A paralyzed soldier asks, 'what was our purpose?'.

Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson Jr., at age 27, is wheelchair-bound and spends a lot of time watching TV. His expertise is tank warfare. When Simpson's unit was deployed from Germany to Iraq, the tanks were left behind and he ended up bouncing around Tikrit in a Humvee, on the lookout for weapons smugglers and other vaguely defined "bad guys." Last April, on a routine patrol, a car bomb exploded just a few feet from him. Simpson is now paralyzed from the waist down. His feelings about the military, at the moment, are ambivalent. "Of course, I still wish I could walk and still, be in the military," he said. "That's what I love to do." But when asked if he still loved the military itself, he paused and then said, "Not as much. That's basically because we were over there, all these young guys, doing our jobs, but we really didn't know why we were there. I ask myself, 'What was our purpose?' And to this day I still can't figure out our purpose for being there." He said he accepted his obligation, as a soldier, to fight. He is not resentful. But he would have appreciated a little more clarity about what he was fighting for.