Winter Soldier (33 page)

You have heard our three points of unity: immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces, full benefits to all military personnel, and reparations to the people of Iraq so they can rebuild their country on their own terms. We at IVAW are not going to rest until we achieve these three goals.

I first became an activist, home on a two-week leave from Iraq, in October of 2003. At first I simply contradicted reporters when they claimed that morale was high among the troops. Then I started talking about how we were going out there on combat missions without basic equipment, such as bulletproof vests and radios. For lack of armored plates on our vehicles we had to line their walls with old flak vests, their floors with sandbags. I told reporters that in some cases we had to ask other platoons to give us some of their munitions before going out on patrols. And sometimes patrols would get cancelled because we didn’t have but two bottles of water per soldier at a time when the temperature was reaching 140 degrees.

My speaking out then became more radical after I decided I would not return to my unit in ar Ramadi at the end of my R&R leave. I began to speak about the torture of prisoners and the killing of civilians. By the time I surrendered, five months after the end of my leave, I was calling the occupation illegal and immoral and saying servicemen and women did not have a duty to fight in it. The army convicted me of desertion and put me away for nine months.

I started working on GI resistance shortly after I was released from prison in February 2005. I officially joined IVAW the following month and I have been a full-time activist ever since. Over the past several years, I’ve been asked over and over how come the antiwar movement is not as strong as it should be. The answer to that question is complicated and can only be found in an analysis of the political and historical context surrounding the Vietnam War. Such an analysis would note that back then there was a draft that touched the sons of the U.S. middle class, which unleashed the outrage of the more affluent ranks of society, culminating in draft resistance, mass desertions and conscientious objector applications, a militant antiwar student movement on hundreds of college campuses, and massive street demonstrations. Another aspect from that era missing in today’s movement is the fresh legacy of the civil rights movement. Young recruits and members of today’s military don’t have that point of reference, or even that of resistance to the Vietnam War. That history has been removed from the official records in order to disempower new generations of activists.

Yet another disadvantage of today’s movement is the lack of personal engagement of the American public, which is explained not only by the fact that fewer than half a percent of the population is directly involved in the fighting, but also by the fact that those fighting belong to the less affluent sectors of society: working Americans, people of color, immigrants, the uninsured and uneducated; in short, people with lots of needs but very little socioeconomic power.

Today’s society is not experiencing the horror that our military intervention of Iraq is causing to both Iraqis and to servicemembers and their families. Hiding the gruesome reality of the occupation of Iraq is not meant to respect the dignity of the fallen, as our government would have us believe. It is meant to minimize the emotional impact of the occupation so that the United States, as a nation, does not take ownership of the crimes the government commits in its name, with its money, and with the blood of its sons and daughters.

Part of the work of GI organizers is to ensure that the American people, through the voices of veterans and active members of our military, do experience the war. We want regular civilians to know about the suffering of Iraqis, and how our military operations are carried out in the countries we occupy. We want the public to know that occupation translates into the oppression of people, into the killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians, into the humiliation of an entire nation, into the destruction of the environment, and into the destruction of the moral fabric of the members of our military.

In order to achieve this goal, to help the American people take ownership of the actions of our government and of our military, we have to empower our brothers and sisters, both veterans and active-duty and reserve personnel, to speak out. We want people at home to hear not from the government pundits, officials, generals, or from the politicians, but from those of us who have intimate knowledge of our military and of war and occupation.

During the Vietnam era the work of those organizing GIs to speak out was aided by news reports, which were actually depicting the horror of war. Even as someone who was not born in that era, I have imprinted in me some of the horrific images that came from that war: the little Vietnamese girl running toward a television camera, naked, as the village behind her is being bombed with napalm. There were pictures of American soldiers posing with dead Vietnamese as if they were war trophies. There were the images of our own wounded, of our dead, and of those who were alive in body but who were also dead in spirit. The demoralization of our military was able to penetrate into the consciousness of the American public. People in the United States were able to take a peek into the hell of war, a hell that we were unleashing on the people and on the land of Vietnam and that was being carried back home in the hearts of our veterans.

The hell that’s being brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan is being kept from the American public this time around. This means that today’s GI resistance movement has to do double the work in order to help regular people realize the huge burden of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that this is their burden too. The American people have to take ownership of these occupations; that’s the only way they’re going to get out there and protest, not as a favor, but because it affects them personally and because they have a moral responsibility to put an end to the atrocities. Ending the occupations is not a battle that antiwar GIs should have to wage by ourselves. It is not a burden we should bear alone.

The need to empower our brothers and sisters in the military to speak out serves several purposes. On one hand it sends the message to other service personnel that they’re not alone in their opposition to the occupations and that they can and should take a stand. On the other hand it brings the horror of war into the consciousness of regular Americans at a time when the mainstream news outlets are going out of their way to hide that horror.

We in the GI resistance movement want to put a human face to the suffering of Iraqis and Americans alike. What does it mean to the newspaper reader when on the lower inside corner of page A18 he or she reads that three American personnel were killed in an IED attack? How much of the pain felt by the families of those three military personnel can be conveyed by that little box? And what about the Iraqi casualties, the children, the wives and mothers, the fathers, and the destroyed homes—who speaks for them in America? And what about the survivors, who return home with the images of so much suffering forever branded in their hearts?

Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan, chronicled in this present volume, is the biggest, most important event ever put together by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Modeled after the Winter Soldier hearings held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in a Detroit, Michigan hotel in 1971, Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan did not start a new tradition; rather it added a new chapter in the rich history of military resistance that dates back to the Revolutionary War and that carried through to this very day, finding its highest and most successful expression in the military resistance to the Vietnam War.

Without the experience, support, and mentorship of VVAW and Veterans For Peace (VFP), Iraq Veterans Against the War would be walking down very dark roads as we move forward. We know from the experience of our mentors that the government, bent on continuing its criminal wars of aggression at all cost, will persist in trying to isolate the critical voices within the ranks. The history has been rewritten to portray the antiwar movement of the ’60s and ’70s as anti-military. But we know from our mentors at VVAW that the military, like today, was at the forefront of the resistance: distributing hundreds of GI newspapers, opening GI coffeehouses right outside of military bases, organizing veterans and active-duty GIs, and staging huge antiwar rallies, marches, and speakouts.

In Vietnam entire units were refusing to go on missions that were not worth their lives. They began telling their officers how missions would be carried out in order to minimize unnecessary danger. They practiced search-and-avoid missions and went as far as negotiating unofficial truces with their so-called enemies, which they accomplished by wearing white armbands around their sleeves, among other signs.

Today’s military resistance is not as advanced as that of our Vietnam predecessors, but the signs of an ever-escalating disaffection among the ranks, both on the battlefields and at home, become more palpable each passing day.

Sharing our experiences as veterans and as human beings during the Winter Soldier hearings has not only given voice to those of us who will no longer stand quiet in the face of these criminal occupations, it has also brought us together and returned to us the sense of family we were looking for when we joined the military. If our military experience at war has taken from us our humanity, having been able to testify at Winter Soldier renewed in many of us the hope of finding a new life in resistance.

The Iraq War was launched under false pretenses and in direct violation of American and international law. As servicemembers we have a duty to resist participation in illegal wars and to disobey unlawful commands. Torture, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and conducting combat missions in certain civilian areas are all illegal orders that should be refused. But the government would have people believe that these are the actions of a few bad apples and not the result of policy crafted at the highest spheres of power.

These Winter Soldier testimonies, provided by servicemen and women from different branches of the military, who served at different times and in different places and who for the most part did not know one another until joining IVAW, point to a systemic problem that can only end when the occupations themselves end. People in the antiwar movement sometimes make the argument that if we leave Iraq will fall into absolute chaos, but the testimonies we provide in this book show how there is already chaos in Iraq, and how that chaos is caused by the occupation itself.

Saying that because “we broke it we have to stay until we fix it” fails to explain how certain things, once broken, can never be fixed again. It also does not convey the idea that broken things can get even “more broken.” In the case of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan we are not simply talking about “things,” we are talking about human lives and human dignity. A woman who loses her little boy to our bullets will carry a wound that can never be fixed. But if the occupation continues so does the possibility that the rest of her family can also be killed by our bullets—we don’t stay in her country to “fix her.” We can’t do that. We stay in her country to cause further damage, to deepen her wound, to inflict new ones, and to perpetuate the cycle of violence that destroys nations.

By providing our testimony we hope we can help people understand why we demand an unconditional and immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from Iraq. We hope people can see that we demand full benefits for all servicemembers and veterans because without those benefits many of our brothers and sisters simply will not survive (and many are losing the battle every day). We want people in the United States to see how our military presence in the Middle East is responsible for the untold suffering of millions and to understand why we demand that our government pay reparations to those people.

Perhaps our motive for bringing our brothers and sisters home is a bit selfish, but not in a bad way. We stand for justice for the people of Iraq and for our own people because in order to live with ourselves we have to take that stand. Our survival depends on it.

We in the GI resistance movement cannot rely on the electoral process or on the promises of elected politicians because we cannot afford to be demoralized. While politicians and an entire new Congress get elected on antiwar platforms the occupations continue, as do the destruction, the killing, and the unnecessary bloodshed of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As we empower other members of the Armed Forces and other veterans to stand up for what they believe in by speaking truth to power, we want to send the clear message both to the government and to the larger antiwar movement that we will not stop our efforts to organize GI resistance until all of our demands are met. We know the only way wars and occupations can continue indefinitely is when members of the military fail to question their leadership and continue on fighting and obeying clearly illegal and immoral commands.

GI, you don’t have to do that.

I hope the book before you has conveyed a bit of the horror we live with, as well as the conviction that ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is the right and moral thing to do. We know because our work to end the occupations is where we draw the energy to live every day, and because through that work we are able to rebuild ourselves and find new life. We are here. And we are not merely survivors. We are fighters. We are Winter Soldiers.

Aaron Glantz

The veterans who spoke at Winter Soldier could have stayed silent. They could have accepted parades and accolades of heroism and blended back into society and the world would have never known about the terrible atrocities they committed or witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By coming forward to share their stories, however, these veterans have done a great service, permanently changing the historical record of “what happened” in the war zones.

I will never forget Winter Soldier as long as I live. As a journalist who’s spent the last six years covering the Iraq War, first from Turkey and Jordan, then from Iraq, and then back here in the United States, I’ve never heard any words from anyone in this country that struck me as closer to the truth. Usually Americans talk about war like it’s a Nintendo game or a series of lines and arrows on a map. Elites from the left and right talk about the American soldiers and Iraqi people like they are chess pieces to be moved around for the maximum benefit of a particular cause or ideology. Nobody stops to talk about what is actually happening, because the pain and suffering of those on all sides is uncomfortable and almost beyond comprehension—even for those of us who have witnessed it personally.