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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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April 22nd,
2009 - Serving Under the Army’s Most Ruthless Soldier |
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Serving Under
the Army’s Most Ruthless Soldier By Elspeth Reeve The Daily Beast April 22, 2009 When Scott Beauchamp first
described misconduct by American soldiers in Baghdad, the political right
accused him of lying. Last week, one of the soldiers who denounced him became
the highest-ranking service member to be found guilty of murder in the Iraq war.
Beauchamp’s wife, Elspeth Reeve, reports from his trial. In the spring of 2007, four
blindfolded and zip-cuffed men stood in a line along a shallow and dirty
canal in southwest Baghdad. Earlier that day, American soldiers had found
them inside a house alongside a cache of weapons. Standard operating
procedure required that the prisoners be taken to a detention facility, but
then-First Sergeant John E. Hatley, the top NCO of Alpha Company 1-18
Infantry Regiment, told the soldiers who captured the men that instead they
would “take care” of them. The prisoners were brought to the canal, shot in
the back of the head, and dumped into the water. Last week, Hatley was
convicted of premeditated murder, based solely on the testimony of his
soldiers, who wept at his conviction. He became the highest-ranking service
member to be found guilty of premeditated murder in the Iraq war - a fact
that earned his trial national attention. But the case was of particular
interest to me because my husband had served under him in Alpha 1-18 (which
has since been reflagged as part of the 172nd Infantry Brigade). My husband, Scott Beauchamp,
had also brought attention to the unit in the summer of 2007, when he wrote
an essay in The New Republic describing how the stress of the war zone led
soldiers to do things they wouldn't do in civilian life: running over dogs
with Bradleys, goofing around with a skull fragment they'd found near some
buildings, and making fun of a disfigured lady in a mess hall. Compared to
the crime Hatley and two others are now known to have committed only a few
months earlier, Scott’s essay seems almost quaint, but at the time of its
publication, it provoked enormous controversy. Horror and fury came from all
over the right wing, which accused Scott of lying. (Only one fact in Scott’s
piece - the location of one of the incidents he described - was ever proven
incorrect and it was discovered because Scott himself admitted to
misremembering it. Nevertheless, the editors at The New Republic retracted
when they became frustrated in trying to contact Scott, which was difficult
in light of the fact that his superiors in Iraq had punished him with 20-hour
work shifts.) Hatley was, to say the
least, an imposing figure who had no tolerance for soldiers embarrassing the unit.
When the controversy over Scott’s piece erupted, Hatley personally weighed
in, emailing a blogger to say “My soldiers conduct [sic] is consistently
honorable. This soldier has other underlining [sic] issues which I'm sure
will come out in the course of the investigation.” So when I heard rumors in
early 2008 that the same first sergeant, who had insisted when denouncing my
husband that his soldiers’ conduct was “consistently honorable,” was being
investigated for murder, I was naturally intrigued. When charges were pressed
and a trial date was set for this month, I booked a ticket for Vilseck,
Germany, where he would be tried. The soldiers were
uncomfortable with having events that happened “down range” (slang for “in
Iraq”) being dredged up and examined in civilian life. At the time of the
murders, they had served in Baghdad’s West Rashid district, a particularly
violent area where Sunni and Shia were battling for control over mixed
neighborhoods. They passed over grisly details as if they were no big deal.
Leahy testified that he transported a dead detainee to an Iraqi police
station and just put him on “the pile of dead bodies.” When I asked a
sergeant about the bodies, he dismissed them. “The term 'pile of dead bodies'
brings to mind Dachau or something. … I mean, it's not like bodies were
littering the streets or anything, but we'd pick up a lot of them and took
them to the IP station, before they decided to start killing us more, instead
of each other.” When I asked if the police station smelled, he laughed, “It
smelled like all of Iraq smelled.” “Civilians are such a pain.
They don't get anything …” the junior NCO complained. “It's like, nobody
wanted to cause the horrible situation that we're all talking about, but it
was there and it was a reality and we had to find a way to deal with it ...
And then [civilians] start in on the situation itself and how the situation
shouldn't be allowed to exist and how we should have been doing something to
change the situation. It's so easy to say when you're behind a desk typing
away on a keyboard - go out there and try to change the world and you'll
probably end up bitter and suicidal.” The defense had two
arguments: that Hatley was a good soldier and that the government never found
any bodies, bullet casings, or families missing the victims. The defense
asked prosecution witnesses if they actually checked the bodies to see if
they were dead, and how they could possibly be sure they were dead and not
unconscious, and had they heard that you can survive a bullet wound to the
head? At one point he got carried away with himself, and asked a witness if
he had actually seen a bullet go into a detainee. The soldier responded, “I
don't think anyone can see a bullet, sir.” All the witnesses were
allowed to watch the closing arguments, and it was standing room only in the
courthouse. The defense reiterated its main points: The bodies were never
found in the canal and that there was conflicting testimony over details like
times and dates. The prosecution pointed out that the detainees were not
walking around Iraq with holes in their heads, and, as first sergeant, Hatley
had been responsible for the soldiers who'd already been convicted. After the
trial, the section sergeant wrote to me that during closing arguments, “I could
also feel my face flushing, and I looked around the room and saw that I
wasn't the only one. I remembered meeting then-1SG Hatley … he was a stickler
about meeting every new soldier in the company … [I] thought about how when I
first met him I never thought I'd be standing where I was on 15 April '09. ” The verdict was read without
drama, Hatley remained calm, and we filed out of the courtroom silently. I
leaned against the courthouse and watched the 30 or so soldiers light up
their cigarettes in the dark and cluster together without talking. We stood
around for an hour or so, and at some point Hatley came out and greeted each
of his supporters. His wife's shoes were obviously killing her, as she stood
alone shifting her weight from one leg to another, occasionally illuminated
by headlights. Hatley read an unsworn
statement to the jury at his sentencing hearing. Hatley expressed little
guilt or remorse about what happened, but that he had “loved and defended soldiers
for half my life,” that his soldiers were like his sons, and that there was
nothing he wouldn't do to protect them, and that he'd had his “honor and
courage questioned by so many who'd never had theirs tested.” He ended his
statement by yelling the units' names. ”Vanguards! Wolfpack!” And the galley
responded, “Hooah!” He got life with the possibility of parole. After the trial, the junior
NCO warned me, “When you try to explain a war to a bunch of people who have
never seen anything close to a war, first you're going to horrify a bunch of
people who haven't seen a war because war is horrifying, and second you're
going to piss off a whole bunch of people who have been to war, because you
haven't and you're going to get it wrong. Basically what I'm saying is you're
completely screwed.” Elspeth Reeve is a writer
living in New York. She has written for Time, New York, and The New Republic. External link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-22/serving-under-the-armys-most-ruthless-soldier/ |