Your article touched me in ways others have not (‘They trained us to be killers. What happens when we get home?’: US veterans and families on the Iraq war, 26 March). In fact, I have blindly turned the page on most of these awkward reminiscences for years. I served for a year at the British embassy in Baghdad in 2007-08 in a counterinsurgency role, and I am not sure I have ever fully been the same.
As a member of the Labour party, it undermined the politics I had known my whole life. As a pacifist, it undermined my views in that doctrine too. As a human, it reaffirmed how amazing we are and how terrible. I saw wrongs and I saw beauty, and I must suppose I helped both happen and not happen too. These stories echo so much of what I feel, and for a long time I would only say that in the past tense. What an epoch-defining, awful thing we have lived through. May we never forget. Thank you.
Name and address supplied
