 What he was telling me I knew was a ghost story. It reminded me of old reports of torture and orange jumpsuits and dead civilians, and that what America had asked of its soldiers could unhinge them. The war that defined my parents' generation in Vietnam had the draft and civil unrest with it. By the time the Iraq War started when I was 18, America had a volunteer army, so people like me could carry on without worrying that our number would be called.