For reasons, I don’t have many keepsakes or mementos of my time in the Navy. This picture is the only evidence I have that I ever even served.
It’s taken me a long time but I’ve finally started to heal and I feel I am in a place where I can willfully show this to anyone.
It’s not anything special, just a picture of me standing on the flight deck during flight ops, but for a long time, I hated it. What I was forced to participate in. How I was used to wage war on people I never even met. To have a hand in taking life.
In 2006, I found myself working in a military hospital in Baghdad where an Iraqi translator and his son befriended me. I remember the son trying to sell me some bootleg CDs of pop music popular back home, and we struck up a conversation. During our talk, he asked me why I joined the military and what I did before getting assigned to work in the hospital. I showed him this picture and showed him the airplanes I helped maintain and fix. I talked about how much I loved aviation and flying and how it was one of the main reasons I joined the military to begin with. Upon seeing the pictures of the planes, his eyes looked up at me and he seemed troubled. He said when he was very young, one of the first memories he had was of these planes screaming across the sky and how terrified he was of them. Not because they had bombed where he lived, but because everyone around him was terrified when they heard the planes, so he said he could feel their fear and it made him scared. He then asked to see the picture of the plane again, pointed at it and said “angel of death” and tears started welling in his eyes. Hearing him say that and seeing the fear in his eyes broke my heart.
That day I came to know war in an intimate and ugly way. It became all too personal and I was too young and immature to process it properly and I was not right for many years after that.
I hope that kid is alive and well somewhere out there with a family of his own. I think about him almost every day.
I was stationed on the Truman from 2015-2019. Went to the Middle East and then (thankfully) the North Atlantic after that. Hated every minute of it, but wouldn't have changed a thing.
![image showing [OC] This is me onboard USS Harry S Truman somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean in early 2003](5b3989e5-5cc2-51c5-8b19-55f900240181.jpg)
Phyrexian_Archlegion on November 11st, 2025 at 21:42 UTC »
For reasons, I don’t have many keepsakes or mementos of my time in the Navy. This picture is the only evidence I have that I ever even served.
It’s taken me a long time but I’ve finally started to heal and I feel I am in a place where I can willfully show this to anyone.
It’s not anything special, just a picture of me standing on the flight deck during flight ops, but for a long time, I hated it. What I was forced to participate in. How I was used to wage war on people I never even met. To have a hand in taking life.
In 2006, I found myself working in a military hospital in Baghdad where an Iraqi translator and his son befriended me. I remember the son trying to sell me some bootleg CDs of pop music popular back home, and we struck up a conversation. During our talk, he asked me why I joined the military and what I did before getting assigned to work in the hospital. I showed him this picture and showed him the airplanes I helped maintain and fix. I talked about how much I loved aviation and flying and how it was one of the main reasons I joined the military to begin with. Upon seeing the pictures of the planes, his eyes looked up at me and he seemed troubled. He said when he was very young, one of the first memories he had was of these planes screaming across the sky and how terrified he was of them. Not because they had bombed where he lived, but because everyone around him was terrified when they heard the planes, so he said he could feel their fear and it made him scared. He then asked to see the picture of the plane again, pointed at it and said “angel of death” and tears started welling in his eyes. Hearing him say that and seeing the fear in his eyes broke my heart.
That day I came to know war in an intimate and ugly way. It became all too personal and I was too young and immature to process it properly and I was not right for many years after that.
I hope that kid is alive and well somewhere out there with a family of his own. I think about him almost every day.
jeffreycoley on November 11st, 2025 at 22:41 UTC »
Brownshirts unite..( no nazis)
bmcasler on November 12nd, 2025 at 02:53 UTC »
I was stationed on the Truman from 2015-2019. Went to the Middle East and then (thankfully) the North Atlantic after that. Hated every minute of it, but wouldn't have changed a thing.