Winter Soldier (6 page)

The Airborne guys had taken fire from the left. Some of the guys also had heard gunfire coming in from the right, so the whole platoon returned fire in both directions. When the firing stopped, they sent some guys who ran out into the field. They didn’t find any insurgents. They looked for blood trails, didn’t find any blood trails. They didn’t find anything but some empty shell casings. The rest of them immediately dismounted and kicked in the door of this house that they had taken fire from. They were gonna raid the house and maybe catch the guy who had been shooting at them.

When they kicked in the door of this house, what they found was an entire extended Iraqi family celebrating a wedding. For those of us who have been in Iraq or at least in Baghdad, you know that any excuse they have is a good excuse to get on the roof and shoot their guns in the air. It’s a celebratory thing. We’ve all heard of celebratory fire being mistaken for hostile fire and this is a textbook case of that. Old Grandpa was on top of the roof cuttin’ loose with his rifle because he was so happy that his daughter was getting married. Meanwhile this 82nd patrol in his front yard gets ambushed from across the road and they returned fire in both directions.

They hit three people inside the wedding party. One was an adult man, who was slightly wounded, another young girl of maybe ten was slightly wounded. But there was another girl who was six or seven and she was dead. I was in the gunner’s hatch of the Humvee. I didn’t get out and go inside the house, but I looked through the doorway and that was the first time that I had ever seen a six-year-old girl dead.

This happens every day. People always say, “Yeah, well, that’s war,” and that is war, and that’s especially this war. Little girls get killed by soldiers in Iraq every day, not because we want to, but just because it happens. What happened next was that the 82nd patrol just mounted up and left it with us. It was our responsibility. Once again, we got stuck calling this up. We called it up to our Tactical Operations Center, and we told them what happened. They told us to continue mission. They said, “Charlie Mike” and that’s military jargon for continue mission.

So we hopped up in our Humvees and rode out. We didn’t even have a translator and we didn’t speak Arabic. We couldn’t say “sorry.” We just hopped in our vehicle and rode off.

For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to get up here and talk about these things. But what’s also difficult is that right after this happened, we never talked about it again. We drove away. We didn’t even tell the other guys back at the post about this. This was something that we just stuffed it the back in our minds and we thought, “Well, these things happen.” It was just forgotten and then the occupation dragged on.

I was in the same unit as Clif. During the November 2003 free-fire zone Clif was talking about, our Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Williams’s personal Humvee had been purportedly shot at. He did an interview with CBS the afternoon before the incident.

He said, “If you are trying to send a message by firing and harboring yourself inside of an area like this, we want to send the message right back that you can be reached. We will find you and surgically remove you.”

Spectre Gunships are not a precision weapon. There’s no precision to it as there is with surgery, so to have him use that comparison is a little odd. I have video footage of the air strike itself, and the most disturbing part was the parties on the rooftops. Our roofs were set up in a semicircle around this post, and in building after building everyone was told to grab their chairs and popcorn and jerky and go on top and watch this thing go down. I was there. I probably hooped and hollered as well. There are higher-up NCOs on the video saying, “Can you hear haji die?” “We don’t have zone five anymore because they just blew the shit out of it.” And lots of cheering. You know there are civilians there, but that’s what we’re supposed to do.

I never got a true body count out of it. We never went to inspect the rubble afterwards, but I can tell you that it happened. Clif can tell you that it happened. He was in a separate building at a different vantage point watching the same show.

Another one of their main objectives was to rid the camp of the mortar, but the mortar fire continued almost every day even after this target was destroyed, so he may have done some surgery or what have you, but I can assure you that I still have plenty of issues with loud noises caused by the mortars landing daily on and around my post, and I just don’t see any justification for it all.

I was in the forward platoon doing operations on the streets. There were no friendlies. In April of 2004 we were scheduled to go home, but due to a rise in violence we had to remain and we returned to the Operation Blackjack. We went to the city of Abu Ghraib, where we were supposed to secure and patrol.

Several buildings had already been bulldozed by American engineering companies, two had been flattened. Rubble and vehicles were piled up on the side of the road and set ablaze. That’s how they cleaned up the area and weeded out the bad guys. We were a cleanup crew after that, and we witnessed several different instances where people took advantage of the free-fire order.

I witnessed personal weapons being fired into the radiators and windshields because these vehicles were coming up the correct side of the road that we were going down the wrong way. Our orders at this point in time were to have one vehicle on each side of the highway and ensure there was no one on the highway besides us.

There’s only so much hand-waving you can really do from a vehicle, and those who didn’t turn around, unfortunately, were neutralized one way or another. I personally witnessed shots fired into windshields and radiators well over twenty different times. I personally never fired at these and used the free-fire order, but there was a lot of collateral damage. No combatant damage that I can recall at that point in time by the people I was with.

Lastly, I want to talk about the way the raids were conducted. Usually what we found, what happened in raids is what the military calls a “dry hole” or “whoops.” This happened several times.

There was one raid, just a typical night raid. It was my platoon and a couple of Bradleys. We rolled out to this house. Typically there were concrete walls around the house, with closed and secured metal gates. So we would pivot and steer the Bradleys into the walls to knock down the wall and tear down whatever security infrastructure the person’s home had. Sometimes we would even crush the vehicles parked behind the wall. After doing that, we dropped a ramp and continued inside.

Then we started hearing a lady screaming from the inside, her and her children. We get to the door and bust the door in, and take her and her children to what we call the EPW roundup area, which is where a couple of lower-enlisted soldiers would take the enemy prisoners of war, like this lady and her children, at gunpoint and hold them until the raid was complete. Next, we entered their house and destroyed it. We rummaged through her personal effects looking for weapons. We punctured the walls looking for soft spots. We’d heard the insurgents were putting things in the walls, so that was our order.

To make this long story short, we destroyed this lady’s house and we found nothing. We’ve scared her and her children to death and come to find out we were off by a number. We were supposed to raid the house across the street. I actually said, “Hey, we’ve got time. Why don’t we go?” However, we didn’t go. We chalked it up, and as Clif says, “Charlie Mike.” We went home and maybe went to bed.

This was not an isolated incident for my platoon. I can’t blame the people who did it. I was one of them. We were all good people. We were just in a bad situation and we did what we had to do to get through. So for all those in the video and that I served with, like Clifton, I have to thank them, and I hope they hear it.

I worked as part of a ten-man team while I was in Iraq, so I didn’t serve with a lot of different U.S. soldiers and marines over there. I did work with a lot of the Iraqi forces though, and if you want my opinion as to whether or not Rules of Engagement actually exist within the Iraqi army, the answer is no.

We had some phrases: “Spray ‘n pray,” where the Iraqis would just start shooting and pray they hit the enemy, if there was one. “The death blossom” was also a term we used regularly, because once the shooting started, death would blossom all around.

I never saw any civilians get killed by these actions, but one instance sticks out in my mind. I lived in Fallujah the whole time that I was in Iraq, on an Iraqi firm base, and the enemy would take potshots at us. They would shoot RPGs at us. We’d get mortared and as soon as something like that would happen, the Iraqi guards on the roof would start a barrage of fire. It didn’t matter where the fire had initially come from, if it was just mortars or a combination. They would just start shooting. One day I ran up to the roof. And while I couldn’t see any incoming fire, I saw the Iraqis shooting indiscriminately, and that was normal. I saw a civilian running and the wall that she was running in front of was just peppered by bullets. The Iraqis weren’t shooting at her. I know that for a fact. They weren’t aiming at her. They were just shooting indiscriminately.

Iraqis can be very brutal. We would often take in prisoners. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be on a joint mission. The Iraqis would conduct presence patrols and bring people in for questioning. They weren’t overly nice, but they weren’t overly brutal in those situations. But when we took Iraqi casualties, that’s really when the tides turned. I saw Iraqi soldiers make prisoners run the gauntlet from the vehicle in which they were transported to the S2 Intelligence Office where they would be questioned. Our job as American advisers was to try our best to stop that, and we did. However, there’s only so much you can do, and you can’t prevent it all. We weren’t there when prisoners initially got picked up. More times than not, the guys that they were bringing in got released after a short questioning.

After a while I was almost like, “I don’t care. I’m over it.” I tried to stop it, but I just stopped caring. It was their people and that’s what they were gonna do. We’re just ordinary people that decided to pick up a uniform and serve this nation and you can only take so much. We’re sons, we’re brothers. Some are fathers. When people take pot shots at you, shoot RPGs at your house, mortar you, it begins to wear on your mind and that creates apathy.

The Iraqis have been doing their thing for thousands of years and I think it is very pretentious of us as Americans to think that we can go in there and spoon-feed them democracy. I think it’s even more pretentious to try to go in there and change their culture and the way they handle situations. I think that it is a lost cause in Iraq. I think that regardless of when we leave, whether it is tomorrow or in a hundred years, the Iraqis are going to handle things the way that they’re going to handle them. It’s their culture. It’s their country. We are allegedly giving them democracy, so let’s give it to them and let’s let them do what they want with their country and their lives.

At this point, given my experience working, living, speaking in Arabic with my Iraqi counterparts, getting to know them and getting to care about them, and with my military history and my friends who are in the U.S. military, I don’t think that it’s worth it to continue losing American lives, to continue what we now see in hindsight as a pretty big mistake. I just don’t think it’s worth it.