Winter Soldier (16 page)

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s been deployed since September 11 that the word “haji” is used to dehumanize people, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but anyone. We bought haji DVDs at haji shops, from the hajis that worked there. The Pakistani KBR employees who did our laundry became hajis. The KBR employees who worked inside our chow halls became hajis. Everyone not in the U.S. forces became a haji: not a person, not a name, a haji.

I used to have conversations with members of my unit, and I would ask them why they used that term, especially members of my unit who are people of color. It used to shock me that they would. Their answers were very similar, almost always. “They’re just hajis, who cares?” That came from ranks as low as mine, sergeant, all the way up to a lieutenant colonel in my unit.

The highest-ranking officer that I ever heard use this word was the commanding officer during my deployment to Iraq: General George W. Casey, Jr. At a briefing that my unit, the 42nd Infantry Division Rear Operations Center at FOB Speicher, gave to General Casey, I heard him refer to the Iraqi people as hajis. I’ve heard several generals, including the 42nd Infantry Division commander, Major General Joseph J. Taluto, and Brigadier General Thomas Sullivan, use these terms in reference to the Iraqi people. These things start at the top, not at the bottom.

I have one story that I want to share with you. One of the most horrifying experiences of my tour, something that still stays with me, was during a briefing I gave.

In the early summer 2005, in the 42nd Infantry Division’s area of operations, there was a traffic control point shooting. Traffic control point shootings are rather common in Iraq. They happen on a near-daily basis.

A vehicle was driving quickly toward a traffic control point. A young machine gunner made a split-second decision that the vehicle was a threat and put two hundred .50-caliber machine gun rounds into the vehicle. He killed a mother, a father, and two children. The boy was age four and the girl was age three.

After the officer in charge briefed it to the general, Colonel William Rochelle of the 42nd Infantry Division turned in his chair to the entire division level staff, and said in a very calm manner, “If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.” I looked around the TOC at the other officers, at the other enlisted men. As a sergeant, I think I was the lowest-ranking person in that room. I didn’t see any dissenting body language or disagreeing head-nods. Everyone agreed, “If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.”

That stayed with me the rest of my tour. I looked around every time “haji” was used, and I thought about that soldier who will carry that with him for the rest of his life, and I thought about the four Iraqis whose bloodline was ended on that day.

Colonel Rochelle could not think of any of that, but only his own racism and dehumanization that has started at the commander in chief of this war and worked its way down the entire chain of command.

When I first joined the army, I was told that racism no longer existed in the military. A legacy of inequality and discrimination was suddenly washed away by something called the Equal Opportunity Program. We would sit through mandatory classes, and every unit had an EO representative to ensure that no elements of racism could resurface. The army seemed firmly dedicated to smashing any hint of racism.

Then September 11 happened, and I began to hear new words like “towel-head,” and “camel jockey,” and the most disturbing, “sand nigger.” These words did not initially come from my fellow lower-enlisted soldiers, but from my superiors; my platoon sergeant, my first sergeant, my battalion commander. All the way up the chain of command, these viciously racist terms were suddenly acceptable.

When I got to Iraq in 2003, I learned a new word, “haji.” Haji was the enemy. Haji was every Iraqi. He was not a person, a father, a teacher, or a worker. It’s important to understand where this word came from. To Muslims, the most important thing is to take a pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. Someone who has taken this pilgrimage is a haji. It’s something that, in traditional Islam, is the highest calling in the religion. We took the best thing from Islam and made it into the worst thing.

Since the creation of this country, racism has been used to justify expansion and oppression. Native Americans were called “savages,” the Africans were called all sorts of things to excuse slavery, and Vietnam veterans know the multitude of words used to justify that imperialist war.

So haji was the word we used. It was the word we used on this particular mission I’m going to talk about. We’ve heard a lot about raids and kicking down the doors of people’s houses and ransacking their houses, but this was a different kind of raid.

We never got any explanation for our orders. We were only told that a group of five or six houses was now property of the U.S. military, and we had to go in and make those families leave their houses.

We went to these houses and informed the families that their homes were no longer theirs. We provided them no alternative, nowhere to go, no compensation. They were very confused and very scared. They did not know what to do and would not leave, so we had to remove them.

One family in particular, a woman with two small girls, a very elderly man, and two middle-aged men; we dragged them from their house and threw them onto the street. We arrested the men because they refused to leave, and we sent them off to prison.

A few months later I found out, as we were short interrogators and I was given that assignment. I oversaw and participated in hundreds of interrogations. I remember one in particular that I’m going to share with you. It was the moment that really showed me the nature of this occupation.

This particular detainee was already stripped down to his underwear, hands behind his back and a sandbag on his head. I never saw this man’s face. My job was to take a metal folding chair and smash it against the wall next to his head—he was faced against the wall with his nose touching it—while a fellow soldier screamed the same question over and over again. No matter what his answer, my job was to slam the chair against the wall. We did this until we got tired.

I was told to make sure he kept standing up, but something was wrong with his leg. He was injured, and he kept falling to the ground. The sergeant in charge would come and tell me to get him up on his feet, so I’d have to pick him up and put him against the wall. He kept going down. I kept pulling him up and putting him against the wall. My sergeant was upset with me for not making him continue to stand. He picked him up and slammed him against the wall several times. Then he left. When the man went down on the ground again, I noticed blood pouring down from under the sandbag. I let him sit, and when I noticed my sergeant coming again, I would tell him quickly to stand up.

Instead of guarding my unit from this detainee, I realized I was guarding the detainee from my unit.

I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These are human beings. I’ve since been plagued by guilt. I feel guilt anytime I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk who we rolled onto a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.

We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.

I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home, and if we organize and fight, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.

Over the past five years, U.S. military raids, patrols, and bombings have taken a terrible toll on the Iraqi people. Already straining before the war under dual weights of international sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship, Iraqi society now finds itself in nearly complete collapse.

The cycle of violence that began with the U.S. invasion now permeates every aspect of society. “The humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world,” the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in March 2008. “Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. … Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.”1 More than five million Iraqis—20 percent of the country’s entire population—have fled their homes since the U.S. invasion in 2003. One and a half million Iraqis now live in Syria, while over a million refugees have gone to Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Gulf States.2

The daily reality of living in U.S.-occupied Iraq is so grim it’s beyond the comprehension of most Americans. Imagine for a moment that you are the parent of an Iraqi child. Imagine every day when you send your daughter off to school you worry that she could be killed by a car bomb, kidnapped for ransom by a criminal gang, accidentally shot by U.S. troops or neighborhood militias, or simply run over by an American convoy that had been ordered not to stop for “bumps in the road.”

Now imagine further that when your daughter gets to school, the school is only half full. Some of your daughter’s classmates have been killed and the parents of some of her other classmates pulled them out of school to make sure they don’t meet the same fate. In addition, many of the teachers have abandoned their jobs, fleeing the city for the perceived safety of their ancestral farm or the security of a neighboring country. You think every day about following suit—about ditching everything you have and leaving the country—but after five years of war, Syria and Jordan have closed their borders to all but the wealthiest Iraqis. So you continue the only way you know how, dropping your daughter off at school, hoping she’ll come home safe, and praying to God that the situation changes.