Winter Soldier (8 page)

I posed on the hood of that car, and as someone mentioned earlier, it felt funny not because what we were doing was morally wrong, but because I wasn’t the one that killed this guy. There was a group of us marines that all took turns taking pictures and posing like this. At the first Winter Soldier in 1971, one of the testifiers showed a similar picture and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you.” Our government is still doing this to patriotic young men and women who have volunteered their lives in the service of this country, putting them in a situation where this kind of thing is normal.

At one point during the siege of Fallujah we decided to let women and children out of the city. We thought it was the most gracious thing we could have done. I went out on the northern bridge over the Euphrates on the western side of Fallujah, and our guidelines were that males had to be under fourteen years old. If they were old enough to be in your fighting hole, they were too old to get out of the city. I had to go there and turn these men back.

We thought that we were doing something really noble and gracious, and it took me a long time before I could think about what a horrible decision we were forcing these families to make. They could split up and leave their husband and older sons in the city and hope a Spectre gunship round doesn’t land on their head, or stay with them and hunker down and just hope that they made it through alive.

After the siege of Fallujah, my civil affairs team was pulled to set up a Civil Military Operations Center or CMOC two clicks east of Fallujah. My role there was manning the front checkpoint. We didn’t have enough translators and I was learning Arabic and spoke enough to run a checkpoint without a translator. We were still putting down Spectre gunship rounds into the city, and one night some of those rounds started a fire. Iraqi firefighters and policemen responded and they were silhouetted against the fire. Since the marine’s Rules of Engagement at that time were to shoot anything after dark, marines started firing at these firefighters and policemen.

An Iraqi policeman woke me up in the middle of the night and through pointing, pantomime, the little Arabic I spoke at the time, and a translation dictionary, I was able to figure out that marines were shooting at Iraqi firefighters and cops. We sent it down our chain of command and stopped it from happening, but how many incidents like that happen? I know that that happened while I was there, during the siege of Fallujah.

One day in the middle of summer I got a random call on my field phone at the checkpoint saying, “Take one marine and get up to the road and stop any black Opel that comes your way,” because al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was fleeing the city in a black Opel. All I could say was, “What’s an Opel?”

I got up there, and I was with my marine, he was behind me, and I saw a black blur coming toward us, and I was like, “Hey, is that a black Opel?” He was like, “That’s a black blur, Sergeant.”

So I got up on the road and I pointed my rifle down the freeway—the main road between Fallujah and Baghdad. I yelled, “Kif! Stop!” at this car that’s going about fifty miles an hour. It whizzed right by me and I turned around, and was like, “Oh, crap, I hope I don’t have to shoot out his tires.” Fortunately he stopped and I pulled him out. The other marine was right behind me. We got there, we pulled him out of the car and said, “We need to search you.” They hadn’t told me that I was looking for Zarqawi, so I was like, “Alright, get out of the car.” He had his wife and his kids in the back seat. I frisked him and called up and said, “Got one ‘pak’ detained. Please advise. Over.”

My staff sergeant came out, trotted up, after coming out of the air-conditioned building, and he pulls out the al-Zarqawi “wanted” poster. He looks at the person we had stopped and then he looks at the poster and goes, “Ah, that’s not him. Let him go.” That kind of thing, where we’re just harassing people unnecessarily, is part of daily life.

A lot of people who were detained are innocent. There are a lot of people who get detained who are guilty, but guilty or innocent, they usually get similar treatment. Even at Abu Ghraib, they’ll do six months and get out because we don’t have the capacity to provide any kind of due process.

We’re really pissing a lot of people off that way. If the game for the insurgency is: shoot at Americans and if you get caught, if you’re not killed, you’ll do six months and you’ll get out, then—not that being at Abu Ghraib is a picnic by any means—but the game is understood.

When I was activated, we were told we’d be working on schools and mosques and clinics and water projects, and rebuilding Iraq. I was really excited about that. I thought we were going to be the tip of the spear, and we were going to be leading the charge to rebuild Iraq.

We were six-man teams attached to these larger infantry units: regiments or battalions, usually. You couldn’t go anywhere in Fallujah without six Humvees and machine guns, and we were just six marines. So we had to beg these infantry commanders to tag along on their convoys so we could do our missions. We were constantly struggling to justify our existence, and we came up with a slogan: “We care so that you don’t have to.” To the macabre Marine Corps sense of humor that’s pretty funny. But it’s easy to step back and think, “Man, we’ve got units in Iraq whose job is to care so that someone else doesn’t have to. But that someone else isn’t just those grunts in infantry, but it was everybody all the way up.” We care so that Paul Bremer doesn’t have to, so that the chiefs of staff don’t have to, so that Congress doesn’t have to, and so that the president can gush on and on about how much he cares about the Iraqi people while continuing a policy that is decimating their country.

And we care so the American people don’t have to, so that these things can go on in our names and they can just go back to the mall and their daily lives and pretend like nothing’s wrong. That’s one of the things that disturbs me the most about the state of affairs right now.

An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by. This was quite easy for most marines to get away with because our Rules of Engagement stated that the town of al-Qaim had already been forewarned and knew to pull their cars to a complete stop when approaching a United States convoy. Of course, the consequences of such actions pose a huge problem for those of us who patrol the streets every day. This was not the best way to become friendlier with an already hostile local population. This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.

We were sent out on a mission to blow up a bridge that was supposedly being used to transport weapons across the Euphrates, and we were ambushed. We were forced to return fire in order to make our way out of the city. This incident took place in the middle of the day, and most of those who were engaging us were not in clear view. Many hid in local houses and businesses and were part of the local population themselves, once again making it very hard to determine who was shooting from where and where exactly to return fire. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything, i.e., properties, cars, people, in order to push through the town. I fired most of my magazines into the town, but not once did I clearly identify the targets that I was shooting at.

Once we were taking rocket fire from a town and a member of our squad mistakenly identified a tire shop as being the place where the rocket fire came from. Sure enough, we mortared the shop. This was one of the only times we actually had the chance to investigate what we had done and to talk to the people we had directly affected. Luckily, the family who owned the shop was still alive. However, we were not able to compensate the family, nor were we able to explain how it was he could rebuild his livelihood. This was not an isolated incident, and it took place over the course of our eight-month deployment.

Another task our platoon took on was transporting prisoners from our base back to the desert. The reason I say the desert and not their town is because that is exactly where we would drop them off, in the middle of nowhere. Now, most of these men had obviously been deemed innocent, or else they would have been moved to a more permanent prison and not released back into the population. We took it upon ourselves to punch, kick, butt-stroke, or generally harass these prisoners. Then, we would take them to the middle of the desert, throw them out of the back of our Humvees while continually kicking, punching, and at times throwing softball-sized rocks at their backs as they ran away from our convoy. Once again, this is not an isolated incident, and this took place over the duration of our eight-month deployment.

The last and possibly the most disturbing of what took place in Iraq was the mishandling of the dead. On several occasions, our convoy came across bodies that had been decapitated and were lying on the side of the road. When encountering these bodies, standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures with these bodies, which was also standard practice whenever we encountered the dead. On one specific occasion, I had shot a man in the back of the head after we saw him planting an IED device; we pulled his body out of the ditch he was laying in and left it to rot in the field. We saw the body again up to two weeks later. There were also pictures taken of this gentleman, and his picture became the screen-saver on the laptop belonging to one of our more motivated marines.

The larger point that I’d like to touch on is that these are the consequences for sending young men and women into battle. These are the things that happen. And what I’d like to ask anyone who’s viewing this testimony is to imagine your loved ones put in such positions. Your brothers, your sisters, your nieces, your nephews, your aunts, and your uncles, and more importantly, and maybe most importantly, to be able to put ourselves in the Iraqis’ shoes who encountered these events every day and for the last five years.

Our area of operation was near Vincent Emanuele’s, along the Syrian border. It was a little base. The town was not secure when we arrived, and the initial Rules of Engagement were if a person had a weapon, or there’s suspicious activity going on, we had to call the commanding post, request permission, assess the situation, and see what we were going to do.

The third day after we arrived, our company commander, our first lieutenant, and one of our NCOs all got killed by an IED. As time went on, and as the casualties grew in number, the Rules became lenient. Because we saw our friends getting blown up and killed every day, we didn’t really question them. We were angry. We just wanted to do our job and come back