The
Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness
By Chris Hedges &
Laila Al-Arian
12 July, 2007
The
Nation
Over
the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans
of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate
the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians.
These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical
scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid,
on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely
seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.
Their stories, recorded and
typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns
of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed
witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower.
Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian
casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail,
from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized
that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said
that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless
described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and
almost always go unpunished.
Court cases, such as the
ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and the rape and murder of
a 14-year-old in Mahmudiya, and news stories in the Washington
Post, Time, the London Independent and elsewhere based on Iraqi accounts
have begun to hint at the wide extent of the attacks on civilians. Human
rights groups have issued reports, such as Human Rights Watch's Hearts
and Minds: Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by U.S. Forces,
packed with detailed incidents that suggest that the killing of Iraqi
civilians by occupation forces is more common than has been acknowledged
by military authorities.
This Nation investigation
marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from
within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate
these assertions.
While some veterans said
civilian shootings were routinely investigated by the military, many
more said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you physically could
not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed
because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that,"
said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia.
He served from August 2004 to March 2005 in Ramadi with a Marine Corps
civil affairs unit supporting a combat team with the Second Marine Expeditionary
Brigade. (All interviewees are identified by the rank they held during
the period of service they recount here; some have since been promoted
or demoted.)
Veterans said the culture
of this counterinsurgency war, in which most Iraqi civilians were assumed
to be hostile, made it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their
victims--at least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect.
"I guess while I was
there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi,"
said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado. Specialist
Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, in
Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad, for a year beginning
in February 2004. "You know, so what?... The soldiers honestly
thought we were trying to help the people and they were mad because
it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying to help you,
here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and my family,
and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these missions.
Well, we're trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill
us."
He said it was only "when
they get home, in dealing with veteran issues and meeting other veterans,
it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."
The Iraq War is a vast and
complicated enterprise. In this investigation of alleged military misconduct,
The Nation focused on a few key elements of the occupation, asking veterans
to explain in detail their experiences operating patrols and supply
convoys, setting up checkpoints, conducting raids and arresting suspects.
From these collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely
populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and
the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.
Many of these veterans returned
home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war
and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media.
The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one
that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial
wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American
war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
"I'll tell you the point
where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from
Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with
the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya,
a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was]
this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little
pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED
[improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just
started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked
at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I
know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking
me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like,
This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."
Much of the resentment toward
Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report
released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by
the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just
47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians
should be treated with dignity and respect. Only 55 percent of soldiers
and 40 percent of marines said they would report a unit member who had
killed or injured "an innocent noncombatant."
These attitudes reflect the
limited contact occupation troops said they had with Iraqis. They rarely
saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds
that often came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their
compounds ready for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an
elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their
steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare
an open war on all Iraqis.
Veterans described reckless
firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of
gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into
the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children.
These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.
In June 2003 Staff Sgt. Camilo
Mejía's unit was pressed by a furious crowd in Ramadi. Sergeant
Mejía, 31, a National Guardsman from Miami, served for six months
beginning in April 2003 with the 1-124 Infantry Battalion, Fifty-Third
Infantry Brigade. His squad opened fire on an Iraqi youth holding a
grenade, riddling his body with bullets. Sergeant Mejía checked
his clip afterward and calculated that he had personally fired eleven
rounds into the young man.
"The frustration that
resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking
us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population
that was supporting them," Sergeant Mejía said.
We heard a few reports, in
one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so
lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses.
One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation,
shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled
brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.
"Take a picture of me
and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's
squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía
recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that
the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in
his chest.
"Damn, they really fucked
you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Sergeant Mejía
said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.
In the sections that follow,
snipers, medics, military police, artillerymen, officers and others
recount their experiences serving in places as diverse as Mosul in the
north, Samarra in the Sunni Triangle, Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad
in the center, during 2003, 2004 and 2005. Their stories capture the
impact of their units on Iraqi civilians.
A Note on Methodology
The Nation interviewed fifty
combat veterans, including forty soldiers, eight marines and two sailors,
over a period of seven months beginning in July 2006. To find veterans
willing to speak on the record about their experiences in Iraq, we sent
queries to organizations dedicated to US troops and their families,
including Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the antiwar groups
Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against
the War and the prowar group Vets for Freedom. The leaders of IVAW and
Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of IAVA, were especially helpful in putting
us in touch with Iraq War veterans. Finally, we found veterans through
word of mouth, as many of those we interviewed referred us to their
military friends.
To verify their military
service, when possible we obtained a copy of each interviewee's DD Form
214, or the Certificate of Release or Discharge From Active Duty, and
in all cases confirmed their service with the branch of the military
in which they were enlisted. Nineteen interviews were conducted in person,
while the rest were done over the phone; all were tape-recorded and
transcribed; all but five interviewees (most of those currently on active
duty) were independently contacted by fact checkers to confirm basic
facts about their service in Iraq. Of those interviewed, fourteen served
in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, twenty from 2004 to 2005 and two from 2005
to 2006. Of the eleven veterans whose tours lasted less than one year,
nine served in 2003, while the others served in 2004 and 2005.
The ranks of the veterans
we interviewed ranged from private to captain, though only a handful
were officers. The veterans served throughout Iraq, but mostly in the
country's most volatile areas, such as Baghdad, Tikrit, Mosul, Falluja
and Samarra.
During the course of the
interview process, five veterans turned over photographs from Iraq,
some of them graphic, to corroborate their claims.
Raids
"So we get started on
this day, this one in particular," recalled Spc. Philip Chrystal,
23, of Reno, who said he raided between twenty and thirty Iraqi homes
during an eleven-month tour in Kirkuk and Hawija that ended in October
2005, serving with the Third Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade. "It
starts with the psy-ops vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers
playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen
to be, saying, basically, saying, Put your weapons, if you have them,
next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're
needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we're running around,
and they--we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon
leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people.
"And we were approaching
this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're,
like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main
house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a
storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family
dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And
my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't--motherfucker--he
shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm
a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes
on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And
like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right
there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And
I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the
fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without
a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead
scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know?
At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....
"And--I actually get
tears from just saying this right now, but--and I had tears then, too--and
I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter
over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty
bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to
them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that.
"Was a report ever filed
about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment
ever dished out? No, absolutely not."
Specialist Chrystal said
such incidents were "very common."
According to interviews with
twenty-four veterans who participated in such raids, they are a relentless
reality for Iraqis under occupation. The American forces, stymied by
poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting
into homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But
such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which
soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search
and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin
the long torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away
as suspects.
Raids normally took place
between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia,
who estimates that he took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes.
He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city infamous for its prison,
located twenty miles west of the capital, with the Third Brigade, First
Armor Division, First Battalion, for one year beginning in April 2003.
His descriptions of raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other
veterans who served in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad,
Mosul and Tikrit.
"You want to catch them
off guard," Sergeant Bruhns explained. "You want
to catch them in their sleep." About ten troops were involved in
each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching
the home.
Once they were in front of
the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade
launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to
Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:
"You run in. And if
there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not,
you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one
rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with
an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other
rifle team leader that's outside.
"You go up the stairs.
You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his
wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops,
PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms
and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go
into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's
no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.
"You get the interpreter
and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll
ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have
any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here
that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent
activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'
"Normally they'll say
no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So
what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them.
If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into
the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor,
and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up
his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically
leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.
"And if you find something,
then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have
a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his
entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed
his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing
in a hundred homes."
Each raid, or "cordon
and search" operation, as they are sometimes called, involved five
to twenty homes, he said. Following a spate of attacks on soldiers in
a particular area, commanders would normally order infantrymen on raids
to look for weapons caches, ammunition or materials for making IEDs.
Each Iraqi family was allowed to keep one AK-47 at home, but according
to Bruhns, those found with extra weapons were arrested and detained
and the operation classified a "success," even if it was clear
that no one in the home was an insurgent.
Before a raid, according
to descriptions by several veterans, soldiers typically "quarantined"
the area by barring anyone from coming in or leaving. In pre-raid briefings,
Sergeant Bruhns said, military commanders often told their troops the
neighborhood they were ordered to raid was "a hostile area with
a high level of insurgency" and that it had been taken over by
former Baathists or Al Qaeda terrorists.
"So you have all these
troops, and they're all wound up," said Sergeant Bruhns. "And
a lot of these troops think once they kick down the door there's going
to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting
at them."
Sgt. Dustin Flatt, 33, of
Denver, estimates he raided "thousands" of homes in Tikrit,
Samarra and Mosul. He served with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First
Infantry Division, for one year beginning in February 2004. "We
scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every
house," he said.
Spc. Ali Aoun, 23, a National
Guardsman from New York City, said he conducted perimeter security in
nearly 100 raids while serving in Sadr City with the Eighty-Ninth Military
Police Brigade for eleven months starting in April 2004. When soldiers
raided a home, he said, they first cordoned it off with Humvees. Soldiers
guarded the entrance to make sure no one escaped. If an entire town
was being raided, in large-scale operations, it too was cordoned off,
said Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, 32, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry
scout and sniper with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division,
who was deployed to Baquba for a year in February 2004.
Staff Sgt. Timothy John Westphal,
31, of Denver, recalled one summer night in 2004, the temperature an
oppressive 110 degrees, when he and forty-four other US soldiers raided
a sprawling farm on the outskirts of Tikrit. Sergeant Westphal, who
served there for a yearlong tour with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade,
First Infantry Division, beginning in February 2004, said he was told
some men on the farm were insurgents. As a mechanized infantry squad
leader, Sergeant Westphal led the mission to secure the main house,
while fifteen men swept the property. Sergeant Westphal and his men
hopped the wall surrounding the house, fully expecting to come face
to face with armed insurgents.
"We had our flashlights
and...I told my guys, 'On the count of three, just hit them with your
lights and let's see what we've got here. Wake 'em up!'"
Sergeant Westphal's flashlight
was mounted on his M-4 carbine rifle, a smaller version of the M-16,
so in pointing his light at the clump of sleepers on the floor he was
also pointing his weapon at them. Sergeant Westphal first turned his
light on a man who appeared to be in his mid-60s.
"The man screamed this
gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, just horrified scream," Sergeant
Westphal recalled. "I've never heard anything like that. I mean,
the guy was absolutely terrified. I can imagine what he was thinking,
having lived under Saddam."
The farm's inhabitants were
not insurgents but a family sleeping outside for relief from the stifling
heat, and the man Sergeant Westphal had frightened awake was the patriarch.
"Sure enough, as we
started to peel back the layers of all these people sleeping, I mean,
it was him, maybe two guys...either his sons or nephews or whatever,
and the rest were all women and children," Sergeant Westphal said.
"We didn't find anything.
"I can tell you hundreds
of stories about things like that and they would all pretty much be
like the one I just told you. Just a different family, a different time,
a different circumstance."
For Sergeant Westphal, that
night was a turning point. "I just remember thinking to myself,
I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's
just not what I joined the Army to do," he said.
Intelligence
Fifteen soldiers we spoke
with told us the information that spurred these raids was typically
gathered through human intelligence--and that it was usually incorrect.
Eight said it was common for Iraqis to use American troops to settle
family disputes, tribal rivalries or personal vendettas. Sgt. Jesus
Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco, Texas, was a scout in Tikrit with the Fourth
Infantry Division during a yearlong tour that ended in March 2004. In
late 2003, Sergeant Bocanegra raided a middle-aged man's home in Tikrit
because his son had told the Army his father was an insurgent. After
thoroughly searching the man's house, soldiers found nothing and later
discovered that the son simply wanted money his father had buried at
the farm.
After persistently acting
on such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who raided Iraqi homes in more
than fifty operations, said soldiers began to anticipate the innocence
of those they raided. "People would make jokes about it, even before
we'd go into a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna get the wrong house,"
he said. "'Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong
house." Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon leader
shared a joke of their own: Every time he raided a house, he would radio
in and say, "This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I found
the weapons of mass destruction in here."
Sergeant Bruhns said he questioned
the authenticity of the intelligence he received because Iraqi informants
were paid by the US military for tips. On one occasion, an Iraqi tipped
off Sergeant Bruhns's unit that a small Syrian resistance organization,
responsible for killing a number of US troops, was holed up in a house.
"They're waiting for us to show up and there will be a lot of shooting,"
Sergeant Bruhns recalled being told.
As the Alpha Company team
leader, Sergeant Bruhns was supposed to be the first person in the door.
Skeptical, he refused. "So I said, 'If you're so confident that
there are a bunch of Syrian terrorists, insurgents...in there, why in
the world are you going to send me and three guys in the front door,
because chances are I'm not going to be able to squeeze the trigger
before I get shot.'" Sergeant Bruhns facetiously suggested they
pull an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle up to the house and shoot a missile
through the front window to exterminate the enemy fighters his commanders
claimed were inside. They instead diminished the aggressiveness of the
raid. As Sergeant Bruhns ran security out front, his fellow soldiers
smashed the windows and kicked down the doors to find "a few little
kids, a woman and an old man."
In late summer 2005, in a
village on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Specialist Chrystal searched a compound
with two Iraqi police officers. A friendly man in his mid-30s escorted
Specialist Chrystal and others in his unit around the property, where
the man lived with his parents, wife and children, making jokes to lighten
the mood. As they finished searching--they found nothing--a lieutenant
from his company approached Specialist Chrystal: "What the hell
were you doing?" he asked. "Well, we just searched the house
and it's clear," Specialist Chrystal said. The lieutenant told
Specialist Chrystal that his friendly guide was "one of the targets"
of the raid. "Apparently he'd been dimed out by somebody as being
an insurgent," Specialist Chrystal said. "For that mission,
they'd only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't
there with the rest of the troops." Specialist Chrystal said he
felt "humiliated" because his assessment that the man posed
no threat was deemed irrelevant and the man was arrested. Shortly afterward,
he posted himself in a fighting vehicle for the rest of the mission.
Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of
Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade,
First Infantry Division, served a yearlong tour in several cities in
Iraq, including Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, beginning in February 2004.
He estimates that he searched more than a hundred homes in Tikrit and
found the raids fruitless and maddening. "We would go on one raid
of a house and that guy would say, 'No, it's not me, but I know where
that guy is.' And...he'd take us to the next house where this target
was supposedly at, and then that guy's like, 'No, it's not me. I know
where he is, though.' And we'd drive around all night and go from raid
to raid to raid."
"I can't really fault
military intelligence," said Specialist Reppenhagen, who said he
raided thirty homes in and around Baquba. "It was always a guessing
game. We're in a country where we don't speak the language. We're light
on interpreters. It's just impossible to really get anything. All you're
going off is a pattern of what's happened before and hoping that the
pattern doesn't change."
Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, 26,
of Buffalo, New York, served in Tikrit with the Rear Operations Center,
Forty-Second Infantry Division, for one year beginning in October 2004.
He said combat troops had neither the training nor the resources to
investigate tips before acting on them. "We're not police,"
he said. "We don't go around like detectives and ask questions.
We kick down doors, we go in, we grab people."
First Lieut. Brady Van Engelen,
26, of Washington, DC, said the Army depended on less than reliable
sources because options were limited. He served as a survey platoon
leader with the First Armored Division in Baghdad's volatile Adhamiya
district for eight months beginning in September 2003. "That's
really about the only thing we had," he said. "A lot of it
was just going off a whim, a hope that it worked out," he said.
"Maybe one in ten worked out."
Sergeant Bruhns said he uncovered
illegal material about 10 percent of the time, an estimate echoed by
other veterans. "We did find small materials for IEDs, like maybe
a small piece of the wire, the detonating cord," said Sergeant
Cannon. "We never found real bombs in the houses." In the
thousand or so raids he conducted during his time in Iraq, Sergeant
Westphal said, he came into contact with only four "hard-core insurgents."
Arrests
Even with such slim pretexts
for arrest, some soldiers said, any Iraqis arrested during a raid were
treated with extreme suspicion. Several reported seeing military-age
men detained without evidence or abused during questioning. Eight veterans
said the men would typically be bound with plastic handcuffs, their
heads covered with sandbags. While the Army officially banned the practice
of hooding prisoners after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, five soldiers
indicated that it continued.
"You weren't allowed
to, but it was still done," said Sergeant Cannon. "I remember
in Mosul [in January 2005], we had guys in a raid and they threw them
in the back of a Bradley," shackled and hooded. "These guys
were really throwing up," he continued. "They were so sick
and nervous. And sometimes, they were peeing on themselves. Can you
imagine if people could just come into your house and take you in front
of your family screaming? And if you actually were innocent but had
no way to prove that? It would be a scary, scary thing." Specialist
Reppenhagen said he had only a vague idea about what constituted contraband
during a raid. "Sometimes we didn't even have a translator, so
we find some poster with Muqtada al-Sadr, Sistani or something, we don't
know what it says on it. We just apprehend them, document that thing
as evidence and send it on down the road and let other people deal with
it."
Sergeant Bruhns, Sergeant
Bocanegra and others said physical abuse of Iraqis during raids was
common. "It was just soldiers being soldiers," Sergeant Bocanegra
said. "You give them a lot of, too much, power that they never
had before, and before you know it they're the ones kicking these guys
while they're handcuffed. And then by you not catching [insurgents],
when you do have someone say, 'Oh, this is a guy planting a roadside
bomb'--and you don't even know if it's him or not--you just go in there
and kick the shit out of him and take him in the back of a five-ton--take
him to jail."
Tens of thousands of Iraqis--military
officials estimate more than 60,000--have been arrested and detained
since the beginning of the occupation, leaving their families to navigate
a complex, chaotic prison system in order to find them. Veterans we
interviewed said the majority of detainees they encountered were either
innocent or guilty of only minor infractions.
Sergeant Bocanegra said during
the first two months of the war he was instructed to detain Iraqis based
on their attire alone. "They were wearing Arab clothing and military-style
boots, they were considered enemy combatants and you would cuff 'em
and take 'em in," he said. "When you put something like that
so broad, you're bound to have, out of a hundred, you're going to have
ten at least that were, you know what I mean, innocent."
Sometime during the summer
of 2003, Bocanegra said, the rules of engagement narrowed--somewhat.
"I remember on some raids, anybody of military age would be taken,"
he said. "Say, for example, we went to some house looking for a
25-year-old male. We would look at an age group. Anybody from 15 to
30 might be a suspect." (Since returning from Iraq, Bocanegra has
sought counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder and said his "mission"
is to encourage others to do the same.)
Spc. Richard Murphy, 28,
an Army Reservist from Pocono, Pennsylvania, who served part of his
fifteen-month tour with the 800th Military Police Brigade in Abu Ghraib
prison, said he was often struck by the lack of due process afforded
the prisoners he guarded.
Specialist Murphy initially
went to Iraq in May 2003 to train Iraqi police in the southern city
of Al Hillah but was transferred to Abu Ghraib in October 2003 when
his unit replaced one that was rotating home. (He spoke with The Nation
in October 2006, while not on active duty.) Shortly after his arrival
there, he realized that the number of prisoners was growing "exponentially"
while the amount of personnel remained stagnant. By the end of his six-month
stint, Specialist Murphy was in charge of 320 prisoners, the majority
of whom he was convinced were unjustly detained.
"I knew that a large
percentage of these prisoners were innocent," he said. "Just
living with these people for months you get to see their character....
In just listening to the prisoners' stories, I mean, I get the sense
that a lot of them were just getting rounded up in big groups."
Specialist Murphy said one
prisoner, a mentally impaired, blind albino who could "maybe see
a few feet in front of his face" clearly did not belong in Abu
Ghraib. "I thought to myself, What could he have possibly done?"
Specialist Murphy counted
the prisoners twice a day, and the inmates would often ask him when
they would be released or implore him to advocate on their behalf, which
he would try to do through the JAG (Judge Advocate General) Corps office.
The JAG officer Specialist Murphy dealt with would respond that it was
out of his hands. "He would make his recommendations and he'd have
to send it up to the next higher command," Specialist Murphy said.
"It was just a snail's crawling process.... The system wasn't working."
Prisoners at the notorious
facility rioted on November 24, 2003, to protest their living conditions,
and Army Reserve Spc. Aidan Delgado, 25, of Sarasota, Florida, was there.
He had deployed with the 320th Military Police Company to Talil Air
Base, to serve in Nasiriya and Abu Ghraib for one year beginning in
April 2003. Unlike the other troops in his unit, he did not respond
to the riot. Four months earlier he had decided to stop carrying a loaded
weapon.
Nine prisoners were killed
and three wounded after soldiers opened fire during the riot, and Specialist
Delgado's fellow soldiers returned with photographs of the events. The
images, disturbingly similar to the incident described by Sergeant Mejía,
shocked him. "It was very graphic," he said. "A head
split open. One of them was of two soldiers in the back of the truck.
They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head
and [one soldier has] got an MRE spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out
some of his brain, looking at the camera and he's smiling. And I said,
'These are some of our soldiers desecrating somebody's body. Something
is seriously amiss.' I became convinced that this was excessive force,
and this was brutality."
Spc. Patrick Resta, 29, a
National Guardsman from Philadelphia, served in Jalula, where there
was a small prison camp at his base. He was with the 252nd Armor, First
Infantry Division, for nine months beginning in March 2004. He recalled
his supervisor telling his platoon point-blank, "The Geneva Conventions
don't exist at all in Iraq, and that's in writing if you want to see
it."
The pivotal experience for
Specialist Delgado came when, in the winter of 2003, he was assigned
to battalion headquarters inside Abu Ghraib prison, where he worked
with Maj. David DiNenna and Lieut. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, both implicated
in the Taguba Report, the official Army investigation into the prison
scandal. There, Delgado read reports on prisoners and updated a dry
erase board with information on where in the large prison compound detainees
were moved and held.
"That was when I totally
walked away from the Army," Specialist Delgado said. "I read
these rap sheets on all the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and what they were
there for. I expected them to be terrorists, murderers, insurgents.
I look down this roster and see petty theft, public drunkenness, forged
coalition documents. These people are here for petty civilian crimes."
"These aren't terrorists,"
he recalled thinking. "These aren't our enemies. They're just ordinary
people, and we're treating them this harshly." Specialist Delgado
ultimately applied for conscientious objector status, which the Army
approved in April 2004.
The Enemy
American troops in Iraq lacked
the training and support to communicate with or even understand Iraqi
civilians, according to nineteen interviewees. Few spoke or read Arabic.
They were offered little or no cultural or historical education about
the country they controlled. Translators were either in short supply
or unqualified. Any stereotypes about Islam and Arabs that soldiers
and marines arrived with tended to solidify rapidly in the close confines
of the military and the risky streets of Iraqi cities into a crude racism.
As Spc. Josh Middleton, 23,
of New York City, who served in Baghdad and Mosul with the Second Battalion,
Eighty-Second Airborne Division, from December 2004 to March 2005, pointed
out, 20-year-old soldiers went from the humiliation of training--"getting
yelled at every day if you have a dirty weapon"--to the streets
of Iraq, where "it's like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi
men look at us with fear and we can--do you know what I mean?--we have
this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just
knocked down to this primal level."
In Iraq, Specialist Middleton
said, "a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that,
you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're
not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
In the scramble to get ready
for Iraq, troops rarely learned more than how to say a handful of words
in Arabic, depending mostly on a single manual, A Country Handbook,
a Field-Ready Reference Publication, published by the Defense Department
in September 2002. The book, as described by eight soldiers who received
it, has pictures of Iraqi military vehicles, diagrams of how the Iraqi
army is structured, images of Iraqi traffic signals and signs, and about
four pages of basic Arabic phrases such as Do you speak English? I am
an American. I am lost.
Iraqi culture, identity and
customs were, according to at least a dozen soldiers and marines interviewed
by The Nation, openly ridiculed in racist terms, with troops deriding
"haji food," "haji music" and "haji homes."
In the Muslim world, the word "haji" denotes someone who has
made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is now used by American troops
in the same way "gook" was used in Vietnam or "raghead"
in Afghanistan.
"You can honestly see
how the Iraqis in general or even Arabs in general are being, you know,
kind of like dehumanized," said Specialist Englehart. "Like
it was very common for United States soldiers to call them derogatory
terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger."
According to Sergeant Millard
and several others interviewed, "It becomes this racialized hatred
towards Iraqis." And this racist language, as Specialist Harmon
pointed out, likely played a role in the level of violence directed
at Iraqi civilians. "By calling them names," he said, "they're
not people anymore. They're just objects."
Several interviewees emphasized
that the military did set up, for training purposes, mock Iraqi villages
peopled with actors who played the parts of civilians and insurgents.
But they said that the constant danger in Iraq, and the fear it engendered,
swiftly overtook such training.
"They were the law,"
Specialist Harmon said of the soldiers in his unit in Al-Rashidiya,
near Baghdad, which participated in raids and convoys. "They were
very mean, very mean-spirited to them. A lot of cursing at them. And
I'm like, Dude, these people don't understand what you're saying....
They used to say a lot, 'Oh, they'll understand when the gun is in their
face.'"
Those few veterans who said
they did try to reach out to Iraqis encountered fierce hostility from
those in their units.
"I had the night shift
one night at the aid station," said Specialist Resta, recounting
one such incident. "We were told from the first second that we
arrived there, and this was in writing on the wall in our aid station,
that we were not to treat Iraqi civilians unless they were about to
die.... So these guys in the guard tower radio in, and they say they've
got an Iraqi out there that's asking for a doctor.
"So it's really late
at night, and I walk out there to the gate and I don't even see the
guy at first, and they point out to him and he's standing there. Well,
I mean he's sitting, leaned up against this concrete barrier--like the
median of the highway--we had as you approached the gate. And he's sitting
there leaned up against it and, uh, he's out there, if you want to go
and check on him, he's out there. So I'm sitting there waiting for an
interpreter, and the interpreter comes and I just walk out there in
the open. And this guy, he has the shit kicked out of him. He was missing
two teeth. He has a huge laceration on his head, he looked like he had
broken his eye orbit and had some kind of injury to his knee."
The Iraqi, Specialist Resta
said, pleaded with him in broken English for help. He told Specialist
Resta that there were men near the base who were waiting to kill him.
"I open a bag and I'm
trying to get bandages out and the guys in the guard tower are yelling
at me, 'Get that fucking haji out of here,'" Specialist Resta said.
"And I just look back at them and ignored them, and then they were
saying, you know, 'He doesn't look like he's about to die to me,' 'Tell
him to go cry back to the fuckin' IP [Iraqi police],' and, you know,
a whole bunch of stuff like that. So, you know, I'm kind of ignoring
them and trying to get the story from this guy, and our doctor rolls
up in an ambulance and from thirty to forty meters away looks out and
says, shakes his head and says, 'You know, he looks fine, he's gonna
be all right,' and walks back to the passenger side of the ambulance,
you know, kind of like, Get your ass over here and drive me back up
to the clinic. So I'm standing there, and the whole time both this doctor
and the guards are yelling at me, you know, to get rid of this guy,
and at one point they're yelling at me, when I'm saying, 'No, let's
at least keep this guy here overnight, until it's light out,' because
they wanted me to send him back out into the city, where he told me
that people were waiting for him to kill him.
"When I asked if he'd
be allowed to stay there, at least until it was light out, the response
was, 'Are you hearing this shit? I think Doc is part fucking haji,'"
Specialist Resta said.
Specialist Resta gave in
to the pressure and denied the man aid. The interpreter, he recalled,
was furious, telling him that he had effectively condemned the man to
death.
"So I walk inside the
gate and the interpreter helps him up and the guy turns around to walk
away and the guys in the guard tower go, say, 'Tell him that if he comes
back tonight he's going to get fucking shot,'" Specialist Resta
said. "And the interpreter just stared at them and looked at me
and then looked back at them, and they nod their head, like, Yeah, we
mean it. So he yells it to the Iraqi and the guy just flinches and turns
back over his shoulder, and the interpreter says it again and he starts
walking away again, you know, crying like a little kid. And that was
that."
Convoys
Two dozen soldiers interviewed
said that this callousness toward Iraqi civilians was particularly evident
in the operation of supply convoys--operations in which they participated.
These convoys are the arteries that sustain the occupation, ferrying
items such as water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel
across Iraq. And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR
(formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and other private contractors,
required daily protection by the US military. Typically, according to
these interviewees, supply convoys consisted of twenty to thirty trucks
stretching half a mile down the road, with a Humvee military escort
in front and back and at least one more in the center. Soldiers and
marines also sometimes accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers.
These convoys, ubiquitous
in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of wanton destruction.
According to descriptions
culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys--guarding
such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when
these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they
usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through
densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed
by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys
leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without
warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian
vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children,
were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot
drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted
to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.
"A moving target is
harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28,
a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad
with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March
2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty
miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your friend. And certainly
in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two
things that could really determine whether or not you were going to
get injured or killed or if they just completely missed, which happened."
Following an explosion or
ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately
in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three
veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and
SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds
per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.
"One example I can give
you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of
the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand
Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion,
First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And,
you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just
start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And
I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people
died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."
Several veterans said that
IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their
greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible
for killing more US troops--39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed--than
any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors
deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the
highest number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginning
of the war.
"The second you left
the gate of your base, you were always worried," said Sergeant
Flatt. "You were constantly watchful for IEDs. And you could never
see them. I mean, it's just by pure luck who's getting killed and who's
not. If you've been in firefights earlier that day or that week, you're
even more stressed and insecure to a point where you're almost trigger-happy."
Sergeant Flatt was among
twenty-four veterans who said they had witnessed or heard stories from
those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys.
These incidents, they said, were so numerous that many were never reported.
Sergeant Flatt recalled an
incident in January 2005 when a convoy drove past him on one of the
main highways in Mosul. "A car following got too close to their
convoy," he said. "Basically, they took shots at the car.
Warning shots, I don't know. But they shot the car. Well, one of the
bullets happened to just pierce the windshield and went straight into
the face of this woman in the car. And she was--well, as far as I know--instantly
killed. I didn't pull her out of the car or anything. Her son was driving
the car, and she had her--she had three little girls in the back seat.
And they came up to us, because we were actually sitting in a defensive
position right next to the hospital, the main hospital in Mosul, the
civilian hospital. And they drove up and she was obviously dead. And
the girls were crying."
On July 30, 2004, Sergeant
Flanders was riding in the tail vehicle of a convoy on a pitch-black
night, traveling from Camp Anaconda south to Taji, just north of Baghdad,
when his unit was attacked with small-arms fire and RPGs (rocket-propelled
grenades). He was about to get on the radio to warn the vehicle in front
of him about the ambush when he saw his gunner unlock the turret and
swivel it around in the direction of the shooting. He fired his MK-19,
a 40-millimeter automatic grenade launcher capable of discharging up
to 350 rounds per minute.
"He's just holding the
trigger down and it wound up jamming, so he didn't get off as many shots
maybe as he wanted," Sergeant Flanders recalled. "But I said,
'How many did you get off?' 'Cause I knew they would be asking that.
He said, 'Twenty-three.' He launched twenty-three grenades....
"I remember looking
out the window and I saw a little hut, a little Iraqi house with a light
on.... We were going so fast and obviously your adrenaline's--you're
like tunnel vision, so you can't really see what's going on, you know?
And it's dark out and all that stuff. I couldn't really see where the
grenades were exploding, but it had to be exploding around the house
or maybe even hit the house. Who knows? Who knows? And we were the last
vehicle. We can't stop."
Convoys did not slow down
or attempt to brake when civilians inadvertently got in front of their
vehicles, according to the veterans who described them. Sgt. Kelly Dougherty,
29, from Cañon City, Colorado, was based at the Talil Air Base
in Nasiriya with the Colorado National Guard's 220th Military Police
Company for a year beginning in February 2003. She recounted one incident
she investigated in January 2004 on a six-lane highway south of Nasiriya
that resembled numerous incidents described by other veterans.
"It's like very barren
desert, so most of the people that live there, they're nomadic or they
live in just little villages and have, like, camels and goats and stuff,"
she recalled. "There was then a little boy--I would say he was
about 10 because we didn't see the accident; we responded to it with
the investigative team--a little Iraqi boy and he was crossing the highway
with his, with three donkeys. A military convoy, transportation convoy
driving north, hit him and the donkeys and killed all of them. When
we got there, there were the dead donkeys and there was a little boy
on the side of the road.
"We saw him there and,
you know, we were upset because the convoy didn't even stop," she
said. "They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even
slowed down. But, I mean, that's basically--basically, your order is
that you never stop."
Among supply convoys, there
were enormous disparities based on the nationality of the drivers, according
to Sergeant Flanders, who estimated that he ran more than 100 convoys
in Balad, Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba. When drivers were not American,
the trucks were often old, slow and prone to breakdowns, he said. The
convoys operated by Nepalese, Egyptian or Pakistani drivers did not
receive the same level of security, although the danger was more severe
because of the poor quality of their vehicles. American drivers were
usually placed in convoys about half the length of those run by foreign
nationals and were given superior vehicles, body armor and better security.
Sergeant Flanders said troops disliked being assigned to convoys run
by foreign nationals, especially since, when the aging vehicles broke
down, they had to remain and protect them until they could be recovered.
"It just seemed insane
to run civilians around the country," he added. "I mean, Iraq
is such a security concern and it's so dangerous and yet we have KBR
just riding around, unarmed.... Remember those terrible judgments that
we made about what Iraq would look like postconflict? I think this is
another incarnation of that misjudgment, which would be that, Oh, it'll
be fine. We'll put a Humvee in front, we'll put a Humvee in back, we'll
put a Humvee in the middle, and we'll just run with it.
"It was just shocking
to me.... I was Army trained and I had a good gunner and I had radios
and I could call on the radios and I could get an airstrike if I wanted
to. I could get a Medevac.... And here these guys are just tooling around.
And these guys are, like, they're promised the world. They're promised
$120,000, tax free, and what kind of people take those jobs? Down-on-their-luck-type
people, you know? Grandmothers. There were grandmothers there. I escorted
a grandmother there and she did great. We went through an ambush and
one of her guys got shot, and she was cool, calm and collected. Wonderful,
great, good for her. What the hell is she doing there?
"We're using these vulnerable,
vulnerable convoys, which probably piss off more Iraqis than it actually
helps in our relationship with them," Flanders said, "just
so that we can have comfort and air-conditioning and sodas--great--and
PlayStations and camping chairs and greeting cards and stupid T-shirts
that say, Who's Your Baghdaddy?"
Patrols
Soldiers and marines who
participated in neighborhood patrols said they often used the same tactics
as convoys--speed, aggressive firing--to reduce the risk of being ambushed
or falling victim to IEDs. Sgt. Patrick Campbell, 29, of Camarillo,
California, who frequently took part in patrols, said his unit fired
often and without much warning on Iraqi civilians in a desperate bid
to ward off attacks.
"Every time we got on
the highway," he said, "we were firing warning shots, causing
accidents all the time. Cars screeching to a stop, going into the other
intersection.... The problem is, if you slow down at an intersection
more than once, that's where the next bomb is going to be because you
know they watch. You know? And so if you slow down at the same choke
point every time, guaranteed there's going to be a bomb there next couple
of days. So getting onto a freeway or highway is a choke point 'cause
you have to wait for traffic to stop. So you want to go as fast as you
can, and that involves added risk to all the cars around you, all the
civilian cars.
"The first Iraqi I saw
killed was an Iraqi who got too close to our patrol," he said.
"We were coming up an on-ramp. And he was coming down the highway.
And they fired warning shots and he just didn't stop. He just merged
right into the convoy and they opened up on him."
This took place sometime
in the spring of 2005 in Khadamiya, in the northwest corner of Baghdad,
Sergeant Campbell said. His unit fired into the man's car with a 240
Bravo, a heavy machine gun. "I heard three gunshots," he said.
"We get about halfway down the road and...the guy in the car got
out and he's covered in blood. And this is where...the impulse is just
to keep going. There's no way that this guy knows who we are. We're
just like every other patrol that goes up and down this road. I looked
at my lieutenant and it wasn't even a discussion. We turned around and
we went back.
"So I'm treating the
guy. He has three gunshot wounds to the chest. Blood everywhere. And
he keeps going in and out of consciousness. And when he finally stops
breathing, I have to give him CPR. I take my right hand, I lift up his
chin and I take my left hand and grab the back of his head to position
his head, and as I take my left hand, my hand actually goes into his
cranium. So I'm actually holding this man's brain in my hand. And what
I realized was I had made a mistake. I had checked for exit wounds.
But what I didn't know was the Humvee behind me, after the car failed
to stop after the first three rounds, had fired twenty, thirty rounds
into the car. I never heard it.
"I heard three rounds,
I saw three holes, no exit wounds," he said. "I thought I
knew what the situation was. So I didn't even treat this guy's injury
to the head. Every medic I ever told is always like, Of course, I mean,
the guy got shot in the head. There's nothing you could have done. And
I'm pretty sure--I mean, you can't stop bleeding in the head like that.
But this guy, I'm watching this guy, who I know we shot because he got
too close. His car was clean. There was no--didn't hear it, didn't see
us, whatever it was. Dies, you know, dying in my arms."
While many veterans said
the killing of civilians deeply disturbed them, they also said there
was no other way to safely operate a patrol.
"You don't want to shoot
kids, I mean, no one does," said Sergeant Campbell, as he began
to describe an incident in the summer of 2005 recounted to him by several
men in his unit. "But you have this: I remember my unit was coming
along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below,
pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he's going to start shooting. And
you gotta understand...when you have spent nine months in a war zone,
where no one--every time you've been shot at, you've never seen the
person shooting at you, and you could never shoot back. Here's some
guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides he's going to start
shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen.
Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest
weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds." Sergeant Campbell
was not present at the incident, which took place in Khadamiya, but
he saw photographs and heard descriptions from several eyewitnesses
in his unit.
"Everyone was so happy,
like this release that they finally killed an insurgent," he said.
"Then when they got there, they realized it was just a little kid.
And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in the head.... They'd
show all the pictures and some people were really happy, like, Oh, look
what we did. And other people were like, I don't want to see that ever
again."
The killing of unarmed Iraqis
was so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of
the daily landscape. "The ground forces were put in that position,"
said First Lieut. Wade Zirkle of Shenandoah County, Virginia, who fought
in Nasiriya and Falluja with the Second Light Armored Reconnaissance
Battalion from March to May 2003. "You got a guy trying to kill
me but he's firing from houses...with civilians around him, women and
children. You know, what do you do? You don't want to risk shooting
at him and shooting children at the same time. But at the same time,
you don't want to die either."
Sergeant Dougherty recounted
an incident north of Nasiriya in December 2003, when her squad leader
shot an Iraqi civilian in the back. The shooting was described to her
by a woman in her unit who treated the injury. "It was just, like,
the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them
over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado," she said.
"He just, like, seemed to view every Iraqi as like a potential
terrorist."
Several interviewees said
that, on occasion, these killings were justified by framing innocents
as terrorists, typically following incidents when American troops fired
on crowds of unarmed Iraqis. The troops would detain those who survived,
accusing them of being insurgents, and plant AK-47s next to the bodies
of those they had killed to make it seem as if the civilian dead were
combatants. "It would always be an AK because they have so many
of these weapons lying around," said Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout
Joe Hatcher, 26, of San Diego, said 9-millimeter handguns and even shovels--to
make it look like the noncombatant was digging a hole to plant an IED--were
used as well.
"Every good cop carries
a throwaway," said Hatcher, who served with the Fourth Cavalry
Regiment, First Squadron, in Ad Dawar, halfway between Tikrit and Samarra,
from February 2004 to March 2005. "If you kill someone and they're
unarmed, you just drop one on 'em." Those who survived such shootings
then found themselves imprisoned as accused insurgents.
In the winter of 2004, Sergeant
Campbell was driving near a particularly dangerous road in Abu Gharth,
a town west of Baghdad, when he heard gunshots. Sergeant Campbell, who
served as a medic in Abu Gharth with the 256th Infantry Brigade from
November 2004 to October 2005, was told that Army snipers had fired
fifty to sixty rounds at two insurgents who'd gotten out of their car
to plant IEDs. One alleged insurgent was shot in the knees three or
four times, treated and evacuated on a military helicopter, while the
other man, who was treated for glass shards, was arrested and detained.
"I come to find out
later that, while I was treating him, the snipers had planted--after
they had searched and found nothing--they had planted bomb-making materials
on the guy because they didn't want to be investigated for the shoot,"
Sergeant Campbell said. (He showed The Nation a photograph of one sniper
with a radio in his pocket that he later planted as evidence.) "And
to this day, I mean, I remember taking that guy to Abu Ghraib prison--the
guy who didn't get shot--and just saying 'I'm sorry' because there was
not a damn thing I could do about it.... I mean, I guess I have a moral
obligation to say something, but I would have been kicked out of the
unit in a heartbeat. I would've been a traitor."
Checkpoints
The US military checkpoints
dotted across Iraq, according to twenty-six soldiers and marines who
were stationed at them or supplied them--in locales as diverse as Tikrit,
Baghdad, Karbala, Samarra, Mosul and Kirkuk--were often deadly for civilians.
Unarmed Iraqis were mistaken for insurgents, and the rules of engagement
were blurred. Troops, fearing suicide bombs and rocket-propelled grenades,
often fired on civilian cars. Nine of those soldiers said they had seen
civilians being shot at checkpoints. These incidents were so common
that the military could not investigate each one, some veterans said.
"Most of the time, it's
a family," said Sergeant Cannon, who served at half a dozen checkpoints
in Tikrit. "Every now and then, there is a bomb, you know, that's
the scary part."
There were some permanent
checkpoints stationed across the country, but for unsuspecting civilians,
"flash checkpoints" were far more dangerous, according to
eight veterans who were involved in setting them up. These impromptu
security perimeters, thrown up at a moment's notice and quickly dismantled,
were generally designed to catch insurgents in the act of trafficking
weapons or explosives, people violating military-imposed curfews or
suspects in bombings or drive-by shootings.
Iraqis had no way of knowing
where these so-called "tactical control points" would crop
up, interviewees said, so many would turn a corner at a high speed and
became the unwitting targets of jumpy soldiers and marines.
"For me, it was really
random," said Lieutenant Van Engelen. "I just picked a spot
on a map that I thought was a high-volume area that might catch some
people. We just set something up for half an hour to an hour and then
we'd move on." There were no briefings before setting up checkpoints,
he said.
Temporary checkpoints were
safer for troops, according to the veterans, because they were less
likely to serve as static targets for insurgents. "You do it real
quick because you don't always want to announce your presence,"
said First Sgt. Perry Jefferies, 46, of Waco, Texas, who served with
the Fourth Infantry Division from April to October 2003.
The temporary checkpoints
themselves varied greatly. Lieutenant Van Engelen set up checkpoints
using orange cones and fifty yards of concertina wire. He would assign
a soldier to control the flow of traffic and direct drivers through
the wire, while others searched vehicles, questioned drivers and asked
for identification. He said signs in English and Arabic warned Iraqis
to stop; at night, troops used lasers, glow sticks or tracer bullets
to signal cars through. When those weren't available, troops improvised
by using flashlights sent them by family and friends back home.
"Baghdad is not well
lit," said Sergeant Flanders. "There's not street lights everywhere.
You can't really tell what's going on."
Other troops, however, said
they constructed tactical control points that were hardly visible to
drivers. "We didn't have cones, we didn't have nothing," recalled
Sergeant Bocanegra, who said he served at more than ten checkpoints
in Tikrit. "You literally put rocks on the side of the road and
tell them to stop. And of course some cars are not going to see the
rocks. I wouldn't even see the rocks myself."
According to Sergeant Flanders,
the primary concern when assembling checkpoints was protecting the troops
serving there. Humvees were positioned so that they could quickly drive
away if necessary, and the heavy weapons mounted on them were placed
"in the best possible position" to fire on vehicles that attempted
to pass through the checkpoint without stopping. And the rules of engagement
were often improvised, soldiers said.
"We were given a long
list of that kind of stuff and, to be honest, a lot of the time we would
look at it and throw it away," said Staff Sgt. James Zuelow, 39,
a National Guardsman from Juneau, Alaska, who served in Baghdad in the
Third Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment, for a year beginning in January
2005. "A lot of it was written at such a high level it didn't apply."
At checkpoints, troops had
to make split-second decisions on when to use lethal force, and veterans
said fear often clouded their judgment.
Sgt. Matt Mardan, 31, of
Minneapolis, served as a Marine scout sniper outside Falluja in 2004
and 2005 with the Third Battalion, First Marines. "People think
that's dangerous, and it is," he said. "But I would do that
any day of the week rather than be a marine sitting on a fucking checkpoint
looking at cars."
No car that passes through
a checkpoint is beyond suspicion, said Sergeant Dougherty. "You
start looking at everyone as a criminal.... Is this the car that's going
to try to run into me? Is this the car that has explosives in it? Or
is this just someone who's confused?" The perpetual uncertainty,
she said, is mentally exhausting and physically debilitating.
"In the moment, what's
passing through your head is, Is this person a threat? Do I shoot to
stop or do I shoot to kill?" said Lieutenant Morgenstein, who served
in Al Anbar.
Sergeant Mejía recounted
an incident in Ramadi in July 2003 when an unarmed man drove with his
young son too close to a checkpoint. The father was decapitated in front
of the small, terrified boy by a member of Sergeant Mejía's unit
firing a heavy .50-caliber machine gun. By then, said Sergeant Mejía,
who responded to the scene after the fact, "this sort of killing
of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."
The next month, Sergeant Mejía returned stateside for a two-week
rest and refused to go back, launching a public protest over the treatment
of Iraqis. (He was charged with desertion, sentenced to one year in
prison and given a bad-conduct discharge.)
During the summer of 2005,
Sergeant Millard, who served as an assistant to a general in Tikrit,
attended a briefing on a checkpoint shooting, at which his role was
to flip PowerPoint slides.
"This unit sets up this
traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on top of an armored
Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he said. "This car
speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that
that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts
200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother,
a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged
3. And they briefed this to the general. And they briefed it gruesome.
I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel
turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these fucking
hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Whether or not commanding
officers shared this attitude, interviewees said, troops were rarely
held accountable for shooting civilians at checkpoints. Eight veterans
described the prevailing attitude among them as "Better to be tried
by twelve men than carried by six." Since the number of troops
tried for killing civilians is so scant, interviewees said, they would
risk court-martial over the possibility of injury or death.
Rules of Engagement
Indeed, several troops said
the rules of engagement were fluid and designed to insure their safety
above all else. Some said they were simply told they were authorized
to shoot if they felt threatened, and what constituted a risk to their
safety was open to wide interpretation. "Basically it always came
down to self-defense and better them than you," said Sgt. Bobby
Yen, 28, of Atherton, California, who covered a variety of Army activities
in Baghdad and Mosul as part of the 222nd Broadcast Operations Detachment
for one year beginning in November 2003.
"Cover your own butt
was the first rule of engagement," Lieutenant Van Engelen confirmed.
"Someone could look at me the wrong way and I could claim my safety
was in threat."
Lack of a uniform policy
from service to service, base to base and year to year forced troops
to rely on their own judgment, Sergeant Jefferies explained. "We
didn't get straight-up rules," he said. "You got things like,
'Don't be aggressive' or 'Try not to shoot if you don't have to.' Well,
what does that mean?"
Prior to deployment, Sergeant
Flanders said, troops were trained on the five S's of escalation of
force: Shout a warning, Shove (physically restrain), Show a weapon,
Shoot non-lethal ammunition in a vehicle's engine block or tires, and
Shoot to kill. Some troops said they carried the rules in their pockets
or helmets on a small laminated card. "The escalation-of-force
methodology was meant to be a guide to determine course of actions you
should attempt before you shoot," he said. "'Shove' might
be a step that gets skipped in a given situation. In vehicles, at night,
how does 'Shout' work? Each soldier is not only drilled on the five
S's but their inherent right for self-defense."
Some interviewees said their
commanders discouraged this system of escalation. "There's no such
thing as warning shots," Specialist Resta said he was told during
his predeployment training at Fort Bragg. "I even specifically
remember being told that it was better to kill them than to have somebody
wounded and still alive."
Lieutenant Morgenstein said
that when he arrived in Iraq in August 2004, the rules of engagement
barred the use of warning shots. "We were trained that if someone
is not armed, and they are not a threat, you never fire a warning shot
because there is no need to shoot at all," he said. "You signal
to them with some other means than bullets. If they are armed and they
are a threat, you never fire a warning shot because...that just gives
them a chance to kill you. I don't recall at this point if this was
an ROE [rule of engagement] explicitly or simply part of our consistent
training." But later on, he said, "we were told the ROE was
changed" and that warning shots were now explicitly allowed in
certain circumstances.
Sergeant Westphal said that
by the time he arrived in Iraq earlier in 2004, the rules of engagement
for checkpoints were more refined--at least where he served with the
Army in Tikrit. "If they didn't stop, you were to fire a warning
shot," said Sergeant Westphal. "If they still continued to
come, you were instructed to escalate and point your weapon at their
car. And if they still didn't stop, then, if you felt you were in danger
and they were about to run your checkpoint or blow you up, you could
engage."
In his initial training,
Lieutenant Morgenstein said, marines were cautioned against the use
of warning shots because "others around you could be hurt by the
stray bullet," and in fact such incidents were not unusual. One
evening in Baghdad, Sergeant Zuelow recalled, a van roared up to a checkpoint
where another platoon in his company was stationed and a soldier fired
a warning shot that bounced off the ground and killed the van's passenger.
"That was a big wake-up call," he said, "and after that
we discouraged warning shots of any kind."
Many checkpoint incidents
went unreported, a number of veterans indicated, and the civilians killed
were not included in the overall casualty count. Yet judging by the
number of checkpoint shootings described to The Nation by veterans we
interviewed, such shootings appear to be quite common.
Sergeant Flatt recounted
one incident in Mosul in January 2005 when an elderly couple zipped
past a checkpoint. "The car was approaching what was in my opinion
a very poorly marked checkpoint, or not even a checkpoint at all, and
probably didn't even see the soldiers," he said. "The guys
got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they shot up the
car. And they literally sat in the car for the next three days while
we drove by them day after day."
In another incident, a man
was driving his wife and three children in a pickup truck on a major
highway north of the Euphrates, near Ramadi, on a rainy day in February
or March 2005. When the man failed to stop at a checkpoint, a marine
in a light-armored vehicle fired on the car, killing the wife and critically
wounding the son. According to Lieutenant Morgenstein, a civil affairs
officer, a JAG official gave the family condolences and about $3,000
in compensation. "I mean, it's a terrible thing because there's
no way to pay money to replace a family member," said Lieutenant
Morgenstein, who was sometimes charged with apologizing to families
for accidental deaths and offering them such compensation, called "condolence
payments" or "solatia." "But it's an attempt to
compensate for some of the costs of the funeral and all the expenses.
It's an attempt to make a good-faith offering in a sign of regret and
to say, you know, We didn't want this to happen. This is by accident."
According to a May report from the Government Accountability Office,
the Defense Department issued nearly $31 million in solatia and condolence
payments between 2003 and 2006 to civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan
who were "killed, injured or incur[red] property damage as a result
of U.S. or coalition forces' actions during combat." The study
characterizes the payments as "expressions of sympathy or remorse...but
not an admission of legal liability or fault." In Iraq, according
to the report, civilians are paid up to $2,500 for death, as much as
$1,500 for serious injuries and $200 or more for minor injuries.
On one occasion, in Ramadi
in late 2004, a man happened to drive down a road with his family minutes
after a suicide bomber had hit a barrier during a cordon-and-search
operation, Lieutenant Morgenstein said. The car's brakes failed and
marines fired. The wife and her two children managed to escape from
the car, but the man was fatally hit. The family was mistakenly told
that he had survived, so Lieutenant Morgenstein had to set the record
straight. "I've never done this before," he said. "I
had to go tell this woman that her husband was actually dead. We gave
her money, we gave her, like, ten crates of water, we gave the kids,
I remember, maybe it was soccer balls and toys. We just didn't really
know what else to do."
One such incident, which
took place in Falluja in March 2003 and was reported on at the time
by the BBC, even involved a group of plainclothes Iraqi policemen. Sergeant
Mejía was told about the event by several soldiers who witnessed
it.
The police officers were
riding in a white pickup truck, chasing a BMW that had raced through
a checkpoint. "The guy that the cops were chasing got through and
I guess the soldiers got scared or nervous, so when the pickup truck
came they opened fire on it," Sergeant Mejía said. "The
Iraqi police tried to cease fire, but when the soldiers would not stop
they defended themselves and there was a firefight between the soldiers
and the cops. Not a single soldier was killed, but eight cops were."
Accountability
A few veterans said checkpoint
shootings resulted from basic miscommunication, incorrectly interpreted
signals or cultural ignorance.
"As an American, you
just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers
pointing to the sky," said Sergeant Jefferies, who was responsible
for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a day. "That means
stop to most Americans, and that's a military hand signal that soldiers
are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please freeze, but an open
hand means stop. That's a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi
person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can see the problem that
develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think
they're saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they're saying come
here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come
there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you're shooting
pregnant women."
"You can't tell the
difference between these people at all," said Sergeant Mardan.
"They all look Arab. They all have beards, facial hair. Honestly,
it'll be like walking into China and trying to tell who's in the Communist
Party and who's not. It's impossible."
But other veterans said that
the frequent checkpoint shootings resulted from a lack of accountability.
Critical decisions, they said, were often left to the individual soldier's
or marine's discretion, and the military regularly endorsed these decisions
without inquiry.
"Some units were so
tight on their command and control that every time they fired one bullet,
they had to write an investigative report," said Sergeant Campbell.
But "we fired thousands of rounds without ever filing reports,"
he said. "And so it has to do with how much interaction and, you
know, the relationship of the commanders to their units."
Cpt. Megan O'Connor said
that in her unit every shooting incident was reported. O'Connor, 30,
of Venice, California, served in Tikrit with the Fiftieth Main Support
Battalion in the National Guard for a year beginning in December 2004,
after which she joined the 2-28 Brigade Combat Team in Ramadi. But Captain
O'Connor said that after viewing the reports and consulting with JAG
officers, the colonel in her command would usually absolve the soldiers.
"The bottom line is he always said, you know, We weren't there,"
she said. "We'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but make sure
that they know that this is not OK and we're watching them."
Probes into roadblock killings
were mere formalities, a few veterans said. "Even after a thorough
investigation, there's not much that could be done," said Specialist
Reppenhagen. "It's just the nature of the situation you're in.
That's what's wrong. It's not individual atrocity. It's the fact that
the entire war is an atrocity."
The March 2005 shooting death
of Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari at a checkpoint in Baghdad,
however, caused the military to finally crack down on such accidents,
said Sergeant Campbell, who served there. Yet this did not necessarily
lead to greater accountability. "Needless to say, our unit was
under a lot of scrutiny not to shoot any more people than we already
had to because we were kind of a run-and-gun place," said Sergeant
Campbell. "One of the things they did was they started saying,
Every time you shoot someone or shoot a car, you have to fill out a
15-[6] or whatever the investigation is. Well, that investigation is
really onerous for the soldiers. It's like a 'You're guilty' investigation
almost--it feels as though. So commanders just stopped reporting shootings.
There was no incentive for them to say, Yeah, we shot so-and-so's car."
(Sergeant Campbell said he
believes the number of checkpoint shootings did decrease after the high-profile
incident, but that was mostly because soldiers were now required to
use pinpoint lasers at night. "I think they reduced, from when
we started to when we left, the number of Iraqi civilians dying at checkpoints
from one a day to one a week," he said. "Inherent in that
number, like all statistics, is those are reported shootings.")
Fearing a backlash against
these shootings of civilians, Lieutenant Morgenstein gave a class in
late 2004 at his battalion headquarters in Ramadi to all the battalion's
officers and most of its senior noncommissioned officers during which
he asked them to put themselves in the Iraqis' place.
"I told them the obvious,
which is, everyone we wound or kill that isn't an insurgent, hurts us,"
he said. "Because I guarantee you, down the road, that means a
wounded or killed marine or soldier.... One, it's the right thing to
do to not wound or shoot someone who isn't an insurgent. But two, out
of self-preservation and self-interest, we don't want that to happen
because they're going to come back with a vengeance."
Responses
The Nation contacted the
Pentagon with a detailed list of questions and a request for comment
on descriptions of specific patterns of abuse. These questions included
requests to explain the rules of engagement, the operation of convoys,
patrols and checkpoints, the investigation of civilian shootings, the
detention of innocent Iraqis based on false intelligence and the alleged
practice of "throwaway guns." The Pentagon referred us to
the Multi-National Force Iraq Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad,
where a spokesperson sent us a response by e-mail.
"As a matter of operational
security, we don't discuss specific tactics, techniques, or procedures
(TTPs) used to identify and engage hostile forces," the spokesperson
wrote, in part. "Our service members are trained to protect themselves
at all times. We are facing a thinking enemy who learns and adjusts
to our operations. Consequently, we adapt our TTPs to ensure maximum
combat effectiveness and safety of our troops. Hostile forces hide among
the civilian populace and attack civilians and coalition forces. Coalition
forces take great care to protect and minimize risks to civilians in
this complex combat environment, and we investigate cases where our
actions may have resulted in the injury of innocents.... We hold our
Soldiers and Marines to a high standard and we investigate reported
improper use of force in Iraq."
This response is consistent
with the military's refusal to comment on rules of engagement, arguing
that revealing these rules threatens operations and puts troops at risk.
But on February 9, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, then coalition spokesman,
writing on the coalition force website, insisted that the rules of engagement
for troops in Iraq were clear. "The law of armed conflict requires
that, to use force, 'combatants' must distinguish individuals presenting
a threat from innocent civilians," he wrote. "This basic principle
is accepted by all disciplined militaries. In the counterinsurgency
we are now fighting, disciplined application of force is even more critical
because our enemies camouflage themselves in the civilian population.
Our success in Iraq depends on our ability to treat the civilian population
with humanity and dignity, even as we remain ready to immediately defend
ourselves or Iraqi civilians when a threat is detected."
When asked about veterans'
testimony that civilian deaths at the hands of coalition forces often
went unreported and typically went unpunished, the Press Information
Center spokesperson replied only, "Any allegations of misconduct
are treated seriously.... Soldiers have an obligation to immediately
report any misconduct to their chain of command immediately."
Last September, Senator Patrick
Leahy, then ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, called a Pentagon
report on its procedures for recording civilian casualties in Iraq "an
embarrassment." "It totals just two pages," Leahy said,
"and it makes clear that the Pentagon does very little to determine
the cause of civilian casualties or to keep a record of civilian victims."
In the four long years of
the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy
toll--both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have
witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians, overseen by
epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public
Health, published a study late last year in the British medical journal
The Lancet that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the
March 2003 invasion as the result of violence. The researchers found
that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent
deaths, an estimate they said could be "conservative," since
"deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if
households had any uncertainty about the responsible party."
"Just the carnage, all
the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw," Specialist
Englehart said. "I just--I started thinking, like, Why? What was
this for?"
"It just gets frustrating,"
Specialist Reppenhagen said. "Instead of blaming your own command
for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi
people.... So it's a constant psychological battle to try to, you know,
keep--to stay humane."
"I felt like there was
this enormous reduction in my compassion for people," said Sergeant
Flanders. "The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and
the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned."
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