To the Iraqi People..

Many things have come to light for me in the last several years that were not so apparent as a young man. I love my country and what it is supposed to stand for. I, and many others like me, was lied to, trained and used as a tool to oppress others. Many of these things were not my fault, but I was there to witness. So, like the man I want to be:

To the people of Iraq,

     I’m sorry for helping do to you, what I would never let happen to me or my loved ones. I am sorry for having hate in my heart; bringing my horrible skills to bear upon your brave men is a saddening thing for me in retrospect. I feel guilt for terrifying the people who I was supposedly protecting. I’m sorry for having had the drive to be better at tracking people in my scope, when I should have been opposing the occupation. I’m sorry that I was skilled and able to deal death at extreme ranges; what was once impressive is now repulsive.

     Although I will never deserve or receive your forgiveness, know that I am sorry for helping give my people a bad name. We often helped, but more often hurt people. I have joked about the death of others, but cried over those we suffered; no humans should have lost lives on either side. I am sorry for allowing spite, revenge or rage to fill me up and flow over. I’m sorry for being another invader into your sovereign land and removing your civil liberties at gunpoint. I’m sorry for using superior technology and deception to take away your family members. I’m sorry that we removed innocent men from their homes, without cause, in the name of security.

     I’m sorry I took away your guns. I’m sorry that your land has been ravaged by war and that men like me and my brothers were your enemy. If we had been born on the same block, we would probably been friends. I’m sorry that my friends glorified me for my successes in battle and boasted about their own. I’m sorry also that the common condition in wartime troops is to dehumanize their opponents to make them easier to mistreat; I am just as guilty of this. I’m sorry for being a part of something our Forefathers fought against.

     I’m sorry that I, at one time, thought that the ability to take a life was power. I’m sorry that my country is plagued by young men and women who suffer with guilt over things they did. I’m sorry that we had to kill to ensure the safety of others. I’m sorry that war is ironic at times. I’m sorry that the man in Tal Afar who guarded the bank, who treated us with such kindness, is not able to live in peace. I’m sorry that the Christian family in Mosul, who showed us love, has to live in hiding from sectarian violence.

     To the children, I am sorry that you had to witness young American men as monsters. I’m sorry that your childhood was filled with explosions, gunfire and large, armored men kicking in doors. I’m sorry that your soccer fields became a danger zone. I’m sorry that your kindness and wonder was not able to be spent in peace time. There was an old man and a young boy in the car that was hijacked by another man and all three had their hands up. I shot the hijacker when he pulled out a pistol; I am sorry that boy and old man had to fear for their lives.

     I’m sorry that it took nearly a decade to leave your land. I am sorry that thousands of peaceful people per year were killed by ordinance, stray bullets or carelessness. We accidentally killed a woman and went to pay reparations to her family; I’m sorry to that husband and those children that his wife and their mother died. I’m sorry that there were so many dinner tables with families waiting for their loved ones to come home, who never did.

     I’m sorry that it was “us versus them” and that you paid that price by proximity. I can say that I never targeted an unarmed person with lethal force, but some of my peers may have. I’m sorry that communications get confused, descriptions are vague, maps are not marked clearly and that our judgment is not always sound. I’m sorry that I thought my squad leader was a coward for leading us away from the fighting when he could.

       All these things and more are ones I and tens of thousands of military vets get to live with. We all have the chance to make good lives and we have an obligation to work hard accordingly. I saw the error of my ways and now try to teach my friends that respecting others is the only way we will ever evolve as a species. My son asked me “what’s a war?” and it broke my heart. I am glad though, that he has no clue about the horror so many children experience daily.

My First Alpha Brain Dream. PTSD heavy.

After hearing about it on The Joe Rogan Experience (best podcast ever), I started taking Alpha Brain from Onnit labs *www.onnit.com* a month ago or so and it, along with eating better has given me the best sleep in years. Along with this good, fully-satisfying sleep are the most lucid dreams ever. I was afraid at first that it would make me have horrible dreams that terrified me, but Joe Rogan is a smart dude and it’s worth a shot. Here is the first dream that I remembered in every detail. Enjoy.

I felt my heart pounding in my chest as I readied myself to confront whoever just broke into my house. I heard the rustling downstairs and then footsteps coming up. I squeezed hard on the grip of my Taurus .45; the rough texture of the plastic grip was digging into my hands. Suddenly, I saw a figure pop its head over the stairwell divider. I recognized a man’s face and a pistol; he did not fire and ducked down. I fired one round through the wall at the location he should have been.

I proceeded to slowly walk downstairs toward where this guy was and as I rounded the corner, I recognized a former teacher of mine (this guy wasn’t really a former teacher, but I knew him as such in the dream) and for some stupid reason he had a gun in my house and had broke in. I leveled the pistol at him and squeezed off round after round into his chest. I could feel the Taurus’ sloppy trigger breaking with each pull and the violent recoil from the +P ammo I carry. I could not hear the shots as I fired, but I felt the all-too-familiar overpressure in my ears.

The man was not falling down or returning fire and was actually trying to escape. After the tenth round, the slide locked to the rear and I dropped the magazine with one hand as I reached to my left rear pocket for the second. I felt the stitching of my jeans and the panic as I realized there was no mag there. I immediately wheeled around and sprinted up the 12 stairs to the kitchen; I felt the burning in my thighs as I reached the top.

I reached high atop the cupboard, searching for the second magazine. I felt the drywall dust and grease from the stove stick to my fingers as I found the magazine. The metal body was cool and it slid easily into the pistol. I released the slide to chamber the round and went back down to make sure I took care of business…..

That is the last I recall….

What a wild thing to experience this again in VIVID detail. It was the most real dream I’ve had in many years. It had all the sensations, visual impact and horrible panic of combat, but I experienced this as I would have about 6 years ago. Back then, I did not think about the now per se, I was more concerned with making people incapable of killing me.

I told my friend about this and he told me to write it down. If you want to enhance your dreams and REM sleep, check out the Alpha Brain from Onnit Labs. The stuff is legit.

I hope this was not a waste of time for you readers. Thanks.  

Good to Be Done With This Nonsense

It’s been six years since I’ve had to shoot another person and it feels great. I can’t understand how so many young men want to go out and take other peoples’ lives out of hate or some bullshit ideal of “patriotism”. Here is what they wrote about me back then. Link---à http://www.bobcat.ws/how5.pdf <---- Link

Heroes of the Week

A Company

HERO OF THE WEEK

SGT JACK A. BRIDENSTINE

On 24 August 2005, Alpha Company 1-5 INF Snipers made contact with an insurgent

vehicle carrying several A.I.F. personnel. The sniper O.P. observed the insurgents

throw an explosive device into an abandoned I.A. vehicle being used as part of a

baited ambush and proceeded to engage. The vehicle was disabled causing the

insurgents to get out of the car and break contact in multiple directions into the

industrial area located north of route Isuzu. 1ST Platoon heard warmongers transmissions stating that an element of 2nd platoon

was in pursuit of one of the insurgents who were on foot and heading south. A 1-3 and A 1-4 proceeded north as a split section element into the industrial area in an attempt to intercept the insurgent. As A 1-3 headed north, they observed the insurgent matching the description given by Warmonger, force his way into a car full of civilians. Warmonger fired onto the intersection directly in front of the vehicle as it attempted to speed away.

With Warmonger isolating the vehicle, A 1-3 cut the vehicle off and ordered the occupants out. SGT Jack A. Bridenstine dismounted from the vehicle with the remainder of his squad following closely behind. SGT Bridenstine ordered the civilian occupants to keep their hands up. The insurgent frantically paced back and forth

with his hands at near shoulder level. The insurgent then pulled a pistol that had been concealed in his waist, and attempted to fire. SGT Bridenstine quickly identified the threat and engaged the insurgent, hitting him center mass several times. In keeping with his reputation of total composure, SGT Bridenstine then quickly began to clear and search the enemy KIA and help bag the body. Bringing his confirmed kill count to two, thwarting another A.I.F. attack, and once again saving the lives of his buddies, SGT Jack A. Bridenstine has earned the title, HERO OF THE WEEK.

Hanging Out With the Dead

It’s not always, or even that particularly often that it happens, but when it happens it is intense. I think everyone who has read prior posts on this site of shenanigans kinda gets where I come from, but for the others: Just read on.

Last night was another such instance where I was hanging out with old friends in my dream and we were having a great time. I recognized many people from different times of the past eight or so years and we were all having a great time. Now this is where it gets strange; usually I interact with the people in the dreams, but I couldn’t this time. One person who was silent and inactive was my friend Karl; he died from heart failure the morning my youngest son was born. It was sad moment in a joyous day.

Karl was sitting in a chair and he looked like a hologram of dark light and looked like he was wearing a mask of some sort. It looked like a version of a fighter pilot’s mask and he was also wearing his body armor from the Army for some reason. Before he died, he was out of the Army for a while, but in the Army is the last time I saw him. I have never met or spoken to his parents, but they were there.

Everyone else was having a blast drinking and smoking and whatever else. Music was playing and for some reason there was a truck in this place. Karl’s father, whom I have never seen even a picture of, was sitting in the bed towards the cab. I walked up to him and shook his hand and tried to tell him who I am and that I missed his son. I didn’t even get the words out before I began to sob and quiver. Even now it is strange to me that I am somehow sad about not seeing someone that I once knew, but may well have never seen again. Is him being gone such a travesty or just something I am stuck on for my own reasons? I have no idea.

This type of thing happens from time to time, but this time was unique because my lost friend was not talking to me or doing anything for that matter. He sat in a wooden chair, wearing body armor and a grim-looking mask that covered his whole face; I didn’t even SEE his face, but still knew is was him.

Then comes reality in the morning and it hurts less knowing what is and what isn’t. I forced myself to concentrate on the road and not the prior hours. Just another senseless posting here… hope it was worth the effort.

Whitewashing Over Mental Illness

When I came back from Iraq in September 2005, we were sent through a series of redeployment screenings. The most horrific of all things I witnessed of the red tape while in the Army was the way they herded us through and passively suggested we lie about our conditions. They rewarded those who lied and "checked the block" let them go home earlier than those who told the truth.
The test was one that asked a series of questions that relate to what we had experienced the previous year. We were infantryman and they were treating us like Girl Scouts; if we did what they said, we got a reward. I was among the few who got no reward due to my truthful nature.
I had, and still am without, no shame about telling a stranger about what I did. I committed murder in the name of freedom. I pulled innocent people from their homes because we were terrified that they may be bad. I helped make enemies out of people who just wanted to go about their lives. Men whose heads had been cut off had been blown up, from IEDs under them, when family went to retrieve the body; these horrors are commonplace in war in my experience.
When we rounded up the men, we treated them like cattle; ultimate hypocrisy on my part in that I would never let people do to me what I've done to others. We did it to protect ourselves, and sometimes we may have been right, but more often than not we were recreating the horrible events that the nazis did in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. The pleas of the old men are haunting, just as the screams of the children as we took away their fathers and brothers.
Back to the screenings: those of us who answered truthfully about what we did, saw, felt and experienced while we sleep were kept there for several hours more. We had to speak to a series of counselors, social workers and a chaplain. we were the bastards who told what we saw.
The next part is how they asked us to explain away our nightmares, flashbacks, violent tendencies, suicidal thoughts and murderous dreams. I answered "yes" to the question, "in the past two weeks, have you thought about hurting yourself or someone else?" The person whom I spoke with later was happy to remove the red flag once I told them my logic; I may imagine it, but it doesn't mean I'm really going to do it. She was happy to do this with every red flag on my sheet.
Over the course of the time, they managed to get me to explain all my symptoms away and suddenly, according to my medical records, i was 100% fine and dandy. Of the men who were made to take this same course, three are dead today. One sought out death by repeated deployments and two others took their own lives with firearms. The point is that they should have been more prudent with the data given on testing.
The modern stigma that exists about soldiers seeking help is one of the worst ones that can exist. The men and women who are experiencing bloodshed and who are taken from their loved ones deserve to be looked after. Instead, we get wrung out like a sponge and promptly discarded.
I found out about the extent of the cover-up when I went to the VA (department of veterans affairs) after getting out of the service. They told me that I had no evidence of having nightmares, flashbacks or of being hyper-vigilant. This shocked me and was only taken seriously once they interviewed my wife. She told them how I am, which may not be so bad most of the time, and how I manage to wake up screaming or gasping from time to time.
While few people will read this and do anything with it, those who have loved ones coming back from war or who have problems now, will know how serious it is. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is as deadly as a round from an AK-47 or an IED. If you know someone who suffers from this disease, be there to listen to them. Also, don't be scared to act.
In August of 2010 a man, who used to be a soldier of mine, killed himself after he was refused psychiatric help. He wanted to see his daughter after a year-long deployment and his ex-wife insisted upon getting counseling. He tried....