Media Lies & Agenda

It's 2021, and we're living in confusing times in America. Without getting into the politics of it, I'll say why I don't trust the media; despite whatever political stance you stand by.
    So during our time, it's a big mess with understanding who was who when it came to knowing which person was an enemy and which person was just a non-hostile with no ill intent towards us, or our allies, just innocent bystanders. Because they blended together with the enemy looking just like the local population, there was only one reasonable solution (at the time) to distinguish people who were a threat and who weren't; home searches and patrols.
    We'd overwhelm ourselves into their streets so everyone knew we were in the area. The bad ones knew we'd be doing searches and questioning people away from everyone else and challenging each story of whose who between them. This created distrust between them once we left and they had to figure out who talked to us and who didn't. You could tell who was nervous about being questioned because they didn't know what kind of intel we had. Our presence with the numbers alone was enough to stir up emotions of those involved with any acts against us.
Many patrol missions executed in 120 degree weather, plus the extra armor you're wearing so it's already irritating right off the bat. Next you mix in the fear from the locals because of the insurgents that were embedded within them. We try to talk to the locals, but because they either don't want us there, or because they have too much fear to help us, they don't and it becomes frustrating and difficult to do our job to rid their area of the insurgency. This pissed us off because they wouldn't help us to help them with their problems; to include helping establish some type of local police force. Many of them were corrupt.
    We searched houses and property night and day and we'd mix up our routes and times so the enemy wouldn't know when to attack us. Each house in the neighborhoods were different and held a different situation where in one house it could have ten or so people and everyone be innocent with no ties to , or suspicion that they're part of anything illegal. Then in the next, it could be a family of three, but the husband's an insurgent with caches of weapons buried in his fields. It was a mess, you didn't know shit from shit and each raid came with a different headache, whether from IEDs, ambushes, or just dealing with the people.
But, either way, you'd be in the most uncomfortable position when you'd muscle your way inside their homes because no one speaks each other's language, everyone's looking at you with eyes of wanting to kill you, there's fear and kids are screaming because they don't know what's going on. They'd be  scared because it'd go from complete silence to Americans with guns being quick and aggressive with busting through the front and back doors of their home and start splitting the woman from the men.
We'd give the kids to the women to try and calm them down, but many times the women would be going ape shit over us putting their husbands in zip ties and blindfolding them to question them. I can handle a lot of things, but seeing the kids confused by our presence and aggressiveness and for them to get hurt, it's without a doubt, much harder now that years have passed and I've become a father.
I'd kill for my family, and so to witness a father helpless over there without being able to protect his kids, or his wife, his possessions and having no choice but to do what the men in your home tell you because if any resistance was given, you were considered hostile and that gave us reason to escalate the situation. It's a feeling that I wouldn't want to feel. Sometimes dealing with the women was worse than the men because you had to be careful, and couldn't search them being a male to female, but we did segregate them and tried our best to talk to them, although because their religious views, wasn't a popular tactic, but it happened.
Dogs would start barking, dogs would be everywhere, and many were malnutritioned, aggressive and we'd shoot them if it required us having a safer raid, no questions on that. The last thing you needed was to be handling the people and have to worry about a rabid dog coming and biting you. The American forces were the law in every way out there as we tried to create some type of order. We wanted them to protect their own country and we wanted to go home. They didn't have a police force that was active, everything was being rebuilt, people were looting each other and destroying each other's market stands, women were being kidnapped and raped, kids were learning how to shoot Ak's and everything we trained for, we found ourselves conducting missions that we hadn't been trained for and we learned as we went; one mission at a time. There were a lot of mistakes on all ends.
People looked you in the eyes and lied to you on a daily basis as you were in their homes and neighborhoods trying to gain intel about the enemy and their activity, but it was always a challenge. To a degree, I get it, they were scared and didn't want to die because of the insurgency that flooded their neighborhoods, but neither did we, and we were in their country fighting to help them rebuild. Translators, if you're lucky enough to have one with you on the missions, you hoped that they were legit on your side and saying to, whoever the target was, the right message and the way it was intended to come across. Interpreters changed teams constantly, depending on their situation of safety and gain. If they were threatened by Al' Qaeda, they'd switch teams and help kill Americans just as quickly as they took our offer to help us. No loyalty, fear and profit.
    Now you got a shade of an idea about what the situation's like on the streets. So, we're on a patrol, like any other one, and this IED goes off somewhere in the distance and my team was radioed to secure off the area and help contain the people while the unit that was attacked got their bearings and control of their situation.
We're patrolling in Bradleys and humvees and at some point I'm ordered to get on foot and just walk around to make sure no one's acting suspicious, or trying to get out of the area we were at. People were everywhere, soldiers were all over the place, just madness and there's no real order of what to do, just walk around the area and try to act like you know what you're doing. I was around 19 years old, what did I know? I did what I was told by my superiors and I acted without much thought of what I was doing and the overall effect it would have years later.
While I'm walking around, I got my M-4 at the ready position and I walked tall while in the presence of the locals. As I'm covering the area, I see this uniform soldier start walking towards me, but he's not in a regular American uniform. I could tell he was American from the flag patch, but he wasn't dressed like one of us. He walks up to me and this guy's around 40 something, sunglasses on his face, huge intimidating guy with an old time thick mustache. All seriousness type of persona without even having to speak.
He comes up to me, "Hey guy, what unit are you with?"
I told him and even pointed out who the lead sergeant was at the scene from our crew. I was one of the low guys on the totem pole, whatever business this guy had and whatever information he needed, I wasn't the guy he needed to talk to, but he hit me with left field on what he said.
"There's a unit in the area and they have a journalist with them. If they come up to you and interview you about what type of missions your unit does, what your personal position on the war was, whatever they ask you, you're only to tell them that you and your fellow soldiers are in high morale and the missions that are being conducted are in good efforts to bring peace and restore a form of democracy to the area, understood?"
It was short, but it was said where the point, to me, was clear. "Understood." "What else was I gonna do.
He took my name, unit, rank and started talking to other guys that were around.
The real truth was our morale wasn't high. We were done and wanted to go home. We would use our (American Tax Paying Dollars) to help build their roads back to be operable and then they'd blow em up again usually injuring Americans, bystanders, resources that needed to be replaced, costing more money and decreasing our "morale" that much more. We'd help rebuild the school that the insurgents would destroy and mosques, then the cowards would use them to hide and store weapons in them, knowing our rules by Geneva Convention about not searching religious places, or schools.
Our position on it was that we wanted to go back home to our country and our families. They wouldn't stand most of the time to defend their own neighborhoods and would drop their weapons and run when a threat happened and the enemy would gain more to their arsenal. The fear that Al Qaeda instilled in the population was something crazy, but the fear worked and made our lives hell while trying to do our jobs the best we could. It wasn't always easy, and we weren't always using the best moral decisions when situations happened, but it was what it was.
So I have this experience with what I was to tell the media, as most were, and then during the whole tour, during our down time, we'd huddle around in the common areas of wherever we were at and we would listen, or watch the news of what was being shown back home, and much of what they were saying, was bullshit. The main aspects had much truth, but when it came to things like manipulating American public opinion to support the war, to drag out the war, even to this day, my kids are now soon old enough to fight the same war I did. It's sick.
It's also the reason why when a death happened, or a bad attack, the base did what was called a "blackout" and cut all communication with the outside world so the facts of soldiers saying what they think happened and causing panic without having the real details because they weren't there. The investigation team needed to do their thing, the unit needed to do a private service if guys were lost, just a number of different reasons that makes sense to close off communication to the world, but it does come with a price because we do get a contorted truth of what happened and biased opinion.
The government owns the news and with that type of power, you see what they want you to see; I'm convinced.