The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness
Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian
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 Mej燰's unit was pressed by a furious
crowd in Ramadi. Sergeant Mej燰, 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
Mej燰 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 Mej燰
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 Mej燰's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse.
Sergeant Mej燰 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 Mej燰 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 Mej燰, 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 Ca隳n 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."
Sergeant Dougherty recounted an incident north of Nasiriya in December
2003, when her squad leader shot an Iraqi civilian in the back. The
shooting was described to her by a woman in her unit who treated the
injury. "It was just, like, the mentality of my squad leader was like,
Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in
Colorado," she said. "He just, like, seemed to view every Iraqi as like
a potential terrorist."
Several interviewees said that, on occasion, these killings were
justified by framing innocents as terrorists, typically following
incidents when American troops fired on crowds of unarmed Iraqis. The
troops would detain those who survived, accusing them of being
insurgents, and plant AK-47s next to the bodies of those they had
killed to make it seem as if the civilian dead were combatants. "It
would always be an AK because they have so many of these weapons lying
around," said Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout Joe Hatcher, 26, of San
Diego, said 9-millimeter handguns and even shovels--to make it look
like the noncombatant was digging a hole to plant an IED--were used as
well.
"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Hatcher, who served with
the Fourth Cavalry Regiment, First Squadron, in Ad Dawar, halfway
between Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005. "If you
kill someone and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em." Those who
survived such shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused
insurgents.
In the winter of 2004, Sergeant Campbell was driving near a
particularly dangerous road in Abu Gharth, a town west of Baghdad, when
he heard gunshots. Sergeant Campbell, who served as a medic in Abu
Gharth with the 256th Infantry Brigade from November 2004 to October
2005, was told that Army snipers had fired fifty to sixty rounds at two
insurgents who'd gotten out of their car to plant IEDs. One alleged
insurgent was shot in the knees three or four times, treated and
evacuated on a military helicopter, while the other man, who was
treated for glass shards, was arrested and detained.
"I come to find out later that, while I was treating him, the snipers
had planted--after they had searched and found nothing--they had
planted bomb-making materials on the guy because they didn't want to be
investigated for the shoot," Sergeant Campbell said. (He showed The
Nation a photograph of one sniper with a radio in his pocket that he
later planted as evidence.) "And to this day, I mean, I remember taking
that guy to Abu Ghraib prison--the guy who didn't get shot--and just
saying 'I'm sorry' because there was not a damn thing I could do about
it.... I mean, I guess I have a moral obligation to say something, but
I would have been kicked out of the unit in a heartbeat. I would've
been a traitor."
Checkpoints
The US military checkpoints dotted across Iraq, according to twenty-
six soldiers and marines who were stationed at them or supplied them--
in locales as diverse as Tikrit, Baghdad, Karbala, Samarra, Mosul and
Kirkuk--were often deadly for civilians. Unarmed Iraqis were mistaken
for insurgents, and the rules of engagement were blurred. Troops,
fearing suicide bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, often fired on
civilian cars. Nine of those soldiers said they had seen civilians
being shot at checkpoints. These incidents were so common that the
military could not investigate each one, some veterans said.
"Most of the time, it's a family," said Sergeant Cannon, who served at
half a dozen checkpoints in Tikrit. "Every now and then, there is a
bomb, you know, that's the scary part."
There were some permanent checkpoints stationed across the country,
but for unsuspecting civilians, "flash checkpoints" were far more
dangerous, according to eight veterans who were involved in setting
them up. These impromptu security perimeters, thrown up at a moment's
notice and quickly dismantled, were generally designed to catch
insurgents in the act of trafficking weapons or explosives, people
violating military-imposed curfews or suspects in bombings or drive-by
shootings.
Iraqis had no way of knowing where these so-called "tactical control
points" would crop up, interviewees said, so many would turn a corner
at a high speed and became the unwitting targets of jumpy soldiers and
marines.
"For me, it was really random," said Lieutenant Van Engelen. "I just
picked a spot on a map that I thought was a high-volume area that might
catch some people. We just set something up for half an hour to an hour
and then we'd move on." There were no briefings before setting up
checkpoints, he said.
Temporary checkpoints were safer for troops, according to the
veterans, because they were less likely to serve as static targets for
insurgents. "You do it real quick because you don't always want to
announce your presence," said First Sgt. Perry Jefferies, 46, of Waco,
Texas, who served with the Fourth Infantry Division from April to
October 2003.
The temporary checkpoints themselves varied greatly. Lieutenant Van
Engelen set up checkpoints using orange cones and fifty yards of
concertina wire. He would assign a soldier to control the flow of
traffic and direct drivers through the wire, while others searched
vehicles, questioned drivers and asked for identification. He said
signs in English and Arabic warned Iraqis to stop; at night, troops
used lasers, glow sticks or tracer bullets to signal cars through. When
those weren't available, troops improvised by using flashlights sent
them by family and friends back home.
"Baghdad is not well lit," said Sergeant Flanders. "There's not street
lights everywhere. You can't really tell what's going on."
Other troops, however, said they constructed tactical control points
that were hardly visible to drivers. "We didn't have cones, we didn't
have nothing," recalled Sergeant Bocanegra, who said he served at more
than ten checkpoints in Tikrit. "You literally put rocks on the side of
the road and tell them to stop. And of course some cars are not going
to see the rocks. I wouldn't even see the rocks myself."
According to Sergeant Flanders, the primary concern when assembling
checkpoints was protecting the troops serving there. Humvees were
positioned so that they could quickly drive away if necessary, and the
heavy weapons mounted on them were placed "in the best possible
position" to fire on vehicles that attempted to pass through the
checkpoint without stopping. And the rules of engagement were often
improvised, soldiers said.
"We were given a long list of that kind of stuff and, to be honest, a
lot of the time we would look at it and throw it away," said Staff Sgt.
James Zuelow, 39, a National Guardsman from Juneau, Alaska, who served
in Baghdad in the Third Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment, for a year
beginning in January 2005. "A lot of it was written at such a high
level it didn't apply."
At checkpoints, troops had to make split-second decisions on when to
use lethal force, and veterans said fear often clouded their judgment.
Sgt. Matt Mardan, 31, of Minneapolis, served as a Marine scout sniper
outside Falluja in 2004 and 2005 with the Third Battalion, First
Marines. "People think that's dangerous, and it is," he said. "But I
would do that any day of the week rather than be a marine sitting on a
fucking checkpoint looking at cars."
No car that passes through a checkpoint is beyond suspicion, said
Sergeant Dougherty. "You start looking at everyone as a criminal.... Is
this the car that's going to try to run into me? Is this the car that
has explosives in it? Or is this just someone who's confused?" The
perpetual uncertainty, she said, is mentally exhausting and physically
debilitating.
"In the moment, what's passing through your head is, Is this person a
threat? Do I shoot to stop or do I shoot to kill?" said Lieutenant
Morgenstein, who served in Al Anbar.
Sergeant Mej燰 recounted an incident in Ramadi in July 2003 when an
unarmed man drove with his young son too close to a checkpoint. The
father was decapitated in front of the small, terrified boy by a member
of Sergeant Mej燰's unit firing a heavy .50-caliber machine gun. By
then, said Sergeant Mej燰, who responded to the scene after the fact,
"this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much
interest or even comment." The next month, Sergeant Mej燰 returned
stateside for a two-week rest and refused to go back, launching a
public protest over the treatment of Iraqis. (He was charged with
desertion, sentenced to one year in prison and given a bad-conduct
discharge.)
During the summer of 2005, Sergeant Millard, who served as an
assistant to a general in Tikrit, attended a briefing on a checkpoint
shooting, at which his role was to flip PowerPoint slides.
"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old
kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he
said. "This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second
decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly
trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It
killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the
daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they
briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him.
And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If
these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Whether or not commanding officers shared this attitude, interviewees
said, troops were rarely held accountable for shooting civilians at
checkpoints. Eight veterans described the prevailing attitude among
them as "Better to be tried by twelve men than carried by six." Since
the number of troops tried for killing civilians is so scant,
interviewees said, they would risk court-martial over the possibility
of injury or death.
Rules of Engagement
Indeed, several troops said the rules of engagement were fluid and
designed to insure their safety above all else. Some said they were
simply told they were authorized to shoot if they felt threatened, and
what constituted a risk to their safety was open to wide
interpretation. "Basically it always came down to self-defense and
better them than you," said Sgt. Bobby Yen, 28, of Atherton,
California, who covered a variety of Army activities in Baghdad and
Mosul as part of the 222nd Broadcast Operations Detachment for one year
beginning in November 2003.
"Cover your own butt was the first rule of engagement," Lieutenant Van
Engelen confirmed. "Someone could look at me the wrong way and I could
claim my safety was in threat."
Lack of a uniform policy from service to service, base to base and
year to year forced troops to rely on their own judgment, Sergeant
Jefferies explained. "We didn't get straight-up rules," he said. "You
got things like, 'Don't be aggressive' or 'Try not to shoot if you
don't have to.' Well, what does that mean?"
Prior to deployment, Sergeant Flanders said, troops were trained on
the five S's of escalation of force: Shout a warning, Shove (physically
restrain), Show a weapon, Shoot non-lethal ammunition in a vehicle's
engine block or tires, and Shoot to kill. Some troops said they carried
the rules in their pockets or helmets on a small laminated card. "The
escalation-of-force methodology was meant to be a guide to determine
course of actions you should attempt before you shoot," he said.
"'Shove' might be a step that gets skipped in a given situation. In
vehicles, at night, how does 'Shout' work? Each soldier is not only
drilled on the five S's but their inherent right for self-defense."
Some interviewees said their commanders discouraged this system of
escalation. "There's no such thing as warning shots," Specialist Resta
said he was told during his predeployment training at Fort Bragg. "I
even specifically remember being told that it was better to kill them
than to have somebody wounded and still alive."
Lieutenant Morgenstein said that when he arrived in Iraq in August
2004, the rules of engagement barred the use of warning shots. "We were
trained that if someone is not armed, and they are not a threat, you
never fire a warning shot because there is no need to shoot at all," he
said. "You signal to them with some other means than bullets. If they
are armed and they are a threat, you never fire a warning shot
because...that just gives them a chance to kill you. I don't recall at
this point if this was an ROE [rule of engagement] explicitly or simply
part of our consistent training." But later on, he said, "we were told
the ROE was changed" and that warning shots were now explicitly allowed
in certain circumstances.
Sergeant Westphal said that by the time he arrived in Iraq earlier in
2004, the rules of engagement for checkpoints were more refined--at
least where he served with the Army in Tikrit. "If they didn't stop,
you were to fire a warning shot," said Sergeant Westphal. "If they
still continued to come, you were instructed to escalate and point your
weapon at their car. And if they still didn't stop, then, if you felt
you were in danger and they were about to run your checkpoint or blow
you up, you could engage."
In his initial training, Lieutenant Morgenstein said, marines were
cautioned against the use of warning shots because "others around you
could be hurt by the stray bullet," and in fact such incidents were not
unusual. One evening in Baghdad, Sergeant Zuelow recalled, a van roared
up to a checkpoint where another platoon in his company was stationed
and a soldier fired a warning shot that bounced off the ground and
killed the van's passenger. "That was a big wake-up call," he said,
"and after that we discouraged warning shots of any kind."
Many checkpoint incidents went unreported, a number of veterans
indicated, and the civilians killed were not included in the overall
casualty count. Yet judging by the number of checkpoint shootings
described to The Nation by veterans we interviewed, such shootings
appear to be quite common.
Sergeant Flatt recounted one incident in Mosul in January 2005 when an
elderly couple zipped past a checkpoint. "The car was approaching what
was in my opinion a very poorly marked checkpoint, or not even a
checkpoint at all, and probably didn't even see the soldiers," he said.
"The guys got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they
shot up the car. And they literally sat in the car for the next three
days while we drove by them day after day."
In another incident, a man was driving his wife and three children in
a pickup truck on a major highway north of the Euphrates, near Ramadi,
on a rainy day in February or March 2005. When the man failed to stop
at a checkpoint, a marine in a light-armored vehicle fired on the car,
killing the wife and critically wounding the son. According to
Lieutenant Morgenstein, a civil affairs officer, a JAG official gave
the family condolences and about $3,000 in compensation. "I mean, it's
a terrible thing because there's no way to pay money to replace a
family member," said Lieutenant Morgenstein, who was sometimes charged
with apologizing to families for accidental deaths and offering them
such compensation, called "condolence payments" or "solatia." "But it's
an attempt to compensate for some of the costs of the funeral and all
the expenses. It's an attempt to make a good-faith offering in a sign
of regret and to say, you know, We didn't want this to happen. This is
by accident." According to a May report from the Government
Accountability Office, the Defense Department issued nearly $31 million
in solatia and condolence payments between 2003 and 2006 to civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan who were "killed, injured or incur[red]
property damage as a result of U.S. or coalition forces' actions during
combat." The study characterizes the payments as "expressions of
sympathy or remorse...but not an admission of legal liability or
fault." In Iraq, according to the report, civilians are paid up to
$2,500 for death, as much as $1,500 for serious injuries and $200 or
more for minor injuries.
On one occasion, in Ramadi in late 2004, a man happened to drive down
a road with his family minutes after a suicide bomber had hit a barrier
during a cordon-and-search operation, Lieutenant Morgenstein said. The
car's brakes failed and marines fired. The wife and her two children
managed to escape from the car, but the man was fatally hit. The family
was mistakenly told that he had survived, so Lieutenant Morgenstein had
to set the record straight. "I've never done this before," he said. "I
had to go tell this woman that her husband was actually dead. We gave
her money, we gave her, like, ten crates of water, we gave the kids, I
remember, maybe it was soccer balls and toys. We just didn't really
know what else to do."
One such incident, which took place in Falluja in March 2003 and was
reported on at the time by the BBC, even involved a group of
plainclothes Iraqi policemen. Sergeant Mej燰 was told about the event
by several soldiers who witnessed it.
The police officers were riding in a white pickup truck, chasing a BMW
that had raced through a checkpoint. "The guy that the cops were
chasing got through and I guess the soldiers got scared or nervous, so
when the pickup truck came they opened fire on it," Sergeant Mej燰
said. "The Iraqi police tried to cease fire, but when the soldiers
would not stop they defended themselves and there was a firefight
between the soldiers and the cops. Not a single soldier was killed, but
eight cops were."
Accountability
A few veterans said checkpoint shootings resulted from basic
miscommunication, incorrectly interpreted signals or cultural
ignorance.
"As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards
somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky," said Sergeant
Jefferies, who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in
Diyala twice a day. "That means stop to most Americans, and that's a
military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed
fist, please freeze, but an open hand means stop. That's a sign you
make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here.
So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a
checkpoint, and the soldiers think they're saying stop, stop, and the
Iraqis think they're saying come here, come here. And the soldiers
start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler
more, and pretty soon you're shooting pregnant women."
"You can't tell the difference between these people at all," said
Sergeant Mardan. "They all look Arab. They all have beards, facial
hair. Honestly, it'll be like walking into China and trying to tell
who's in the Communist Party and who's not. It's impossible."
But other veterans said that the frequent checkpoint shootings
resulted from a lack of accountability. Critical decisions, they said,
were often left to the individual soldier's or marine's discretion, and
the military regularly endorsed these decisions without inquiry.
"Some units were so tight on their command and control that every time
they fired one bullet, they had to write an investigative report," said
Sergeant Campbell. But "we fired thousands of rounds without ever
filing reports," he said. "And so it has to do with how much
interaction and, you know, the relationship of the commanders to their
units."
Cpt. Megan O'Connor said that in her unit every shooting incident was
reported. O'Connor, 30, of Venice, California, served in Tikrit with
the Fiftieth Main Support Battalion in the National Guard for a year
beginning in December 2004, after which she joined the 2-28 Brigade
Combat Team in Ramadi. But Captain O'Connor said that after viewing the
reports and consulting with JAG officers, the colonel in her command
would usually absolve the soldiers. "The bottom line is he always said,
you know, We weren't there," she said. "We'll give them the benefit of
the doubt, but make sure that they know that this is not OK and we're
watching them."
Probes into roadblock killings were mere formalities, a few veterans
said. "Even after a thorough investigation, there's not much that could
be done," said Specialist Reppenhagen. "It's just the nature of the
situation you're in. That's what's wrong. It's not individual atrocity.
It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."
The March 2005 shooting death of Italian secret service agent Nicola
Calipari at a checkpoint in Baghdad, however, caused the military to
finally crack down on such accidents, said Sergeant Campbell, who
served there. Yet this did not necessarily lead to greater
accountability. "Needless to say, our unit was under a lot of scrutiny
not to shoot any more people than we already had to because we were
kind of a run-and-gun place," said Sergeant Campbell. "One of the
things they did was they started saying, Every time you shoot someone
or shoot a car, you have to fill out a 15-[6] or whatever the
investigation is. Well, that investigation is really onerous for the
soldiers. It's like a 'You're guilty' investigation almost--it feels as
though. So commanders just stopped reporting shootings. There was no
incentive for them to say, Yeah, we shot so-and-so's car."
(Sergeant Campbell said he believes the number of checkpoint shootings
did decrease after the high-profile incident, but that was mostly
because soldiers were now required to use pinpoint lasers at night. "I
think they reduced, from when we started to when we left, the number of
Iraqi civilians dying at checkpoints from one a day to one a week," he
said. "Inherent in that number, like all statistics, is those are
reported shootings.")
Fearing a backlash against these shootings of civilians, Lieutenant
Morgenstein gave a class in late 2004 at his battalion headquarters in
Ramadi to all the battalion's officers and most of its senior
noncommissioned officers during which he asked them to put themselves
in the Iraqis' place.
"I told them the obvious, which is, everyone we wound or kill that
isn't an insurgent, hurts us," he said. "Because I guarantee you, down
the road, that means a wounded or killed marine or soldier.... One,
it's the right thing to do to not wound or shoot someone who isn't an
insurgent. But two, out of self-preservation and self-interest, we
don't want that to happen because they're going to come back with a
vengeance."
Responses
The Nation contacted the Pentagon with a detailed list of questions
and a request for comment on descriptions of specific patterns of
abuse. These questions included requests to explain the rules of
engagement, the operation of convoys, patrols and checkpoints, the
investigation of civilian shootings, the detention of innocent Iraqis
based on false intelligence and the alleged practice of "throwaway
guns." The Pentagon referred us to the Multi-National Force Iraq
Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, where a spokesperson sent
us a response by e-mail.
"As a matter of operational security, we don't discuss specific
tactics, techniques, or procedures (TTPs) used to identify and engage
hostile forces," the spokesperson wrote, in part. "Our service members
are trained to protect themselves at all times. We are facing a
thinking enemy who learns and adjusts to our operations. Consequently,
we adapt our TTPs to ensure maximum combat effectiveness and safety of
our troops. Hostile forces hide among the civilian populace and attack
civilians and coalition forces. Coalition forces take great care to
protect and minimize risks to civilians in this complex combat
environment, and we investigate cases where our actions may have
resulted in the injury of innocents.... We hold our Soldiers and
Marines to a high standard and we investigate reported improper use of
force in Iraq."
This response is consistent with the military's refusal to comment on
rules of engagement, arguing that revealing these rules threatens
operations and puts troops at risk. But on February 9, Maj. Gen.
William Caldwell, then coalition spokesman, writing on the coalition
force website, insisted that the rules of engagement for troops in Iraq
were clear. "The law of armed conflict requires that, to use force,
'combatants' must distinguish individuals presenting a threat from
innocent civilians," he wrote. "This basic principle is accepted by all
disciplined militaries. In the counterinsurgency we are now fighting,
disciplined application of force is even more critical because our
enemies camouflage themselves in the civilian population. Our success
in Iraq depends on our ability to treat the civilian population with
humanity and dignity, even as we remain ready to immediately defend
ourselves or Iraqi civilians when a threat is detected."
When asked about veterans' testimony that civilian deaths at the hands
of coalition forces often went unreported and typically went
unpunished, the Press Information Center spokesperson replied only,
"Any allegations of misconduct are treated seriously.... Soldiers have
an obligation to immediately report any misconduct to their chain of
command immediately."
Last September, Senator Patrick Leahy, then ranking member of the
Judiciary Committee, called a Pentagon report on its procedures for
recording civilian casualties in Iraq "an embarrassment." "It totals
just two pages," Leahy said, "and it makes clear that the Pentagon does
very little to determine the cause of civilian casualties or to keep a
record of civilian victims."
In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties
have already taken a heavy toll--both on the Iraqi people and on the US
servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi
physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's
Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study late last year in
the British medical journal The Lancet that estimated that 601,000
civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion as the result of
violence. The researchers found that coalition forces were responsible
for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be
"conservative," since "deaths were not classified as being due to
coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the
responsible party."
"Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I
saw," Specialist Englehart said. "I just--I started thinking, like,
Why? What was this for?"
"It just gets frustrating," Specialist Reppenhagen said. "Instead of
blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you
start blaming the Iraqi people.... So it's a constant psychological
battle to try to, you know, keep--to stay humane."
"I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for
people," said Sergeant Flanders. "The only thing that wound up
mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be
damned."
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