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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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July 15th,
2007 - Two Portraits of Local Marine Awaiting Trial |
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Two Portraits
of Local Marine Awaiting Trial Sergeant accused of murder By Anna Badkhen The Boston Globe July 15, 2007 Plymouth - They might as
well be talking about two different men. The friends and family of Sergeant
Lawrence G. Hutchins III, a 23-year-old Marine squad leader from Plymouth,
portray him as a caring friend, a deferential son, and a dedicated Marine,
the type of guy who always held the car door open for his mother and who
spent his entire first paycheck on a Father's Day gift of a gas grill. Six members of his squad
have testified under oath that he is a killer who masterminded and led the
kidnapping and execution of an Iraqi civilian and afterward, according to one
testimony, told his squad members: "Congratulations. We just got away with
murder, gents." Hutchins's parents, Kathleen
and Lawrence Hutchins Jr., maintain his innocence. But they also say the war
had transformed their son from a friendly boy who loved to ride his bicycle
at dawn on streets winding along White Horse Beach to buy milk for his mother
into a young man haunted by war even in his sleep. "He wakes up
screaming," said Kathleen Hutchins. As military experts,
specialists on combat trauma, and retired Marines familiar with the case
await a court-martial scheduled to begin July 24 at Camp Pendleton to
determine whether Hutchins is guilty, they say that the extreme duress of war
can impel a person to commit atrocities. Continuous exposure to
violence in a war that has no front lines and the constant fear of attacks by
an elusive enemy who wears no uniform can cause troops to act violently even
in such a well-trained military as that of the United States, specialists on
combat trauma say. Although people with prior history of criminal behavior or
behavioral problems are more inclined to breach military discipline, the
extreme stress of war sometimes can push people who do not have a history of
violent behavior to lose self-control. "War brings out the
best and the beast in people," said Raymond Scurfield, a sociologist who
served as an Army social worker in Vietnam and who has written scientific
books about psychological effects of war on veterans in Vietnam and Iraq.
"Sometimes it brings out both." Marine expects acquittal In a telephone interview
last week from jail at Camp Pendleton, where he is awaiting trial, Hutchins
sounded upbeat and said he was expecting to be acquitted. "I think it's gonna go
well," Hutchins, who says he is innocent, said about the pending
court-martial. Hutchins faces charges that include murder, kidnapping, and
conspiracy in the April 26, 2006, death of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a retired
policeman in the Iraqi village of Hamdaniya. If convicted, he faces life in
prison. In court testimony, six
squad members said Hutchins had hatched a plan to catch and shoot Saleh Gowad,
a suspected terrorist. Frustrated that they could not find Gowad during a
predawn raid, Hutchins allegedly ordered his troops to take Awad, a father of
11 living in the same village. According to the testimony, Hutchins then
ordered the Marines to bind Awad and take him to a bomb crater half a mile
away, where Hutchins and other squad members shot the Iraqi several times in
the chest and head. Then they placed a Kalashnikov rifle in Awad's hands and
a shovel in the crater to make it appear that Awad was an insurgent planting
explosives. After the execution,
Hutchins congratulated fellow squad members with getting away with murder,
testified Navy Corpsman Melson Bacos, the squad medic. Bacos and four other
members of Hutchins' squad have pleaded guilty to lesser charges and received
sentences ranging from one to eight years. The court-martial of Hutchins and
two other Marines are taking place this month. This accused murderer is not
the Lawrence Hutchins his friends and family know. "I just can't see him
doing it," said Seth Lawrence, 32, Hutchins' friend and the owner of a
youth dirt-bike racing team for which the Marine had competed as a teenager. "Larry is the kind of
son every mother dreams of," said Kathleen Hutchins, who described
Hutchins as an adoring father of his 2-year-old daughter, Kylie. Mary Hale,
82, who lives across the street from the Hutchinses' gray clapboard house,
recalled Hutchins as "a sweetheart of the neighborhood" who often
helped her around the yard. Hutchins' deployment exposed
him to a world of brutality and hardship that was nothing like his life in
Plymouth. Hutchins's parents said
their son's terse, infrequent descriptions of the war painted a picture of
relentless violence, a war in which the enemy was often long gone before the
roadside bomb went off, it was often impossible to avenge the attacks, and
insurgents and friendly civilians looked alike. "He's talked to me
about being pinned down, about being shot at, about when people set the dogs
on you. Seeing people dead and blown up," said Lawrence Hutchins Jr., a
retired Marine who has never seen combat. "He's said people were killed
on different missions he was on." Hutchins had spent four
months in Iraq before the alleged killing, searching for insurgents in dusty
villages west of Baghdad. He would leave the base with his squad for five
days at a time, riding in an armored vehicle through hamlets scattered across
the desert, eating military-issue, flavorless ready-to-eat meals and often
sleeping on the floor in abandoned houses, said his younger brother, Kurt
Hutchins. They would return to base for two days and go back out into the
sinister desert again. In his short phone calls
home over a satellite phone from Iraq, Hutchins had complained of physical
deprivations. "'It's freezing here at
night, please send me socks. And hungry, very hungry,'" his mother
recalled Hutchins as saying. His lips were chapped from the dry desert wind.
His eyes hurt from frequent dust storms and blinding sun. The court-martial of
Hutchins and his seven squad members is one of several high-profile trials
examining alleged war crimes by American troops since the war in Iraq began
in 2003. So far, at least 21 US servicemen have been convicted and at least
22 servicemen are under investigation in criminal cases stemming from deaths
of Iraqis. The cases include the
alleged 2006 massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha and the rape and murder of a
14-year-old girl later that year. Last month, military prosecutors charged
two soldiers with premeditated murder in connection with the deaths of three
Iraqis between April and June. The reported incidents of
alleged war crimes by US troops in Iraq are less than previous American
military campaigns. For example, the Army is currently investigating five
cases of soldiers shooting and killing civilians, compared with at least 320
such alleged incidents during the Vietnam War - not including the 1968 My Lai
massacre, in which US troops killed more than 300 Vietnamese civilians in
three hours. That massacre became a turning point in Americans' perception of
the Vietnam War. ‘Atrocities on all sides’ It is possible that many
atrocities in Iraq are unreported, said John Pike, director of
GlobalSecurity.org, a military think-tank in Alexandria, Va., citing a recent
study by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team. Only 40 percent of Marines
and 55 percent of soldiers surveyed in the study said they would report a
member of their unit for killing or wounding a civilian in Iraq. While not commenting about
the Hutchins case specifically, Army Colonel Kathy Platoni, a clinical
psychologist, linked mistreatment of civilians to psychological changes
caused by exposure to violence, saying that the grueling stress of war
sometimes provokes violent reactions "that are totally out of
character." "Sometimes that rage
just takes over," said Platoni, who has traveled in Iraq extensively as
the leader of a unit helping US troops on the battlefield manage combat
stress. "War brutalizes and
therefore it's natural that there should be atrocities on all sides,"
said Robert Rotberg, a specialist on conflict and conflict resolution at
Harvard University. "We do what we are not supposed to do, which is
retaliate in kind, often targeting innocents." "Somebody starts
shooting at me and they're hiding behind women and children, I'll shoot
back," said retired Marine captain Donald Greenlaw, a veteran of the war
in Korea who had led Hutchins's fiancée, Reyna Griffin, down the aisle at the
couple's wedding last fall at Camp Pendleton. Whatever the outcome of
Hutchins's court-martial, he will never be the same young man who went to war
last year, his parents said. "He doesn't want to go
over there killing people but that's what you have to do. It obviously takes
a burden on you," said Lawrence Hutchins Jr. Ambitiousness described Before he went to Iraq,
Hutchins was going to spend his life in the Marine Corps, like his father and
grandfather, Lawrence Hutchins Sr. He was an ambitious young man who
"always strives to be the best at what he does," said Kurt Hutchins.
Now he no longer wants to become a career Marine. He takes medication to
subdue his nightmares. "All I want to
do," Hutchins said over the phone, "is be a father to my daughter
and a husband to my wife." External link: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/15/two_portraits_of_local_marine_awaiting_trial/ |