Growing up, I seemed to always have an obsession for the military, I thought going to war and dying for one's country was the most honorable deed a person could do in life. My fascination started when I was four at the most, my mom used to always buy me dress-up costumes, my favorite was the soldier's battle costume. It came with a fake knife, grenade, helmet, and green camouflage vest. At the time, I lived in Statesville, NC, and we would always travel to Charlotte to attend the parades, my favorite was Veteran's Day, til this day, I remember watching all the JROTC groups marching down Tryon Street Uptown. I was mesmerized, I immediately knew that's what I wanted to be in life, wearing those spiffy uniforms, shiny medals, and glossy shoes, I wanted to be in the brotherhood, the honorable fraternity fighting for my country. My sophomore year, I had everything planned out, how I would've been able to go to my dream college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and become a United States Marine with little to no college debt. The US Navy and Marine Corps offer a scholarship that pays for all your tuition, books, and other fees as well as paying you at least $300 a month, only to become a hero after your schooling. I was destined to become my dream no matter the cost, I had everything I needed except for a recruiter, but everything changed my junior year. I learned that the US Armed Forces weren't heros, but terrorists.

I was on YouTube looking at videos on random facts or either history or religion, it was one of my favorite past times. I long to learn, to understand not only why things are as they are, but as to why people think and act as they do. I kept seeing videos on the Illuminati, Freemasons, and other secret societies in the video suggestion section, I remembered how deeply I once was believing in such things during my sixth grade year, at the time I started to get fearful, so I had eventually stopped, but I had clicked on one video, and as YouTube goes, I began to click and watch more videos. I quickly stumbled across videos that were about military veterans speaking out on war, federal politicians, being used by corporations, the blatant disregard for the US Constitution, and how they viewed the infamous terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

The video that struck me the hardest is titled "Soldier Speaks Out about 2012 and FEMA and NWO Elites. He Quits and Throws His Medals", John Michael Turner, a Iraqi War veteran, is the main character in the video, and is speaking at a Democracy Now conference that once appeared on the former Link TV network. The video starts off with former Marine Turner saying that, "eat the apple, F the corps, I don't work for you no more", then he yanks his medals off of his shirt throwing them onto the ground in front of him. Turner then talks about how his confirmed kill count was mostly made of unarmed, innocent Iraqi civilians, and how him and his squad dressed up as Iraqis and started shooting in order to create a firefight. I was beyond flabbergasted and hurt, we spend over $4 billion to tear people away from their families from months to even years at a time, to invade countries, and kill innocent civilians.

I couldn't take part in murder, no matter how honorable millions of people would've deemed me to be, morals are something that people rarely stick to these days, but I am a rare individual. I was a JROTC cadet in both the Army and Air Force, active on the drill team, volunteering, staff member board, and being a flight and platoon commander. Soldiers aren't heroes, they're murderers and invaders, and this is what the American people do not realize, and I would never go back to the thought as the War on Terror is something patriotic.