Editor’s note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
If not for what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, Valeria Casillas probably would not have joined the military. But in the surge of patriotism following deadly terrorist attacks on New York City and outside Washington, D.C., she saw service as a chance to give back to the country where her father — a truck driver and naturalized citizen from Mexico — had carved his own path.
“My dad loves this country so much. … He came to the U.S. and made his life what he wanted,” she said. “It feels almost like my contribution is in my father’s name.”
In 2006, the then-18-year-old Casillas enlisted in the Air Force, where she became an intelligence analyst. But she began to question the value of her mission during a 2008 deployment, after spending 12-hour shifts watching airborne overwatch videos of Iraqi society’s slide into chaos.
“I remember being at the smoke pit after we’d been there a couple months … with other junior enlisted, all of us 18, 19, 20 years old, asking ‘What are we doing here? What’s the point?’” she recalled. “And I just remember being real quiet.”
Launched after the Sept. 11 attacks, the global war on terrorism expanded from Afghanistan and Iraq to counterterrorism missions in countries including Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. Between 1.9 million and 3 million U.S. service members served in those wars and related theaters. By 2021, more than 7,000 service members had died and more than 53,000 had been wounded in action.
Twenty-five years after 9/11 reshaped American foreign policy, veterans whose lives were defined by the wars that followed may still be reconciling two truths: They are proud of the values they defended and the people they served beside, and they question if the wars themselves accomplished anything.
In interviews with The War Horse, three veterans described their service after 9/11, and what it means for them now.
‘To be a true patriot’
At first, Casillas saw the mission to Iraq as a good thing: U.S. troops were helping to build a democracy after the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. She was assigned to an F-16 expeditionary fighter squadron at Balad Air Base, about 40 miles north of Baghdad.
There, one of her jobs was to review footage from Litening targeting pods belly-mounted to F-16 fighter jets, which acted as eyes in the sky from 13,000 or 14,000 feet. One day, while reviewing that footage, Casillas saw the aftermath of an ambush that killed American troops riding in a convoy. Iraqi troops — men in whom the U.S. had invested billions of dollars for training — had abandoned their posts at a nearby checkpoint. This was part of a pattern of desertion and infiltration across the Iraqi army, and Casillas said its soldiers often happened to not show up the day of a fight.
“You can have the American military train all these units, but their hearts aren’t in it,” she said. “At that point I did start to feel frustrated, and maybe angry, at how we lost people every day, young people. And for what?”
Throughout the deployment, Casillas also had to watch footage of Sunni and Shia extremists killing each other, civilians, and Iraqi Christians in addition to burning down each other’s homes.
“We would watch … how these insurgents would drive in a convoy to these villages and drag people out of their houses and murder them and pillage or take the women and then burn an entire village down,” Casillas said. “And I know that there’s rules of engagement. But again, that hopelessness, that frustration, that here we are, you know, we have [helicopters], and we’re just watching these people being slaughtered, innocent people, women and children, just completely wiped out, and it’s like, okay, why are we just sitting here watching this happen?”
Beyond that, Casillas was often made to feel as if she did not belong in uniform. Years before that deployment, while at analyst training, she said she was sexually assaulted and was discriminated against for being Latina. And at Balad, Casillas said she and other military women often felt unsafe from not only enemy rocket and mortar fire, but the threat of sexual assault and violence from their fellow service members and the foreign nationals working on the base.
An Army account from that period reported that Balad’s senior sexual assault response coordinator counseled and assisted more than 100 service members over a nine-month deployment. Casillas said she was grateful to have a truck to drive across the sprawling base rather than take the bus at odd hours.
“We might get mortared and you want to take cover, but you literally got these other service members who might attack you too,” she said.
Casillas left the Air Force in 2010, but it took years to come to terms with her experience. Looking back, she said that military service made her mature and see a bigger picture of the world, and it introduced her to “a sisterhood” of women in uniform who became mentors. As for the bad parts, she found a way to grow through them.
“People say ‘I’m really glad I went through that because it made me a stronger person,’” she said. “I’ve done enough therapy now to know … that nobody should be grateful for or think they deserve any kind of trauma. [But] I’m stronger in spite of it. And I do very much feel that way.”
After feeling alienated in the military, Casillas didn’t maintain relationships with most of the people she met there. But that changed after she got involved in events with Patrol Base Abbate, a nonprofit veterans organization.
“I realized a lot of veterans after getting out had similar experiences or similar views about politics, race issues, and our active duty experiences,” she said. “I remember feeling anxious about doing my first trip because I thought I was going to be the only person in a group that wasn’t a conservative. And while some veterans are that way, I think there’s also a lot of veterans who, like me, are vocal about and have similar views on the things we experienced and current events.”
Being vocal is a key ingredient.
“I feel like to be a true patriot is to ask questions,” she said. “And who better to ask questions and speak up than veterans, because we’ve experienced what most civilians haven’t.”
‘I can’t hold everybody’s hands all the time’
For Casillas, questioning the mission became a form of patriotism. For Paul Brown, the reckoning centered on a more intimate obligation: How long should he remain responsible for the Marines he had tried to keep alive?
Sept. 11, 2001, was only one day after Brown had returned from thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail.
“I panicked and said, ‘Screw this! I’m going back out to the mountains,’” he said.
But by 2009, Brown had a family to support, student loans to pay off, and few prospects besides bartending amid the Great Recession. He also considered himself patriotic and wanted to do something that he felt his young son could look up to.
He decided to become a Navy corpsman at 33 years old and was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, where over the next few years he served as medic and mentor for infantrymen almost half his age.
“They always asked me for advice with their family and treated me like I was a wise old man, even though I was 35,” he said. “I really started to take ownership of them.”
In 2010, the battalion deployed to Afghanistan on a mission to clear Taliban fighters out of the town of Sangin. It turned out to be one of the fiercest battles of the war.
“Every day was so intense,” Brown recalled. “Every step that you’re taking was, ‘Am I going to blow up on this step? No? Great, let’s take the next one.’”
Over their six-month deployment, Brown’s battalion suffered one of the highest casualty rates of the war, with 25 Marines killed and 184 wounded. Just in Brown’s platoon and its attached personnel, three Marines were killed and 14 were injured. And when they came home in 2011, the war followed. One of the men Brown saved on the battlefield committed suicide. Another became addicted to heroin. Brown blames himself for not being there the way he was in Sangin.
“I feel like I let my guys down because the follow-up with them has not been there on my part,” he said. “I didn’t follow up because I was dealing with my own stuff.”
There was a lot to deal with. Brown found he now angered easily, and when he walked anywhere unpaved, he worried the ground might explode beneath him. Brown vividly remembers one day when he was tying his son’s hockey skates. He usually bent down on one knee to do it, but this time he got down on both — and the war came flooding back.
“Leaning over someone on both knees was what I’d do taking care of one of my guys,” he said. “To put tourniquets on as they lost their legs. … One of my guys had an abdominal evisceration, and even treating enemy combatants that we had blown the hell out of —trying to prepare their bodies for the mosque.
“Every time I was down on two knees, I was dealing with carnage,” Brown said.
In the following years, Brown became suicidal and had to be hospitalized. But part of what aided his recovery was a sense of responsibility for his children. That feeling eventually helped create a boundary between his old job as a corpsman and his ongoing job as a father.
“Not being able to help the guys in a meaningful way after we got home is hard,” he said. “But I also just can’t hold everybody’s hands all the time.”
Brown remains proud that he supported his Marines in-country. But having seen the devastation of a “just war” firsthand, he wishes more thought was put into how America fights, especially amid the war with Iran. Experts have criticized the Trump administration for its ambiguous goals in the Iran war and the lack of planning to keep the Strait of Hormuz safe against waves of cheap Iranian drones.
“For me, it’s more of a, ‘Why didn’t we think it through before we did this?’” Brown said. “It’s not so much the fact that we’re doing something, it’s how we’re doing it.”
‘I believe that I did a lot of good’
Brown was able to accept the limits of what he could do after the war. Bob Gilling reached a similar conclusion about what he could accomplish while still in it.
An Army infantryman, Gilling first enlisted in 2000 and manned the guns of a Bradley fighting vehicle charging across Iraq during the 2003 invasion.
He was inspired to join the infantry because of retired Army 1st Sgt. John Tucker, a Vietnam veteran who brought Junior ROTC to his high school. Tucker was the kind of man Gilling wanted to be: motivated and accountable — and he brought those same values to Afghanistan, even if it landed him in hot water.
By 2010, Gilling had risen to staff sergeant and was now training Afghan National Army troops. He took the position seriously, devouring books on the Vietnam War so he could learn the lessons from a past counterinsurgency fight and apply it to his own.
One rule he picked up was to never pass a candidate who didn’t meet training standards, but that put him in conflict with higher-ups who wanted to meet goals for troop numbers.
“I think I lost them when I said I’ve been reading these books on Vietnam,” Gilling recalled. “Nobody wants to hear that.”
Eventually, Gilling was pulled from his training unit and sent to evaluate how other coalition countries were training Afghan troops in skills such as reacting to an ambush, setting up a traffic control point, and responding to improvised explosive devices. Gilling took notes, gave feedback, and made few friends. He got a sergeant first class fired for being ineffective, and got into an argument with a French captain mistraining his Afghan troops.
“I felt I was disliked because I gave a shit when some people seemed like they just wanted to check the box,” Gilling said.
But enough people read his reports and asked questions that Gilling, a mere staff sergeant, was given a new job: meeting with Afghan colonels to learn more about how their training programs were going. But the Vietnam parallels followed him. One colonel, for example, had an officer on staff who Gilling said was always high on hashish.
“I asked, ‘Can’t you do something about this guy?’ And he just goes, ‘No, his uncle is in the ministry of defense, so there’s nothing I can do,’” Gilling recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, corruption.’ He just goes, ‘Yes, it’s a big problem in Afghanistan.’ I’m just like, ‘Yeah, you know where else it was a problem? Vietnam, and we didn’t fix that either.’”
Still, Gilling strived to live the values he learned from Sgt. Tucker and pass them on to younger soldiers. When one private complained in front of Afghan troops that they “fucking stink,” Gilling pulled him aside. He explained that plenty of Afghans understood English after working with Americans for years.
“When you say stuff like that, when you act disrespectfully, we lose ground,” Gilling told the soldier. “They’re not going to take you seriously because they’re not going to view you as a professional.”
Gilling also pointed out the lack of clean water and basic sanitation across much of Afghanistan, and that “these dudes could outclimb you up these mountains.” The talk worked.
“What’s great is the kid really took to it,” Gilling said. “He became a solid instructor out there, being able to rally the [Afghan] troops.”
Moments like that make Gilling proud of his time in the Army.
“I believe that I did a lot of good in what I could do as a [noncommissioned officer],” he said. “I trained a lot of good people, and I looked out for a lot of soldiers.”
Like Brown and Casillas, Gilling questioned whether the wars he fought in made the world a better place. But like the other two, he learned to move on from them.
“As far as the war aspect goes … a lot of that is out of my control,” he said. “If I can’t control something, I kind of have to just let it go.”
This article from The War Horse was edited by Paul Szoldra, fact-checked by Trey Strange, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.
