Three years ago I wrote a column for my high school newspaper about the War in Iraq. Like many people, I had been glued to my television watching every exploding palace in Baghdad, every tracer in the night sky and every grainy image of embedded journalists reporting from the field.

And that creeped me out. It was the first war to be covered like this; it was almost like watching a movie. (I believe the exaggerated example I used then was Connie Chung parachuting into Baghdad with a blazing assault rifle in each hand.) It was the beginning of the first war that I, and everyone else around my age, was old enough to fully comprehend.

What I didn’t think about was the possibility that the war would still be going on three years later. I didn’t think that I would be in my sophomore year of college hearing daily reports of U.S. Marine and Iraqi civilian deaths. I didn’t think the country would be on the brink of a civil war. And I didn’t even bother to think about the people my age fighting this impossible fight.

Now, those soldiers who served a tour that first year in Iraq when they were only 18 or 19 years old are preparing for their second deployment. These 20-somethings are already veterans of war, and they’re going back for more. It’s tough to imagine what it must be like to go from the comfort of your hometown high school to the streets of Baghdad in a matter of months. It’s even tougher to imagine doing it twice in as many years. While you and I are guzzling pitchers of Honey Brown at Chuck’s at Happy Hour, they’re dodging bullets in Sadr City or watching innocent civilians being blown to bits by suicide bombers.

I took a trip to Fort Drum, an Army base upstate, a few weeks ago for a news writing class, and I was able to talk to several of these young soldiers preparing for their second tour in Iraq. It was amazing to see how nonchalantly they spoke of the violence they saw there, as if they had become desensitized to it.

One soldier I spoke to, 20-year-old Joseph Girardin from Long Island, described to me one instance a little more than a year ago in which he saw a civilian get killed right in front of him. The man walked out of a barbershop only to get hit by a mortar shell that insurgents randomly fired into the city.

‘He walked outside at the wrong place at the wrong time and boom, he was gone,’ Girardin said.

Girardin’s voice didn’t even falter. It was no different than if he was telling me about a new pair of sneakers he had just bought.

Hearing someone just a few months older than me tell me this changed my feelings about the War in Iraq. I’m still against it, but at least I have a better understanding for why the soldiers are there. It’s not their fault. They’re young and trying to do what they can to make a future for themselves. They’re only doing their job.