world one day truly see your strength, your brilliance, your humanity.

And may we never again mistake power for righteousness.

I will spend the rest of my life telling this truth.

I owe you that much, at the very least.