Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq and lost close friends in that war, responded to Saturday’s news of two more American combat deaths with characteristically blunt language, framing the losses as the direct cost of a war he has argued from the outset was launched without justification or planning.
“Trump started a stupid war, with no plan to get us out of it. Now our men and women in uniform are paying for it,” Gallego wrote on X at 4:59 p.m. on July 18, 2026.
The statement followed CENTCOM’s confirmation that two service members were killed in action on July 17 while defending against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks in Jordan. A third remains missing, and four others who were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals have since been discharged. CENTCOM said it is withholding the fallen troops’ identities until 24 hours after next of kin notification.
A Veteran’s Opposition, Rooted in Personal Loss
Gallego’s response drew on an argument he has made since the war’s first days, one inseparable from his own service. Deployed to Iraq at age 24 as part of the Marine Corps’ Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment — a unit that suffered some of the heaviest casualties of the Iraq War — Gallego has repeatedly invoked his own experience, including 23 people he knew who were killed in action and the improvised explosive device attack that killed his best friend riding behind him in a convoy.
On February 28, 2026, the day Operation Epic Fury launched, Gallego’s office released a statement in which he said, “I watched brave young men die in Iraq for a mission that was never clearly justified to the American people. I came home carrying the weight of that war, and I live with PTSD every single day,” adding that “President Trump promised no more forever wars. Instead, he has illegally dragged us into another one without congressional authorization and no long term strategy.”
At a VoteVets town hall in late March, Gallego told attendees that “the most patriotic thing you could do for veterans is to not send us to stupid wars,” a line he echoed in Saturday’s post. And in March, following a Senate vote in which the war powers effort again failed to advance far enough, Gallego’s office issued a statement in which he said, “I fought in Iraq. I lost friends there and live with PTSD every day. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past by sending another generation of young working-class Americans to die in a war that hasn’t been explained to the American people.”
Connecting the War to Costs at Home
Gallego, a member of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, has also tied the war’s human toll to its financial one. At the Center for American Progress’s IDEAS Conference in May, he told the audience that “the price of gas hitting $5 a gallon in Arizona” and rising grocery and housing costs were “the direct consequences of a war of choice in Iran,” adding, “Trump got his war, and working families got stuck with the bill.”
A War Still Widening
The attack that killed the two service members Saturday came amid a broader overnight escalation, with Jordan’s military reporting the interception of 10 Iranian ballistic missiles and Iranian strikes also hitting Kuwaiti oil infrastructure and a water desalination plant in Iran, according to the New York Times and Al Jazeera. The new deaths bring the conflict’s American toll to at least 16, according to CNN’s coverage of the CENTCOM statement, up from the 13 fatalities cited in Gallego’s statements as recently as May.