Winter Soldier (5 page)

That is a man’s face on April 2, 2005, at Abu Ghraib. We sustained a very highly coordinated attack, and the next day we went ahead and had to search the premises for any remains. That face, or that part of the face, was found and put on top of a Kevlar, so a picture could be taken of it.

We had a mortar attack at Camp India, which was in between Camp Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. This was a twelve-year-old boy who was building our camp for us, and he took a piece of shrapnel to the head.

On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. He was an innocent man. I don’t know his name. I call him “the Fat Man.” During the incident, he walked back to his house and I shot him in front of his friend and father. The first round didn’t kill him after I’d hit him in his neck. Afterwards, he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. I looked at my friend I was on post with, and I said, “Well, I can’t let that happen.” I took another shot and took him out. The rest of his family carried him away. It took seven Iraqis to carry his body.

We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me. This is the same individual who stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death would get a four-day pass when we returned from Iraq.

My third confirmed kill was a man riding his bicycle. We had Laura Logan from CBS with us, but she was with the other squad. It was later on in the day, and we went ahead and took out some individuals because we were excited about the firefight we had just gotten into. And we didn’t have a cameraman or woman with us.

Anytime we did have embedded reporters with us, our actions changed drastically. We never acted the same. We were always on key with everything, did everything by the book.

House raids: Because we were a grunt battalion, we were responsible for going on several patrols. A lot of the raids and patrols we did were at night at around three o’clock in the morning. We kicked in doors and terrorized families. We segregated the women and children from the men. If the men of the household gave us problems, we’d take care of them any way we felt necessary, whether it be choking them or slapping their head against the walls.

On my wrist, there is Arabic for “fuck you.” I got it put on my wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking hand and anytime I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead and use it.

I’m going to show you a video of the Fatimid mosque minaret. It is riddled with bullet holes. The holes in the top of it were from mortars. A tank round went into the minaret even though we weren’t sure if we were taking fire. It is illegal to shoot into a mosque unless you are taking fire from it. There was no fire that was taken from that mosque. It was shot into because we were angry. This video shows the tank round that went into the minaret.

[The video plays. A soldier inside the tank jokes over the radio:] “We are on ice cream trying to suppress the blue and white minaret.... Go ahead, take another round at that building, at that mosque over there. Another round, Kilo Two. Fuck yes. Awesome.” [Video ends.]

There are many more stories and incidents for me to talk about although we don’t have the time. Everyone sitting up here has these stories, and there’s been over a million troops that have gone in and out of Iraq, so the possibilities are endless.

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.

Those four crosses and this memorial service were for the five guys in Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Eighth Marines that we lost. Throughout our unit, we had eighteen that got killed.

Before I begin, I have a brief statement: For the infantrymen, scouts, and tankers of C Troop First Squadron, First United States Cavalry Regiment, there are few words which can express my admiration. I can merely say that I love them with all of my heart and that I would never have made it home alive without such worthy and courageous troopers at my side. These were men who risked everything for a cause they believed was just and true. They left behind their families, their friends, and their lives. They endured the unendurable. They did this not for greed, or jealousy, or hatred, but for the sake of love, and for that they are beyond judgment. I am no judge, and I did not come here to pass judgment either on my fellow soldiers or the officers who once commanded us in war. I’m here today to pass judgment on war itself.

First item, April 2004, free-fire zone in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood of Baghdad: During Operation Blackjack, I was instructed by our troop commander, a captain, that one sector was now a free-fire zone. He told us there were “no friendlies in the area.” He said, “Game on. All weapons free.”

Upon arrival in the neighborhood, the streets were littered with wreckage of vehicles. Who knows if it’s a civilian vehicle or an enemy vehicle? There’s no way to tell. In addition, there wasn’t a single building that hadn’t had a hole shot through it or something exploded inside of it. The streets were littered with human and animal corpses. I did not see military gear or weapons of any kind on any of the bodies.

I did not fire my weapon on this operation, but other members of my unit embraced the weapons-free order by firing indiscriminately into occupied civilian vehicles and at civilians themselves. They used personal weapons like rifles, vehicle-mounted weapons such as machine guns, and coaxial machine guns of various caliber. I swear until the day I die, I did not see one enemy on that operation. Judging from what I saw on the ground, the majority of those so-called KIAs were civilians attempting to flee the battlefield.

This is what happens when a conventional force such as the U.S. military attacks a heavily populated urban area. We’re not bad people. We were there because we thought that we were gonna make things better, because these people wanted us to be there. We showed up and realized that there’s a whole bunch of people that wanted to kill us. Guess what? They look just like the folks who don’t want to kill us. How were we gonna sort them out? The only way to ensure our survival was to make sure that we put them in the dirt before they put us in the dirt, to put it bluntly.

In November 2003, an AC-130 gunship attacked a five-building apartment complex: People shot at us from these buildings. We all thought they were calling in mortar fire on our post. There were a handful of enemy fighters who tried to kill Americans out of these apartment buildings, but they were also just regular apartment buildings occupied by families. People were out on the balconies getting fresh air. There was laundry hanging off every balcony. The place was heavily populated. Besides having a handful of people with rifles who didn’t really know how to shoot them and a handful of people who spotted for mortars, it was packed full of innocent families and it was in no way a legitimate military target.

But one day the squadron commander, who was a lieutenant colonel, rode by in his personal Humvee and they shot at him. So the command went around and told everybody that at ten o’clock that night they were gonna put on a show for us. So this AC-130 showed up and didn’t just strafe or shoot a few rounds here and there; it approached and launched sustained attack on those buildings.

I don’t recall exactly how long it circled. These planes circle until they expend their ammunition. The main weapon they used in this raid was the 40mm cannon, which loads automatically and can fire a round every half second or so. The 40mm round is like a hand grenade, and it fired maybe a hundred rounds.

On January 21, 2004—I have the exact dates because I wrote about all this in my journal—a civilian was run over by one of our Humvees and left for dead. We had been on a long night mission. We had been out all night and were tired, wanted to go home and hit the rack. There had been a lot of shooting that night. It had been a real bad night and we just wanted it to be over. We wanted to go home.

The guys ahead of us arrived at the gate when they apparently ran somebody over. I knew the guys in that Humvee. The driver’s one of my best friends, and the staff sergeant in command was also a very close friend. Later he was killed over there. The staff sergeant ordered the driver to continue driving and then ordered everyone on patrol not to say anything about it. He did this not because he was afraid of getting in trouble for killing somebody, but because he didn’t want to have to wait around and fill out a report. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced. They just wanted to go home and go to sleep.

As I said in my opening statement, these troopers are not bad people. These are people like any of us, but when put in terrible situations they respond horribly. When you are around that much death, running over some guy who was standing in the road is not a big deal. What’s a big deal is being separated from your cot another two or three hours, having to talk about it.

So they didn’t say anything, and we rolled up on them. We were the idiots who stopped and called it up and we got stuck out there for three hours, and after that, we made sure that if we saw anybody dead or anything like that we just kept going because it wasn’t worth the trouble.

February 21, 2004—civilians killed and wounded by American small arms fire.

It was during another nighttime patrol. This was an unusually friendly neighborhood, where people came out and waved. People didn’t seem to hate us. We were riding around and we heard an IED blast up ahead and AK-47 fire. Then we heard M-16s firing back, which are our rifles. We could tell that some of our people were in a fight. We raced ahead, eager to get some of the action, but by the time we showed up, the fight was over.

So there was the patrol of 82nd Airborne guys, infantry guys, and Humvees and they were packed in these unarmored fiberglass Humvees with machine guns pointing out on either side. They were attacked by two or three insurgents. They were in an open field, laying in a ditch across on their left. On their right was a civilian neighborhood, with housing for disabled military families from the Iraqi army.