I am another unknown soldier.

I believed the obvious lies; fell for the false promises presented to persuade me into signing my life away to the devil we call the government so that they may do with it whatever they wished. To them I was just another unknown soldier.

I joined the armed forces in hopes that I would be able to make a difference for my country, the same country that had cast me aside, treated me like its unwanted, illegitimate stepson. I signed up to be another unknown soldier.

I trained furiously so as to prove the army enlistment commercials true, to finally become, “all that I could be,” and do all in my power to defend the rights we enjoy as Americans. I pushed myself to become another unknown soldier.

I invaded foreign soil in representation of the whims of a group of corrupt cowards considering themselves, “representatives of the people,” who were more concerned with the number of votes they received than with those who cast them. They only saw me as another unknown soldier.

I fought our alleged enemies, the peasants; whose only reason for being there was defending their land from those who, as the government said, were “eliminating the terrorist threat,” while laying claim to one oil field after another. I was considered nothing more than another unknown soldier.

I took many lives from fathers and sons whose only true crimes were protecting their families and their homes from an invading people who were, “trying to instill a stable, democratic government,” which would allow for easier trade. They could only think of me as another unknown soldier.

I shed tears for my fallen comrades, the men and women I had come to consider family; whose blood now stained the sandy battlegrounds as bullets from AK-47’s continued diminishing our ranks. Each of those proud fighters was another unknown soldier.

I bled from countless wounds inflicted by opposing forces, considering each a sign of valor, a symbol of my courage in the heat of battle in the name of Freedom and the American Dream, so these ideals could be upheld. Every drop of blood belonged to another unknown soldier.

I remembered my loving family just as the bullet drove through my right lung, thought of my mother crying herself to sleep every night, my father who praying to God for the day that I finally return, my brothers thinking of how their brother was an American hero. They knew I was more than another unknown soldier.

I lost my life, gave it up whole-heartedly to a cause which I had no faith in, no real reason for taking part in, defending the world’s most powerful nation from one which posed no real, “threat to democracy.” Now my corpse is only that of another unknown soldier.

The sad truth is that I will only be remembered as another unknown soldier.