Iraq conflict leaves officers weary and humbled

In the summer of 2006, Maj. Walt Cooper was convinced that his Special Forces team's work was only contributing to the violence spiraling out of control in Baghdad. 

Cooper and his soldiers were training a police battalion that took orders from a radical Shiite militia. "We know that the guys we train are some of the same dudes who are putting bullets in the back of people's heads or going to work on them with power drills," he wrote in a July 2006 e-mail home. 

As the months passed, his cynicism and anger grew. "This place is now rotten to the core," he concluded. 

A year later Cooper was back in Iraq, working with 150-man police unit. His second tour, which coincided with a surge of about 30,000 American soldiers, almost felt like a different war. Violence dropped. Markets opened. Something resembling stability seemed to take hold. Cooper remembers his battle-scarred Iraqi police partner from that period as a brother in arms. 

The 33-year-old Green Beret is part of a generation of Army officers whose careers have been defined by the chaos and contradictions of one of America's longest and costliest wars. These soldiers have watched close friends die, weathered separations from family, and struggled to explain to grieving parents why their loved ones didn't make it home. 

When the U.S. and Iraqi brass gather in Baghdad on Monday to mark the official end of U.S. combat operations, these officers will largely be absent.

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