I stood at the podium, looking out across the packed, 500-seat auditorium. Having served as Gen. Raymond T. Odierno’s political adviser from 2007–2010 in Iraq, I had been asked to brief III Corps ahead of their deployment back there.“I’m honored to be back at Fort Hood, [Texas],” I began. “There is no place that has borne the cost of the Iraq War more.”I paused. I saw only one face I knew in the audience. “How many of you have served in Iraq?” I asked. Hundreds of hands went up. And it was at that moment that I recognized every person in the room. My hesitancy left me. These were battle buddies.“Nothing that happened in Iraq after 2003 was preordained. Nothing was inevitable. There were different potential futures for the country,” I told the audience.I spoke to them about the Surge: how I had witnessed commanders on the ground pacify their areas by protecting the population, reaching out to insurgents, brokering cease-fires and carefully targeting irreconcilables.“From 2007–09, we had, for the only time during the whole war, the right strategy, leadership and resources. The violence dropped dramatically. What our soldiers did was real. It made a difference,” I said. And for a moment, I was carried back to battlefield circulation with Odierno, visiting units camped out in the middle of nowhere; and Odierno assuring the assembled soldiers, who were exhausted and filthy from patrol, that what they did mattered, that their tactical successes contributed to the overall strategy.It had been real. All the indicators at the time pointed in a positive trajectory. We and the Iraqis thought the civil war was behind us and that the country was headed in a positive direction. But then it all went wrong.Things fell apart because of the politics: Iraqi politics and our politics. In our rush for the exit, we gave up our role of “balancer,” of moderator, of protector of the political process. We failed to broker the formation of government after the closely contested 2010 elections, thus providing Iran with the opportunity to heavily increase its influence by guaranteeing Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a second premiership on the condition there would be no follow-on security agreement with the U.S. We did not transition from a military-led to a civilian-led relationship with Iraq. We gave up our soft power as we withdrew our hard.Maliki used his second term to go after Sunni politicians, driving them from the political process. He reneged on his promises to the Awakening leaders who had fought against al-Qaida. He arrested Sunnis en masse. He subverted the judiciary and undermined democratic institutions. Sunni protests were violently crushed. Such an environment enabled the Islamic State group to rise up out of the ashes of al-Qaida in Iraq. And Sunnis who had previously contained al-Qaida in Iraq, with our support, determined that the Islamic State was the lesser of two evils when compared with the Iranian-backed regime of Maliki.When the Islamic State moved into Mosul, the Iraqi army, which greatly outnumbered them, fled, leaving behind all their U.S.-supplied equipment. Maliki had replaced leaders who he feared were too close to the U.S. with ones loyal to him. They had pocketed the funds that were supposed to be used to buy ammunition and food for the troops. And they had not given orders to their soldiers to fight.As the Phantom Corps prepared, once again, to deploy to Iraq, I advised those who had served there before to recalibrate their thinking. It was not the same place; it was not the same mission.“Keep asking how the military component fits into the overall strategy,” I urged them. The military effort is essential, but not decisive. It has to be in support of the political and diplomatic activities. But the military gives muscle to U.S. diplomacy. The deployment shows commitment.Later, I hung out for a couple of hours with soldiers. Some came up to me to pose questions they’d been too embarrassed to ask in front of the large audience. Some wanted to talk to me about their previous deployments. And a number were seeking answers to what the Iraq War had been for, what all the sacrifice had been for.It is the hardest question to answer. They died as soldiers, doing a job they loved and believed in. They sacrificed their lives in the knowledge that the soldier on the right and the soldier on the left would have done the same for them.It was a scorching day in Texas—Baghdad hot. But at least I didn’t have to wear body armor, or gloves. And then I thought of Command Sgt. Maj. Neil L. Ciotola, the sergeant major of III Corps during the Surge. He had been a stickler for standards and cared so much for soldiers. He always made me smile, and he always had words of wisdom. We spoke while I was in Texas.“Look, Miss Emma, did I think the war was a good idea? Of course I didn’t. But that decision was not up to me. That was for our political masters to answer. As a soldier, my job is to salute and move out to execute the mission to the best of my abilities.” As we reminisced, joked and laughed, he told me how much he had been changed by his experience in Iraq, how it had made him a better person. The soldiers had set out to transform Iraq and instead, they had been transformed by it. Amid the horror of war, they had seen their better selves, learned who they really were and what they were capable of doing, and had been prepared to lay down their lives for each other.There is not a day that goes by when I don’t see a post on Facebook commemorating a soldier who died on that particular day, with a photograph and a short note about who they were and how they lived. I see soldiers setting up organizations such as the Warrior-Scholar Project to help enlisted veterans get into university. I see soldiers helping their former translators get visas to the U.S. through the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, and helping them resettle in the U.S. through No One Left Behind. I see sponsored runs in the names of fallen comrades raising money for wounded warriors—and for Iraqi children. I see soldiers standing for election. I see soldiers active in civic life, committed to making America a better place, to make it worthy of the sacrifice of our soldiers.I wish politics and media in America were less polarized. I wish more was done to generate consensus on America’s role in the world and how to strengthen the capacity of institutions to implement that vision. I wish there would be a bipartisan commitment to learn lessons from the Iraq experience. It is the best way that we can honor those who gave their lives in this war. I wish our civilian and political leadership would try to learn how to better set achievable objectives and make rational assumptions; how to develop an overall national strategy; and how to use military means not as an end in itself, but as a tool to achieve political outcomes.Despite its faults, the Army does at least try to learn and improve, to understand the utility of force and its own limitations. I think of Odierno and Ciotola: friendships formed on the battlefield through sweat and tears, and loss and loss and loss, in an effort to give Iraqis the hope of a better future—the only purpose that made any sense as to why we were there.When I think back to the war, I remember our dedication to each other, the commitment to the mission, the selflessness, the trust, the better angels of our nature.