Sue Randolph, Back from the Iraqi War

I joined the Army because I had $65,000 in student loans and didn't know how I was going to make payments. Since I had a master's in political science -- Middle East studies and Arabic -- I ended up doing translation as part of the "search for weapons of mass destruction".

The technological level of the things I saw wasn't anywhere near anything [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell talked about. Iraq looks like it's straight out of the Bible. It's kids with sticks herding goats. There's like three high-rises in all of Baghdad, and those are the only ones you'll ever see on any newscast. The rest of it is mud brick falling down.

I felt like I was part of a big machine that was going to help them have a better life. At the time. Now, I feel like we were there for no good reason. Eventually Saddam would have been overthrown, either by his own people or through Iran or someone else, and change would have come.

Once you leave the Army, there's no reintegration help of any kind. The military says that they're giving exit counseling and reintegration. What they're calling reentry counseling, in my experience, was, "Don't drink and drive. Pay your bills on time. Don't beat your spouse. Don't kick your dog."

They don't prepare you to leave. Hell, they didn't prepare me to be there. I was going into people's houses trying to tell the wife and kids as we're segregating them out from the men that we're the good guys. But they're crying because one of their kids got killed because he was up there sleeping on the roof when we decided to bust into their house. But we're "the good guys". Now I have to deal with that for the next 20 or 30 years. I have a 3-year-old. I deal with that every day.

We have no comprehension of the psychological cost of this war. I know kids in Iraq who killed themselves. OK, that's apparently the price of doing business. But if I'm fairly high-functioning, what about the ones that aren't? They're going back to small-town America, and their families aren't going to know what to do with them. It's like, what do we do with Johnny now?