Have You Been There?

"Who are you," I ask him. He gives me a puzzled look.

"I'm Lee," he replies, telling me his name again.

"Yeah, thanks. I got that part, but that doesn't tell me anything."

"Well," he starts, "I'm a huge Democrat."

"That's not a bad thing," I interrupt.

"And I'm finishing my last year in law school after spending the last two years in Iraq with the Army."

There are thousands of young men and women fighting a war in Iraq right now. It's rare, at least for me, to put a face with the label "soldier." Looking at Lee I never would have guessed that he spent 18 months in Iraq. Later in the night he asks, "Have you ever seen Batman or James Bond? That's what I did." I'm not entirely sure if he was serious or not, but I did hear about some of his experiences. As the result of close exposure to a few bombs, Lee suffers from migraines. He's also scared to shower with the shower curtain closed all the way because he was trained to always be on alert even though living in the middle of nowhere Mississippi doesn't exactly scream crime and terror. (At least not this year in this town in the middle of nowhere.)

Lee does not think that Americans should be fighting in Iraq. I agree with him, but his reasoning resonates more. "I hate all the conservatives who say we should be over there," he says. "My response to them is 'Have you been there? No, then shut up.'"