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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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July 30th, 2006 - “I came over
here because I wanted to kill people.” |
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Encountering Steven Green - “I
came over here because I wanted to kill people.” By Andrew Tilghman Washington Post Sunday, July 30, 2006 “I came over here because I
wanted to kill people.” Over a mess-tent dinner of
turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked
right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It
was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of
Baghdad. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be.
I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience.
And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' " He shrugged. "I shot a guy who
wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like
nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing
an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some
pizza.'" At the time, the soldier's
matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was
on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of
my time with grunts like him - mostly young (and immature) small-town kids
who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for
excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that
was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly
desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions
who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid,
a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone. But the private was Steven
D. Green. The next time I saw him, in
a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside
a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to
charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old
Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place
just three weeks after we talked. When I met Green, I knew
nothing about his background - his troubled youth and family life, his
apparent problems with drugs and alcohol, his petty criminal record. I just
saw and heard a blunt-talking kid. Now that I know the charges against Green,
his words take on an utterly different context for me. But when I met him
then, his comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now. Maybe, in part, that's
because we were talking in Mahmudiyah. If there's one place where a soldier
might succumb to what the military calls "combat stress," it's this
town where Green's unit was posted on the edge of the so-called Triangle of
Death, for the last three years a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency.
Mahmudiyah is a deadly patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and
uneasiness that my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was
the unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach. I was nervous even before I
arrived. Although Mahmudiyah is only a 15-minute drive from the heavily
fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, I was taken there by helicopter. Military
officials didn't want to risk my riding in a truck that might be hit by a
roadside bomb. I'd chosen to go to Mahmudiyah because I wanted to be on the front
lines of the war and among the troops fighting it. When I arrived in February,
Green's battalion - the 101st Airborne Division's 502nd Infantry Regiment -
was losing an average of about one soldier per week. Whenever I asked how
many of the nearly 1,000 troops posted there had been killed so far, most
soldiers would just frown and say they'd lost count. Danger was everywhere.
Inside the American base camps, mortar shells fell almost daily. In the towns
where U.S. forces patrolled, car bombs were a constant threat. On the rural
roads, the troops kept watch for massive artillery rounds hidden under piles
of trash that could shred the engine block of an armored Humvee and separate
a driver's limbs from his torso. About a month before I
arrived at Green's base - an abandoned potato-packing plant lined with
20-foot concrete walls - the soldiers there fought off a full-blown assault
that rallied dozens of insurgents in a show of force almost unheard of for a
shadowy enemy that typically avoids face-to-face combat. It took more than an
hour to quell the attack of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades coming from
all sides of the camp. Morale took another nosedive
soon after, when the hastily rigged electrical wiring system caught fire and
burned down the Americans' living quarters. The soldiers watched as the
early-morning blaze destroyed all reminders of home: the family photographs,
the iPods and the video games that provide brief escapes from combat. When I
got there a week later, a chow-hall storage room, packed with radios and
satellite maps, was serving as the base command center. The sergeants were
still passing out toothbrushes and clean socks to the young troops who had
lost everything. The company commander in
charge of Green's unit told me that the situation was so stressful that he
himself had "almost had a nervous breakdown" and had been sent to a
hotel-style compound in Baghdad for three days of "freedom rest"
before resuming his command. And yet despite the horrific
conditions in which they were daily being tested, I found extraordinary
camaraderie among the soldiers in Mahmudiyah. They were among the friendliest
troops I met in Iraq. Green was one of several
soldiers I sat down with in the chow hall one night not long after my
arrival. We talked over dinner served on cardboard trays. I asked them how it
was going out there, and to tell me about some of their most harrowing
moments. When they began talking about the December death of Sgt. Kenith
Casica, my interview zeroed in on Green. He described how after an
attack on their traffic checkpoint, he and several others pushed one wounded
man into the back seat of a Humvee and put Casica, who had a bullet wound in
his throat, on the truck's hood. Green flung himself across Casica to keep the
dying soldier from falling off as they sped back to the base. "We were going, like,
55 miles an hour and I was hanging on to him. I was like, 'Sgt. Casica, Sgt.
Casica.' He just moved his eyes a little bit," Green related with a
breezy candor. "I was just laying on top of him, listening to him
breathing, telling him he's okay. I was rubbing his chest. I was looking at
the tattoo on his arm. He had his little girl's name tattooed on his arm. "I was just talking to
him. Listening to his heartbeat. It was weird - I drooled on him a little bit
and I was, like, wiping it off. It's weird that I was worried about stupid
[expletive] like that. "Then I heard him stop
breathing," Green said. "We got back and everyone was like, 'Oh
[expletive], get him off the truck.' But I knew he was dead. You could look
in his eyes and there wasn't nothing in his eyes. I knew what was going on
there." He paused and looked away.
"He was the nicest man I ever met," he said. "I never saw him
yell at anybody. That was the worst time, that was my worst time since I've
been in Iraq." Green had been in country
only four months at that point, a volunteer in a war he now saw as pointless. "I gotta be here for a
year and there ain't [expletive] I can do about it," he said. "I
just want to go home alive. I don't give a [expletive] about the whole Iraq
thing. I don't care. "See, this war is
different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those
wars were for something. This war is for nothing." A couple of days later, I
ran into Green again, and he invited me to join him and another soldier in a
visit to the makeshift tearoom run by the Iraqi soldiers who share the base
with the American troops. It was after dusk, and the three of us walked
across a pitch-black landing zone and into a small plywood-lined room where a
couple of dozen barefoot Iraqi soldiers were sitting around watching a local
news channel. "Hey, shlonek ,"
Green said, offering a casual Arabic greeting with a smile and a sweeping
wave as he stepped up to the bar. He handed over a U.S. dollar in exchange
for three Styrofoam cups of syrupy brown tea. Green knew a few words of
Arabic, and along with bits of broken English, some hand gestures and smiles,
he joked around with the Iraqis as he sipped their tea. Most U.S. soldiers
didn't hang out on this side of the base with the Iraqis. I asked Green whether he
went there a lot. He did, he said, because he liked to get away from the
Americans "who are always telling me what to do." "These guys are
cool," he said, referring to the Iraqis. "But," he added
with a shrug, "I wouldn't really care if all these guys got waxed." As we talked, Green
complained about his frustration with the Army brass that urged young
soldiers to exercise caution even in the most terrifying and life-threatening
circumstances. "We're out here getting
attacked all the time and we're in trouble when somebody accidentally gets
shot?" he said, referring to infantrymen like himself throughout Iraq.
"We're pawns for the [expletive] politicians, for people that don't give
a [expletive] about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out
here on the line." The soldiers who fought
alongside Green lived in conditions of near-constant violence - violence
committed by them, and against them. Even in my brief stay there,
I repeatedly encountered terrifying attacks. One night, about a mile from
Green's base, a roadside bomb exploded alongside the vehicle I was riding in,
unleashing a deafening crack and a ball of fire. In most places in Iraq,
soldiers would have stopped to investigate. In the Triangle of Death,
however, we just plowed on through the cloud of smoke and shower of sparks,
fearing an ambush if we stopped. Fortunately, the bomb was relatively small,
its detonation poorly timed, and the soldiers all laughed about it moments
later. "Dude, that was [expletive] awesome," the driver said after making
sure no one was hurt. A few days later, I was
standing outside chatting with an officer about the long-term legacy of the
Vietnam War when a rocket came whistling down and struck the base's south
wall. A couple of days after that, a mortar round blew up a tent about 20
feet from the visitors' tent that I called home. My experience, however, was
nothing compared with that of Green and the other young men of his Bravo
company who spent months in the Triangle of Death. In the end, I never included
Green's comments in any of the handful of stories I wrote from Mahmudiyah for
Stars and Stripes. When he said he was inured to death and killing, it seemed
to me - in that place and at that time - a reasonable thing to say. While in
Iraq, I also saw people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably
underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie - there are no
rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical narratives that
help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the air, put holes in people
and their bodily fluids leak out and they die. Those who knew them mourn and
move on. But no level of combat
stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts Green allegedly committed. I
suppose I will always look back on our conversations in Mahmudiyah and
wonder: Just what did he mean? Andrew Tilghman was a
correspondent in Iraq for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He lives
in Houston. © 2006 The Washington Post
Company External link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/28/AR2006072801492.html |