The first lesson he learned as a combat veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was the simplest and most obvious one, said Matthew Weingast of East Windsor, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves.

“We are at war,” Weingast said as he addressed a small audience in the social hall of The Jewish Center in Princeton on the evening of Jan. 17. “We are at war — everybody knows it, everybody says it, but do we really know? What do we mean?

“This is a war,” he repeated. “I’ve seen our enemies. Our enemies want to defeat our way of life. It’s real.”

Weingast, a member of Beth El Synagogue in East Windsor, drove home his message during a program in the center’s men’s club lecture series, The War on Terror: Personal Experiences and Lessons Learned in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now a corporate attorney in Princeton, Weingast was on the front lines of the war on terror during three tours of duty in army reconnaissance and intelligence units between 2001 and 2004 — service for which he was awarded three Bronze Stars. He is cofounder of the American Veterans of the War on Terror, an organization formed to educate the American public about the war.

“My purpose tonight is not to give a political message,” he said. “My agenda is to educate. Obviously, if I do have a slant, my slant is that I want to bring credit to and a better appreciation for our United States military and veterans.”

Weingast’s own military experience includes what he calls his “bedrock” service during the first Gulf War, when he was second-in-command of a reconnaissance unit with the Seventh Cavalry. Afterward, he earned a master’s degree in strategic intelligence and national security studies with a concentration in Middle East policy. In 1996, he left active military duty and earned his law degree.

But in 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, Weingast’s reserve unit was called up and deployed to Pakistan and Afghanistan. There, he served as a senior intelligence officer, in charge of identifying and interrogating members of Al Qaida. “We were one of the first units deployed to Afghanistan,” he said “It was quite an experience. The country at that time was more like the Wild West than anyone could imagine.”

Later, Weingast was called up for a tour in Iraq, where he served as second-in-command of an intelligence unit that reported to the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We were responsible for going out and addressing what we called the foreign fighter problem,” he said. “In 2003 and 2004, this was really the issue in Iraq besides hunting down Saddam.”

When he returned home in 2004, Weingast said, he joined a group of veterans who were upset and frustrated over what they perceived as the American people’s lack of understanding about the war on terror. That was when he helped launch the American Veterans of the War on Terror.

“The point is, it’s difficult in this environment for us to understand,” he said. “What is a war on terror? What is the war against Islamic fundamentalism? The enemy has a strategy, and, if you ask me, their strategy is very viable. There is no doubt that they are out to destroy our way of life. It’s to defeat us from within, to get us out of the Middle East, and then to whittle away at all of Western society from within. They consider our way of life as directly competitive with the Islamic fundamentalist way of life.”

The second lesson he learned after interrogating some 300 Islamic fundamentalist fighters was that this is going to be a long war, Weingast added.

“This war is different, and it has to be fought differently from the way previous generations fought wars,” he said. “This war is not going to be won militarily. It has to be fought militarily, but it’s not going to be won militarily.

“Not one of the guys I spoke with ever indicated any problem with the fact that victory was not something they were going to achieve any time soon — or even in their lifetimes,” he said.

“I remember sitting in a room with one of these guys and listening and listening to him, and for the first time in my life, I had the thought: Is it possible that the United States of America will not be there in 60 or 80 or 100 years? Has anybody in this room ever thought of that? I think not,” he said. “But Americans should spend some time thinking about this, because our enemies have thought about it.”