This is something a good long-time friend of mine posted on Facebook. He encouraged people to share it, so here y’all are.

I am twenty-five years old.

I did not have it particularly bad growing up, or particularly good. My early years were on the lower side of lower middle class with myself and a single mother. Later I lived with my moderately affluent father who in living with his own demons managed to foster and hatch a few eggs of malcontent within me. This is not about the times with my father or the long road to healing that I began walking in late adolescence when I moved back in with my mother.

This is about the Army and being me in my mid-twenties.

I joined the Army at eighteen in no small part because I felt I was squandering what talent I had to share with the world in a spiral of short term gratification and anti-social behavior. I felt there was some good I could contribute to the world in Armed service in defense of my nation and the propagation of the ideals we stand for as a representative republic. I find no fault with my reasoning then and most likely would make the same decisions again if burdened with a time machine. I still believe that even with all the wrongs of our nation that I regularly espouse, we are still heading in the right direction.

I spent a calendar month with my grandfather in preperation for basic training. I needed to dry out and to accept a higher authority in my life. For reasons I don’t need to go in here, God was not available to be that higher authority. J.A. Spahn SR offered the authority instead: with a marine-run and regimented dry household.  I was put on a plane to Ft. Leonard Wood on January 25th, 2005.

I loved the Army. Those who served with me might tell a different story, I’m sure. Enough of an anti-establishment past haunted me that I could not (or would not) share my enthusiasm with my comrades. Although I spewed a constant torrent of negativity and distrust for the Army, I tried to make up for it by doing my job to the best of my ability. I did not shirk work, nor did I ever turn in a product that I believed to be anything other than the best work I could do.

I am proud as hell of most of the work that I did accomplish. My time overseas in Mosul and Baghdad does not have such convenient numbers as a confirmed kill list to point to as proof of my work. I can only take pride in my strong and resolute belief that some of what I did saved lives, American and Iraqi both. I take pride in the fact that some of my work helped take legitimately bad people out of the flow of Iraqi life. I take pride in the fact that while I was never asked to, I know I would have placed my body in the way of my comrades. Comrades that I consider friends, Comrades that I consider enemies, Comrades who have names I never learned. I take comfort in the fact that these feelings are recriprocated.

I do feel shame for some of the things that I did. I feel shame for some of the things my Army did. I do not feel enough shame to write the whole experience off as a loss however. At the risk of sounding trite, I don’t think anyone who experienced the same things we did could treat it as an exercise in futility. To use a vulgar simile, the worst critiscism of the war in Iraq is like an armchair quarterback: it’s easy to say how you would have thrown a beautiful 40 yard hail mary to win the superbowl from the comfort of your couch, it’s another to actualy throw a pattern while a 300lb linebacker blitzes through your offensive line.

I left the Army earlier than I would have liked. I left with an honorable discharge due to a family illness that required my attention. I do not for a moment think I made the wrong choice nor do I blame the Army for putting that choice in front of me. Family comes first, and a soldier unduly concerned about his family is a compromised soldier.

When I returned to civilian life five years ago public perception was very much against not only the war but those who served in it. I was denied employment for ‘being a babykiller.’ I had friends and family who spoke openly and vehemently against veterans and volounteer service.

That has changed in recent years. In many ways it has changed for the worse. Men and women who have spent years deriding their terms of service and the service of others have now jumped on the band wagon to spew hatred and filth in the name of Veterans. Outright lies and hateful political theories are now piggy backing on Veterans. “You’re free to believe what you want, but if you disagree with me you’re against the Veterans” is the gist of their arrogant, false message. These veterans have the right to say what they wish and fight for what they believe, they simply do not have the right to use what I and people like I have gone through to add credence to it. If you are a veteran, that is all fine and good, simply do not try and make peacetime service decades ago somehow comparable to the blood and tears shed by those of us who have fought in this decade of constant war. If it was deplorable for civilians to pretend service and piggy back on the trials of the Vietnam Veterans it so no less equally deplorable for those who served in the time of milk and honey to compare their C-rats chewed upon on a training field to cold MREs eaten in a sandstorm to the tune of falling mortars and small arms fire. Shame on them, and shame on their campaign. It needs to be stopped.

Of course, this is only my opinion. I, however, am happy to tell you whose opinion this is. This is the opinion of Zachariah John Langhauser. This is the opinion of an Intelligence analyst. This is the opinion of a man who owns a home because of the GI Bill. This is the opinion of a man who is receiving schooling on the post 9/11 GI bill. This is the opinion of a man who is sick and spends a week a month in the hospital from pancreatitis that may be related to his time overseas. This is the opinion of a man who is diagnosed with PTSD and has spent three months with six appointments a day for therapy in a bid for normalcy. This is a man who is woken by nightmare and wakes every morning, even in these 32 degree nights I have, drenched in so much sweat he needs a shower.

This is not an opinion of an Airman. This is not an opinion of a Marine. This is not an opinion of a seaman, or a guardsman. This is the opinion of mid-twenties analyst born in Orange, raised on the west coast and living in Lakewood, WA.

This is my opinion. You can of course disagree, but by god do not ever try and tell my your disagreement holds more validity than my statement because of YOUR term of service. To degrade my service is to disintegrate yours. Show some damn respect.

Hug a veteran today.