Winter Soldier (13 page)

They were out there one night and a farmer was on his property. It was 3 a.m., but because electricity is intermittent, there was work that he couldn’t do during the day. He was out there trying to work on a pump. They told him to stop. He panicked and ran. They opened fire and killed this individual. The next day, civil affairs came and spoke with our company and said, “We are not going to pay any benefit to this family.” They also informed us that his brother was our close ally. Until this time he had been working with us and was a respected leader of the local community. They also said the individual we killed had fourteen children. The civil affairs officer suggested that we take up a collection and donate a dollar or two apiece to the family and that he thought that that would go a long way in helping to ease the family’s suffering. There’s roughly 125 members of a rifle company, so you’re talking about anywhere between $125 and $150. I don’t think anyone donated any money.

Oftentimes we would be called out as a quick-reaction force to respond to incidents in the town of Balad. On these patrols through the town, my squad leader would entertain himself by shooting the local animals, including dogs that were tied up in people’s front yards. There was one occasion where he started shooting dogs. The lieutenant came over the radio, said, “What’s going on? Why are you firing? What’s happening?” My squad leader indicated that he was just shooting dogs and my lieutenant replied back, “Well, that’s okay but from now on let me know that you’re gonna do that before you do it.”

Finally—this is probably the hardest incident for me to talk about: One morning, a few months prior to me leaving, I was on the last security post behind the front gate. I was manning a machine gun that was there to ensure that if anyone managed to get past the front gate that they wouldn’t actually get inside the post. It was very early in the morning and I was haggard and not in a very good mood. I saw a Humvee come through the gate towing a blue mini pickup truck. Those were very common in Iraq. From a distance I couldn’t really tell what was going on. As they approached, it appeared that the pickup truck was riddled with bullets and shrapnel; I think one of the tires was flat.

Apparently there had been an attack on a convoy earlier that morning using this pickup truck. As the Humvee pulled past, I realized that the pickup truck was full of dead people killed in this attack. They had obviously been engaged with large-caliber weapons, probably Mark 19s, .50 caliber. There were several decapitated corpses with large holes through their bodies.

I’ll never forget this. There was a very young PFC, I believe, standing in the back of the pickup truck. As they rolled by, he lifted one of the decapitated heads up in front of me and he said, in much rougher language, “We really screwed these guys up, didn’t we?” There was another enlisted member in the back of the truck with him, and they were celebrating on top of these bodies piled up in the back. These “insurgents” didn’t appear to me to look like the hardened terrorists that everyone says they are. These were mostly teenage boys and young men who looked like they were from the local community.

I want to take this time to apologize to the Iraqi people for the things that I helped to do and the actions that people in my unit and myself did while I was there.

I want to talk about some of the smaller things that occurred very frequently throughout my three combat tours. These are things that I left out of the letters home and I rarely mention because they’re not things I’m proud of. Whether I participated or I witnessed it, I never stopped it.

When I first arrived at the fleet after completing infantry training, I checked into my unit, and we had our first company formation. I didn’t think about it until I had made friends with a few people, but our first platoon was a segregated platoon. Nearly 90 percent of all minorities in the company had been moved to 1st Platoon, where white leaders were put in charge as squad leaders and platoon sergeant. After I had been in the Marine Corps a couple years, it became apparent that minorities in our unit were not being promoted at the same rate as whites. The ones that did get promoted were exceptional. They would have been promoted no matter where they were because they went through meritorious boards. They were some of the brightest and best marines I’ve ever worked with.

Some common things you’ll face in your daily non-combat environment. If you’re in an office and it’s the morning, and you’re walking by one of your staff sergeants and you say, “Good morning, staff sergeant.” I guess the common response in the civilian world would be, “Good morning to you, too.” But in the Marine Corps, you get, “Er, kill babies.” That’s motivating. That’s not meant to be funny. That’s meant to motivate you and start off your day with, “Er, kill babies.” And this isn’t something that just happens once. The Marine Corps is filled with one-upmanship to say the most dehumanizing, racist, most offensive thing, and to enjoy it while you’re doing it.

I was deployed to Kuwait in support of the invasion of Iraq. Once the invasion kicked off, we crossed the border into Iraq. We had a mostly positive reception by the Iraqi people. But on these convoys, I saw marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road. When we stopped, marines would take out their MRE bag, remove the moisture-activated chemical heater that we use to heat MREs. They would remove the chemical heater from the package that said, “Do not eat,” with a symbol of a person and an X sign through them, and they would give that to Iraqi children to see the response on their faces.

We didn’t have a clearly defined mission except to keep pushing forward. When you don’t have a clearly defined mission, the mission becomes to come home alive, to survive. Marines love nothing more than to one-up each other by using their training, and when you become stagnant and the mission becomes survival, marines use their training on marines around them or on the civilian population. I saw our training for protesters or violent situations used on unsuspecting civilians countless times, because there were no rules. This was perpetrated by squad leaders and platoon sergeants. It happened all the time.

My second combat deployment was to guard the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we were told we were going to become leaders, that we were going to step up and start taking leadership positions. The point of the matter is that we would be unsupervised, because we were the leadership. Well, this was more viewed as a time to have some fun with our un-supervision and do what boys do.

One of the first things we did as leaders was to drive to a range in white vans. Some people who didn’t even have licenses back in the States or know how to drive stick were now driving these vans through the crowded downtown streets of Kabul, Afghanistan at extremely high speeds, as fast as the vehicles would go. Driving into oncoming traffic, driving between the two lanes, pushing vehicles out of the way. On one occasion, a man was killed coming through an intersection at speeding vehicles. He was hit by the vehicle; he was not shot. Our vehicle hit this man and we kept driving. I do not know if his family received reparations or any repayment from the U.S. government.

Another time one of the drivers without a license hit a man and his donkey on a cart. That was an entire family’s livelihood, and that family could have been ruined by this one small incident.

I returned to Iraq for my third deployment in 2005. We were stationed in downtown Fallujah, at the mayor’s compound. We had a couple marines that were being punished and one of their punishments was to remove all the paperwork from the top floor of the mayor’s compound and bring it down to our dumpsters while in full gear. This took hours, and I think it might have spanned across days. Well, after all the paperwork was gone, I finally had a chance to sit down with my interpreter and ask, “What was all that paperwork?” Well, we destroyed all the birth certificates for the city of Fallujah.

I’d also like to talk about an important story a lot of my fellow IVAW members shared: the moment you realized you were only affected by American casualties and not Iraqi casualties. One of the roles I filled was on an ambulance that rushed to pick up wounded in the city. We were told there were Iraqi wounded and they were the police or the Iraqi military in training. I was excited. Talk to anyone that works in an ambulance or as an EMT, your adrenaline gets going. We rushed out there, our vehicle slowed down, we pulled up. There was a mass of people around a bloodied area and a blown-up vehicle. As we slowly pulled forward, I saw some desert boots and then some digital desert camouflage. I’m like, “I didn’t know that the Iraqi military had this.” Then we pulled farther forward and I realized that it was just another marine that had been wounded. He wasn’t part of our unit. He was on a convoy going through the city, but this was the first time that I was affected in such a way. I was excited about what we were doing, and then a second later I was terrified, and it was only because an American was wounded and not an Iraqi.

I’d like to sum up what all my statements have to do with: When you have neither a clearly defined mission nor positive support, the only mission a marine infantryman knows by heart is the mission of a Marine Corps rifle squad: “Locate, close in, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver or to repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat.” That’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to use your training and you’re going to use that one mission that you know verbatim, by heart, with your eyes closed, while you’re asleep. You dream about it and you train every day, through three months of boot camp and three months of infantry training and you train between deployments and during deployments to carry out that mission.

When your mission’s not defined, all you have is hammers and everything you find is nails and you’re going to crush it. You’re going to crush every nail you find. We’re crushing the Iraqi people with the training we’re given and the unsupportive nature around us in the military.

I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without ever having really made many decisions.

I was seventeen years old when I joined the Army National Guard in Michigan. I was living with friends. I decided to join the military November 20, 2001, because I had no other options. My family was poor, I was poor, and I wanted to go to school. I was promised a significant amount of money for this purpose, which I have yet to receive.

I was in the field artillery, Charlie 1st of the 119th Field Artillery, where I served, quite happily, for…no. That’s a lie. I was miserable; I hated it, but I served nonetheless.

We got orders in October 2003 that we would be deploying to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Artillerymen would be deploying to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to be prison guards.

During our one-month mobilization process, we were taught how to put shackles on other people. It feels ridiculous when you are practicing how to put shackles on another human being. You realize how absurd it is. You’re putting them on somebody’s hands and it’s awkward. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable, and it feels dehumanizing. This is just practice. This is just to warm up for the big game.

We left for Guantánamo Bay early in January 2004. It was hot. It was uncomfortable. We slept in awful little houses, but at least we had houses.

I served on the blocks for two months as a prison guard. My duties were to feed detainees and dispense toilet paper. I occupied myself in some way, shape, or form to drive the boredom out. The primary difficulty in keeping my humanity intact was the boredom.