I remember one night we camped out on the Iraq-Kuwait border on the way in. I’m there in my sleeping bag on a cot in the middle of dry, nothing desert. No landmark, no land features, nothing.

I’m in my sleeping bag, zipped up over my head, and looking at my GPS, and zooming in to see where I was in the world at that moment. [That] was kind of a whoa moment. That was the first time when I saw myself right there.

We’re in these people’s backyard right now. What’s really protecting us now? Right now, right here, right on the cusp of it all. It was all building up to that moment.

Justin Savage was activated on December 7th, 2003 to serve in Mosul, Iraq with the Illinois Army National Guard as a Public Affairs Specialist until February 15th, 2005. Today, he works with Prevail Health Solutions, creators of Vets Prevail and Warriors Prevail.

For three weeks, I didn’t know that Sgt. [redacted] and Sgt. [redacted] had been killed in action.

When I found out that they were dead, it was like from that weekend on, I couldn’t sleep without some type of aid.

To this day, I need medicine to sleep.

I think I’ve gotten control over what has taken place. I think I’ve gotten control over how I felt. I think I’ve gotten control over how to take that negative and turn it into a positive.

I can’t bring back my soldiers. I can’t bring back those guys that lost their lives prior to our incident or after. None of us can. We can’t do anything differently.

I can keep going back to September 23^rd, 2005, all I want. That’s not going to change those events. Period.

So I have to focus on where I am and what’s going to happen next, and I hope that my story will help someone else out.

Dan Casara deployed to Iraq on July 24, 2005. He was critically injured when the M113 that he was riding in drove over an anti-tank mine, flipping the vehicle. Two soldiers were killed and four injured. The blast fractured Casara’s right tibia and fibula, shattered his left tibia, heels, and anklebones, and dislocated his right hip. He would like to thank the Disabled Patriot Fund, SALUTE, the Wounded Heroes Foundation, Leave No Veteran Behind, Hope For the Warriors, Tee it up for the Troops, Achilles, Adaptive Adventures, Challenged Athletes Foundation, The Mission Continues, and Dare 2 Tri.

It’s harder to deploy knowing that she’s back there without me. I’m the one who asked her to marry me. I’ve asked her to share the possibility that I won’t be there. If I deploy, go into combat, or otherwise get killed, then I’m no longer there.

How would I feel if I was in her shoes, and all of a sudden she was gone? If I was the stay-at-home spouse, and she was the soldier, how would I feel? That would break my heart.

That’s what makes it harder. Knowing that she’s back home lonely, knowing that she’s back home celibate, knowing that she’s back home dealing with the refrigerator making the noise, and the light switch that sticks, and the cat just puked on the carpet.

To me, the possibility of me not being here doesn’t matter — because I won’t be here to miss me not being here. If I die, I don’t care. I’ll be dead. It don’t matter to me.

But it matters to her. That’s what matters to me.

Staff Sgt. Jason Deckman is a combat engineer who has deployed six times—to Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

We can change. We all can change. Because I changed. And I’m no better or worse than anybody else. To say that change cannot happen? Well, I’m fuckin’ livin’ proof.

I was fuckin’-dittohead-Rush Limbaugh-voted-for-Bush-go-fuckin’-fuck-up-a-haji guy. That was me. For me to change, anybody can change. This whole world can change. And I think we will.

We will progress past war. We will progress past racism, poverty, eco-cide. To think that we’re at the pinnacle now is fuckin’ insane. We have a long way to go. We just have to work out asses off to get it, to make it just a little easier for the next generation, so they can pick up the fight.

Benjamin Hart Viges was a paratrooper deployed to Iraq in 2003. He became a conscientious objector.

In Iraq, we were outside of Baghdad. We got called out to do some manual labor. It was explosive ordinance disposal.

We were getting these boxes of rockets — they were 104, 105-millimeter rockets — and I’m sitting here on this bumper out in the desert, and we’re loading this stuff on trucks, taking it out to be blown up, and I’m looking at a lot of the guys, and most everybody is younger than me — because I had been to college first and then went into the Army.

It was all American rockets. It was all shit we’d sold the Iraqi regime during the Iran-Iraq War.

I remember talking to people about it, and they were asking, “Well, where does this stuff come from?”

Well, we sold it to them. We sell guns to everybody in the world.

Because if we don’t do it, the French’ll do it. And if the French don’t do it, the Israelis’ll do it. And if the Israelis don’t do it, the Russians will probably be the first on the list to do it.

You know, it’s just business.

George Zubaty served with Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003.