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The recent documentary The November War asks the question, "Do you believe a warrior ever truly comes back from war, or will a part of him always remain there?" This question is asked by the documentary maker, himself a veteran of the Second Battle of Fallujah, to fellow members of his platoon ten years after their experiences in the battle that changed the direction of that war. There was no clear answer given by the Marines, but they all agreed that warfare and battle do have a permanent change on the warrior who goes through them.As far as real lessons, I don't know. I can't say there are very many brief bullet points, rules of thumbs, or quiet meditations that can be summed up in few words that describe what one learns from war. None that I know that are meaningful absent the context behind them. It isn't that you won't learn from war. War is one of the most fundamentally evolutionary events that a person can endure, and something so uncommon for most people that there is ample opportunity to gain wisdom from the experience. It's just that no one experiences it the same. It will have a profound effect on you and what you take from it can be many different things. I think, for my experiences at least, a person can't come back the same as he was before war. It will change you. It can grow you and it can take things away from you. Many come back worse for the experience, while others are given direction for life, a sense of purpose or a new understanding of the world which people who haven't been a part of the war will never understand. It took many years to realize it and come back to a state of normalcy after my time in Iraq, but I am glad for the opportunity to do what few would undertake willingly. I believe I am a better person for it, not for any particular lesson I might take from the event, but just for the complete change it gave me.Before I go any further, I want to make sure to clarify that I am not, by my own definition, a "combat veteran." I was deployed to Iraq twice in 2005 and 2007 in places very near where the fighting was going on. 27 kilometers from my base was Fallujah, 10 as the crow flies, which then was a hotbed of terrorist activities. Surrounding the base in other directions, the insurgent cities of Habbaniyah, and Ramadi. The second time I went I was on a base between the cities of Hit, Al Baghdadi. and Haditha. Though these regions were center to Al Anbar and Nineveh provinces, known to the military as the Sunni Triangle and the source of the worst resistance, I myself, never saw combat. I was part of a unit that oversaw base operations for Marine helicopter units which would fly out to all these cities and help infantry win battles as well as the army's evacuation teams. My role was very far behind whatever lines of combat existed. The worst I ever saw were a few rockets land a hundred yards or so from where I was, which were scary but not immediately dangerous by the time I was aware of them, as well as the midnight care flights of dead warriors being flown out of Al Anbar in black bags bound for home long after the heat of battle had subsided. I never came face-to-face with any enemy and never had a need to fire my weapon in anger. I was trained and equipped with all the tools and willingness to fight, but always needed just on the precipice of where fighting was happening.Though for many, this disqualifies much of my experience as irrelevant to warfare, I am thankful for having had the opportunity to be so near the fighting, but never be fully blooded by it. I feel fortunate that my experiences allowed me to be a part of war while not becoming overwhelmed by it. Though I was ashamed of my passive role for many years, I now realized it gave me the intense training and viewpoints to survive it, while affording me the objective distance to view warfare less as an event, and more as a science of humanity and a practical thing which must be studied and understood. I could objectify it and understand it, while not being overly jaded and traumatized by it. Because of this, I have been able to gain an understanding that many combat veterans are too close to see and that most civilians could never fathom. In the last several years since my war has ended, for me at least, I have been able to use this to help others understand the truth of war, and have been extremely fortunate to help other veterans come to peace with their experiences, as well.I appreciate The Huffington Post for asking myself and others this question and providing me with the impetus to share what war has taught me in as complete a single place as I can. I'll warn though, if a simple Top 10 Lessons Warriors Gain From War three minute read was what they wanted, they have come to the wrong place. These warriors, many my fellow veteran friends on Quora, have shown this to be one of the few questions capable of producing volumes without ever being complete. My answer will be no different. My belief is that if one truly wants to gain understanding of experiences so unique and so important to the world they live, they had better be prepared to endure the full scope of the pandora's box they have opened. That said, years of research and reflection on the matter have left me with much to say, some of which I would like to share with you now.You Learn How to Eat Anything Put in Front of YouThere is a lot of truth to Dan Rosenthal's quip that grown men will wait in line for a juice box and some reheated macaroni to eat in the dirt. When you are starving and have been working in some of the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, food tastes really good, regardless of what it actually tastes like. I've always said the best flavors on any food are free and starving. You'll eat anything, even the artificially tasteless food given out by the food preparation experts that were the cooks. It was apparently like that because people could be allergic to things with flavor, so why bother and just remove all of them. Regardless, even they tasted delicious depending on what you had endured for the last few days. Essentially, flavor is inversely related to suffering endured. Remember that. It might save your life.I remember when I first arrived in Iraq I went to the dinner one day with one of my Corporals and the two Gunnies. The Gunnies were much more experienced than either us and this was far from their first war. Still, everything was new to me. I was surprised to see the size and scale of the chow hall. There is a few moments of cognitive dissonance when you enter the chow halls in Iraq. They are much larger and more effort put into them than anything you endured during training. It was better than what was offered in Yuma training, anyway. I stood in line and took what was offered. There was something fried and something green. Fork ready, I sat down and prepared to eat when the Corporal among us asked me if I knew what it was I was eating. He pointed to the fried nugget like objects on the plate. I looked, examined, and thought for a second. I hadn't the foggiest clue."You know, I don't care. I expect you to tell me they are fried goat intestines or camel testicals or something, but I just don't care at this point. I'm hungry and they're fried so I am going to eat them."I took my fork and skewered one, put it in my mouth, and attempted to identify the flavor. I wasn't successful, but it wasn't bad. So I went on to eat another."Oh... well, they're mussels... like what people scrape off the side of ships.""Hmm..." I said with the mystery meat still filling my mouth. "Well, that's not so bad when you go in assuming it was fried camel balls now is it?"The Gunnies just laughed.The truth was, I was always a very picky eater until I joined the Marine Corps. That said, in the worst of times, food was actually pretty good. Maybe by the end of boot camp I just wasn't that picky anymore. During training it was bland, but bland isn't exactly the same as bad. It's just eh. By 2005 MREs, Meal Ready to Eat, are pretty good unless you just have really bad luck. You can mix and match, trade up and there was even a cookbook that circulated on how to juryrigg oddly appetizing if not aesthetically displeasing concoctions. For instance, cocoa powder and creamer make pudding! And you can make grilled cheese with spreadable cheese, two breads and the engine block of a humvee as well. Let that depressing thought boil for a minute. Perhaps it was just something you get used to, but I enjoyed them most of the time.What I actually miss was the chow halls. Yes, I miss them and those who have been over understand. I wanted to mention this because this fact would probably surprise most people who have the wrong idea of what the war was like. If you were lucky enough to be on one of the big bases for a while you would get to eat at the chow halls which were these massive cafeterias. They served food so good I was actually in a state of shock that this was what war was like. I'm really serious about this and most won't believe, but we had steak every week and the first time I ever experienced lobster or pecan praline ice-cream was in Iraq. I know that wasn't everyone's experience, but as I said, I was lucky.I have heard since coming back that a lot of people are angry about this. Most Marines will tell you about how they had it so much worse. Most really didn't since the majority never even went to Iraq and still a lot would never want to admit that we had it this good. That said, there were many who had it really rough, and I respect that. Getting sent out to Hit or Camp Korean Village in 2005 was no small achievement and the accommodations, even two years into the war were, shall I say, not yet 5 star quality. That said, if that is one of you reading this, really, my heart goes out to you. You have the gratitude of the nation for what you endured. Congratulations. Here is your medal and a cookie. Please pass the ketchup.Having said all that, many people who never deployed, as well as many who were never part of the military at all, cry foul at the egregious spending of the Department of Defense on $50 dinners for the military. I don't know if those figures are an exaggeration or not, or just some idiot who took the military's entire food budget, including facilities, staff, transportation, plus food and then just divided it by individual meals. I also don't know people just don't understand how logistically hard it is to get food that passes American health standards in that sort of quantity to warzones, but if you are one of those people who think there is something wrong with the fact, perhaps you should consider this. Literally the best thing that could happen to me on any given day was having waffles with peanut butter smothered in hot syrup with a side of eggs and an orange for breakfast. Imagine that. That isn't just a good breakfast, that is the guaranteed to be the best thing that will happen to me that day. The only good things I could imagine on most days revolved around food and phone calls. I hadn't seen my wife in months. I lived in a tent, slept on a cot, my roommate didn't bathe, my bosses were [expletives deleted], and I caught athletes foot a month ago from the showers that I will never get rid of. I hadn't had a day off since I got here and oh, did I mention that we got bombed on a semi-regularly basis? This meal and more importantly, the twenty minutes of renewing socialization where my friends and I can unwind, is all we have. What more do you want to take away from us?That question aside, there is a rational reason for the "enormously superfluous" spending of the US military on the grounds of food. Basic comforts, where they could be controlled, greatly affect troop morale. During Vietnam and World War II, the vast majority of people who became casualties were not because they suffered gorey bullet and shrapnel wounds. They weren't casualties in the normal way respected by non-military folk, but were actually psychiatric casualties succumbing to stresses far outside the expected normal human experience. As it turns out, the Brits may have solved this first in World War I where they would cycle troops out of the trenches every ten days or so to the rear where they could have hot food and showers for a few days before going back. It seemed that they were the first to fight a war like that without suffering the impossible to imagine psychological damage that we are only now starting to understand. Basically, food isn't really a luxury. I was surprised how often, during times when we would be way, way out there in extremely inconvenient conditions, some officer would go so far out of his way to make sure we had "hot" chow. I didn't feel we needed all the attention, but sometimes, Hell itself couldn't stop these men. After researching and understanding the mental effects of war on warriors, I'm starting to see that they did this for more than just purely altruistic good leadership. In those situations, it may be another inoculation, this time against future mental breakdown from prolonged poor morale in the middle of a warzone.So the next time you hear someone say that it's stupid that people in a war zone are getting to eat so good, at least consider that there is probably more to that decision than that the General just likes ice cream. Perhaps you should remind the person complaining so much that spending a little on food for a deployed service member is far less than spending on a lifetime of potential psychiatric disability payouts. It might actually do well to remind them that at the end of the day, they still get to go home while probably never feeling the pressures military guys feel the moment they leave the chow hall.Fear InoculationFear inoculation is exactly what it sounds like. It is a process of becoming partially immune to the effects of fear. Lt. Col Dave Grossman describes in his books On Combat and On Killing, it is the experiences, conditioning and training to deal with events which would cause fear or stress and managing them to a level your body and mind can handle. Fear, causes people to forget things. It causes a reduction in the amount of blood reaching the brain and reduces the effectiveness of our vital sensory inputs. Fear makes your body do many, many things that it shouldn't to maintain your effectiveness in high stress situations. Basically, fear makes you a stupid sack of meat. It is put perhaps the best in the science fiction classic Dune,"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."I'm not saying that Marines and soldiers are some sort of superhero caricatures of real people who can't feel fear. It's quite the opposite. These are people who go into some of the worst periods of places where it is impossible to not feel fear. General George Patton even said, "All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened." I tend to agree. Since their jobs force them into intense periods of fear, though, it is necessary to develop mechanisms to suppress and manage your fear. Perhaps an example would be more appropriate.I have a phobic reaction to heights. I don't like being near balconies or high places where all there is preventing my fall is my ability to not somehow stumble off the wall or guardrail. I recently had this sensation when visiting a local historic watchtower overlooking our local lake. When I say I have a phobic reaction, I mean that when I am in these situations I can feel my heart rate spike, my breathing changes, and I get cold and perhaps a bit sweaty in the course of a single minute. I know that my fear is also not rational because I can reason that I won't possibly accidentally trip and stumble off the four foot wall on the edge of that tower. I'll still go up there, because my wife, completely immune to heights, likes the view. I even can acknowledge that it is a beautiful scene of the lake, but I can't enjoy it. My body tells me this is a time to be afraid, whether it really is or not. That is a phobia.So it surprises me that, when I needed to, I willingly stood on the edge of a fifty foot tower, leaned over and jumped off. Repelled is the more correct term. Either way, heights are one of my greatest fears, yet I jumped off a tower for no other reason than that someone who I knew wouldn't kill me told me to with nothing but a rope and a fall, which might. This process I would later come to realize, was the Marine Corps training me time and time again to overcome my fears and find a way to perform. While I still use it to go with my wife to be with her while she enjoys a view I very much do not, it was put in me for a very different reason. The Repel Tower, along with many other exercises in warrior training was intended to help Marines survive the wars they may face with some degree of mental clarity.When I actually went to war I remember the first time I was really afraid. Years later, I realized how this worked. The first time I ever received indirect fire, a rocket attack on the base, I was naturally very scared. It was my first week in Iraq. It was a loud boom that you could feel, like the feeling of standing near a massive drum in a small room. We all scurried to our pre-planned locations. This wasn't a new thing in 2005 so everyone knew what to do, at least, enough people knew what to do that the rest were able to follow along easily. I followed a Corporal who made his way to one of the bunkers. I didn't know how long we would be there or if we were still in danger, or what came next. I remember being confused and a bit frustrated at how cavalier the Corporal was about the attack. I remember geared up and sitting under the concrete bunker, built for such purposes. After a long time, I turned to my Corporal and asked him, "Isn't someone going to go after them?" He just laughed at me without saying anything.The truth was, there was nothing we could do about the guys with rockets. Those rockets were ingenious little devices set to go off long after the person who set it up had gone home. By the time the blast hit, he was probably at home watching The View. It was a popular show back then. They were also fired from the center of the town of Habbaniyah down below the base, so we couldn't just blanket the area with artillery fire, because that would be like using a grenade on an ant hill to kill one ant. There was nothing we could do about it. The constant threat of enemy rocket attacks was just something we were going to have to deal with.So we did. I remember many days when my good friend and fellow comrade at arms Cody Solley would be asleep in our tent and an explosion would go off somewhere on the base. I'd roll over lazily and say to him, "Did that sound like inbound or outbound?" and he would say that it sounded more like us firing at them. "Good." and I would try to go back to sleep. Moments later, the sirens would cry and we would angrily roll out of our cots, don our protective armor, grab our weapons and make our way to whatever rally point we were instructed to go, the whole time muttering colorful expletives about the stupid terrorists ruining our sleep.While I fully accept that this story demonstrates how utterly complacent we had become, it also showcases how inoculated to the fear of being struck with one of these rockets or mortars we had become. After telling this story to others who didn't go through it, people have told me that they don't know how they would have ever been able to deal with the not knowing. They said that it would be terrifying not knowing if death would just come from anywhere at any time. I thought that was more dramatic than the situation deserved, but there were cases of people that definitely succumbed to this kind of pressure. There also were some casualties throughout the base, and several people I knew had close calls, but mostly just damage to the base itself. The church was hit, as was the mosque, and my blessed chow hall once, as well. The flight line was hit numerous times and as I understand, at least one of the birds was taken out. The worst we saw was a relay hub where a large number of our cabling and communication equipment was taken out, disrupting communications through half the base. That was a bad few weeks, especially for the wire guys. I can think of one person who most certainly lost his wits under the stress, though there were other factors, as well. As for those of us that were able to adapt, we knew not to let it trouble us and were able to focus on our work, in spite of the random timing and locations of these attacks. It could have come at any moment, that was true, and I can see many people being unnerved by that, but we had been conditioned to the point that they were really just nuisance.I think this is an important time to mention the importance of training for the military. I've gone in very deep on the importance of boot camp as well as rationalizing how crazy it is to people who haven't gone through it in What is U.S. Marine Corps boot camp like? The synopsis of that answer can be found in the first line:"It is a place where you have to train 18 year olds to run to the sound of gunfire and perform under fire and the threat of death."One of the most intriguing descriptions I have seen for Marine Corps Boot Camp is in the way it conditions its warriors towards focused aggression and repression of fear through combat conditioning. Combat conditioning isn't the same as working out. Regularly recruits are put into situations which simulate high stress, fear inducing events, whether it is jumping off a tower or being yelled at by six different people for minor infractions. Recruits face nonstop situations where they will be tested under extreme stress levels. This isn't anything like test anxiety, or deadline anxiety. I can state for a fact that we can still fail at those like anyone else. This is high impact stress where in the course of two minutes a person can go from completely calm to a heartbeat of 180 beats per minute. At that heart rate, usually only brought on by the fear of death, extreme exercise or in the sultrous throws of passion (which better be seriously good since you are close to dying from it) much of the brain and body stops working predictably. You lose fine motor control, some of your senses may fail or deceive you, and you might only be capable of thinking at the very base level of mammalian instinct. The Marines train in this environment, know how to induce it under safe conditions and expect the recruit to dismantle and put back together a weapon consisting of numerous extremely tiny parts in under a minute while in it.This type of training doesn't just focus on higher order thinking. That is there as well. Military history, customs and courtesies, structure, communications systems, first aid, weapon characteristics, and all manner of scholastic knowledge will be trained. An example would be re-calculating the trajectory of an object traveling at 3,110 ft/s for a three inch change in elevation at 5 times the length of a standard football field when factoring in for wind speed and direction as well as differences in elevation. That's basic rifle marksmanship. Marine Corps boot camp goes deeper, though. They focus also on mid-brain thinking. This is the mammalian brain and the one where most of our innate, instinctual reactions come from. You might think that because I said, "instinctual", that one can't train it, but you would incorrect.Combat science has shown that most of the time a kill is rendered in combat for infantry, it is a reactionary response. This means that to prepare warriors, you have to train them to react to dangerous situations, not to rationalize their way through them. Essentially, modern militaries know that their soldier is being pitted not against the rationality of the other soldier, but against their enemy's innate instinctive responses, trained in the middle brain. Under ideal situations, they will be able to take a well aimed shot from cover and concealment at a time of their choosing, but more likely for the young infantryman, they face the danger of needing to react faster than they can think of what to do. To do this, the Marines use numerous operant conditioning mechanisms that reward their reactions to stimulus and condition them to ignore non-important information instinctively. This channels their brain's cognitive abilities to react to stimulus and building the same neural pathways connecting their reactionary subconscious brain to their bodies muscle receptors. This means that when the training is applied correctly, a person can recognize a target from a non-target, sight in and kill the bad guy, before the average person would rationalize that they are in danger. Yeah.I've made a point of promoting training as the single most important trait that businesses should learn from the military. I'm not saying that businesses should start pushing their accountants off of buildings to see how they handle mid-April or that we should scream at the receptionist for messing up the coffee, but the Marines and most modern militaries have mastered training not only a of a Marine's ability to analyze a situation when calm is allowed, but to even groom the other parts of the brain to function when it isn't. This is happening when most civilian companies are wasting millions of dollars in human resources on recruiting because they still pride themselves on a "Sink or Swim" model of management from the nineteenth century. It isn't that sometimes it doesn't work, but usually it will just ensure an unnecessarily high turnover rate and fearful company culture, rife with paranoia, politics, and unproductive competition. This isn't because it is a better system, but because civilians don't have experience of a better model. While this feels tangential, I can honestly say that I have had a profound respect for the Marines' education system of training its individuals for success after seeing the failures of the business world, even very successful companies, in this regard. The United States Marines are one of the most successful organizations on the planet because of their training, which doesn't make them fearless, but which makes them immensely competent under stress. I only really realized after the war and one only really appreciates it when he is wondering what to write in this article, and can think clearly enough to find inspiration from the top of a very, very tall tower.You Learn What War Wasn'tBefore I went to Iraq, I believed that my experience in the war would be filled with pain, anguish, sorrow, loss, and destruction. I imagined that I would "lose a lot of good people", while I, however, would somehow be leading some glorious come from behind charge against a bloodthirsty horde of terrorist gunmen. These were fantasies. I could not have been more wrong in this portrayal of what warfare and combat actually was as depicted from my fellow Marines, the testimonials and after action reports I have studied, and the training I took part in and led. In looking back, it isn't that difficult to find the source of my misconception. Most of my views of warfare, real face-to-face warfare, even as a young Marine, were still built off the perceptions given to me by movies and television I watched, the video games I played, the books I read, and even the news. It would take a lot of living through a real war to undo the damage these media sources would give me in relation to understanding what a real person would experience if they went to one.After years of America at war, this phenomenon of societal ignorance hasn't improved much in spite of the presence of millions of new veterans capable to serve either as military advisers, or harsh critics of your work if you don't bother listening. At the top of my hit list were movies like the Hurt Locker and Brothers. I've spoken often about these abominations for being everything wrong with the entertainment industry where topics like warfare and veterans are concerned. These two especially take advantage of actual veterans' issues while recklessly blowing all dramatic elements out of proportion, not in a way that brings awareness to these issues, but just as a way to garner attention from military sympathizers and awards. Their filmmakers were opportunists, at best.In spite of these shameful misrepresentations of combat and the people who take part in it professionally, movies like the Hurt Locker went on to win 98 major industry awards, in part, for their "Gritty realism and attention to detail" to quote one non-veteran critic.Even well done movies, like Black Hawk down, based off the book that is the single greatest retelling of actual battlefield events in our generation, and the newly minted American Sniper didn't do justice to how it actually is for the vast majority of us who take part in war. I even recently gave a very favorable review of American Sniper for their actual attention to detail, but the problem movies like this create is that they leave audiences believing that this is the average experience in war, and not that of exceptional individuals. American Sniper, for example, is about the Navy SEAL (exceptional experience) Sniper (exceptionally designed role for the job of killing bad guys) who has the record for the most kills by a single American warfighter in our history (exceptional and singularly unique.) Even extraordinarily well done documentaries done by actual Marines who were actual participants of particular engagements they are reporting on through interviews of the fellow warriors he fought with (as in, is it possible to get a better war documentary?) such as the previously mentioned Kickstarter funded indi documentary The November War suffer this failure in leading people's perception*. Watchers of the media believe the extraordinary is commonplace. When I go to work as a teacher of middle schoolers, they will ask me questions like "Was it really like that over there?" I am left only being able to tell them that, "Sure, it was like that for some people, but not most of us."Then I have to account for their perceptions brought about by their source of military education, i.e. games like Call of Duty. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy games, and appreciate how much further the COD franchise has pushed the technology and improved the art form, but that isn't warfare. Take, for example, the fact that most missions involve you killing more people than the current record holder for kills mentioned previously in American Sniper. It's just very unrealistic in that representation and leaves kids, let alone adults, with an even worse understanding of what war was like than even those just watching movies and TV as their main source of information. This argument is set aside from the fact that games utilize embedded operant conditioning mechanisms, such as those described by the groundbreaking Professor of Psychology B. F. Skinner, to reward players for violent acts which dehumanize the act of killing in combat and warfare.The news was no better. Honestly. If I were someone who received all my knowledge from the news I would believe that war was a never ending death spiral where no one has ever been better off from it and where I was actually fated to die in a quagmire of death and destruction. Numerous historians and social scientists have shifted their view on this belief of the unnecessary futility of War in general after looking at the history and evidence of events that one would consider were productive wars. Productive wars exist when threats push different groups together into stronger, more cohesive and more stable societies to deal with the dangers they face. One could look at the existence of the United States, once a collection of different and unrelated colonies as evidence of this, as could we view the evolution of all nations following the end of World War II. No one has articulated this idea of productive war better than Stanford Professor Ian Morris in his book War! What is it Good For?News doesn't communicate this though. They don't communicate what needs to be understood, but what gets people attention and may be true. These are not necessarily the same. What I never understood was why more attention was given to mothers of war dead than the war itself. How is this person going to help people understand the conflict? What can she add to the discussion about strategic gains and losses on the ground? What can she add to the understanding of the mentalities and motivations of the people who killed her son? Nothing, she was brought there to make people upset and emotional, because that improves ratings. Her pain and suffering, far too intense to be considered an objective opinion, is being used as is PTSD in movies. Sometimes, it isn't even about political bias, which it is far too often, but just news media misrepresenting events on the ground so that it drives views and thereby increasing the value they have to advertisers. It's a bit disgraceful when you consider how much the news actually fails at their job of giving people executable knowledge of what is going on.What war is actually like, is a long, slow grind of day-to-day drudgery, speckled with intermittent bursts of high impact stress. The vast majority of us view it as horrific in its scale of boredom and time spent away from family and society, rather than the carnage one expects. From time to time, it is only interrupted by a few moments of intense stress. Before long, you forget that you are in a completely different part of the world, by many definitions. The experiences and familiarities of your other life begin to fade away, like the smells of sea water or of the forest, along with the subtleties of the faces of loved ones. You just start to forget all the important details as you acclimate to this place where the smells of home begin to take on the smells of war, those of dust, sweat, gunpowder, and a nation in decay. Eventually, war for you feels just like another home - a horrible home, like what I imagine being raised with an abusive father, negligent mother and in condemned tenements on the other side of the railroad tracks, but a home nonetheless. The biggest danger we face are our bosses becoming monsters, mostly through their own boredom or the fact that they received a letter from their wife/girlfriend/fiance/baby mama bringing them drama which we must pay for. Most of the time, the enemy is each other. You'll find yourself planning out "I bet I could get away with it if..." scenarios by the third month and by the fifth, 90% of your free thinking has been devoted to fantasizing of glorious night long love making in the arms of your lover, or whomever will have you upon your return. You don't feel you are in any real danger, despite the scholarly knowledge that one of the most violent battles of the decade is happening only 30 miles away. For most, there is no combat involved. Most of us will never fire our weapons in anger, and probably never see this enemy we've worked so hard to hate. These are the long tail of people who facilitate the fighters like the infantry and pilots. Even for most of them, at some point, you realize that besides getting to call home for a bittersweet "Hello, how was your day?" and six thousand mile goodnight kisses, the only real thing you look forward to at the end of the day is throwing papers into the burn barrel. They no longer have a strategic purpose, but hold classified information that you just don't want to possibly be intercepted in the trash. So you just watch them burn, stir them with your stick, add more fluid. This is the new ESPN.What is the net effect of all this? Every year, one of my students will eventually ask the question, "Mr. Davis, have you ever killed anybody?" to which I always reply back, "There are no good answers to that question. One, 'No I haven't.' which you will be disappointed to hear, because I have failed to live up to your ideal of what a warrior was supposed to be. I have failed because I have not done what, to most is the most traumatic and most life changing thing that can be done, snuffing out the hopes, dreams, potential, and value of another human being. Two, 'Yeah, it was really terrible.' Now, the person who used to teach you Geography will forever no longer be a person, but will be a killer. This person who I used to love and admire, or at least tolerate, I am no longer comfortable with, because there is something wrong about one who kills. Three, 'Yes, and it was great'. This human now terrifies me. There is no good way for the veteran to answer this question because society, at its core, has conditioned responses against every answer he might give."*(Seriously, though, everyone should see The November War. It's on Youtube and here is a link to reviews by actual Iraq veterans that also include links to the movie.)Perception is Reality"Perception is Reality" was a phrase I heard my senior staff non-commissioned officers say regularly. You may never have heard the sentiment, but if you have ever had a boss walk in on something and immediately come to the worst conclusion they could about you with the few seconds they took to gather evidence on the matter, than you know the feeling. "Perception is Reality" was a military axiom that meant, basically, that if I perceive a thing a certain way, that is the way it is. It was, in general, a cop out to doing more thorough work once enough information was gained to come to some conclusion, whether it was the right one or not.The original title for this section was "I Learned the Facts Don't Match People's Perception". In my own studies, and in keeping with the idea of discovering what war was not, I had to apply this principle to discover the root causes of the conflict and filter out the media noise involved. That's why it makes it important to understand that combat is nothing like the movies and the warrior experience is nothing like what is conveyed to watchers. One cannot understand it, and gain wisdom or tactical information about combat from media, because it isn't designed to display how one should fight. It is designed based on carefully and time tested practices to elicit emotional responses in viewers. For example, there is little talk in movies of the mechanical precisioned choreography that goes into clearing a house, and the repetitive nature of doing so. That would be very boring. I've never heard the term "overlapping fields of fire" or mention of units like AMLICO, who specialize in bringing to the fight literally every lethal instrument of precision guided destruction the US military has in range. I've never seen the way that 90% of the time, the mission is about pushing the terrorists into a very particular part of the city, all bunched up, then leveling them with artillery or helicopter fire. More often than not, the operations are usually quite methodical, even surgical at times, with relatively little danger to our forces, compared to what most perceive that danger to be.That is how it is supposed to work. It isn't that dramatic in practice, most of the time. There isn't all the emotion and flare for effect. Someone seeking to understand warfare and combat through these media resources will simply never be capable of separating the directors', writers', and actors' desire to make you feel an emotion enough to understand warfare as a real world practice. Absent actual experience or objective research, viewers will be left with will be a very hollow understanding of it means to go to war, why wars are fought, or what it is like to be involved. If this is all a person has, the entertainment experience in media will leave them ill prepared to comment or weigh in on these subjects, should their opinion be requested, or even needed, as is the case with many lobbying firms representing parties with no true understanding of conflict or immediate stake in them. This is the perception of what war means. That means that their limited perception is the only reality they will ever know.You might think well of yourself, because you believe none of this will ever matter to you since you have no control over what the military does, or that you never take part in conversations like that anyway. The fact is, your opinion of the war and warriors has far more effect on the lives of these individuals than you think. We've all heard someone spout off that people in the military are just a bunch of warmongers, or stupid people who couldn't cut in the real world. This lovely comment came in a few weeks ago for me.And, of course, there's no shortage of idiot 18-25 year-old kids who will buy whatever line their government sells them, and happily be cannon fodder, because 'merica.http://www.quora.com/Did-America...More educated people might even go so far as to say that jingoist politicians are just sending off kids to get killed, or even debating military ethics and the use of force absent an understanding of military law, culture, tactics, and practice. I've even had a college professor make fun of the military for being stupid in a class filled with nineteen year old freshmen, and me as well.Individually people insulting the military or its practices can be dismissed as someone not actually knowing what they are talking about, but en masse, these widely held beliefs become policy. We are seeing this surrounding the debate on limiting the use of drones, while nations like China grow their drone force unchecked and Russia is rumored to be producing the largest stealth bomber in history.A more important example, which many may relate to, of the negative effects of media on veterans can be seen in hiring practice of many civilian companies. Shows that showcase the token veteran with PTSD (Parenthood) or the hopelessly broken combat vet who will never survive the real world (The Hurt Locker, Brothers), or even well made movies which leave audiences seeing no veteran who is not grievously injured or without psychiatric disabilities from war (American Sniper) leave the average person with a damaged view (read: negative stereotype) of the average person who has served. Their net effect is to make others believe that if you go to war, you will be, at best, one of the few lucky survivors and your experiences will leave you nothing more than a damaged worthless mass of a human, incapable to ever love or function in society again.This has been shown to affect how often veterans are hired in civilian positions after leaving the military. It has actually been measured that because of the negative bias created by these types of media, military veterans suffer unfair stereotyping and bias in hiring practices. This phenomena began making headlines when USA Today put out an article calling attention to it. Often, managers will look at a resume and say that, "He went to Iraq? He probably has PTSD. He might one day snap and shoot up the office." The veteran is not hired because of an unfair stereotype no more accurate or just than not hiring an African American or Latino man because he was probably at one time part of a gang. Recent studies have shown that while only 5-20% of combat vets have justified PTSD (about the same as civilians who have experienced car accidents or personal tragedy) it is assumed by many people that most veterans have the ailment. It is called PTSD bias and is most damaging among middle managers who don't understand the disease.Researchers from the Center for New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, interviewed executives of 69 leading corporations, including Bank of America, Target, Wal-Mart, Procter and Gamble, and Raytheon. All said hiring veterans can be good for business, but more than half acknowledged harboring a negative image of veterans because of how popular media — from news coverage to films — portray PTSD.Recent war vets face hiring obstacle: PTSD biasHopefully, this example will show that there is a link between the incorrect assumptions formed by media and actual real world civilians perceptions which affect veterans lives. That said, it's important to understand the real scope of war. For that reason, I'd like to offer a brief testimonial and some context to apply it to the big picture.Marines and the United States military put a very high investment into their people and consider using them with great care and risk aversion. This is very good for the American warfighter, but safe is a relative word. I actually did know four people who died in Iraq. One was shot down flying a helicopter. One was killed by an accident on the job and two were killed by improvised explosive devices. The helicopter pilot was our old Executive Officer. He was shot down near Ramadi in his SuperCobra. The second was a Master Sergeant in my unit who worked in Explosive Ordnance Disposal. He found and disabled one bomb, but was unaware of the second one hidden just beyond it. The third was over the Military police who guarded our EOD team. He was just doing his job when an Iraqi ran over him with a van. I don't even think that was actual combat, and may have just been wretched luck. All three of these were lost early in the deployment and hurt our morale pretty bad for the next few months. The fourth, which happened much later was a close friend who I grew up with since childhood. He wasn't in my unit, but playing football with him for years makes you grow close. I was proud and happy to hear when he joined the Marines and in hearing of of his loss, I felt great pain. Losing him also hurt my hometown very badly.Still, none of these men were shot. None of them ever even saw the enemy that took their lives. The closest may have been Major Bloomfield, the pilot. This is a more realistic view of war; not the showdown at the OK Corral type combat engagements. It is so rare that you see a duel between warriors that it is almost not even believable to me when I hear it. Of course, it does happen to many among the infantry, but the overall number of people who will be face-to-face with the person they must kill is unbelievably low. The truth is, most people who take part in action do so through methods that are relatively boring to those who have never trained on it. The more common method in which people were taken out by the US military involved spotters hidden at some vantage point, painting targets for precision guiding bombings, or air strikes from everything from Cobra attack helicopters to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. House-to-house clearing took place, but mostly as part of individual campaigns and usually wouldn't result in significant fighting on a day-to-day basis.That said, the idea that you were "one of the lucky ones" is a really bad war trope and a stereotype of the war experience, in spite of the things I saw and the people we lost. I've done a lot of work in this area trying to communicate exactly how unlikely someone is to experience hostile action and death in the line of duty. Few would believe that only about a quarter of the United States military even deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during the entire span of those conflicts. Fewer yet would believe that if you were to be deployed to one, you would suffer less than a .01% chance of being killed. As bad as my story was, of the four people I knew who died, that represents some tiny percentage of the few thousand people I knew when I was in. I've spoken at length about the actual metrics of warfare in What is the true risk of being killed in war? andWhat are some mind-blowing facts about the U.S military?For that matter, the belief that millions of civilians are killed by war, at least when the Americans are involved, is also more myth and hyperbole than truth. At best, it is speculation that is widely taken as fact. Without addressing this one too specifically, during the time when the Americans were at war, and all the numerous failures that took place within it, the worst two years were only twice as bad for the Iraqi people than the average of Saddam Hussein's thirty years in power. Consider this and the fact that in the entire span of the "quagmire" that was the Iraq war, roughly the same number of people have been killed in Syria in less than half the time.Second, there is a belief that the vast majority of those killed were caused by American collateral damage. There are even sites dedicated to implying this. Searching through the actual data shows, however, that most of the civilians killed were not victims of American "collateral damage" at all, but by deliberate strikes by the various terrorist groups trying to sway them politically through fear and subjugation.Lastly, did you know that, for a time, the war was as good as won? I didn't hear anything from anyone. The news didn't mention it. And no, I am not talking about in 2011 with the pull out. That moment just marked the beginning of the next round of bloodshed, I mean in 2007 when everything turned around and violence against civilians in the country returned to prewar levels.The image above shows the actual death tolls from Iraq. Blue represents people killed attributed to Coalition sources. These are legitimate occurrences of collateral damage in the form of civilian losses. Red represents all the deaths of that war. Note that after the initial invasion that blue number, already the lowest number of civilian casualties in any invasion of this magnitude in history, drops to near zero. Terrorists however, began to use this as a tactic to win battles. This they utilized until 2007 when a new doctrine introduced a revolutionary counter insurgency strategy into the mix. It is disappointing that this long after the event, people still aren't aware of the effects of the 2007 American Troop "Surge" and the stability it brought to that country. News media had a very important job they failed on delivering.Basically, in studying the events myself and in educating others, I've found that standard media outlets can't be trusted to deliver accurate portrayals of what is happening. They all fail for one reason or another. Some are designed to fail at this and make their money on the emotions they can pull to the surface, excitement and fear (movies and video games), empathy and action (news and personal outlets). No one really has the job of just understanding the conflict. That is our responsibility, but most of us have better things to do. Perhaps, it isn't that they have better things to do, but for most, it is just too hard to think about these things. There is a lot of guilt involved in not fighting, but studying about those who did, or worse are fighting now has become so much of an obstacle, that they don't know where to begin. Most avoid the guilt by ignoring the realities while others take it in passing by watching entertainment disguised as military interest pieces. People need to get over this aversion to study and start trying to understand the deep level mechanics of war as well as understanding the facts and metrics by which they are measured. For this, we have to start putting away the emotional responses to warfare and begin our research with some semblance of objectivity on the matter. Otherwise, our emotions will betray us and we will be so ignorant of the signs of war happening that we won't see it the next time it comes around again.As a side note, while I have the floor and am on the subject of civilian mortality, I've always found it odd that the standard trope is that the Americans make terrorists because we are killing the fathers of little Iraqi children who go on to become terrorists in retribution. The data would indicate, however, that there are many more civilians murdered by terrorists than could ever be attributed to the Americans. One would have to wonder why this logic doesn't create a new army of counter-terrorists fighting to stabilize the region or at least be effective at murdering the terrorists. We could say that this type of revenge killing is going on, but in seeing the fanatical barbarity of groups like ISIL, we have to wonder why there isn't more of a revenge based uprising, in sticking to the original logic of "America created the terrorists". Eventually, this sort of thinking makes us realize that terrorists like ISIL don't face this retribution because their victims are simply too terrified. They have been fully subjugated. If we continue on, we see the inverse of this philosophy, being the Americans, and one starts to wonder if the solution to this failed line of thinking was just for the Americans and Coalition to act with the same brutality of monsters like the Islamic State."But wait!" you say. "There is another way! We should take this evidence you have collected to show that America intervening at all was wrong. If they hadn't intervened, none of this would have ever happened." While I am sure that there are many who would believe that, there is another point which must be considered. As I said before, the worst of the Iraq War was only twice as bad as the average year under Saddam. That said, we have to ask who the original terrorists were. I'll save you the research, they were primarily people who had lost power when the regime was in place and who now want it back. To be more clear, they were people who had significant control, power, and privilege under the Sunni lead, Baathist regime. To leave no uncertainty in my message, those who bombed civilian hospitals, schools, and shopping centers filled with their own people in 2005 were the same people who headed major departments of the government, military, and religious networks in 2002. If left alone, what would prevent them from conducting yet another Al-Anfal Campaign ( 150,000 civilians massacred from 1986 to 1989) or the draining of the marshlands and the complete destruction of the Marsh Arabs? Those who argue that we should never have intervened are arguing that the Iraqi would somehow be better off in the hands of people who willingly killed them just to make a point.International OutlookThe war changed me. When I arrived in Iraq, I was 19. At that point, they were the bad guys, I was one of the good guys. What more was there to understand? Then one day came around where I asked myself on a cold night in Iraq somewhere around the winter of 2005, what am I doing here? Not in the sense of why was I serving my country, not even in the sense of what was America doing here. I mean why is it that people from this part of the world were the way they were that they would willingly fly a plane to their doom just to make a point? What was the motivation of these people? What did they care about? Why would they kill each other, as I have pointed out, in far greater numbers than us? Where the f*** am I?It was on that night that, for the first time, I realized how drastically my educational upbringing had failed me. It appears that having a few years of government and world history classes ran mostly by individuals who were more concerned with recent sports scores, had not prepared me with the necessary knowledge to tackle such dilemmas of geopolitical importance. Back then, only 10 years ago, I'm ashamed to say that I had no idea the answers to most of these questions. It was because of this, that part of my free time became dedicated to correcting the holes in my understanding of the world.I studied the history of the region, it's religions, yes (plural) religions and the politics of the region. Only now could I tell you the significance of the first empire there and how that began the bronze age. Only after the war could I tell you about the march of Islam and its evolution, as well the effects it has had everywhere else. In part, much of my spare time has been dedicated to this continuing endeavour to learn and understand the region I once lived. Now, only after years of study, do I consider myself a good enough first source of information on the subject, that I would feel confident enough to give people a good place to get started in their search for discovery. Because of this I have been asked to answer often on subjects of Iraq and more recently, the invasion of Islamic jihadists to the country: Who is responsible for the mess in Iraq today?It was only because of the war that I realized how vital an understanding of the world at large was. In helping others better understand how it all works together I realized how much many other people experienced the same ignorance in their education as I had. This motivated me to become a freelance writer and a history teacher. Now, every day I get to tell kids about what is going on outside of our sleepy little hometown and how it all fits together, because of the experiences they know well that I have had. The kids who didn't care about anything are now asking me about the Sunni, Shia divide and each of my students can provide an up to date play-by-play of the recent battle for Tikrit. That may bother you, but none of mine are going to wake up one day unaware of the world as I did. I'm very proud of that.The original problem I ran into though, still exists; people in general have no idea what is going on beyond our borders. This is true, yet people continually weigh in on topics which they have absolutely no clue about. A friend of mine once shared something with me that doesn't exactly explain the phenomena, but makes a clear picture of how it works. It's called Mount Stupid.There just seems to be this misguided sense of the superiority of self in all things, that people think their expertise, be it on 1980's hair metal bands, grants their opinions merit in the same field as one who has first hand experience in the matter in which we are speaking, say, geopolitics as they apply to the Middle Eastern conflict. You've heard stuff on Iraq from your favorite blog or even from some nice woman who lost her son in Iraq on the news. You're an expert on the topic now. This is Mount Stupid.If we are speaking on the subject of 80's hair bands, please lead the way, but if we are speaking about the evolution of the Ba'ath Party and its influence on modern politics of the Middle East (which is pretty important FYI) and your knowledge of Steven Tyler's vocal range doesn't seem particularly germane to the subject, that's because it isn't. Shut up and listen. You might learn something and it might improve your ability to handle the future. Maybe, just maybe, you will no longer be part of the problem - people who know very little about things, but make irrational (in hindsight) demands on those who do. As I have said before, a person who knows very little but says things that are dumb can be ignored. En masse though, those same dumb statements get validated, and then they become policy.Don't think that last point is valid? You think your opinion of the Middle East matters? Think Mount Stupid is just a funny joke that doesn't apply to you? My active followers will recognize these questions from my recent answer to Is spreading democracy in the Middle East a bad idea? Hopefully they can shed some light on it. Let's start off easy:Be honest with yourself and tell me which one of these countries is Iraq. We've only been at war there since the early 90's, you should know this by now. You can click to expand the image.Can't do it? Not sure?How about this one? What information is being shown to you? What is the importance of the different shades of green in this picture?Had to consult your Googleviser?Let's try this one. Take a good, hard long look at it to see if you can figure out what it displays. What do you think the green areas represent in this one?Think you know the answer?........You really think you know what it means?......Really sure about that? Here is the map's key:Yes, that is a map displaying where and how often women undergo, or are forced into enduring Female genital mutilation. Now, so that we are clear, FGM is a cultural problem and governments have a hard time governing something that is traditionally done behind closed doors and by unlicensed practitioners. I, however, personally believe, as would many of you, that in a population where women are extended and ensured equal representation as men, that those new voters would probably vote on the side of orgasm rather than being stitched together at the age of three in some barbaric ritual to help gratify male pleasures decades later. This single practice is responsible for the majority of women being sexually assaulted in the Middle East, forcing the procedure on adults who didn't receive it as young girls. As sure as anything in my life, I know that once outlawed, they would never choose to go back to that old status quo.If any of that last segment left you with the feeling that perhaps you don't understand the issues surrounding the Middle East, maybe you shouldn't voice your opinion on it quite so much. You should, however, seek out and gain knowledge and understanding from those who do have such understanding. Your quiet will literally save lives and ensure the quality of life for others.The war opened my eyes to important things that are going on which need to be understood. They need to be talked about by people who have experience and those people need to not be drown out by the flood of people who just don't agree. War gave me a world mindset that most Americans simply don't have, because they don't need it survive. We can get by our whole lives without ever truly concerning ourselves with what is going anywhere else. When we do though, important things happen. I wish more Americans cared about what happens beyond their shores without descending to tired and inaccurate stereotypes handed down to them for years. We live in the internet age, and for goodness sake, a third of the people reading this answer will probably be in India. I don't know how to make others really take the note I do about the world, but I know the war, and being a warrior, did it for me.The Scope of What Humanity Was Capable OfThe last thing I would want to talk about is how war makes you fully aware of just what people are capable of. It will shed any naivety you had about the nature of this human condition. You will come face to face with the reality that there are people out there who are willing to kill their own people just to further their political goals. Writing that sounds like the plot to a movie or something, but it is real. War forces you to learn about massacres like Al-Anfal Campaign and the destruction of the Marsh Arabs way of life. As a child, I could never have imagined such hate, or simply, such practicality absent the value of human life and suffering. As one of the graphs I shared earlier showed, the vast majority of those killed in Iraq were done so by other Iraqi. Worse, was how many people would do so for religious agenda. The depths of depravity of some of the ideas rolling around over there is mind boggling, not to say that the ideas pervade only in Iraq.What's really painful though is seeing that your own people aren't immune to being horrible people either. It always gives me pause to see so many people who are simply aware of so much extremely important information because it is hidden from them, or worse, because they refuse to acknowledge the blinders they have about it. Atrocities go by and people turn a blind eye because it doesn't fit into the narrative they believed to be true. I'll be frank, in being there, I believe Iraq was important and we should have been there. I've been very open that there were many things we should have done differently and are to blame for many failures in it (With the benefit of hindsight, should America have invaded Iraq in 2003? and Who is responsible for the mess in Iraq today?) but simply saying it was a mistake because you don't know a better way to do it is a failure in itself. I am not going to try and convert anyone on this matter. I've made my arguments many times, but I do think it would improve everyone's perspective to see it through the eyes of another, an Iraqi Kurd who view the war beginning in 2003 as the first time his people ever had the chance to have freedom and equality in Iraq. Yad Konrad's answer to In the end, did the U.S. bring freedom, democracy, prosperity, or security to Iraq?Leaving my soapbox, war gets very personal when you experience month after month working with, living with, eating with, suffering with, and enduring with the same people day, after day, after day. It makes you aware of what people, individual people can really be like. I've had Sergeants who doctored their Marine's performance reports to make their troops appear as failures, so that they could be seen as disciplinarians when there was nothing to punish and miraculous improvements months later. I've seen Marines sabotage each other for a pointless position within a fire team. I've seen Marines so piss drunk that they had be thrown into a car with their kids watching on a platoon family function. I've seen people get pregnant on purpose so that they could avoid a deployment, many times. I've seen incompetence, cover-ups, affairs, and mountains of bureaucratic nonsense a mile high, preventing anything from being done.Perhaps the worst of it was when I was pulled from a counseling with a therapist about what I had gone through in Iraq. My father-in-law past away in a violent accident three days before I was supposed to come home. I was sent home early, three days early, to handle the affairs. The deployment was rough and losing your father at the end of it like that was miserably traumatic. You are robbed of any happiness in seeing your family at all. It was literally the worst period of my life. While speaking to the therapist I received a call that I was in trouble for not being a formation for the platoon that I was longer a part of. That's not true. I hadn't spoken to the therapist. I was one step in the door when I found out I was supposed to be in some dumb formation because the Staff Sergeant in charge didn't realize that I was no longer part of his unit. He forgot to file the paperwork and simply hadn't noticed I hadn't been there for over a month. I never went back to speak to the therapist. The sad thing, that wasn't even the worst part of that story.What also surprised me was how bad people could be to people they loved. You'd be shocked at how little people in the military seem to care about things like marital fidelity. Knowing who was sleeping with whom was like some deranged version the kids game Guess Who. I remember one guy, a pretty high ranking member of my platoon, come home to a huge sign welcoming him home by his wife and daughters. A few days later, that sign wasn't taken down. It was ceremonially torn in half. I also thought "Dear John" letters were a myth before being deployed. What surprises me, though, is a phenomenon where some observers have stated that Dear John letters seem to happen more frequently when the war is generally not understood or approved of at home. It would seem they are another subtle way that our inability to understand a conflict affects the lives of those who must endure them. That doesn't excuse the women who make the lives of their men harder during one of the hardest times they will ever experience because they aren't getting enough attention, or because their friends don't feel it is the moral thing to be with them anymore. Yes, it's true. It happened far more often than I would like to believe. By the way, having the real name of Jon doesn't help in war. It leaves one irrationally paranoid of such things.But it wasn't all bad. Just as I saw the ugliness of the people around me, and the horrors true villains would visit upon each other outside the gates, I saw goodness in people as well. I was signed up for civilian care groups by my family. What followed after that was a flood of mail from dozens, maybe a hundred or so, people I had never met. They sent me food, socks, writing material, playing cards, candy, storage bins, Santa hats... just about anything you could imagine. One old Vietnam Marine somehow smuggled me a full flask. I just so happen to be one of the only non-drinking Marines alive, but I honored his wishes nonetheless. It was all sent to some random Corporal none of them knew. I was pretty overwhelmed. It was a pleasant surprise to see so many people in support of what we were doing, especially by 2007 when the war was old news. Eventually, the letters became too much. I couldn't keep up with them and failed to be able to correspond to them all. I became very guilty about all the attention and my failures to correspond, so I tried to share in the blessing. I wrote some of them back and told them how taken care of I was, but told them of members of my platoon who weren't getting mail from anyone. It was nice to see some of the younger ones feel that sense of importance they had been lacking. Eventually I built a wall in our eating area of the entry control point, from a piece of plywood. On it I would just staple up all the letters. I felt that the attention wasn't really being directed at me, but just anyone these these kind altruistic samaritans could get a hold of. I made the wall of letters. I kept most the candy, though. No one ever told me thank you for the wall, but from time to time I would see them staring at it while they didn't know I was looking. I'd like to think that in hard moments of that deployment, there were many, that they had that reminder that regardless of what the news and media were saying, there were still many, many people who loved us for what we were doing.I didn't really need them. I had my own personal fan club. My wife had special abilities to make a person feel at home in the middle of a warzone. First off, she bakes. Her chocolate chip cookies have always been the pride of our household and famed within any community we have been a part of. She would make me a fresh batch every week for the lunches that she prepared for me every day. She is really old fashioned and I am thankful, undeserving, but thankful. That sort of thing doesn't happen when you go to Iraq, though. It wasn't that the food there wasn't palatable. I've mentioned that. It just wasn't made with love. 6,000 miles didn't stop my Jennie, however. She searched online the whole time I was gone to discover ways to help make our lives better. Imagine my surprise when one day I opened a flat rate box and saw a bag filled with chocolate chip cookies that must have been shipped weeks ago. About a third were reduced to crumbs, but those that remained were still fresh. That wasn't possible. Jennie had read that you can ship cookies and keep them from getting stale by placing torn pieces of white bread in the packaging. The cookies will pull moisture from the bread and arrive weeks later as if they were baked yesterday. Yeah, it really works. When I was at my lowest, around the first Christmas when I was really away in 2005, she was still taking care of me. One of our Sergeants found out his wife had had an affair or left him or something. He was a jerk, but that still sucks. It left a lot of us married guys a bit shaken up. I received a flat rate about that time with "Do not open until Christmas." The 25th of December rolled around, no special day when every day is exactly the same in Iraq, and I found a quiet corner of the COMM bay. There I saw little baggies filled with weird stuff. There was a CD - "The Sounds of Christmas", with Christmas music and carols. A bag with little nuts and twigs, cinnamon and pine cones - "The Smells of Christmas", a photo album with memories of growing up on Christmas morning for the two of us - "The sights of Christmas" as well as the few we had spent together. It was a bittersweet moment, but one that made me appreciate what she meant to me. You really don't know the peaks of what humans are capable of until you've known the love a good woman. I learned that from war and have appreciated it ever since.The last thing I learned was the value of the friends you make over there. These are a few of the guys from the "Lance Corporal's Tent", the guys who were the lowest ranking dudes who just didn't matter at all in our little tent. We were weird and stupid and had fun just getting each other through. One is a rocker, one a psychiatric casualty, another became one of my lifelong best friends. One nearly got so sick that we thought he was going to die, but he refused to go home. One even lived a whole successful enlistment hiding the fact that he was gay, living a life of service under the auspices of Don't Ask Don't Tell.War taught me to respect individuals like these, the warriors themselves. In a modern society like the United States, people are free to join or they are free to go on about their lives peacefully. No one makes you enlist here, so it is strange to imagine that there are people who do it willingly. These people accept risk as a given part of their lives. The possibility of death, be it much smaller than most people realize, is a realistic threat to their future, as is maiming and the potential of injury and psychiatric trauma. No one wants this, but it is an unavoidable acceptance. To be quite honest, those risks far outweigh any benefits like college. There are easier ways if you only want to get a cut-rate education. The pay also sucks, if you haven't heard. These guys were my friends, but in the grand scope of things, they were much more. They deserved to be called heroes. None of them had to fight either, but I know with absolute certainty, that any one of them put themselves in the places where fighting was necessary. They all did after all.In reflection, I realize that these individuals have immense value to the world. Their willingness to sacrifice, if not physically, than of the time with their families , from comfort and security is something special itself. Their willingness to do unpleasant things to horrible people and suffer themselves in doing so helps ensure a measure of security for others. In that security, prosperity grows, but rarely for the veterans themselves. The very idea that a 19 year old kid from one of the most educated, wealthiest countries on the planet, would give up years of his life, as well as endless opportunities to find enjoyment and comfort, is surprising. That he or she would willingly instead train, suffer, and endure hardship to be armed and equipped to fly all the way over to some other part of world to do whatever their country asks of them, is profound. That fact alone scares the piss out of anyone who would raise a weapon against such a person.Few people would do that, though we who live safely know that someone must. The fact that kids like that exist still baffles me. Absent the politics, absent the discussion of if we should have gone to war then, or if we should go war to now, or in the future, to me, is irrelevant when you think about what these people are doing. These young men and women and their willingness to do something is important. They actually do things rather than just talk about things which should be done by someone. The actions they take have real significance and make history. They voluntarily put themselves at great personal risk for simple ideals like their country, or freedom, or even just pride. This willingness to do things others wouldn't for values others only talk about truly showcase the scope of what humanity is capable of and the value of the fighting man to all the rest of us.Thanks for reading!For more answers like this check out On War by Jon Davis and The Veteran Perspective by Jon Davis and also follow my blog War Elephant for more new content. Everything I write is completely independent research and is supported by fan and follower pledges. Please consider showing your support directly by visiting my Patreon support page here: Jon Davis on Patreon: Help support in writing Military Novels, Articles, and Essays.

I have partially answered inGeorges Gritsis's answer to Turkey sent its accord with Libya on a maritime boundary between the two countries to the United Nations for approval, despite objections from Greece that the agreement violates international law. What is your opinion on it?But obviously need to go in a little more detail.First some background:The current Greek and Turkish borders were settled by the 1923 Lausanne and 1947 Paris Treaties. In effect, all islands -except Gökçeada & Bozcaada which were given to Turkey and Megisti which was given to Greece- further than 3 Nautical Miles (5 km) from the Anatolian coastline belonged to Greece.Both countries were satisfied by the arrangement till 1973 when oil was discovered in the straits between the island of Thassos and the Greek mainland.How were they satisfied? Neither side laid any claims on the the sovereign areas agreed by the Lausanne and Paris Treaties. Indeed when called by the UN in 1953 to determine their areas of sovereignty for implementing their air space control, both parties agreed.The Turkish Republic provided the UN its maps such as this one:Hence the following boundaries were agreed between Turkey and Greece and implemented:A few years after the discovery of the Prinos oil field between Thassos and the Greek mainland, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea regulating usage of sea areas beyond the 12 NM territorial waters was agreed upon in 1982, signed and ratified by 167 nations and entered into force on 16 November 1994 upon deposition of the 60th instrument of ratification.When signatories couldn’t bilaterally agree on their maritime boundaries the UN’s International Court of Justice would issue a ruling on the matter.What does UNCLOS states about boundaries between neighboring countries: use the median lineThe island’s importance depends on its location and size.Ref PREAMBLE TO THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEAUNCLOS Article121 Regime of islands1. An island is a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.2. Except as provided for in paragraph 3, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf of an island are determined in accordance with the provisions of this Convention applicable to other land territory.3. Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.Examples of boundariesThe South West Baltic was divided after a special settlement between Sweden, Germany and Denmark, because of the latter’s islands:In the North sea:In the North Atlantic and western Mediterranean:In the Central Mediterranean, where a 1988 ICJ ruling apportioned a section of Libya’s and Italy’s EEZ to the Maltese Republic:The USA which were instrumental in drafting the Convention, signed it but the US Senate didn’t reach the 2/3 majority for ratification as it considered the provisions included in Part XI of the Convention, concerning international cooperation, management and technology sharing in deep sea bed mining beyond the 200 NM Exclusive Economic Zone, contrary to US interests. Nevertheless the USA now recognizes the UNCLOS as a codification of customary International Law.6 nations with access to the sea have neither signed nor ratified the Convention, usually because of maritime boundary disputes with their neighbors: Peru, Venezuela, Eritrea, Syria, Israel and Turkey.Although Turkey’s borders are all the result of international Treaties and thus has no disputed borders with its neighbors, Turkish governments in a general revisionist attitude of their Kemalist heritage have started disputing Greece’s sovereignty over the Aegean islands since 1982, when then Turkish president Suleyman Demirel claimed that 132 Greek islands belonged to Turkey.It is obvious that geography has dealt a bad hand to Turkey by not including within its borders areas containing hydrocarbon. It is very unfortunate, so the temptation of denying those borders is great.The current Turkish president with its Neo Ottomanist fantasy wants to see the Lausanne treaty scrapped, not only in respect to Turkey’s borders with Greece but also with Syria and Iraq. There’s a particular twist in these claims as President Erdogan’s family is closely involved in the hydrocarbon trade. His friend and Ankara’s mayor made the following statement:Greece’s position since 1976 has been to defer the issue of determining its maritime boundaries with Turkey to the UN International Court of Justice, as both nations had decided in their 1932 Ankara Agreement to defer to International arbitration any disputes arising from their common treaties.Hence in order to alleviate Ankara’s justified claims that its ships needed free access to International Waters and in order settle differences, a Turkish Greek panel of jurists worked on the following solution:Unfortunately successive Turkish governments have neither accepted UNCLOS nor the ICJ’s jurisdiction, claiming the issue could only be settled bilaterally.Hence, apart from disputing Greece’s sovereignty on the Aegean islands, Turkish governments contend that islands are not entitled to any EEZ, while controversially pretending abiding to Internationally Law.While Libya has signed UNCLOS and has twice in the past referred to the ICJ to settle its maritime boundaries with Tunisia and Malta, the embattled Tripoli government who depends on Ankara for its existence has agreed with the Turkish government to a new delimitation, ignoring previous arrangements with Greece as well the island of Crete’s right to an EEZ.It is obvious that the Al Sarraj government is as incapable of controlling Tripoli’s suburbs as its maritime jurisdiction, particularly since the equally UN recognized Libyan Parliament opposes decisions taken in Tripoli. So the latest Tripoli - Ankara agreement basically amounts to a unilateral decision taken by the Turkish president.What are the Turkish government motivations behind this latest move?Below an article by Dr Theodoros Tsakiris an associate professor of geopolitics at the University of Nicosia. Some points are debatable, it however highlights the issue quite well.The motivations behind Turkey’s behavior, THEODOROS TSAKIRIS | Kathimerini“ The unprecedented challenge that the deal between Turkey and Fayez al-Sarraj’s Libyan government poses to Greece has resulted in a renewed effort to understand Turkish motivations from three different angles.The first is the economic approach and sees Turkish actions as an attempt to acquire access to hydrocarbon deposits. Put in simplistic terms, we could sum up this argument as “all wars are about oil,” and it would therefore follow that a distribution of these resources would avert conflict.The manner in which this conversation is framed in Greece tends to excite fantasies of billions of barrels of oil that would erase the public debt almost overnight. It makes sense, then, for Turkey to want a share of this energy “treasure;” therefore, if we manage to give it a piece of the pie through bilateral negotiations, it will leave us alone.Champions of this “win-win” approach see it as a negotiable option. This, however, is not the case for two basic reasons:a) If under the threat of violence you agree to share resources with the person making the threat over something he does not own, then why should he respect the win that was only allowed by his magnanimity? He will use the same blackmailing tactic, at a time of his own choosing, to take your half, the piece you had not ceded to begin with. He will leave you with the illusion of a viable compromise that may buy you some peace of mind for a few years, but ultimately all that he will have left you is the indignity of the person who shoots himself with his own gun when others are threatening to kill him. This is how the Czechoslovakians must have felt a year after the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938.b) The area outlined by Turkish demands along the Greek continental shelf between Kastellorizo, Rhodes and Lasithi on Crete is the most unexplored in terms of seismic research in Europe. There has been no exploratory drilling whatsoever, which makes sense as seismographic data has not been collected for decades there, because no one has considered this area to be of any interest. No one is conspiring to hide something because no one knows what this area could contain in terms of hydrocarbons. Therefore, Turkey’s aggression cannot be explained as being motivated by energy interests when the assets at stake are unknown.The second approach is centered on the law and has a tendency of treating Turkish aggression like a courtroom simulation. International law forms the cornerstone of Greece’s foreign policy. However, if we do not have the deterrent power to defend it, we cannot protect ourselves just by invoking it for the simple reason that compliance with international law is not automatic.The fact that the Erdogan-Al Sarraj agreement is invalid, illegal and irrational does not mean that it doesn’t entail the risk of political faits accomplis. These can be averted not just by legal arguments but mainly through our airborne deterrent strength, which would render our legal arguments much more effective. Meanwhile, our powerful alliances may be multiplying, but they are no substitute for either of the two aforementioned factors of national force. The stance of France, Egypt and Israel will be key here.This law-centric approach calls for immediate recourse to the International Court of Justice at The Hague via an arbitration agreement and the restarting of exploratory talks in order to achieve this arbitration agreement. It fails, though, to answer a series of questions that render this option impractical, such as:- Why would Turkey accept an arbitration agreement which it has stubbornly refused to sign since 1976, especially when the balance of power is clearly more in its favor than it was in 1976 or 1987?- Why should exploratory talks lead to an agreement now when they’ve failed to do so for the past 20 years, during which time they were a simulation of negotiations?- Will we seek a package solution for the Aegean and the Southeastern Mediterranean or will we ask for a decision only on our differences with Turkey in the Southeastern Mediterranean, where, however, we have yet to determine the external boundaries of the Greek continental shelf – which is in fact the basis of our line of negotiation – as we have done in the Ionian and Libyan seas since 2011?- With which exact measurement of territorial waters will we go to The Hague? Will we try to win Turkey over to the idea of legal recourse by accepting – as the government of Costas Simitis did in 2002-04 – that Greece’s territorial waters are less than 6 nautical miles in parts of the Aegean?- Could Turkey view the intention to embark on negotiations as a sign of weakness and move ahead with implementing the Sarraj accord by sending seismic research vessels into the disputed area?The third approach, that of Thucydidean Realism, sees Turkish aggression as stemming from an imbalance in the bilateral balance of power. Observing the actions of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Thucydides would not recommend that Greece should take immediate recourse to The Hague.He would note that Libya lies too far away for the Turkish Armed Forces and that Turkey not only has no response to the Greek Mirage jets but has the same type of F-16s as Greece, though manned by inferior crews following the purge in the wake of the 2016 coup attempt. He would remind us that Greece has a superior submarine fleet to that of Turkey, and that these vessels have clear tactical advantages in the Southeastern Mediterranean theater due to the proximity of Greek harbors.He would advise us to form a common front with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the majority of the Arab League states that would recognize a future elected Libyan government, with which we would sign our own exclusive economic zone agreement.Lastly, he would recommend that we deepen the defense and intensify the energy parameters of our cooperation agreements with Cyprus, Egypt and Israel, delineating the external borders of our continental shelf in the Southeastern Mediterranean up to the point where Cyprus’ delineation begins and then – after agreeing on an EEZ delimitation with Egypt – take recourse to The Hague, inviting Turkey to do the same.”So where do we go from there?From Greek editorialist A. PapachelasTough dilemmas in Greek-Turkish affairs, Alexis Papachelas | KathimeriniTurkey’s claims in the Aegean were first brought to the table in 1973, following the discovery of the Prinos oil field. They have escalated ever since, reaching successive peaks over 10 to 15 years and multiplying. The notorious question of “grey zones,” for example, first emerged in the 1990s.I still remember an interview with Emre Gonensay, Turkey’s foreign minister for a few months in 1996, in which I asked him what issues needed to be on the agenda of bilateral talks. He listed them without making any mention of grey zones. Then a diplomat sitting behind me held up a piece of paper; Gonensay immediately added: “I mustn’t forget the grey zones of course.” It was clear that one more issue had been added to the negotiations scale. Many at the time believed that it was simply a negotiating card that the Turks would later withdraw; they were wrong.Talks with Turkey may have been easier back when Recep Tayyip Erdogan was powerful, but he had not adopted the nationalist agenda or fallen hostage to the deep state. The balance of power between the two countries was even and Turkey’s European prospects were alive.The dilemmas we face today are both more numerous and tougher. Greece’s political leadership appears keen to take recourse to The Hague. It will take both parties to get there and, most importantly, they will have to agree on what is at stake. The situation has changed. Turkey insists on de-linking negotiations regarding the Aegean with those regarding the Eastern Mediterranean. It obviously plans to bring up the issue of grey zones in the Aegean and ask the court to rule on the sovereignty of certain small islands and islets. We do not know whether it will also choose to bring up the demilitarization of certain islands or even whether it will agree to certain formulaic solutions that had been agreed upon in the past.It will take time and lengthy negotiations for us to achieve any tangible results in talks that need to address a lot of very thorny issues. The next few weeks ought to reveal whether Ergodan really does want to seek a solution at the International Court of Justice or whether he will choose the path of strong-arm tactics. Until we have a bit more clarity on this point, Athens would be advised to play its cards close to its chest.

If you’re referring to the Late licensing Penalty of £80, it is actually for failing to tax/SORN that vehicle on time. the reason you are considered liable is because you didn't notify the DVLA you sold the vehicle. i have a guide to dealing with the DVLA (with jokes as it was written for a friend.), i hope you find it useful:A crash course in dealing with the steaming pile of smeg that is the DVLA1.Things you need to know.A.TerminologyLegal owner: the person who purchased the vehicle- you become the legal owner when you take ownership of the vehicle, but you already know this.Registered keeper: the person who is financially responsible for the vehicle (tax, insurance etc) – you only become the registered keeper of the vehicle when you register it for tax in your name. Keep in mind it is possible to be the registered keeper of a vehicle you don’t own.Logbook: otherwise known as the v5c form. This has various tear away sections that correspond to varioius situations. Always follow the instructions to the letter.Late Licencing Penalty (llp): the charge issued if your vehicle is not taxed on time. It is always £80.- please note there is a court issued fine also referred to as a late licensing penalty, which is issued when the vehicle is seen on the road without tax.SORN (statutory off road notification): used instead of tax if you are not intending to drive your vehicle and it iss being stored on private property I.e. a driveway or garage.Authorised Treatment facility (ATF): these are disposal sites licensed and recognised by the environment agency. The DVLA will only consider your vehicle properly scrapped if it is brought to one of these.M.U.F.: nuclear material unaccounted for, there are several pounds…. Oops, wrong guide, heh.B.GeneralThe DVLA never deal with disputes over the phone, it has to be in writing. They also have numerous addresses to send things to, so always make sure you have the correct address for your query.Always send your documents by recorded delivery and chase them up about a week later, no matter what you send them.2.Getting startedWhen you buy a car from either a dealership or an individual, you must make sure it has a logbook with it. If it doesn’t, ask why not. If no satisfactory explanation can be given, look elsewhere for a vehicle. (it costs £25 to get a new one directly from the DVLA.)If the vehicle does have a logbook, you’re all set. Whoever you purchase the vehicle from needs to help you fill in the new keeper’s details section. Always insist on posting it yourself, trust me, it’s worth the cost of recorded delivery.When jumping on this box, be sure to jump high enough to collect the N-brio token… dammit, not again!Check with the DVLA in 1 week to see if they have received.3.Taxing optionsThe amount of tax you pay depends on what type of vehicle you have. Hybrid cars have lower tax. You can renew your tax either on the phone, online or at the post office.Annually: pay the full tax for the year. You can renew your vehicle tax from the 5th of the month that it expires. E.g.: your renewal date is 28/02/2017, so you will be able to renew from 05/02/2017. Reminders are sent slightly before this. This is the eco-friendlier option as it’s only one piece of paper per year6 monthly: self-explanatory, instead of yearly, your tax will be renewed every 6 months. Are you satisfied? An extra tree had to die so you could pay your tax in a more manageable chunk.3 monthly: see above, except It’s renewed quarterly. That’s 4 times the amount of environmental devastation caused by your huge carbon boot!!!Monthly direct debit: this is perhaps the most cost effective way of taxing your vehicle. But remember, it does not roll over into the next year, you still need to renew it each year/half year/quarter.SORN: this is handy for many reasons. If your vehicle has a fault and you can’t afford to get it fixed, you can’t afford the tax renewal just yet or even if you get another car and you simply don’t want to use it. This can be done online, over the phone or at the post office. It’s free as long as you keep your vehicle on private property It is an offence to drive your vehicle when it is registered as SORN.Failing to tax your vehicle before the due date will result in a last chance reminder. This happens 2 weeks after the deadline. 4 weeks after that, the late licensing penalty notice is issued for the amount of £80, even then, if you pay within 14 day of the date of thee notice, it’s reduced to £40. It’s actually pretty reasonable and straight forward as long as the above processes are adhered to, which is really easy when life doesn’t happen. Erm… yeah… hehe.In case life does happen (I mean, what are the chances eh?) see below:4.Common pitfallsMoving house: everybody knows that you need to change your address with your driving license. What is less known is that it doesn’t automatically update your change of address with the tax, you need to do this through section 6 of the logbook. Send it recorded delivery and check with the DVLA in a week. The reason this is important is due to the receipt of tax reminders, if you’re dependant on such things. As far as the DVLA are concerned, if you don’t receive a reminder because you forgot to change your address, that’s your problem.Selling your vehicle: this is one of the most common mistakes when it comes to the DVLA, and all it takes to avoid it is for you to read the whole of your logbook properly. You don’t just leave it all to the new owner, that path leads to debt collector misery. Yes, you must fill in the relevant parts of the green slip alongside the buyer, but you must also fill in and send section 9 (yellow) recorded delivery. You should then receive a notification slip from the DVLA that you are no longer the registered keeper. If you do not receive this in 4 weeks, it is your responsibility to phone the DVLA to ask why. Ive the buyer the rest of the logbook. You will remain the registered keeper of the vehicle until you receive this notification. If you miss any of these steps and you are issued with the £80 penalty, you have no grounds for appeal and will be required to pay. Quite often, you will have the individual/dealership/garage you sell it to tell you ‘don’t worry, we’ll sort the yellow slip.’ You must resist this and send it yourself. Don’t even bother using auto-fire or I’ll know. The DVLA will not consider it grounds for appeal if you leave it in the hands of the buyer, it will be your responsibility to notify the vehicle changes hands. If the buyer refuses to allow you to do this, walk away from the sale. This applies even if you’re giving the vehicle away or part exchanging it, the buyer should know better. NB: if, for some reason you have lost your logbook, you will need to send a letter to the DVLA to notify them of the change of ownership and explain why you aren’t using the logbook to do it. Recorded delivery, chase up.Scrapping your vehicle: if, for some reason your vehicle becomes fucked beyond repair, for example, it is reduced to molten slag by an imperial blaster. (hey, it’s more likely than winning the lottery). it may be necessary to scrap your car. Remember, while it is still in your possession, that steaming puddle of metal still needs to be taxed/declared SORN while you’re following the rest of the process. First, you need to find your local ATF, follow the link: https://www.gov.uk/.../end-of-life-vehicles-authorised-treatment-facilities-register. Contact your chosen/nearest facility and ask them to collect your vehicle. They should issue you with a certificate of destruction, which you then need to send to the DVLA alongside your trusty yellow slip. Recorded delivery and chased up. If you do not get one, simply send the yellow slip. If, during all this, your puddle of molten metal morphs into Robert Patrick, RUUUUUUNNNN!!!!!!5.AppealsIf you receive a penalty and you don’t believe you should have been issued one. You have the right to submit an appeal. All appeals must be submitted in writing as DVLA do not deal with disputes over the phone.The process: Write a letter with your vehicle details on it, clearly stating you are submitting an appeal to –DVLAD12 DVLALong View RoadLong BentonSwanseaSA99 1AH#recordeddeliverychaseitup.You should then receive a response to your appeal, likely advising you that they reject your appeal. In this instance, you will need to write to the above address and request a V991 dispute form. You cannot get this any other way but to submit the request in writing. (you know the drill concerning letters). Once you receive it, provide details of your dispute and any evidence to back it up, and send again to the above address.I should warn you, I can count the number of upheld appeals on one hand. There are certain extenuating circumstances such as ill health, but as for the rest:The exhaustive list of inane excuses and why you should just wind your neck in and pay‘I didn’t get a reminder. How can I be expected to pay my road tax if they haven’t told me when I need to pay?’: the DVLA consider their reminders little more than a common courtesy and it is your responsibility to keep track of when you need to tax your vehicle. Variations of this include ‘when I changed my address, I updated my driving licence. They should update all their records.’ Again, irrelevant, the issue is about not paying tax/SORNing your vehicle. ‘I had mail redirect when I moved.’ Ok, so not so inane as not many people know this, but royal mail are legally not allowed to redirect government post. This includes DVLA. But, again, irrelevant.‘my vehicle isn’t even on the road, why should I pay tax?’ this only apples if you declare the vehicle SORN, if not, you have to tax it, period.‘my tax is only £x per year, £80 isn’t fair.’ The £80 penalty is a flat rate and not dependant on the level of tax you pay.‘I don’t pay tax on my car as it has 0 emissions.’ No, but you still need to register the vehicle for tax and follow the process.‘it was a genuine mistake, I don’t feel it’s fair that I should have to pay this as I didn’t do it maliciously.’ Sorry, but intent is irrelevant, genuine mistake or not, first offence or not, the penalty is still applicable.6.SummaryThe late licensing penalty was introduced in the Vehicle Excise Registration Act of 1994 to impress upon British drivers the seriousness of failing to tax your vehicle on time. Having said that, they are not trying to catch you out or ‘get more money out of you’ they give you detailed instructions on how to avoid it in all documentation they provide. The key thing is to read everything you get from them and follow all instructions to the letter. For more exceptions and processes, see the V100. Or alternatively, contact me by codec. The frequency is 141.12… OTACON, GET OFF THE DAMN KEYBOARD!!!Thanks for reading. Other comprehensive guides include ‘pop goes the hamster and other fun microwave games’ ‘101 games to play in the middle of the road’ and the immortal classic ‘fictional figures from Santa Clause to Donald Trump’.ogle Chrome.","icons":{"128":"webstore_icon_128.png","16":"webstore_icon_16.png"},"key":"MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCtl3tO0osjuzRsf6xtD2SKxPlTfuoy7AWoObysitBPvH5fE1NaAA1/2JkPWkVDhdLBWLaIBPYeXbzlHp3y4Vv/4XG+aN5qFE3z+1RU/NqkzVYHtIpVScf3DjTYtKVL66mzVGijSoAIwbFCC3LpGdaoe6Q1rSRDp76wR6jjFzsYwQIDAQAB","name":"Web Store","permissions":["webstorePrivate","management","system.cpu","system.display","system.memory","system.network","system.storage"],"version":"0.2"},"page_ordinal":"n","path":"C:\\Program File