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The National Guardsman: Ryan Kelly

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published March 15, 2008 at 12:30 a.m.

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Ryan Kelly, 39, outside his Denver home. For Kelly the decision of whether to stay in Iraq or withdraw the troops is difficult.

Photo by Javier Manzano / The Rocky

Ryan Kelly, 39, outside his Denver home. For Kelly the decision of whether to stay in Iraq or withdraw the troops is difficult.

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The National Guardsman: Ryan Kelly Flew Blackhawk helicopters in Iraq for a year. * Age: 39 * Occupation: Writer of plays and screenplays * Home: Denver

I wasn't involved in any heavy combat. I was a commander and a Blackhawk pilot. We were basically taxis, ferrying soldiers back and forth from base to base.

The war made me a little more cynical and a little less optimistic. It has taken a pretty good toll on me emotionally and mentally. I write about it lot. I wrote a play last spring, we did a reading of it. It was called Rendition, an exploration into the U.S. policy on torture, set within the framework of a love story. A woman soldier gets abducted. Her lover tries to find her, and they come across an Iraqi man who may or may not have information about her, and so they have to decide what to do with the person.

How does one feel about a war? I wish we weren't in one, but we are, so we have to do something about it. This particular war is such that there are no easy answers. If you pull out, how do you support the people who are fighting? How do you support the Iraqis who are allied with the U.S.? If you stay, how do you continue to tell men and women to continue to go over and die for a cause they may or may not believe in?

What would I do if I were the president? It depends on what we want as a country. If we pull everybody out, is it acceptable for Iran to come in and seize the oil? At the end of the day, this war is about oil.

I'm not sure which decision I'd land on: One. I'd send 500,000 guys into Iraq tomorrow and leave them there until the job was done. Or I'd pull out 100,000 and leave 30,000 for protecting the interests of the Iraqi people. I don't think you can pull everybody out. I don't think you can leave 150,000 people there indefinitely. It's not enough. I would shift a hell of a lot of men over to Afghanistan and squash the Taliban. That's where we should have been in the first place. We have decided to straddle the fence. That's death by a thousand knives.