One of the things that comes through really strongly when you’re serving overseas—and it’s true of Iraq, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa, where I went—is you’re struck by the incredible power and capability of young Americans. I had joined when I was 26 and I was older, working with guys who were 19 and 20 years old. To see the kind of endurance, patience, fortitude, and thoughtfulness that they conducted their duties with in places like Iraq, where it’s 107 degrees outside, you’re wearing body armor, and inside Humvees, and then have to step out and, at a moment’s notice, engage a potential terrorist or speak with a family inside a home, was really impressive. The other thing is that people really do look to the United States for leadership. When you go anywhere in the world, almost always the longest line is the line outside the U.S. Embassy with people waiting to get a visa. There’s a profound respect for the idea of what America offers—that anyone can come and find a way to build a life here.

When I came home from duty, I flew back to the States, woke up the next morning, and drove off the base. I remember driving by a Wendy’s drive-thru, and there were all these people sitting in line at the Wendy’s. Forty-eight hours before, I had been in a helicopter that was getting shot at in Iraq. I remember wanting to stop my truck and go out and ask these people if they knew what was happening overseas. People have a tremendous respect for the U.S. military, but they don’t really understand what this generation of soldiers has endured. I also visited some friends at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., and the most serious injuries I saw weren’t people who had lost their eyes or their legs. The most serious challenge was when people lost their sense of purpose.

The idea behind our organization The Mission Continues is to create a way for veterans to serve in their community, and by doing so, they can rebuild a sense of purpose themselves while at the same time making their community stronger. All of these men and women came back with all of these great skills, talents, and abilities, and they were searching to find a way to build that same sense of accomplishment and purposeful work at home that they had overseas.

It’s 8:30 a.m. and I haven’t had coffee yet.

I have spent the past four years as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in Afghanistan. I have been one of about a dozen international reporters across various news outlets charged with telling the American public what's going on "over there." It makes for a strange workday: rushing out to bomb sites, counting suicide attacks and emailing with the Taliban.

People call the news the first draft of history. Working for a wire service in Afghanistan is like being there for the brainstorming session, then publishing your notes. It's a terrifying job. There's a lot more chance of getting something wrong than right, and there's the fear of losing a bit of your humanity in covering the daily death toll of war.

“What the arts can do,” said Iscol, an Iraq veteran of the Battle of Fallujah and now the executive director of the Headstrong Project, “is it can normalize the experience.”

“You realize, I’m not the only one numbed by this experience in combat,” said Iscol. “The hope is by normalizing it through the arts, people understand what they’re suffering from … and that it reduces a barrier to care.”

Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, perhaps best known among the military community for his role in Jarhead, the 2005 film based on the memoir written by U.S. Marine Anthony Swofford, was among the evening’s performers. Gyllenhaal opened his poetry reading saying, “I am just an actor,” and let the words of the poet and WWI veteran Wilfred Owen do the speaking. He read:

Forty years after serving during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Jack remained tortured by the war. In the years before his death, the 61-year-old U.S. Army veteran downed prodigious amounts of vodka, drove his truck to random locations and talked of dead bodies floating in the water.

But even though Jack received an honorable discharge and sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder before his suicide in July 2009, the Department of Veterans Affairs denied his widow’s request to help pay for his burial and declined to grant the monthly compensation intended for survivors of veterans with deaths linked to military service.

By the time the agency reversed itself a year later, Sheryl had lost her home to foreclosure and racked up $700 in interest on a high-interest loan she’d taken out to pay for the funeral.

Several smaller San Diego–area companies, too, build drones, and additional firms make component parts and engage in research and development. These companies are looking at a variety of applications for this technology, from law enforcement to mapping to power-line observation. Even underwater drones are being developed.

All this means big bucks for the local economy. The drone industry in the San Diego area, most of which is clustered in the northern part of San Diego County, has doubled in five years, according to the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC). It’s expected to double again in the next seven.

David Klucsik, a spokesman for Rhodia, tells The Daily Beast, “Alcolac did not supply thiodiglycol to Iraq. Not even the plaintiff [in the current court case] argues that Alcolac did so. Rather, plaintiff says that Alcolac sold TDG to an entity that then resold it to Iraq.”

Pitts’s suit will be heard at a time when chemical weapons and Baathist policies have returned to the front pages, as the Syrian government and opposition forces accuse each other of using them in an attack in Aleppo last week that killed 26 people. While preliminary reports show no chemical weapons were used, many observers believe the Syrian government may be preparing to use chemical weapons against the rebels. This month also marks the 25th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s deadly chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in northeast Iraq, which killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds and injured about 10,000 others. It is considered the largest chemical attack on civilians in world history.

While Alcolac paid a fine in 1990 for one charge of exporting TDG in violation of the Export Administration Act, a 2011 Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling found that a corporation couldn’t be sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act, and that the Kurds who’d been victims of mustard gas, or were family members of those who had been, lacked standing to sue under the Alien Tort Statue, since they’d failed to prove purposeful conduct by Alcolac.

The Secretary of Defense

Donald Rumsfeld glared the whole time.

Years later, I still wonder whether I should have said more. The squinty-eyed Illinois native—and former Princeton wrestler renowned for his quick “fireman’s carry” takedowns—stood before me in a muddy corner of Camp Fallujah under wet, leaden skies in December 2004. His frontline visit happened on short notice, an implied though unacknowledged mea culpa of sorts. He brought a lot of reporters with him. Weeks earlier, with the Iraq war still young—like most who would fight and die in it—the media revealed that the defense chief’s killed-in-action (KIA) condolence letters were auto-penned. The final death tally would reach 4,487 Americans and well over 100,000 Iraqis.

The Last Grand Mufti

The junior imams showed up first. They always did. Those with the real power waited for a few days before meeting with us. Al Qaeda in Iraq led by mastermind Abu Musab al Zarqawi had intimidated the top Muslim leaders out of their mosques to the outskirts of Fallujah. Even Sheik Hamza Abbas al Isaawi, the grand mufti of Fallujah, had to leave his spiritual home, like a pope banished from Rome.

Sadly, as someone who was there throughout, I feel in my heart now what I was told to be true then: that the insurgent war didn't have to happen. The chance to avoid it was offered to us, plainly and clearly, and we failed to act upon it. Then failed again and again each time that chance was presented anew. Four long bloody years in which perhaps so very many people did not have to die; not those we knew, nor the multitude we didn't.

Such thoughts stagger me. Render me silent. I'm not ashamed to say.

When insurgent leadership factions first offered peace terms, at least to my knowledge, it was to prevent the nascent conflict. It subsequently evolved into terms to end the insurgency and assassinate al Qaeda. It was a conversation pressed spasmodically by the guerrillas, with a view to a negotiated political settlement with the U.S.

One day let's hope Iraqis will write their own books about the Iraq War. When they do, their stories in their words should be required reading for all.

"My God, My Glock, and my Gallant"

Above hardpan deserts, red dawns chased away Orion, the Hunter, day after night. U.S. Marines, no longer in Kansas or Montana or Texas, were strangers in a strange, faraway land and in the business of killing Arabs—if some Arabs did not kill them first. We were in the midst of a duel.

Childers was 30 years old and the son of a career Navy man. He had wanted to be a Marine since he was five, when he saw the Marine guards at the embassy in Tehran while his father was stationed in Iran. The approaching Islamic revolution caused the family to be evacuated in 1978. His father, Joseph Childers, had been briefly held hostage the following February, in a scenario that would now be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie Argo.

The family was living in Mississippi when Therrell Childers enlisted in the Marines at the age of 17. He was subsequently selected an officer training program. He had the distinction of becoming a “mustang,” a Marine enlisted man elevated to officer. He kept rock-hard fit by running, swimming and biking as if in a perpetual triathlon. He often said his dream was to lead a platoon into combat.

After 9/11, Childers would have been more than willing to lead his men in tracking down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He trusted the wisdom of his leaders when they said national security would best be served by sending him into Iraq. He did not stop to ponder whether the Bush administration was just using 9/11 as a pretext to go after Saddam Hussein. He did not wonder aloud at the irony of going into battle against the same army that had been battling the fanatics in Iran who had briefly held his father prisoner.