The Vets Speak Truth

Only recently have we emerged from the effects of the heart- and gut-
wrenching Winter Soldier hearings. Over four days, we witnessed 30 hours
of vetted statements from 72 veterans, active duty soldiers, experts, and
Iraqis who had the great courage to go public with their first-hand
experiences.1 In account after account, a common thread emerged of
soldiers who struggled with their mission as occupiers of a country in the
midst of a civil war, and Iraqi families being torn apart and terrified, terrified
by—not grateful for—the presence of American soldiers and private
mercenaries.

We need to comprehend the enormous scale of the so-called “collateral
damage” in Iraq. It is appalling to learn that over a million Iraqi civilians are
estimated to have died since the U.S. invasion. 2 The speakers told of
Iraqis, being without power and water, begging for food and fuel, and only
wanting foreign troops and war profiteers to leave so they can begin to
rebuild their devastated country. Like Clifton Hicks,3 who served in Iraq and
lost three close friends there, most voices trembled with soft emotion or
rose, filled with bitterness or anger; and so many faces and clenched fists
reflected the pain of those who had experienced too much death, too much
fear, and too much destruction.

The groundbreaking hearings, held by the national veterans organization,
Iraq Vets Against the War (IVAW) near Washington D.C. from March 13 to
16, were patterned after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held in Detroit by
the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which are now thought to be one of
the turning points of that conflict. The title for the hearings comes from
Thomas Paine who wrote in 1776, “These are the times that try men’s souls.
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from
the service of [their] country; but he that stands [by] it now, deserves the
love and thanks of man and woman.” Unlike the “summer soldiers” who often
deserted their duties in Paine’s time, “winter soldiers” carry on courageously
through the darkness.

The accounts began to take on a similar tone, no matter if the narrator was
Army or Marine, black or white or Latino, stationed in Fallujah or Baghdad,
or some other city or town. The soldiers and veterans explained how trickle-
down abuse starts at the top ranks of the military hierarchy with
institutionalized racism, sexual harassment, and assault on the lower ranks.
They talked about their complete lack of training in Iraqi culture and
language. As we listened, a composite picture emerged, in which our
soldiers are conditioned before leaving U.S. soil to think of Iraqis as “less
than,” as “Hajis;” a term once reserved for pilgrims to Mecca, now turned
inside out to demean and dehumanize. “Haji” has become to the Iraq
occupation what “Gook” became to the Vietnam and Korean wars. When a
people is rendered less than, everyone soon loses some humanity. When a
population is dehumanized, it becomes easier to kill them.

The presenters at Winter Soldier went deeper than telling stories that once
again confirm what we all should know, war is hell. They addressed the
anguished question that naturally arises: How do you explain actions that
would be criminal even in a war zone? The soldiers and veterans repeatedly
described their honorable motives in joining the military and throughout their
service, no matter the difficulty and repeated sacrifices it demanded of
them; however, they came to believe the invasion and occupation were
unjust and not what they were led to believe. We could not listen to the four
days of accounts and imagine our country invaded Iraq to export the
American dream of freedom and democracy any more than we could
imagine, now that we have removed the impediment of Saddam Hussein, the
five Western oil companies that will have free access to Iraq’s resources are
more interested in exporting this same American dream instead of importing
a more flammable one. Even the ultraconservative former Federal Reserve
chairman, Alan Greenspan, declared that “the prime motive for the war in
Iraq was oil.”4 It didn’t take long for the soldiers and vets who spoke to
come to the same conclusion.

The nature of this occupation and the civil war it sparked are especially
brutal for everyone involved. Not so for those of us in the 99% of the
population who are not really touched by this war. Daniel Fanning, who
served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard, described
the duty the Commander in Chief has tasked to us: “shopping with yellow
ribbons proudly displayed on our SUVs.” As in all wars, if you haven’t
experienced it, it’s hard to grasp the white-hot frustration, anger, and
vengeful wrath that results when our soldiers have no reliable way to discern
friend from foe and are under extreme duress at virtually all times in a near-
country-wide combat zone. As the disillusionment over the injustice and the
impossibility of the mission grows, so does the abuse of civilians. When
soldiers, deployed two, three, four, and even five times, experience more
and more casualties in their units—people with whom they share a bond that
can be even stronger than family—their rage understandably erupts and
they need to blame someone for their grief. Similar circumstances produced
similar results in the jungles of Vietnam.

The soldiers and vets described the shear mechanics of killing so many
people. In story after story, we heard how Rules of Engagement slowly
eroded to the point where it was too often left up to these young, very
frightened, soldiers to determine for themselves if they “felt” threatened.
Jason Lemieux, who served almost five years with the Marines, including the
invasion and three tours in Iraq, described the rules he received: “[M]y
commander told me that our mission was—and I quote—‘to kill those who
need to be killed and save those who need to be saved.’ And with those
words, he pretty much set the tone for the deployment.” Too often, the
Rules were reduced to “Shoot anything that moves.”5

Two Marines talked about trashing the country during the invasion. One of
them, Brian Casler, served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. As
part of the invasion force, he said he and others in their unit defecated and
urinated into the containers of food and water they threw at the welcoming
children they encountered. To relieve the boredom during his first
deployment, they demolished Babylonian ruins and “drove over the rubble
for fun.” After describing how they ransacked a public building, he said, “We
found out later that we had shredded all of the birth certificates for the City
of Fallujah.”6

Several speakers talked about the disrespect of the Iraqi dead. Michael
Leduc, for example, told us about “Rotten Randy” and “Tony the Torso,” the
nicknames his Marine unit gave to the corpses they used for rifle practice.

Soldiers and vets also explained the practice of “reconnaissance by fire,”
where they’d shoot first into a house or a neighborhood in order to draw
return fire. Then, instead of moving on the source of the return fire and
incurring more risk to the unit, they’d respond with overwhelming firepower
that devastated the entire building or area. Hart Vigas, a mortarman who
served with the Army’s 82nd Airborne for the invasion of Iraq, painted a
word picture of the indiscriminate, “ground-shaking” destruction from C-130
Specter gunships.7 The students have learned from their teachers. A
forward observer and drill instructor with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division,
Jessie Hamilton stated that the Iraqi forces “showed little or no restraint”
when they responded to the slightest attack with such indiscriminate firing
that the U.S. troops gave nicknames to their methods: ‘spray and pray’ and
‘death blossom.’ “Once the shooting started,” he said, “death would blossom
all around.”8

Clifton Hicks described an operation that resulted in an official estimate of
700 to 800 enemy dead. “Judging from what I saw on the ground,” he said,
“I'm willing to swear under oath in all honesty that while many enemy
combatants were in fact killed, the majority of those so-called KIAs were in
fact civilians attempting to flee the battlefield.9

We were transfixed by the presentation and pictures of Jon Michael Turner,
a shorter young man with a blonde beard who served in Iraq with the 8th
Marines. Like so many personal veteran stories we’ve heard, his was still
bleeding with its raw truthfulness. “A lot of the raids and patrols we did were
at night around three in the morning . . . . And what we would do is just kick
in the doors and terrorize the families.” After he described segregating the
women, the children, and the men, he said, “If the men of the household
were giving us problems, we’d go ahead and take care of them anyway we
felt necessary, whether it be choking them or slamming their head against
the walls. . . . On my wrist, there’s Arabic for ‘F you.’ I got that put on my
wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking
hand, and any time I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead
and use it.”

He was one of the first to speak of these things but far from the last. Like so
many other speakers, he said this kind of situation was the norm for him and
for others, not the exception. As for so many later speakers, other speakers
on the panel nodded in agreement. With a forced smile that constrained his
quivering lips, he closed with an apology to the Iraqi people: “I just want to
say that I am sorry for the hate and destruction that I have inflicted on
innocent people. . . . until people hear about what is going on with this war, it
will continue to happen and people will continue to die. I am sorry for the
things that I did. I am no longer the monster that I once was.”10

Describing the heartache that results from not being able to identify your
enemy, Jason Washburn, a Marine who served four years and completed
three tours of duty in Iraq, said this: “If the town or the city that we were
approaching was a known threat, if the unit that went through the area
before we did took a high number of casualties, we were basically allowed to
shoot whatever we wanted. . . . I remember one woman was walking by,
carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading towards us. So
we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher. And
when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was only full of groceries.
And, I mean, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to
pieces for it.” 11

We listened to Jason Hurd, a medic with ten years of Army service including
tours of duty in Iraq: “But as time went on and the absurdity of war set in,
they started taking things too far. Individuals from my unit indiscriminately
and unnecessarily opened fire on innocent civilians as they were driving
down the road on their own streets.”12 He asked us all to see the war
through the eyes of an Iraqi and consider how we might respond if a foreign
army invaded our communities and terrorized our families.

Soldiers and vets told how superior officers instructed them on the official
ways to torment and beat detainees. Andrew Duffy, a medic who served on
the trauma team at the Abu Ghraib military prison, put it this way, “You can’t
spell abuse without ‘Abu.’” They were told to use the term “detainee”
because, unlike “prisoner of war,” there are no laws protecting detainees.
While he rocked back and forth in his seat nervously, Mathew Childess, a
Marine infantryman who served two tours in Iraq, referred to beating
detainees and “breaking fingers.” When a particular detainee begged for
food and water, he took the man’s hat, wiped himself with it, and stuffed it
into the man’s mouth.

Like Turner, numerous soldiers and veterans stared into the cameras that
were recording the hearing for broadcast and pled for forgiveness from the
Iraqi people now that they were distanced from the madness in Iraq in an
apparent attempt to regain some of what had been lost. For many, their
hands trembled as they talked and, along with us witnesses, were moved to
tears. At other times, so many only revealed that thousand-yard stare we’ve
seen too many times on the faces of Vietnam vets who carry the scars of
that war.

We sat engulfed in the horror, sorrow, and grief of the soldiers’ experiences
and wondered how can we transform this to help our children and
grandchildren reach an understanding so that they can make wise decisions
when they have the opportunity to serve their community and country at the
local homeless shelter, the voting booth, the peace march, or the armed
forces.

It bears repeating: So many soldiers and veterans spoke of their noble
motives for joining the military—especially after 9/11—but then having to
face the ignoble inhumanity of this occupation that so compromised their
values. Then they returned to a country that anointed them as the heroes
they so wished to be. Is it any wonder they are conflicted and disillusioned
with the contradictions? Is it any wonder that government statistics report
that one in three returning soldiers has mental problems and that CBS News
recently described the suicide rate among today’s soldiers and vets as
“epidemic?”13 As we continue to see with Vietnam vets, post traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) is a normal human response to the inhumanity of
war.

Kristofer Goldsmith was a good soldier, graduating at the top of his basic
training class and receiving a 94.6% average in his Warrior Leadership
Course. But after four deployments in Iraq and almost shooting a six-year-
old boy, he said he became a “broken soldier.” He was due to get out of the
service when he, like some 80,000 other soldiers, was “stop-lossed” and
ordered to redeploy to Iraq for a fifth time. The day before he was to leave,
he tried to kill himself with alcohol and prescription pills. He was finally
released, but his discharge papers state: Misconduct: Serious Offense. His
offense? A suicide attempt due to mental illness. He showed the audience a
picture of himself, in uniform as the proud soldier, then slammed it down on
the table saying “This boy is dead.”

Some vets like Jeff Lucey couldn’t speak, so his parents spoke in his stead.
His father said his grown Marine son came home so haunted by what he had
done and witnessed that he drank heavily to anesthetize his pain—a coping
strategy mentioned by many of the vets who spoke. His parents said
Veterans Affairs (VA) told them they couldn’t assess him for PTSD until he
was alcohol free. Although he wouldn’t talk about the trauma he
experienced, Jeff would ask his father to hold him on his lap and rock him so
he could feel safe. Jeff’s father said the last time he was able to hold his son
was when he cut his body down from the rafters at their home where Jeff
had hung himself with a hose.14

Those who sell the invasion and occupation as a “just war” will deny that
these first-hand accounts are part of the whole truth or they will simply
dismiss the speakers as liars and traitors, which is already happening. They
will continue to entice new advocates and a never-ending stream of recruits,
all made possible by a gutless Congress, a compliant media, an apathetic
public, and a bottomless military budget, including $4 billion annually for
recruiting.

Repeatedly, the speakers stated that they welcomed the opportunity to
testify as to the accuracy of their statements in a legal proceeding. Luis
Montalvan, a captain with 17 years of service in the Army, stated, “I would
like nothing better than to testify under oath to Congress.” He then quoted
President Theodore Roosevelt: “To announce that there must be no
criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or
wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public.”

The establishment media has been promoting the notion that we can “win”
and that the winning part has now started with the success of the surge.
What the argument ignores is that the recent drop in casualties are more
attributable to the fact that over four million Iraqis are refugees now and for
those who stayed at home, most of the ethnic cleansing has been
accomplished. The Winter Soldier speakers knew not to be swayed by this
propaganda. They know it’s immoral to use violence to achieve imperial
ends. Nearly everyone who spoke (including two Iraq civilians) concluded by
saying, U.S. troops AND the 180,000 private contractors and mercenaries15
need to get out of Iraq now.

ENDNOTES

Video and some transcripts are available at the IVAW Web site (www.
ivaw.org) and at www.democracynow.
January 2008 - Update on Iraqi Casualty Data. Further survey work
undertaken by Opinion Research Business, in association with its
research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over
1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which
started in 2003. http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?
NewsId=88
The statement from Mr. Hicks can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/clifton-hicks-
steven-casey/video
London Times, 9/16/07
Mr. Lemieux’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-2/jason-
washburn/video
The other Marine, Matt Howard, served with the 1st Marines. His
statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/breakdown-military/matt-howard/video
Mr. Vigas’ statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/hart-viges/video
Mr. Hamilton’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/jesse-
hamilton/video
http://therealnews.com/web/index.php?
thisdataswitch=0&thisid=1138&thisview=item
Mr. Turner’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-2/jon-turner/video
Mr. Washburn’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-2/jason-
washburn/video
Mr. Hurd’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/jason-hurd/video
A 2007 CBS news investigation found that in 2005, veterans
between the ages of 20-24 were between 2 and 4 times as likely to
commit suicide as their civilian peers.
The statement of Kevin and Joyce Lucey can be read at: http://www.
democracynow.org/2008/3/19/half_a_decade_of_war_five
The statement by Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, Blackwater,
was particularly damning as regards the corporate profiteers, the
“Coalition of the Billing,” as he called it.

Link.