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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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July 30th,
2007 - The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness |
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The Other War: Iraq Vets
Bear Witness by Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian The Nation July 30, 2007 Over the past several months
The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around
the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the
four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans,
some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have
come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They
described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or
chronicled in newspaper accounts. Their stories, recorded and
typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of
behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed
Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some
participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian
casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members
of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all
troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were
perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as
common and said they often go unreported - and almost always go unpunished. Court cases, such as the
ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and the rape and murder of a
14-year-old in Mahmudiya, and news stories in the Washington Post, Time, the
London Independent and elsewhere based on Iraqi accounts have begun to hint
at the wide extent of the attacks on civilians. Human rights groups have
issued reports, such as Human Rights Watch's Hearts and Minds: Post-war
Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by U.S. Forces, packed with detailed incidents
that suggest that the killing of Iraqi civilians by occupation forces is more
common than has been acknowledged by military authorities. This Nation investigation
marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within
the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these
assertions. While some veterans said
civilian shootings were routinely investigated by the military, many more
said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you physically could not do an
investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just
happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that," said Marine
Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia. He served
from August 2004 to March 2005 in Ramadi with a Marine Corps civil affairs
unit supporting a combat team with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade.
(All interviewees are identified by the rank they held during the period of
service they recount here; some have since been promoted or demoted.) Veterans said the culture of
this counterinsurgency war, in which most Iraqi civilians were assumed to be
hostile, made it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their victims - at
least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect. "I guess while I was
there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi,"
said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado. Specialist
Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, in Baquba,
about thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad, for a year beginning in
February 2004. "You know, so what?... The soldiers honestly thought we
were trying to help the people and they were mad because it was almost like a
betrayal. Like here we are trying to help you, here I am, you know, thousands
of miles away from home and my family, and I have to be here for a year and
work every day on these missions. Well, we're trying to help you and you just
turn around and try to kill us." He said it was only
"when they get home, in dealing with veteran issues and meeting other
veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then." The Iraq War is a vast and
complicated enterprise. In this investigation of alleged military misconduct,
The Nation focused on a few key elements of the occupation, asking veterans
to explain in detail their experiences operating patrols and supply convoys,
setting up checkpoints, conducting raids and arresting suspects. From these
collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely populated
urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the
hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents. Many of these veterans
returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the
war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The
war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears
a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and
occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in
Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. "I'll tell you the
point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from
Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the
167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town
near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you
know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I
look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive
device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and
the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything,
it just looked at me like - I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy,
but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my
leg?... I was just like, This is - this is it. This is ridiculous." Much of the resentment
toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report
released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by the
Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just 47 percent
of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated
with dignity and respect. Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of
marines said they would report a unit member who had killed or injured
"an innocent noncombatant." These attitudes reflect the
limited contact occupation troops said they had with Iraqis. They rarely saw
their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds that often
came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their compounds ready
for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the
devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead
and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis. Veterans described reckless
firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline
being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas
to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often
enraged Iraqi witnesses. In June 2003 Staff Sgt.
Camilo Mejía's unit was pressed by a furious crowd in Ramadi. Sergeant Mejía,
31, a National Guardsman from Miami, served for six months beginning in April
2003 with the 1-124 Infantry Battalion, Fifty-Third Infantry Brigade. His
squad opened fire on an Iraqi youth holding a grenade, riddling his body with
bullets. Sergeant Mejía checked his clip afterward and calculated that he had
personally fired eleven rounds into the young man. "The frustration that
resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to
tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was
supporting them," Sergeant Mejía said. We heard a few reports, in
one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their
moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo,
among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an
American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead
Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon. "Take a picture of me
and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad
said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud
covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only
his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest. "Damn, they really
fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed. The scene, Sergeant Mejía
said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins. In the sections that follow,
snipers, medics, military police, artillerymen, officers and others recount
their experiences serving in places as diverse as Mosul in the north, Samarra
in the Sunni Triangle, Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad in the center,
during 2003, 2004 and 2005. Their stories capture the impact of their units
on Iraqi civilians. A Note on Methodology The Nation interviewed fifty
combat veterans, including forty soldiers, eight marines and two sailors,
over a period of seven months beginning in July 2006. To find veterans
willing to speak on the record about their experiences in Iraq, we sent
queries to organizations dedicated to US troops and their families, including
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the antiwar groups Military
Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War and
the prowar group Vets for Freedom. The leaders of IVAW and Paul Rieckhoff,
the founder of IAVA, were especially helpful in putting us in touch with Iraq
War veterans. Finally, we found veterans through word of mouth, as many of
those we interviewed referred us to their military friends. To verify their military
service, when possible we obtained a copy of each interviewee's DD Form 214,
or the Certificate of Release or Discharge From Active Duty, and in all cases
confirmed their service with the branch of the military in which they were
enlisted. Nineteen interviews were conducted in person, while the rest were
done over the phone; all were tape-recorded and transcribed; all but five
interviewees (most of those currently on active duty) were independently
contacted by fact checkers to confirm basic facts about their service in
Iraq. Of those interviewed, fourteen served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, twenty
from 2004 to 2005 and two from 2005 to 2006. Of the eleven veterans whose
tours lasted less than one year, nine served in 2003, while the others served
in 2004 and 2005. The ranks of the veterans we
interviewed ranged from private to captain, though only a handful were
officers. The veterans served throughout Iraq, but mostly in the country's
most volatile areas, such as Baghdad, Tikrit, Mosul, Falluja and Samarra. During the course of the
interview process, five veterans turned over photographs from Iraq, some of
them graphic, to corroborate their claims. Raids "So we get started on
this day, this one in particular," recalled Spc. Philip Chrystal, 23, of
Reno, who said he raided between twenty and thirty Iraqi homes during an
eleven-month tour in Kirkuk and Hawija that ended in October 2005, serving
with the Third Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade. "It starts with the
psy-ops vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message
in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be, saying,
basically, saying, Put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door
in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had
Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good
show of force. And we're running around, and they - we'd done a few houses by
this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a
couple other people. "And we were
approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area,
they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main
house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage
shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was
barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out
of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't - motherfucker - he shot it and it
went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog - I'm a huge animal lover;
I love animals - and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running
around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell
is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children
and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell
at him. I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping.
It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're
just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot
it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed.... "And - I actually get
tears from just saying this right now, but - and I had tears then, too - and
I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over
with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks,
because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told
them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. "Was a report ever
filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever
dished out? No, absolutely not." Specialist Chrystal said
such incidents were "very common." According to interviews with
twenty-four veterans who participated in such raids, they are a relentless
reality for Iraqis under occupation. The American forces, stymied by poor
intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting into
homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But such
catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which soldiers
assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search and left
terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin the long
torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away as suspects. Raids normally took place
between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of
Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi
homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city infamous for its prison,
located twenty miles west of the capital, with the Third Brigade, First Armor
Division, First Battalion, for one year beginning in March 2003. His
descriptions of raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other veterans
who served in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and
Tikrit. "You want to catch them
off guard," Sergeant Bruhns explained. "You want to catch them in
their sleep." About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with
five stationed outside and the rest searching the home. Once they were in front of
the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade
launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant
Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure: "You run in. And if there's
lights, you turn them on - if the lights are working. If not, you've got
flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes
inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a
microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's
outside. "You go up the stairs.
You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife.
You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates
first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family,
and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the
room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can
use to attack us. "You get the
interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint,
and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you
have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all - anything - anything in here
that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent
activity or anti-coalition forces activity?' "Normally they'll say
no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So
what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he
has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if
he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take
his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll
throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like
a hurricane just hit it. "And if you find
something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you.
Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his
entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home.
And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred
homes." Each raid, or "cordon
and search" operation, as they are sometimes called, involved five to
twenty homes, he said. Following a spate of attacks on soldiers in a
particular area, commanders would normally order infantrymen on raids to look
for weapons caches, ammunition or materials for making IEDs. Each Iraqi
family was allowed to keep one AK-47 at home, but according to Bruhns, those
found with extra weapons were arrested and detained and the operation
classified a "success," even if it was clear that no one in the
home was an insurgent. Before a raid, according to
descriptions by several veterans, soldiers typically "quarantined"
the area by barring anyone from coming in or leaving. In pre-raid briefings,
Sergeant Bruhns said, military commanders often told their troops the
neighborhood they were ordered to raid was "a hostile area with a high
level of insurgency" and that it had been taken over by former Baathists
or Al Qaeda terrorists. "So you have all these
troops, and they're all wound up," said Sergeant Bruhns. "And a lot
of these troops think once they kick down the door there's going to be people
on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting at them." Sgt. Dustin Flatt, 33, of
Denver, estimates he raided "thousands" of homes in Tikrit, Samarra
and Mosul. He served with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry
Division, for one year beginning in February 2004. "We scared the living
Jesus out of them every time we went through every house," he said. Spc. Ali Aoun, 23, a
National Guardsman from New York City, said he conducted perimeter security
in nearly 100 raids while serving in Sadr City with the Eighty-Ninth Military
Police Brigade for eleven months starting in April 2004. When soldiers raided
a home, he said, they first cordoned it off with Humvees. Soldiers guarded
the entrance to make sure no one escaped. If an entire town was being raided,
in large-scale operations, it too was cordoned off, said Spc. Garett
Reppenhagen, 32, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry scout and sniper
with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, who was deployed to
Baquba for a year in February 2004. Staff Sgt. Timothy John
Westphal, 31, of Denver, recalled one summer night in 2004, the temperature
an oppressive 110 degrees, when he and forty-four other US soldiers raided a
sprawling farm on the outskirts of Tikrit. Sergeant Westphal, who served
there for a yearlong tour with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First
Infantry Division, beginning in February 2004, said he was told some men on
the farm were insurgents. As a mechanized infantry squad leader, Sergeant
Westphal led the mission to secure the main house, while fifteen men swept
the property. Sergeant Westphal and his men hopped the wall surrounding the
house, fully expecting to come face to face with armed insurgents. "We had our flashlights
and...I told my guys, 'On the count of three, just hit them with your lights
and let's see what we've got here. Wake 'em up!'" Sergeant Westphal's
flashlight was mounted on his M-4 carbine rifle, a smaller version of the
M-16, so in pointing his light at the clump of sleepers on the floor he was
also pointing his weapon at them. Sergeant Westphal first turned his light on
a man who appeared to be in his mid-60s. "The man screamed this
gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, just horrified scream," Sergeant Westphal
recalled. "I've never heard anything like that. I mean, the guy was
absolutely terrified. I can imagine what he was thinking, having lived under
Saddam." The farm's inhabitants were
not insurgents but a family sleeping outside for relief from the stifling
heat, and the man Sergeant Westphal had frightened awake was the patriarch. "Sure enough, as we
started to peel back the layers of all these people sleeping, I mean, it was
him, maybe two guys...either his sons or nephews or whatever, and the rest
were all women and children," Sergeant Westphal said. "We didn't
find anything. "I can tell you
hundreds of stories about things like that and they would all pretty much be
like the one I just told you. Just a different family, a different time, a
different circumstance." For Sergeant Westphal, that
night was a turning point. "I just remember thinking to myself, I just
brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's just not
what I joined the Army to do," he said. Intelligence Fifteen soldiers we spoke
with told us the information that spurred these raids was typically gathered
through human intelligence - and that it was usually incorrect. Eight said it
was common for Iraqis to use American troops to settle family disputes,
tribal rivalries or personal vendettas. Sgt. Jesus Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco,
Texas, was a scout in Tikrit with the Fourth Infantry Division during a
yearlong tour that ended in March 2004. In late 2003, Sergeant Bocanegra
raided a middle-aged man's home in Tikrit because his son had told the Army
his father was an insurgent. After thoroughly searching the man's house,
soldiers found nothing and later discovered that the son simply wanted money
his father had buried at the farm. After persistently acting on
such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who raided Iraqi homes in more than
fifty operations, said soldiers began to anticipate the innocence of those
they raided. "People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into
a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna get the wrong house," he said.
"'Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house."
Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon leader shared a joke of
their own: Every time he raided a house, he would radio in and say,
"This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I found the weapons of mass
destruction in here." Sergeant Bruhns said he
questioned the authenticity of the intelligence he received because Iraqi
informants were paid by the US military for tips. On one occasion, an Iraqi
tipped off Sergeant Bruhns's unit that a small Syrian resistance
organization, responsible for killing a number of US troops, was holed up in
a house. "They're waiting for us to show up and there will be a lot of
shooting," Sergeant Bruhns recalled being told. As the Alpha Company team
leader, Sergeant Bruhns was supposed to be the first person in the door.
Skeptical, he refused. "So I said, 'If you're so confident that there
are a bunch of Syrian terrorists, insurgents...in there, why in the world are
you going to send me and three guys in the front door, because chances are
I'm not going to be able to squeeze the trigger before I get shot.'"
Sergeant Bruhns facetiously suggested they pull an M-2 Bradley Fighting
Vehicle up to the house and shoot a missile through the front window to
exterminate the enemy fighters his commanders claimed were inside. They
instead diminished the aggressiveness of the raid. As Sergeant Bruhns ran
security out front, his fellow soldiers smashed the windows and kicked down
the doors to find "a few little kids, a woman and an old man." In late summer 2005, in a
village on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Specialist Chrystal searched a compound
with two Iraqi police officers. A friendly man in his mid-30s escorted
Specialist Chrystal and others in his unit around the property, where the man
lived with his parents, wife and children, making jokes to lighten the mood.
As they finished searching - they found nothing - a lieutenant from his
company approached Specialist Chrystal: "What the hell were you
doing?" he asked. "Well, we just searched the house and it's
clear," Specialist Chrystal said. The lieutenant told Specialist
Chrystal that his friendly guide was "one of the targets" of the
raid. "Apparently he'd been dimed out by somebody as being an
insurgent," Specialist Chrystal said. "For that mission, they'd
only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't there with
the rest of the troops." Specialist Chrystal said he felt
"humiliated" because his assessment that the man posed no threat
was deemed irrelevant and the man was arrested. Shortly afterward, he posted
himself in a fighting vehicle for the rest of the mission. Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of
Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First
Infantry Division, served a yearlong tour in several cities in Iraq,
including Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, beginning in February 2004. He estimates
that he searched more than a hundred homes in Tikrit and found the raids
fruitless and maddening. "We would go on one raid of a house and that
guy would say, 'No, it's not me, but I know where that guy is.' And...he'd
take us to the next house where this target was supposedly at, and then that
guy's like, 'No, it's not me. I know where he is, though.' And we'd drive
around all night and go from raid to raid to raid." "I can't really fault
military intelligence," said Specialist Reppenhagen, who said he raided
thirty homes in and around Baquba. "It was always a guessing game. We're
in a country where we don't speak the language. We're light on interpreters.
It's just impossible to really get anything. All you're going off is a
pattern of what's happened before and hoping that the pattern doesn't
change." Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, 26,
of Buffalo, New York, served in Tikrit with the Rear Operations Center,
Forty-Second Infantry Division, for one year beginning in October 2004. He
said combat troops had neither the training nor the resources to investigate
tips before acting on them. "We're not police," he said. "We
don't go around like detectives and ask questions. We kick down doors, we go
in, we grab people." First Lieut. Brady Van
Engelen, 26, of Washington, DC, said the Army depended on less than reliable
sources because options were limited. He served as a survey platoon leader
with the First Armored Division in Baghdad's volatile Adhamiya district for
eight months beginning in September 2003. "That's really about the only
thing we had," he said. "A lot of it was just going off a whim, a
hope that it worked out," he said. "Maybe one in ten worked
out." Sergeant Bruhns said he
uncovered illegal material about 10 percent of the time, an estimate echoed
by other veterans. "We did find small materials for IEDs, like maybe a
small piece of the wire, the detonating cord," said Sergeant Cannon.
"We never found real bombs in the houses." In the thousand or so
raids he conducted during his time in Iraq, Sergeant Westphal said, he came
into contact with only four "hard-core insurgents." Arrests Even with such slim pretexts
for arrest, some soldiers said, any Iraqis arrested during a raid were
treated with extreme suspicion. Several reported seeing military-age men
detained without evidence or abused during questioning. Eight veterans said
the men would typically be bound with plastic handcuffs, their heads covered
with sandbags. While the Army officially banned the practice of hooding
prisoners after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, five soldiers indicated that it
continued. "You weren't allowed
to, but it was still done," said Sergeant Cannon. "I remember in
Mosul [in January 2005], we had guys in a raid and they threw them in the
back of a Bradley," shackled and hooded. "These guys were really
throwing up," he continued. "They were so sick and nervous. And
sometimes, they were peeing on themselves. Can you imagine if people could
just come into your house and take you in front of your family screaming? And
if you actually were innocent but had no way to prove that? It would be a
scary, scary thing." Specialist Reppenhagen said he had only a vague
idea about what constituted contraband during a raid. "Sometimes we
didn't even have a translator, so we find some poster with Muqtada al-Sadr,
Sistani or something, we don't know what it says on it. We just apprehend
them, document that thing as evidence and send it on down the road and let
other people deal with it." Sergeant Bruhns, Sergeant
Bocanegra and others said physical abuse of Iraqis during raids was common.
"It was just soldiers being soldiers," Sergeant Bocanegra said.
"You give them a lot of, too much, power that they never had before, and
before you know it they're the ones kicking these guys while they're
handcuffed. And then by you not catching [insurgents], when you do have
someone say, 'Oh, this is a guy planting a roadside bomb' - and you don't
even know if it's him or not - you just go in there and kick the shit out of
him and take him in the back of a five-ton - take him to jail." Tens of thousands of Iraqis
- military officials estimate more than 60,000 - have been arrested and
detained since the beginning of the occupation, leaving their families to
navigate a complex, chaotic prison system in order to find them. Veterans we
interviewed said the majority of detainees they encountered were either
innocent or guilty of only minor infractions. Sergeant Bocanegra said
during the first two months of the war he was instructed to detain Iraqis
based on their attire alone. "They were wearing Arab clothing and
military-style boots, they were considered enemy combatants and you would
cuff 'em and take 'em in," he said. "When you put something like
that so broad, you're bound to have, out of a hundred, you're going to have
ten at least that were, you know what I mean, innocent." Sometime during the summer
of 2003, Bocanegra said, the rules of engagement narrowed - somewhat. "I
remember on some raids, anybody of military age would be taken," he
said. "Say, for example, we went to some house looking for a 25-year-old
male. We would look at an age group. Anybody from 15 to 30 might be a
suspect." (Since returning from Iraq, Bocanegra has sought counseling
for post-traumatic stress disorder and said his "mission" is to
encourage others to do the same.) Spc. Richard Murphy, 28, an
Army Reservist from Pocono, Pennsylvania, who served part of his
fifteen-month tour with the 800th Military Police Brigade in Abu Ghraib
prison, said he was often struck by the lack of due process afforded the
prisoners he guarded. Specialist Murphy initially
went to Iraq in May 2003 to train Iraqi police in the southern city of Al
Hillah but was transferred to Abu Ghraib in October 2003 when his unit
replaced one that was rotating home. (He spoke with The Nation in October
2006, while not on active duty.) Shortly after his arrival there, he realized
that the number of prisoners was growing "exponentially" while the
amount of personnel remained stagnant. By the end of his six-month stint,
Specialist Murphy was in charge of 320 prisoners, the majority of whom he was
convinced were unjustly detained. "I knew that a large
percentage of these prisoners were innocent," he said. "Just living
with these people for months you get to see their character.... In just
listening to the prisoners' stories, I mean, I get the sense that a lot of
them were just getting rounded up in big groups." Specialist Murphy said one
prisoner, a mentally impaired, blind albino who could "maybe see a few
feet in front of his face" clearly did not belong in Abu Ghraib. "I
thought to myself, What could he have possibly done?" Specialist Murphy counted
the prisoners twice a day, and the inmates would often ask him when they
would be released or implore him to advocate on their behalf, which he would
try to do through the JAG (Judge Advocate General) Corps office. The JAG
officer Specialist Murphy dealt with would respond that it was out of his
hands. "He would make his recommendations and he'd have to send it up to
the next higher command," Specialist Murphy said. "It was just a
snail's crawling process.... The system wasn't working." Prisoners at the notorious
facility rioted on November 24, 2003, to protest their living conditions, and
Army Reserve Spc. Aidan Delgado, 25, of Sarasota, Florida, was there. He had
deployed with the 320th Military Police Company to Talil Air Base, to serve
in Nasiriya and Abu Ghraib for one year beginning in April 2003. Unlike the
other troops in his unit, he did not respond to the riot. Four months earlier
he had decided to stop carrying a loaded weapon. Nine prisoners were killed
and three wounded after soldiers opened fire during the riot, and Specialist
Delgado's fellow soldiers returned with photographs of the events. The
images, disturbingly similar to the incident described by Sergeant Mejía,
shocked him. "It was very graphic," he said. "A head split
open. One of them was of two soldiers in the back of the truck. They open the
body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has]
got an MRE spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at
the camera and he's smiling. And I said, 'These are some of our soldiers
desecrating somebody's body. Something is seriously amiss.' I became
convinced that this was excessive force, and this was brutality." Spc. Patrick Resta, 29, a
National Guardsman from Philadelphia, served in Jalula, where there was a
small prison camp at his base. He was with the 252nd Armor, First Infantry
Division, for nine months beginning in March 2004. He recalled his supervisor
telling his platoon point-blank, "The Geneva Conventions don't exist at
all in Iraq, and that's in writing if you want to see it." The pivotal experience for
Specialist Delgado came when, in the winter of 2003, he was assigned to
battalion headquarters inside Abu Ghraib prison, where he worked with Maj.
David DiNenna and Lieut. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, both implicated in the Taguba
Report, the official Army investigation into the prison scandal. There,
Delgado read reports on prisoners and updated a dry erase board with
information on where in the large prison compound detainees were moved and
held. "That was when I
totally walked away from the Army," Specialist Delgado said. "I
read these rap sheets on all the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and what they were
there for. I expected them to be terrorists, murderers, insurgents. I look
down this roster and see petty theft, public drunkenness, forged coalition
documents. These people are here for petty civilian crimes." "These aren't
terrorists," he recalled thinking. "These aren't our enemies.
They're just ordinary people, and we're treating them this harshly."
Specialist Delgado ultimately applied for conscientious objector status,
which the Army approved in April 2004. The Enemy American troops in Iraq
lacked the training and support to communicate with or even understand Iraqi
civilians, according to nineteen interviewees. Few spoke or read Arabic. They
were offered little or no cultural or historical education about the country
they controlled. Translators were either in short supply or unqualified. Any
stereotypes about Islam and Arabs that soldiers and marines arrived with
tended to solidify rapidly in the close confines of the military and the
risky streets of Iraqi cities into a crude racism. As Spc. Josh Middleton, 23,
of New York City, who served in Baghdad and Mosul with the Second Battalion,
Eighty-Second Airborne Division, from December 2004 to March 2005, pointed
out, 20-year-old soldiers went from the humiliation of training - "getting
yelled at every day if you have a dirty weapon" - to the streets of
Iraq, where "it's like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at
us with fear and we can - do you know what I mean? - we have this power that
you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this
primal level." In Iraq, Specialist
Middleton said, "a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that,
you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not
as human as us, so we can do what we want." In the scramble to get ready
for Iraq, troops rarely learned more than how to say a handful of words in
Arabic, depending mostly on a single manual, A Country Handbook, a
Field-Ready Reference Publication, published by the Defense Department in
September 2002. The book, as described by eight soldiers who received it, has
pictures of Iraqi military vehicles, diagrams of how the Iraqi army is
structured, images of Iraqi traffic signals and signs, and about four pages
of basic Arabic phrases such as Do you speak English? I am an American. I am
lost. Iraqi culture, identity and
customs were, according to at least a dozen soldiers and marines interviewed
by The Nation, openly ridiculed in racist terms, with troops deriding
"haji food," "haji music" and "haji homes." In
the Muslim world, the word "haji" denotes someone who has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is now used by American troops in the same way
"gook" was used in Vietnam or "raghead" in Afghanistan. "You can honestly see
how the Iraqis in general or even Arabs in general are being, you know, kind
of like dehumanized," said Specialist Englehart. "Like it was very
common for United States soldiers to call them derogatory terms, like camel
jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger." According to Sergeant
Millard and several others interviewed, "It becomes this racialized
hatred towards Iraqis." And this racist language, as Specialist Harmon
pointed out, likely played a role in the level of violence directed at Iraqi
civilians. "By calling them names," he said, "they're not
people anymore. They're just objects." Several interviewees
emphasized that the military did set up, for training purposes, mock Iraqi
villages peopled with actors who played the parts of civilians and
insurgents. But they said that the constant danger in Iraq, and the fear it
engendered, swiftly overtook such training. "They were the
law," Specialist Harmon said of the soldiers in his unit in
Al-Rashidiya, near Baghdad, which participated in raids and convoys.
"They were very mean, very mean-spirited to them. A lot of cursing at
them. And I'm like, Dude, these people don't understand what you're
saying.... They used to say a lot, 'Oh, they'll understand when the gun is in
their face.'" Those few veterans who said
they did try to reach out to Iraqis encountered fierce hostility from those
in their units. "I had the night shift
one night at the aid station," said Specialist Resta, recounting one
such incident. "We were told from the first second that we arrived
there, and this was in writing on the wall in our aid station, that we were
not to treat Iraqi civilians unless they were about to die.... So these guys
in the guard tower radio in, and they say they've got an Iraqi out there
that's asking for a doctor. "So it's really late at
night, and I walk out there to the gate and I don't even see the guy at
first, and they point out to him and he's standing there. Well, I mean he's
sitting, leaned up against this concrete barrier - like the median of the
highway - we had as you approached the gate. And he's sitting there leaned up
against it and, uh, he's out there, if you want to go and check on him, he's
out there. So I'm sitting there waiting for an interpreter, and the
interpreter comes and I just walk out there in the open. And this guy, he has
the shit kicked out of him. He was missing two teeth. He has a huge
laceration on his head, he looked like he had broken his eye orbit and had
some kind of injury to his knee." The Iraqi, Specialist Resta
said, pleaded with him in broken English for help. He told Specialist Resta
that there were men near the base who were waiting to kill him. "I open a bag and I'm
trying to get bandages out and the guys in the guard tower are yelling at me,
'Get that fucking haji out of here,'" Specialist Resta said. "And I
just look back at them and ignored them, and then they were saying, you know,
'He doesn't look like he's about to die to me,' 'Tell him to go cry back to
the fuckin' IP [Iraqi police],' and, you know, a whole bunch of stuff like
that. So, you know, I'm kind of ignoring them and trying to get the story from
this guy, and our doctor rolls up in an ambulance and from thirty to forty
meters away looks out and says, shakes his head and says, 'You know, he looks
fine, he's gonna be all right,' and walks back to the passenger side of the
ambulance, you know, kind of like, Get your ass over here and drive me back
up to the clinic. So I'm standing there, and the whole time both this doctor
and the guards are yelling at me, you know, to get rid of this guy, and at
one point they're yelling at me, when I'm saying, 'No, let's at least keep
this guy here overnight, until it's light out,' because they wanted me to
send him back out into the city, where he told me that people were waiting
for him to kill him. "When I asked if he'd
be allowed to stay there, at least until it was light out, the response was,
'Are you hearing this shit? I think Doc is part fucking haji,'"
Specialist Resta said. Specialist Resta gave in to
the pressure and denied the man aid. The interpreter, he recalled, was
furious, telling him that he had effectively condemned the man to death. "So I walk inside the
gate and the interpreter helps him up and the guy turns around to walk away
and the guys in the guard tower go, say, 'Tell him that if he comes back
tonight he's going to get fucking shot,'" Specialist Resta said.
"And the interpreter just stared at them and looked at me and then
looked back at them, and they nod their head, like, Yeah, we mean it. So he
yells it to the Iraqi and the guy just flinches and turns back over his
shoulder, and the interpreter says it again and he starts walking away again,
you know, crying like a little kid. And that was that." Convoys Two dozen soldiers
interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi civilians was
particularly evident in the operation of supply convoys - operations in which
they participated. These convoys are the arteries that sustain the
occupation, ferrying items such as water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage,
food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by
KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and other private contractors,
required daily protection by the US military. Typically, according to these
interviewees, supply convoys consisted of twenty to thirty trucks stretching
half a mile down the road, with a Humvee military escort in front and back
and at least one more in the center. Soldiers and marines also sometimes
accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers. These convoys, ubiquitous in
Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of wanton destruction. According to descriptions
culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys - guarding
such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk - when
these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually
roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated
areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that
stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in
traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto
sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles,
shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were
frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of
civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys
as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way. "A moving target is
harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28, a
National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad with the
172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March 2004. Flanders
ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad.
"So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation,
absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that could really determine
whether or not you were going to get injured or killed or if they just
completely missed, which happened." Following an explosion or
ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired
indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according
to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns
and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per
minute) left many civilians wounded or dead. "One example I can give
you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the
sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction,
Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry
Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've
got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there
could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous
occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb
goes off." Several veterans said that
IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their
greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible
for killing more US troops - 39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed - than
any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors
deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest
number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginning of the war. "The second you left
the gate of your base, you were always worried," said Sergeant Flatt.
"You were constantly watchful for IEDs. And you could never see them. I
mean, it's just by pure luck who's getting killed and who's not. If you've
been in firefights earlier that day or that week, you're even more stressed
and insecure to a point where you're almost trigger-happy." Sergeant Flatt was among
twenty-four veterans who said they had witnessed or heard stories from those
in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These
incidents, they said, were so numerous that many were never reported. Sergeant Flatt recalled an
incident in January 2005 when a convoy drove past him on one of the main
highways in Mosul. "A car following got too close to their convoy,"
he said. "Basically, they took shots at the car. Warning shots, I don't
know. But they shot the car. Well, one of the bullets happened to just pierce
the windshield and went straight into the face of this woman in the car. And
she was - well, as far as I know - instantly killed. I didn't pull her out of
the car or anything. Her son was driving the car, and she had her - she had
three little girls in the back seat. And they came up to us, because we were
actually sitting in a defensive position right next to the hospital, the main
hospital in Mosul, the civilian hospital. And they drove up and she was
obviously dead. And the girls were crying." On July 30, 2004, Sergeant
Flanders was riding in the tail vehicle of a convoy on a pitch-black night,
traveling from Camp Anaconda south to Taji, just north of Baghdad, when his
unit was attacked with small-arms fire and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades).
He was about to get on the radio to warn the vehicle in front of him about
the ambush when he saw his gunner unlock the turret and swivel it around in
the direction of the shooting. He fired his MK-19, a 40-millimeter automatic
grenade launcher capable of discharging up to 350 rounds per minute. "He's just holding the
trigger down and it wound up jamming, so he didn't get off as many shots
maybe as he wanted," Sergeant Flanders recalled. "But I said, 'How
many did you get off?' 'Cause I knew they would be asking that. He said,
'Twenty-three.' He launched twenty-three grenades.... "I remember looking out
the window and I saw a little hut, a little Iraqi house with a light on....
We were going so fast and obviously your adrenaline's - you're like tunnel
vision, so you can't really see what's going on, you know? And it's dark out
and all that stuff. I couldn't really see where the grenades were exploding,
but it had to be exploding around the house or maybe even hit the house. Who
knows? Who knows? And we were the last vehicle. We can't stop." Convoys did not slow down or
attempt to brake when civilians inadvertently got in front of their vehicles,
according to the veterans who described them. Sgt. Kelly Dougherty, 29, from
Cañon City, Colorado, was based at the Talil Air Base in Nasiriya with the
Colorado National Guard's 220th Military Police Company for a year beginning
in February 2003. She recounted one incident she investigated in January 2004
on a six-lane highway south of Nasiriya that resembled numerous incidents
described by other veterans. "It's like very barren
desert, so most of the people that live there, they're nomadic or they live
in just little villages and have, like, camels and goats and stuff," she
recalled. "There was then a little boy - I would say he was about 10
because we didn't see the accident; we responded to it with the investigative
team - a little Iraqi boy and he was crossing the highway with his, with
three donkeys. A military convoy, transportation convoy driving north, hit
him and the donkeys and killed all of them. When we got there, there were the
dead donkeys and there was a little boy on the side of the road. "We saw him there and,
you know, we were upset because the convoy didn't even stop," she said.
"They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down.
But, I mean, that's basically - basically, your order is that you never
stop." Among supply convoys, there
were enormous disparities based on the nationality of the drivers, according
to Sergeant Flanders, who estimated that he ran more than 100 convoys in
Balad, Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba. When drivers were not American, the
trucks were often old, slow and prone to breakdowns, he said. The convoys
operated by Nepalese, Egyptian or Pakistani drivers did not receive the same
level of security, although the danger was more severe because of the poor
quality of their vehicles. American drivers were usually placed in convoys
about half the length of those run by foreign nationals and were given
superior vehicles, body armor and better security. Sergeant Flanders said
troops disliked being assigned to convoys run by foreign nationals,
especially since, when the aging vehicles broke down, they had to remain and
protect them until they could be recovered. "It just seemed insane
to run civilians around the country," he added. "I mean, Iraq is
such a security concern and it's so dangerous and yet we have KBR just riding
around, unarmed.... Remember those terrible judgments that we made about what
Iraq would look like postconflict? I think this is another incarnation of
that misjudgment, which would be that, Oh, it'll be fine. We'll put a Humvee
in front, we'll put a Humvee in back, we'll put a Humvee in the middle, and
we'll just run with it. "It was just shocking
to me.... I was Army trained and I had a good gunner and I had radios and I
could call on the radios and I could get an airstrike if I wanted to. I could
get a Medevac.... And here these guys are just tooling around. And these guys
are, like, they're promised the world. They're promised $120,000, tax free,
and what kind of people take those jobs? Down-on-their-luck-type people, you
know? Grandmothers. There were grandmothers there. I escorted a grandmother
there and she did great. We went through an ambush and one of her guys got
shot, and she was cool, calm and collected. Wonderful, great, good for her.
What the hell is she doing there? "We're using these
vulnerable, vulnerable convoys, which probably piss off more Iraqis than it
actually helps in our relationship with them," Flanders said, "just
so that we can have comfort and air-conditioning and sodas - great - and
PlayStations and camping chairs and greeting cards and stupid T-shirts that
say, Who's Your Baghdaddy?" Patrols Soldiers and marines who
participated in neighborhood patrols said they often used the same tactics as
convoys - speed, aggressive firing - to reduce the risk of being ambushed or
falling victim to IEDs. Sgt. Patrick Campbell, 29, of Camarillo, California,
who frequently took part in patrols, said his unit fired often and without
much warning on Iraqi civilians in a desperate bid to ward off attacks. "Every time we got on
the highway," he said, "we were firing warning shots, causing
accidents all the time. Cars screeching to a stop, going into the other
intersection.... The problem is, if you slow down at an intersection more
than once, that's where the next bomb is going to be because you know they
watch. You know? And so if you slow down at the same choke point every time,
guaranteed there's going to be a bomb there next couple of days. So getting
onto a freeway or highway is a choke point 'cause you have to wait for
traffic to stop. So you want to go as fast as you can, and that involves
added risk to all the cars around you, all the civilian cars. "The first Iraqi I saw
killed was an Iraqi who got too close to our patrol," he said. "We
were coming up an on-ramp. And he was coming down the highway. And they fired
warning shots and he just didn't stop. He just merged right into the convoy
and they opened up on him." This took place sometime in
the spring of 2005 in Khadamiya, in the northwest corner of Baghdad, Sergeant
Campbell said. His unit fired into the man's car with a 240 Bravo, a heavy
machine gun. "I heard three gunshots," he said. "We get about
halfway down the road and...the guy in the car got out and he's covered in
blood. And this is where...the impulse is just to keep going. There's no way
that this guy knows who we are. We're just like every other patrol that goes
up and down this road. I looked at my lieutenant and it wasn't even a
discussion. We turned around and we went back. "So I'm treating the
guy. He has three gunshot wounds to the chest. Blood everywhere. And he keeps
going in and out of consciousness. And when he finally stops breathing, I
have to give him CPR. I take my right hand, I lift up his chin and I take my
left hand and grab the back of his head to position his head, and as I take
my left hand, my hand actually goes into his cranium. So I'm actually holding
this man's brain in my hand. And what I realized was I had made a mistake. I
had checked for exit wounds. But what I didn't know was the Humvee behind me,
after the car failed to stop after the first three rounds, had fired twenty, thirty
rounds into the car. I never heard it. "I heard three rounds,
I saw three holes, no exit wounds," he said. "I thought I knew what
the situation was. So I didn't even treat this guy's injury to the head.
Every medic I ever told is always like, Of course, I mean, the guy got shot
in the head. There's nothing you could have done. And I'm pretty sure - I
mean, you can't stop bleeding in the head like that. But this guy, I'm
watching this guy, who I know we shot because he got too close. His car was
clean. There was no - didn't hear it, didn't see us, whatever it was. Dies,
you know, dying in my arms." While many veterans said the
killing of civilians deeply disturbed them, they also said there was no other
way to safely operate a patrol. "You don't want to
shoot kids, I mean, no one does," said Sergeant Campbell, as he began to
describe an incident in the summer of 2005 recounted to him by several men in
his unit. "But you have this: I remember my unit was coming along this
elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an
AK-47 and just decides he's going to start shooting. And you gotta
understand...when you have spent nine months in a war zone, where no one - every
time you've been shot at, you've never seen the person shooting at you, and
you could never shoot back. Here's some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an
AK-47, decides he's going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most
obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this
kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds."
Sergeant Campbell was not present at the incident, which took place in
Khadamiya, but he saw photographs and heard descriptions from several
eyewitnesses in his unit. "Everyone was so happy,
like this release that they finally killed an insurgent," he said.
"Then when they got there, they realized it was just a little kid. And I
know that really fucked up a lot of people in the head.... They'd show all
the pictures and some people were really happy, like, Oh, look what we did.
And other people were like, I don't want to see that ever again." The killing of unarmed
Iraqis was so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of
the daily landscape. "The ground forces were put in that position,"
said First Lieut. Wade Zirkle of Shenandoah County, Virginia, who fought in
Nasiriya and Falluja with the Second Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion
from March to May 2003. "You got a guy trying to kill me but he's firing
from houses...with civilians around him, women and children. You know, what
do you do? You don't want to risk shooting at him and shooting children at
the same time. But at the same time, you don't want to die either." |