An orange bottle of prescription anti-depressants sits on a nightstand in the corner of a dark basement. Next to the pills sits a half-full bottle of cheap vodka. And next to the two bottles sits an alarm clock. It is 2:30 a.m.

Jim lies awake in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to look at anything but the nightstand, trying to think of anything but Iraq. Then, like an insurgent uprising, the war takes hold of him, and he finds himself far from the dark confines of his bedroom in Littleton.

Jim is not his real name, but his story is real… and horrifying.

Jim is in Fallujah now, lying in his sweat-soaked Army bunk. The only movement in the hot tent comes from his torso as it gently rises and falls as he breathes in and out. Beads of sweat trickle down his face and neck, catch for a second, and then proceed into his hair and his damp shirt.

“This place is hell,” he thinks.

As he finishes his thought, a fellow Army mechanic stomps in to rouse him. Jim’s down time is cut short; his commanding officer needs to see him.

“Just perfect,” he grunts to himself as he stumbles to his feet and out of the tent.

His CO assigns him and a handful of other mechanics to assist in the clean up of a downed helicopter just outside the violent city.

He doesn’t realize it now, but these are the last moments of Jim’s waning innocence.

As he and his comrades approach the crash site, it is apparent that something has gone terribly wrong. The helicopter sits on its side in a few large pieces after being hit with some sort of exploding device, possibly a rocket-propelled grenade. There are no survivors; in fact, the ground is littered with dark pools of blood, dead bodies and severed limbs. Jim’s stomach hits his throat, he swallows hard, and he proceeds with wide eyes.

But this was not the first time Jim has seen the destruction of the Iraq war. As a mechanic, he mostly has stayed on or near the base, maintaining and fixing various vehicles, but he had helped clean up a similar crash a few weeks before-one with survivors and some relatively minor injuries-and it was not out of his routine as one of the lowest level technicians to perform such services for the Army.

Jim had entered into the Army in a manner not unlike many young men and women who do so. After barely passing high school, and with no plans for his future, he wanted to make something of himself. At his parents’ repeated suggestions, he joined the Army to “be all that he could be.”

And now this. He was deemed unfit for combat so the service assigned him to Iraq as a mechanic, where he thought he would be protected from any direct confrontation with death. He spent most of his free time either trying to sleep in a hot tent or hanging out with his two best friends from basic training who had been assigned to combat positions. This was far from the glorious, dignifying experience that he had dreamed for himself. But he was making it through all the same, and he felt in some sense that he was doing something with his life. Though he hated his low-level position and taking orders all day, he got a certain satisfaction from knowing, for the first time in his life, that he was going to be okay, at least as soon as he got stateside again.

But these comforting thoughts elude Jim now as he approaches the splintered helicopter and splintered bodies. While many veterans note the immense and constant noise that permeates military life in Iraq, all Jim can hear is a deafening, strange silence. No screams, no helicopters, no shouting.

In this vacuum, Jim’s senses become heightened. He stares at the several dead bodies, the guts and gore strewn on the scene, and he hears only his rapid breathing and the sound of his boots in the gravely dirt beneath him. Then his eyes fix on a familiar face: his best friend-what is left of him-is lying in a massive puddle of his own crimson blood. He drops to his knees, never blinking from his friend’s fixed and dilated pupils, and in a familiar image, he crawls over to the man who had laughed with him only the night before, and Jim held his best friend’s head in his lap.

But this image of the soldier with his best friend’s head in his lap is different than the others Jim remembers from old war movies: Jim is holding only his friend’s head-he was decapitated in the exploding crash.

Since the incident, Jim spends his days, now stateside, driving between a base in Colorado Springs and his parents’ house in Littleton. At night, he has nightmares and flashbacks to that day when he held his best friend’s head in his hands. To combat this, he takes his Army-prescribed anti-depressants, and washes them down with hard liquor. The only way he knows how to cope with what he has seen is to medicate himself so heavily that he no longer dreams, so that he can sleep, wake up, and serve again tomorrow.

To be sure, Jim’s experience is his own, and likely very different from the thousands of others who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But almost all veterans of war share the firsthand experience of the atrocities and horrors of combat, from the highest ranking generals to the lowest ranking foot-soldiers and even mechanics like Jim.

The men and women who serve this nation do not take the possible witness of and participation in this carnage lightly, but like Jim, it seems that there are likely many who have a different image in their heads than what war looks and feels like.

To be a soldier in the U.S. military today is to be heroic, not just because defending this nation and its ideals with your life is heroic, but also because no one knows how horrific and terrible the violence, destruction, and bloodshed are in war until they experience it firsthand.

As seen in the years since the beginning of the Iraq war, the cause and the purpose is often ambiguous when we go to war. Are we in Iraq because there’s a connection to the 9/11 attacks, or to “liberate” the Iraqis, as the Bush administration has told us? Are we protecting our economic interest, namely in the oil trade, by being there, as many speculate?

This ambiguity is often the reason many of us choose not to join the all-volunteer military. The simple fact is that we do not fully know, and may never know, why we fight, and why our nation’s leaders send good men and women to die. All we do know, in some subjective sense like hearing Jim’s story, is that war is hell, and the consequences and reverberating aftershocks can be, too.

God bless the servicemen and women who lay down their lives in the face of our leaders’ possible betrayal of them. And God bless Jim, who has literally given up his dreams so that the rest of America can have theirs.