Winter Soldier (34 page)

Four months after Winter Soldier, the words of former marine Jon Michael Turner still ring in my mind. “The reason I am doing this today is not only for myself and for the rest of society to hear. It’s for all those who can’t be here to talk about the things that we went through, to talk about the things that we did,” he said. “Until people hear about what is going on with this war, it will continue to happen, and people will continue to die.”

When I was in Iraq, I worked as an unembedded journalist. I had no military escort. I traveled around in taxis and beat-up old economy cars and met regular Iraqi people and talked with them about their daily lives and their attitudes about the U.S. occupation. My biggest safety concern was not the “insurgents” but the American soldier at a checkpoint with an itchy trigger finger and loose Rules of Engagement. On my first day in Iraq in April 2003, at the first checkpoint I crossed, a young soldier with a helmet too big for his head almost lit me up when I stepped out of the taxi. The only thing that saved me was that I was with another journalist…and he was blond.

Over my three trips to Iraq from 2003 to 2005, I reported stories that were eerily similar to those presented by veterans at Winter Soldier. In Fallujah, I watched a medical team lift the rotting corpse of a middle-aged woman out of the garden of a neighbor’s home. In Babylon, I visited a human rights office that had been raided by the U.S. military, parts of two sheiks’ brains splattered on a hallway wall. West of Baghdad, I spoke with a tribal chief whose sons had been pulled over by U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint and then thrown off a bridge into the Tigris River to their deaths.

As I reported these stories, my heart filled with rage at these Americans and I felt myself going through the same process of dehumanization the veterans described at Winter Soldier. If I had a weapon instead of a microphone, I don’t know what I would have done. I understood the motivations of the fighters who fired on the American soldiers as they rolled their tanks and Humvees through civilian neighborhoods. I returned home with a rage toward these soldiers and toward my country, a rage that has only subsided after I’ve had the opportunity to meet these same soldiers now that they’re veterans and have had the chance to take off their uniforms and put down their weapons. I’ve understood through these personal interactions that in war it is not the “other side” that is the enemy but the war itself and the leaders who started it.

This is why I think Winter Soldier is so important. These brave veterans, by coming forward en masse and in public, give us the opportunity to begin an important conversation about the nature of war and the effect on the human condition. Someday soon this war will end and the last American troops will come home from Iraq. At that point American veterans and Iraqi civilians will be able to sit across the table from each other without guns, tanks, or mortars and have the same kind of exchanges that each of us do with our neighbors.

During my three trips to Iraq I was met with great courtesy by nearly every Iraqi I encountered. Across the country, Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish families all invited me into their homes and offered me tea and sometimes a complete lunch. It didn’t matter that I was an American. The main point was that I was interested in their story and didn’t carry a gun. Iraqi people are ready to have this conversation and Winter Soldier shows American veterans are too.

June 13, 2008

1.“Valley Forge Encampment: A Winter of Suffering,” National Park Service, available at: http://www.nps.gov/history/logcabin/html/vf.html.

2.Gerald Niccosia, Home to War: The History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement (New York: Crown Books, 2001), 80.

3.“Flashback: A Rare Broadcast of John Kerry’s 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War Before the Senate,” Democracy Now!, July 30, 2004, available at: http:// www. democracynow.org/2004/7/30/flashback_a_rare_broadcast_of_john.

4.“Opening Remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee,” General George Casey, February 28, 2008, available at: http://www.army.mil/-speeches/2008/ 02/ 28/ 7824-opening-remarks-house-armed-services-committee/.

Rules of Engagement

1.Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, Appendix E, “The Rules of Engagement for US Military Forces in Iraq,” Human Rights Watch, December 2003, available at: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/index.htm.

2.Colin Kahl, “In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and US Conduct in Iraq,” International Security 32, No. 1 (Summer 2007): 4–46.

3.Josh White et al., “Homicide Charges Rare in Iraq War: Few Troops Tried For Killing Civilians,” Washington Post, August 28, 2006, A01.

4.A full database of these internal Pentagon documents is available on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union, http://www.aclu.org/natsec/foia/search.html.

5.Gilbert Burnham et al., “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet, October 11, 2006.

Racism and the Dehumanization of War

1.“President Bush Meets with Alhurra Television on Wednesday,” The White House, May 5, 2004, available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/ 20040505-5.html.

2.Jennifer Harper, “‘Bad News’ Rife in Military Coverage,” Washington Times, June 14, 2006.

3.Noel Cisneros, “San Jose Marine Granted Conscientious Objector Status,” April 1, 2007, available at http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id= 5173724.

4.Aaron Glantz, “Civilian Court Sides with Conscientious Objector,” Inter Press Service, April 5, 2007, available at http://ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=37233.

5.S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (New York: William Morrow Company, 1950) 54–58.

6.David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996) 252–54.

7.Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007) 307–308.

Civilian Testimony: The Cost of War in Iraq

1.International Committee of the Red Cross, “Iraq: No Let-Up in Humanitarian Crisis,” March 2008, available at: http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/ ­htmlall/iraq-report-170308/$file/ICRC-Iraq-report-0308-eng.pdf.

2.Refugees International, “The Iraqi Displacement Crisis,” March 3, 2008, available at: http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/9679.

3.“Iraq Poll March 2008,” D3 Systems of Vienna, VA, and KA Research Ltd. of Istanbul, Turkey for ABC and BBC News, available at: http://abcnews.go.com/ ­PollingUnit/ Story?id=4444000&page=4.

4.Ciara Gilmartin, “The ‘Surge’ of Iraqi Prisoners,” (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Policy in Focus, May 7, 2008), available at: http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/5207.

5.Translation in English: “Thank you very much for being here today. God willing, we will go together to Iraq someday and share in happiness and security. Today, we will talk about the situation in Iraq.”

Divide to Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military

1.Sara Corbett, “The Women’s War,” New York Times, March 18, 2007.

2.Helen Benedict, “Women Warriors,” International Herald Tribune, May 26, 2008.

3.Ibid.

4.Helen Benedict, “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” Salon.com, March 7, 2007, available at: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/07/women_in_military/.

5.National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Iraq War Clinician Guide: Military Sexual Trauma, 66–67, available at: http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/ ncdocs/manuals/iraq_clinician_guide_ch_9.pdf?opm=1&rr=rr1519&srt= d&echorr=true.

6.“Arguments for Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network, available at: http://www.sldn.org/binary-data/SLDN_ARTICLES/ pdf_ file/3195.pdf.

7.Michael Boucai, “Balancing Your Strengths Against Your Felonies: Considerations for Military Recruitment of Ex-Offenders,” February 13, 2007, Michael D. Palm Center at the University of Santa Barbara, available at: http://www. ­palmcenter.org/ files/active/0/boucaiM_strengthsFelonies_092007.pdf.

8.Army Regulation 601-201, pages 35–36, available at: http://www. palmcenter.org/ files/active/0/Army_Regulation_601-210.pdf.

The Crisis in Veterans’ Health Care and the Costs of War at Home

1.Ira Katz, “Re: Suicides,” e-mail to Michael J. Kussman, Undersecretary of Health, Veterans Administration, December 15, 2007, Plantiff’s Exhibit P-1283, United States District Court for Northern California, Case No., C 07 3758.

2.Ira Katz, “FW: Not for the CBS News Interview Request,” e-mail to Ev Chasen, VA Spokesperson, February 13, 2008, Plaintiff’s Exhibit P-1269, United States District Court for Northern California, Case No., C 07 3758.

3.Ibid.

4.“The Truth About Veterans’ Suicides,” Hearing of the House Committee on ­Veterans Affairs, May 6, 2008. Transcripts and video of the hearing available at: http://veterans.house.gov/hearings/hearing.aspx?NewsID=237.

5.Veterans for Common Sense v. Peake, Northern District of California Before the Honorable Samuel Conti, Trial Transcript Final, April 30, 2008, 1369, 1372.

6.Department of Defense: Iraq War (Operation Iraqi Freedom, OIF), Casualties from March 19, 2003, through May 31, 2008; DoD Contingency Tracking System, through March 31, 2008; and Afghanistan War (Operation Enduring Freedom, OEF), Casualties from October 7, 2001, through May 31, 2008.

7.Department of Veterans Affairs, “Analysis of VA Health Care Utilization Among US Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) Veterans,” March 25, 2008, and “VA Benefits Activity: Veterans Deployed to the Global War on Terror,” April 16, 2008. Obtained by VCS using the Freedom of Information Act.

The Breakdown of the Military

1.“CTS Deployment File Baseline Report for Operating Enduring Freedom and Operating Iraqi Freedom as of October 31, 2007,” Defense Manpower Data Center, obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.

2.Amy Fairweather, Risk and Protective Factors for Homelessness among OIF/OEF Veterans (San Francisco: Swords to Plowshares, 2006).

3.Greg Zoroya, “US Deploys More than 43,000 Unfit for Combat,” USA Today, May 8, 2008.

4.Leo Shane, “New Guidelines Allow Troops Who’ve Recovered from Traumatic Stress Disorders to Redeploy,” Stars and Stripes, December 22, 2006.

5.Mark Thompson, “America’s Medicated Army,” Time, June 5, 2008.

6.“Mentally Unfit, Forced to Fight,” Hartford Courant, May 17, 2006.

7.Rick Maze, “Bill Would Pay Extra for Stop-Loss Service,” Army Times, May 25, 2008.

8.“CTS Deployment File Baseline Report for Operating Enduring Freedom and Operating Iraqi Freedom as of October 31, 2007,” Defense Manpower Data Center, obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.

9.William McMichael, “Gear Shortage Could Last Years After Iraq,” Army Times, March 30, 2007.

The Future of GI Resistance

1.Zogby International, “U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006,” February 28, 2006, http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075.

2.Mary Wiltenburg, “When A Soldier in Iraq Won’t Soldier,” Christian Science Monitor, August 13, 2007.

3.The Appeal for Redress can be found at http://www.appealforredress.org.

4.Rick Maze, “End Iraq War, Service Members Tell Congress,” Marine Corps Times, January 18, 2007.

5.Noah Schachtman, “Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death,” Wired, May 2, 2007.

.50-Caliber: A standard crew-served machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds, often mounted on the top of a vehicle

AC-130 Gunship: Military fixed-wing aircraft used for close air support and force protection

ACR: Armored cavalry regiment

AK-47: A Russian-made assault rifle used by the many Iraqis, including the police, insurgents, and militias

Apache Helicopter: The U.S. Army’s principal attack helicopter, flies in all weather, day and night

AWOL: Absent Without Leave

Battalion: A military unit of around five hundred to fifteen hundred men, usually consisting of between two and six companies, and typically commanded by a lieutenant colonel

Bradley Fighting Vehicle: An armored personnel carrier used to transport GIs and provide both medium and long-range firing capability for the infantry

CASH: Combat Support Hospital

CID: Criminal Investigation Division; police who investigate crimes inside the military

CO: Conscientious objector, someone who no longer believes in war because of religious, moral, or ethical reasons

CO: Commanding Officer

Company: A military unit, typically consisting of seventy-five to two hundred soldiers. Most companies are formed of three to five platoons

CPATT: Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, part of the U.S. occupation charged with training Iraqi police

DD214: U.S. military discharge certificate

Desertion: To abandon the military without permission

Division: A unit of the military typically consisting of between ten and twenty thousand troops

Flexi-cuffs: Plastic restraints used by soldiers to handcuff detainees

FOB: Forward Operating Base

Hillbilly Armor: Iraq war slang for homemade armor for soft-skinned Humvees

Humvee: Four-wheel-drive jeep used to patrol streets and transport troops, an acronyn for “High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle”

IED: Improvised explosive device

JAG: Judge Advocate General, the judicial arm of the U.S. military

Kalashnikov: An AK-47

KBR: Kellogg, Brown, and Root—a large civilian contractor operating in Iraq, subsidiary of Halliburton

KIA: Killed in action

M-16: A military issue assault rifle

M-60: A machine gun used by American forces

Mark 19: A belt-fed grenade launcher

MedEvac: Medical evacuation, from Iraq usually to Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany

Medic: A trained soldier who is responsible for providing first aid and frontline trauma care

Mortar: Fires shells at a much lower velocity and higher ballistic arc than other ordnance; their shells explode on impact with target