Reckoning

In 2007, I was an Army lieutenant leading a group on a house-clearing mission in Baquba, Iraq, when I called in an artillery strike on a house. The strike destroyed the house and killed everyone inside. I thought we had struck enemy fighters, but I was wrong. A father, mother and their children had been huddled inside.

Retired army captain Shannon P. Meehan writes about the psychological toll of soldiering in today’s Times. He says he’s been thinking about this a lot lately because his own first child, a son, was born in January. “Not surprisingly,” he says, “my thoughts often race back to the children I killed.” God, to be able to write that sentence. Meehan says he’s been relating his experiences, “to show that those deaths are not tucked neatly away in a foreign land.” While his stories from the war may be painful, he says, he thinks it’s his responsibility to tell them. And everyone else’s to listen.