The war in Ukraine has garnered extraordinary emotions among many veterans of the U.S. intelligence and military communities.

It is the classic David vs. Goliath, good vs. evil, struggle absent from our two decades of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. The absence of moral clarity in those conflicts has troubled and haunted many of us who served in them — many of us who saw our friends maimed or killed and who still have trouble processing the worth of the sacrifices made. I have struggled more with my service in Iraq, a war that rested on false premises that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, than with my service in Afghanistan, where I remain intensely proud of the work we did to degrade al Qaeda but where we lost our way and likely stayed too long. Make no mistake, the last two decades have been messy. Many seen and unseen scars remain for those who served.