When I was asked as a veteran to write about war, my first reaction was to say no. Why do it?

Then wrote a few thoughts down.

I spent 25 years — seven active duty and 18 in the guard and reserves — serving my country in the military. In retrospect, war was always something that I was thinking about and training for. It was an honor to serve my country.

My father was a World War II veteran who fought the Japanese in the Philippines. He never talked about what he did, nor about the death and carnage that he saw and experienced. In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, when I decided to join the Air Force, my dad had three things that he told me. The first was that he was proud of me, the second was that no matter where I was sent, to be careful, and the third was to get all the education that the military offered to me. When I listened to him as he spoke, I could sense that he hoped I would never have to face the horrors of war that he had witnessed.

The death and destruction that war produces, whether it is on the enemy or the civilians who are part of the collateral damage, is inconceivable. I understand that the objective of any war is to defeat the enemy, but the fact of war is that when civilians die there is no way to prevent it.

I spent two years stationed in the Philippines working on highly classified equipment to support our Vietnam War missions. Our operations were finally declassified in 1998, but, basically, we electronically listened to, translated, and cross-triangulated all radio signals produced in southeast Asia. My job was to maintain this equipment so that it worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In 1973, we could locate a radio transmission within a quarter of a mile anywhere in Vietnam. If the translated message indicated military importance, a bomber mission was initiated to eliminate that location.

Our air strikes killed thousands of people, some of whom were not fighting against us, but they just happened to be in a location where our enemy was.

As I reflect on my life I wonder if all of this destruction was worth it.

I also spent three years working in an Army Psychological Operations Battalion. As an electronics warrant officer, I was tasked to keep our mobile recording studio operational. Our other mission was to bring foreign radio and TV stations back online during the war in Europe. To do this we had to have training in urban combat to secure these facilities.

During our training one of the instructors told us to count to four and repeat. He then told us to look at our group of four and said that the reality of war was that one of us would not survive. There was no joking, no talking, only an eerie silence as the reality of what could happen and what we were training for swept over the group.

I will never forget this.

I want people to understand that I’m a strong military supporter. I believe that the United States needs to have the strongest and highest trained military force in the world. Our enemies need to understand that if they endanger our people or our country, the full force of our military will come to bear.

But the people who have never served, nor have had family members who have served, need to know and understand that if we have to go to war good people and bad will die.

We are seeing conflicts and wars throughout the world and people are dying every day. Until the people of the world figure out how to resolve conflicts without armed aggression, people will continue to die.

This is a fact of war.

Richard Stroner is commander of American Legion Post 191 in Webster City.