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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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September 24th, 2006 - The Army
vs. Spec. Richmond |
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Edward Richmond Jr. says he was doing his duty when he shot a civilian
in Iraq, but the Army convicted him of manslaughter. His father's mission is
to clear his name. By Anne Hull Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 24, 2006; A01 Gonzales, La. - Eddie
Richmond's son got back from the war in June. He wanted nothing in the way of
a homecoming, no yellow ribbons tied around trees, none of the piles of
boiled crawfish that sent him off. While other sons came home
from Iraq with duffel bags that spilled sand from the desert, 22-year-old
Edward Richmond Jr. carried release papers from an Army jail. Edward had been among the
first soldiers to be sent to prison for killing a civilian in the Iraq war,
and among the first to walk out of prison. What waited for him was a parole
officer in heat-struck Louisiana. Ascension Parish was the
same - green and mossy lowlands afloat with Whataburgers, Starcuts, daiquiri
drive-throughs and gas stations that sell hot shrimp by the pound - but
Edward was different. He didn't like anyone
standing too close. He slept on the floor instead of the bed. When he went
through a box the Army had sent home, he found his uniform, infantry badges
and ribbons. The vestments of a soldier's life. Edward put all of it in the
trash. His release coincided with a
wave of investigations into U.S. soldiers killing civilians in Iraq. After an
incident at Haditha, more than a dozen Marines are being questioned in the
deaths of as many as two dozen civilians. Some blamed the fog of war or the
stress of combat. Others said they only did what they were trained to do. "War is not a pretty
thing," Edward's father often said. "Things happen in a war
zone." The Army had trained his son
to kill. Then Edward went to Iraq, and the Army decided he had killed someone
the wrong way. For two years now, his
father has asked the Army why his son was prosecuted. Even after Edward's release
from prison, the 52-year-old Richmond's war rages on. He owns an air conditioning
and heating business, and as he changed out compressors in the mosquito-rife
back yards around Baton Rouge, sweating and heaving, Iraq was with him. He
cited page numbers and footnotes from his son's case, like a record needle
dropping down mid-song: "In Captain Morgan's statement on the 28th
..." Edward was a casualty of
something, and so was his father. In Gonzales, a large
American flag hangs outside the Richmond house on two shaded acres. If the
family feels any shame or anger, they keep it to themselves. Eddie Richmond strolled into
a coffee shop one afternoon and proudly told the owner, "Edward's home,
he's healthy as a mule, he's just getting settled." But many in Gonzales know
about the father's crusade against the Army. It is an awkward fight for
someone who drives a truck with a decal that says, "Home of the Free,
Because of the Brave." Eddie gets his news from Fox and his accent from
the rural hills of north Louisiana. His own father was a decorated Marine
disabled in the Korean War. He served three years in the Air Force. What fueled his frustration
was a cache of confidential Army documents he had gotten his hands on that
described how another soldier in Edward's brigade with the 1st Battalion,
27th Infantry Regiment, had shot and killed unarmed civilians. But Edward was
the one who went to prison. There seemed little left to
fight for. Edward had served his time, been dishonorably discharged, lost his
right to vote or carry a firearm, and couldn't leave the state without
permission from his parole officer. The general who commanded
the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq and convened Edward's court-martial,
retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, said he has faith in the military justice
system. "If I were Dad, I would be focused on Donald Rumsfeld and his
leadership, which took our great military to war without a strategy, with
insufficient troops on the ground, which allowed chaos to rein in early
2004," Batiste said. So Iraq was a mess and
Edward was folded into the mess. This was unacceptable to Eddie Richmond. Father and son shared the
same name, but it was the elder Richmond who went by "Eddie" and
his son the more formal "Edward." The son was always the guarded
one in life, and he came home from prison burning with mistrust. At Fort Sill,
Edward spent much of his time in a segregated cell for discipline violations.
"You gotta understand, he didn't believe he belonged there," said
Charles W. Gittins, a civilian lawyer handling his appeal. It is impossible to know
whether Edward wanted his name cleared as much as his father. He refused to
be interviewed for this story. His second week back, Edward
got a job at a foundry outside Gonzales. He woke at 4 each morning and spent
the next 10 hours near a furnace so hot that his boots smoked. One day his
boss called him "jarhead." People knew his story. While Louisiana sweltered
and beer signs blinked in the windows of the bars where the Blind River
Outlaws played "brain-busting, spine-tingling Southern metal," all
Edward did was work. His schoolteachers had
always imagined that the exceptionally bright boy would be a mathematician or
an engineer. His parents liked to say he joined the Army after 9/11, but
Edward was less a twin towers avenger than an 18-year-old who needed a fresh
start. As a boy, he preferred
playing computer games to hunting squirrels with his dad. He took medication
for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He competed on the math team
and was described as a "genius" by two former teachers. But Edward refused to follow
instructions if he thought they were pointless. His father made many trips to
meet with administrators at East Ascension High School, including assistant
principal Gwynne Pecue, who found him overprotective but struggling to
understand his son. At the start of 11th grade, Edward announced that high
school had nothing more to teach him, and he dropped out. He was involved in an
altercation with some local boys the next year, and he was charged with
resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. His next run-in was more serious.
A few months shy of his 18th birthday, Edward was arrested with crack cocaine
and marijuana in an undercover drug sting. After deputies swooped in, he
punched an officer in the chest and tried to run. He was charged with possession
of cocaine with intent to distribute, possession of marijuana, battery of a
police officer and resisting arrest. Edward did a 30-day stint in
rehab, passed his GED and enrolled at Louisiana State University, but he
still faced felony drug charges. The military was his answer. "There was the
understanding that if you don't do this, the DA will prosecute you,"
said his attorney, Carl E. Babin of Baton Rouge. A soldier was born. The
prosecutor did not seek a conviction. A recruiter who worked in
the Gonzales office at the time said Edward scored high on his tests and said
he wanted to serve his country. "He had some problems, but it wasn't
anything that we couldn't put him in the Army for," said the recruiter,
who was not supposed to discuss Edward and asked that his name not be used. From basic training, Edward
shipped to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, home of the 1st Batallion/27th
Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division. He broke his jaw in a bar
fight and joined the headquarters company mortar platoon. In "Lightning
Thrust Warrior" training exercises, Edward was chosen as best gunner and
"hero of the battle." His father counseled him
about challenging his superiors. "Regardless of whether they are right
or not, they are wearing stripes," he said. "Daddy," Edward
answered, "dumb people are hard to deal with." For a kid from the
middle-class suburbs, he could trash-talk like a thug, "but when he put
on those glasses and buried his nose in a book, his whole attitude
changed," said Sgt. Shaun Mittler, Edward's squad leader in Hawaii. Sometimes he came off as a
know-it-all. By the time his mortar platoon got its orders for Iraq,
"everybody turned on him," said his buddy, Pfc. Frederick Sidney.
"He would speak out. Everybody else was trying to suck up." Spec. Richmond went home to
Gonzales before deploying. Yellow ribbons were tied around the oaks in his
yard. A photograph shows Edward at a picnic table giving his little sister a
playful headlock. In another shot he is shirtless and handsome, with deep-set
eyes and vacation stubble, staring steadily into the camera. "I'm ready," he
told his mother. 'Frightening and Chaotic' Iraq was cold and rainy when
the mortar platoon got there in February of 2004. The mud was frozen around Forward
Operating Base McHenry, a primitive outpost south of Kirkuk. To fend off
sniper attacks, a 10-foot mound of dirt, topped with triple-stand razor wire,
surrounded the base. Beyond the wire were outlying roads littered with bombs,
especially on the way to Hawija. "We didn't know
anything about the people or their land," said Mittler, the sergeant.
"We all had our finger on the trigger. It was frightening and
chaotic." Late one night, according to
Army court documents, Edward's squad was briefed on a mission. Word came that
high-level insurgents were hiding in the village of Taal Al Jal, possibly
with weapons. The plan was for Alpha Company to perform the raid while Edward
and the mortar guys set up a security checkpoint outside the mud wall of the village.
Sgt. Jeffrey Waruch relayed their orders: Shoot any males fleeing the
village, but check with him if possible before firing. The raid started at
daybreak. Edward could hear screaming in Arabic and English, and shotguns
blowing the locks from doors. After the sun was up, cow and sheep herders
from the village made their way into the fields with their animals. A call came over the radio
to detain all males leaving the village. Edward saw a cow herder in a field
about 200 yards away. Waruch would later testify that Edward asked if he
could shoot the man; Edward said he asked if he was supposed to shoot the
man. Waruch said no and set out
for the cow herder, telling Edward to come along. The man wore sweat pants, a
baggy top and a head scarf. As the two soldiers approached with rifles and
plastic flex-cuffs, the Iraqi became angry and began pointing back to the
village. Waruch pantomimed for the
man to put his hands in the air. As the soldiers came within three yards of
the Iraqi, Waruch told Edward to stand guard with his rifle while he
handcuffed the man. Waruch did a quick upper-body search. As he tried to pull
the man's wrists down to handcuff him, he resisted, and Waruch ordered Edward
to raise his weapon to "high ready." Edward would later say that
Waruch told him to "shoot him if he moves," a statement Waruch
would deny making. Edward was at close range,
but he flipped his rifle scope up, training its red dot on the cow herder's
head. The man stopped resisting as
Waruch cuffed him, and the sergeant turned to lead him back to the road. As
they walked on the uneven field, the man lost his balance and stumbled into
Waruch. A single shot from Edward's
M4 rang out. The Iraqi dropped. Waruch squatted down, covering his ears. Edward was pale and holding
his rifle with one hand. He said the Iraqi had jumped at the sergeant. Brain matter was seeping
from the man's eyes. His cows were wandering away in the field. Another soldier came up.
Seeing the dead man's bound hands, he said to Edward with profane prescience,
"You are f - - - - - ." Edward had been in Iraq less
than three weeks. A Soldier’s Trial Eddie Richmond bought a
$1,700 ticket from New Orleans to Kuwait, then caught military transports the
rest of the way in. A hot, sandy wind swirled through the Black Hawk
helicopter that carried him to the 1st First Infantry Division's headquarters
in Tikrit. Edward's battalion, normally with the 25th Infantry Division, fell
under the command of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq. As the months had passed,
Eddie felt sure that the Army would drop its case against Edward. "I
know my son, and he would not just shoot someone," he said. "How
many of our kids over there hesitate and die?" But the Army charged Edward
with unpremeditated murder and scheduled his general court-martial in Tikrit
in August. He faced life in prison. The trial was held in one of
Saddam Hussein's former palaces near the Tigris River. At night, father and
son slept in a room with some special operations soldiers. Eddie found it
surreal: The same Army that was his gracious host was prosecuting his son. He sat behind Edward in the
makeshift courtroom. When the prosecution showed photos of the dead cow
herder on a projection screen, Eddie felt a knot in his stomach. The man's
name was Muhamad Husain Kadir. Part of his head was missing. The key witness against
Edward was Waruch. The sergeant testified that after he handcuffed Kadir, he
patted him on the shoulder and said to Edward, "He's good, let's
go." Waruch said he even saw Edward lower his rifle. Then came the
blast. Edward took the stand,
wearing his desert camouflage and glasses. His accent dripped like the river
parish he came from. Edward testified that Waruch
ordered him to shoot Kadir if he moved, so he raised his rifle and aimed at
the man's head. Looking through his scope, he was unable to see Waruch put
the handcuffs on. When he saw what looked like Kadir lunging at Waruch, he
believed that his sergeant's life was in danger. The defense tried to keep
out a statement Edward gave a month after the incident, admitting that he was
pumped on adrenaline and "had to know" that Kadir was cuffed
"before I shot him but it just did not register in my mind at that
time." Edward signed the statement after an agent with the Army Criminal
Investigation Command (CID) told him he flunked a polygraph; he really
hadn't. Prosecutors goaded him.
Hadn't it been obvious that a herder walking in a field with cows was not
fleeing the village? "You don't look at everybody
as Saddam Hussein himself, sir, but until it is clarified otherwise, you have
to be suspicious," Edward answered. "I mean, people are dying every
day, so you have be suspicious of everyone, sir." "Answer the
question," the prosecutor said. "Did you or did you not assume that
Mr. Kadir had escaped from the village?" "I knew he had come
from the village, sir," Edward said. "I didn't know. I hadn't
formed an opinion based off that." Two of Edward's fellow
soldiers testified that he often talked about wanting to kill an Iraqi. But
under cross-examination, they said most soldiers did. Edward's sergeant said
he was one of the better soldiers in his platoon. Waruch's credibility was
also on trial. Staff Sgt. Marcus Warner testified that Waruch was a "compulsive
liar." His nickname was "Shady Jay." Eddie Richmond watched his
son, admiring his confidence. Edward never second-guessed himself.
"Daddy, I've done my job, and I did what I thought was right," he
said. He believed he would be acquitted. He was only partly right.
The jury found him not guilty of unpremeditated murder but guilty of
voluntary manslaughter. The prosecution was recommending eight years in
prison and a dishonorable discharge. Edward had one chance to
address the court before sentencing. Instead of asking for mercy, he
expressed a vague regret. "If I had known
everything then that I know now, it wouldn't have happened, and I am sorry
that it had to come to this," he said. The jury gave him three
years, a demotion in rank and a dishonorable discharge. He was shipped to the
Fort Sill Regional Correctional Facility, an Army prison in the hills of
Oklahoma, where he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Sadness Turns To Anger His father went home to
Gonzales. "You could see the
mourning," said his friend Marvin "Bud" Ragland, a retired
rice farmer. "His son - his oldest child - went to war for his country
and was branded by that country as a murderer." But Eddie received something
in the mail that would shift him to outrage. Inside an envelope with no
return address were confidential Army documents. One page was stamped
"Serious Incident Report." It was part of an Army investigative
file, known as a 15-6. The subject was Sgt. Jeffrey Waruch. Eddie sat in his kitchen and
began to read. Waruch had shot three female civilians, one of whom died.
Eddie vaguely remembered the sergeant being asked about it at Edward's trial,
but the judge had limited the questions. Edward never mentioned it to him.
The documents Eddie held in his hand - sworn statements by Waruch and several
other soldiers - laid out what happened in detail. Ten days before Edward shot
the cow herder, the mortar platoon was riding in a convoy to Al-Abassi when a
roadside bomb exploded. Soldiers began firing from the sides of their
vehicles. No one was seriously hurt by the bomb, but orders went out to stop
any Iraqis fleeing the area. Waruch began running across
farmland after a group of several Iraqis in the distance. After crossing a
muddy stream in pursuit, he fired warning shots in the air and screamed for
them to stop. According to his written
statement, Waruch said he was 200 yards away when one of the Iraqis knelt
down with what looked like a tube-like object, possibly a rocket-propelled
grenade. Waruch fired about five times, knocking down two bodies. This
subdued the group, but as he moved closer, two other Iraqis suddenly started
to run toward him, with one reaching into her clothes. He fired five more
rounds. Arriving at the group in the
field, he saw that a girl was shot in the head and her pulse was gone.
Another female was hit in the thigh and going into shock. Another was shot in
the knee. Waruch had fired on a mother
and her two daughters, killing a 14-year-old. The survivors would later tell
a reporter that they had been weeding a bean field and had started to run as
the Americans ran toward them. Waruch was initially cleared
of any wrongdoing, but a second review found that he had violated the rules
of engagement. The girl had been trying to surrender when she was shot. No
weapons were found. As a result of the
shootings, the battalion commander ordered that the soldiers be retrained: no
spraying of bullets, aimed shots only, and only when under hostile intent. Eddie felt his eyes burning
with tears. Whoever sent him the file wanted him to see that the
prosecution's key witness against his son was under investigation for his own
civilian casualties. As he studied the documents, he saw that one soldier had
escaped punishment and that another was needed to pay for the platoon's
mistakes. Eddie wrote to members of
Congress and the Army CID. When a reporter from the Dayton Daily News in Ohio
called, researching a story on civilian deaths in Iraq, Eddie shared his
documents and pushed the Army for more. Eddie wanted the same spotlight that
burned on his son to burn on Waruch. In May 2005, more than a
year after the incident, the CID opened an investigation into the shooting of
the three female civilians. Waruch left the Army early this year. The
investigation remains open. Attempts to reach Waruch for comment for this
story were unsuccessful. Edward turned 22 in prison.
He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, gorged on science fiction novels
and built muscle. He refused to bend to the will of Fort Sill, spending much
of his time in a segregation cell for discipline violations. "It's a mental
war," he wrote his parents. "I'll be fine." Eddie contacted Defend the
Defenders, an organization that raises funds for the legal defense of soldiers
and Marines accused of crimes in combat. It was founded by Merry Pantano,
whose son, Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, was charged with murdering two
Iraqis but was acquitted last year by the Marine Corps. Pantano agreed to
fund Edward's appeal. Eddie slapped his truck with
"Defend the Defenders" stickers and wore the group's T-shirt that
said, "Who's Got Their Backs?" The war in Iraq roiled on, but for
Eddie it was frozen on two days, 10 days apart, in February 2004. Then came a break. In April,
the Army's clemency board granted Edward parole. When he was released in
June, he had served nearly two years of a three-year sentence. He called from
the airport in Lawton, Okla., and told his parents, "I'm a free
man." They picked him up in Baton Rouge. He was pale but rock-hard from
exercise, and still had a grunt's haircut. He soon received a
congratulatory call from Ilario Pantano, the Marine acquitted of murder. In a
sense they both belonged to the same fraternity of the misunderstood. Edward told his father he
didn't want anyone feeling sorry for him. He wanted to start over. But his
father could not let go so easily. After Edward put his Army uniform and
ribbons in the trash, Eddie retrieved them and took them to the charity bins
behind the grocery store in town. In Iraq, the Army has tried
to make up for the tragedies. The family of Muhamad Husain
Kadir was paid $1,000 for his death. The Army paid more than
$4,000 to the family of the girl killed by Waruch, among them her wounded
sister and mother, whose leg was amputated. The 1st Battalion commander wrote
a sympathy letter to the family. "I ask for your continued support as we
attempt to provide a safe and secure environment," wrote Lt. Col. C.
Scott Leith. He closed by quoting the Koran: "We belong to Allah and to
him we shall return." The former 1st Infantry
Division commander in Iraq, Batiste, is now the president of a steel company. Edward is earning $10 an
hour at the foundry. The chapter was closing, but
not for Eddie Richmond. "I just want the truth
to come out," he said. As summer turns to fall, he wears his Defend the
Defenders T-shirt, waiting for word on his son's appeal. Staff researcher Julie Tate
contributed to this report. © 2006 The Washington Post
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