A Veteran's Reddit Reply on Justifying the War on Terror

A US Veteran’s Reddit Reply on Justifying the War on Terror

In the autumn of 2014, under a Reddit discussion of a Last Week Tonight segment about drone warfare, one commenter asked American service members a blunt question: how can you live with the civilian deaths caused in your country's name? The most widely shared answer came from a man who identified himself as Daniel Crimmins, a former infantryman with the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division who served in Iraq. He did not offer a justification. He said, in effect, that many soldiers cannot justify it, and then explained how he went from eager volunteer to a veteran who felt used.

His reply spread across activist and news sites the following year. Below is a summary of what he wrote, with the background needed to understand it and a check of the facts behind it.

What the veteran said, in short

Crimmins described a slow loss of belief. He enlisted after 9/11 because he accepted a simple story of good against evil. In Iraq he found house raids that rarely turned up anything, deadly mistakes that were waved away as honest errors, and a war that seemed to enrich contractors while ordinary Iraqis and young soldiers paid the price. By the time he came home, he wrote, he no longer saw the people on the other side as enemies but as human beings much like himself.

His sharpest image used the films he grew up with. As a boy he wanted to be the hero of Star Wars; as a soldier he decided he had been "basically a Stormtrooper, a faceless, nameless rifleman, carrying a spear for empire." He ended on a note that was sad rather than bitter, saying that some Americans do care, and that their number seems to grow.

The question that started it

The original post, by a user called VisualEffects, came from someone outside the United States who was upset by how casually drone strikes were discussed. The writer pointed out that Americans rightly vow never to forget 9/11, yet the wars launched in response had killed many times more innocent people abroad. How, the post asked, could a country carry that weight so lightly?

That framing was emotional, but the scale it pointed to is real. The September 11 attacks killed 2,977 victims. In Iraq alone, the monitoring project Iraq Body Count has documented roughly 187,000 to 210,000 civilian deaths from violence since the 2003 invasion. That total includes people killed by insurgents and sectarian militias as well as by coalition forces, so it is not a count of deaths caused by American troops. Survey-based studies give higher figures, and Brown University's Costs of War project, which tracks deaths across all the post-9/11 war zones, describes its own numbers as cautious approximations. Whatever estimate you choose, the gap between the two tragedies is enormous.

From the recruiting office to Iraq

Crimmins began by admitting how ordinary his path was. Shaken by the attacks, influenced by comic-book ideas of heroism and the us-against-them language of the time, he left college and walked into a recruiting office. He remembered being surprised that the office was not packed with young men like him, and having to argue with a recruiter who kept steering him toward desk work when he wanted the infantry.

Basic training, he said, did teach something valuable: soldiers learned to see each other as teammates instead of as races or classes. It also taught them to kill. Doubts came early, but pride kept him from admitting them to the people back home.

He was stationed in South Korea when the invasion of Iraq began, and he mocked, with hindsight, the reasons he had heard for it: hidden weapons of mass destruction and a supposed partnership between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Both claims later collapsed. The 9/11 Commission found no evidence of a collaborative operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and a 2006 U.S. Senate intelligence report reached a similar conclusion.

His timeline fits the record. The 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, returned to Iraq in January 2005, the first Army division to serve a second tour there.

Raids, mistakes and a death he could not forget

The heart of the reply is a series of memories told in the second person, as if he were still trying to put distance between himself and them. Friends were killed, and the good memories of nights out together became tangled with the image of their wounds. The fighting went on, yet nothing seemed to change.

He described forcing frightened families to sit on the floor while soldiers tore their homes apart looking for weapons. A few raids were based on solid intelligence, he wrote, but most houses were searched simply because they were there. Asked whether those families were usually hiding anything, his answer was short: "Probably not, they almost never did."

Two incidents stayed with him. In one, a fire-support error dropped mortar rounds on the village his unit was meant to protect. In the other, a large man ran toward the soldiers shouting and was shot several times. Only afterwards did they learn he was probably mentally ill. Crimmins recalled the man's elderly mother holding his body, and the man's confused expression as he died. Back at base, he was told it was an honest mistake and that he should eat and get some sleep. In the dining hall, a television replayed upbeat news about the war.

Why this pattern matters

Psychologists have a name for the kind of wound he describes. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs defines moral injury as the lasting psychological, social and sometimes spiritual distress that follows events which violate a person's deep moral beliefs, such as harming civilians or witnessing harm one could not prevent. It overlaps with PTSD but is different: its core feelings are guilt, shame, betrayal and anger rather than fear. The VA notes that people carrying both conditions face more severe symptoms. Veterans who recognise themselves in this description can find confidential support through the VA or their own doctor.

Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta receives the Medal of Honor from President Barack Obama at the White House, November 16, 2010. US Army photo via Flickr (CC).

The photograph above shows the other face of military service that Americans usually see: a ceremony, a medal and a grateful president. Salvatore Giunta was honoured for his actions in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley in October 2007, and he became the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Courage like his is real. Crimmins's point was that the ceremonies and the raids belong to the same wars, and that the public tends to see only one of them.

Money, media and the feeling of being used

As the deployment wore on, Crimmins began to ask who actually benefited. He noticed contractors earning six-figure salaries to do jobs soldiers once did, the cost of every cannon round fired, the fuel burned and the vehicles replaced as soon as they were destroyed. He came to believe that a great deal of money was being made from a great deal of suffering.

On leave and after discharge, his anger turned toward the politicians and broadcasters who had sold him the war. He felt that the commentators who praised the troops on air did not truly care whether soldiers came home to a parade or in a coffin, and that service members were mostly props in someone else's story. He also wrote that it hurt to hear anyone celebrate a drone strike as a success.

These are one veteran's opinions, written in frustration, and other soldiers who served in the same places have reached very different conclusions. What gives his account weight is that it is specific. He does not speak about war in the abstract; he describes the houses, the mistakes and the dining-hall television.

How much of the story can be checked

Because the reply was an anonymous internet comment later reposted by other sites, it is worth being clear about what is confirmed. The thread itself, under a Last Week Tonight drone discussion on the r/television forum, is real and still linked from many reposts. The details Crimmins gave about his division, its base in Georgia and its January 2005 deployment match the historical record. His name and service history, however, have not been independently confirmed, and the individual incidents he described cannot be verified from outside.

The broader claims are on firmer ground. The weapons stockpiles used to justify the invasion were not found, the alleged Saddam-al-Qaeda alliance was rejected by official inquiries, and civilian deaths in Iraq ran into the hundreds of thousands by most serious estimates. Reasonable people still disagree about how responsibility for those deaths should be divided among invading forces, insurgents and militias.

What readers can take from it

The reply does not answer the original question with a defence, and that is why it resonated. It suggests that many soldiers are not indifferent at all; some carry exactly the grief the questioner wanted to see, often in private and for years.

Listen to veterans' own accounts. They are rarely as simple as either recruiting posters or protest slogans.
Question the case for war before it starts. The 2003 justifications were tested by later inquiries and did not hold up.
Count civilians, too. Independent projects such as Iraq Body Count and Costs of War exist because official tallies often leave them out.
Recognise moral injury. Guilt and shame after combat are not weakness, and help is available.

Crimmins closed by saying that his country's apparent indifference made him profoundly sad, but that not every American shared it: "Some of us care, and I think there are more every day."

Sources: Original Reddit thread and reply (r/television, 2014); reported by Upriser and True Activist; Casualties of the Iraq War (Wikipedia, incl. Iraq Body Count); Costs of War, Brown University; Casualties of the September 11 attacks; Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations; 3rd Infantry Division; Moral injury, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; Salvatore Giunta.