I’ll never be one of those guys with the ball cap that advertises what I did. I will never wear a jacket covered in patches that memorialize my exploits and combat activities.

Here is what I think I know after fighting for compensation with the Veteran’s Administration for a decade. I think I know that America treats its veterans like pieces of animated garbage. I think I know that veterans who were broken by serving in combat zones are, by default, lying about their disabilities until they prove otherwise by engaging in a debasing and intentionally painstaking process that takes years to decades. I think I know that we who fight America’s wars are trained to be grateful for any scraps the rich and powerful are willing to give us.

At the end of this fight that lasted a decade, I hate capitalism and all that it retards. Like taking care of broken people. People broken by a system that taught them to believe the people at the top of the system are competent and have all our best interests at heart. People being inhuman to those with less because they think they can get away with it because they have grown up watching their families get away with it.

I’m thinking about Ted Cruz. I’m thinking about Lindsey Graham. I’m thinking about Donald J Shitstain. The party that talks out of both sides of its mouth. I’m thinking about all the old white people who practice do as I say instead of leading by example. I’m thinking about lobbyists and a broken system that lies and uses misdirection to distract us all from how we are being fleeced.

I’m remembering being mortared on Christmas 2005. How I ran like hell to stay alive. And here I am in the present, alive, disabled, with much of my once fierce optimism squeezed out of me because after I ran from the mortars, I had to prove that actually happened. I had to prove how that experience (and others) fucked me up. I am resigned to my existence, and I look forward to not being. I am tired. I inherited a system that was designed to make me this way.

It has been 18 years since I was ordered to go to war by a liar and a buffoon. Most of my idealism has been extinguished. But I still want to leave younger generations some hope and the possibility that we’ll come out of this as a species. I intend to keep trying until I cannot. My victory against the bureaucracy that is the federal government may be small, but the ten years I invested mean something to me.

Thank you for taking the time to want to know a sliver of the story of me. All you need to know is that the government now considers me 100% totally and permanently disabled. More crumbs for the bums who believed their propaganda and who were willing to fight.