Venezuela isn’t a small, clean battlefield. It’s dense cities, jungle, mountains, poor infrastructure, and a civilian population already stressed by shortages of food, medicine, and electricity. You’re not just treating gunshot wounds, you’re treating collapse.

You worry about your people breaking You don’t just treat bodies — you treat your platoon’s psyche. You’re watching: 19-year-olds see starving families for the first time Guys who signed up to fight bad guys now guarding food lines.

Medics are trained on LOAC, neutrality, treatment of detainees. In a controversial invasion, you’d be hyper-aware that: Every treatment is watched Every death is photographed Every mistake becomes propaganda

A medic also thinks past the invasion. You think: “How many amputees will this create?” “How many TB cases will explode when clinics shut down?” “Who is going to take care of these people when we leave?” Because you know, the cameras go home long before the wounds heal.

Most won’t say this, but they think it: “I can keep people alive, but I can’t make this make sense.” You do the job because the person bleeding in front of you didn’t choose geopolitics. You focus on hands, airway, breath, pulse because that’s the only way to survive the moral weight of it.

Every medic has that patient. The one who permanently rewires how you see war. For me, it’s an Iraqi child — an American round, an American war, an American consequence. A small body that didn’t understand flags or reasons or orders. So when I think about Venezuela, that image comes back first.

You don’t think about geopolitics. You think: “I never want to see that again.” You know how quickly rules of engagement blur when fear spikes. You know how one bad angle, one panicked second can end up in a child’s skull and then it’s your hands trying to undo something that can’t be undone.

That memory makes you slower to celebrate force and faster to dread proximity to civilians. It makes you hyper-vigilant, not just about saving lives, but about preventing the moment where you’re kneeling over another kid and realizing the blood is on your side of the line.

And the hardest part isn’t anger — it’s knowing that even if you do everything right, you might still be asked to clean up something you never wanted to be part of again. “I can treat the wound. I can’t treat the knowledge that we caused it.”