Winter Soldier (7 page)

I ’m from a little place nestled in the mountains of east Tennessee called Kingsport and hence the mountain-man beard. People don’t really trust you if you’re clean-shaven there. Kingsport is truly small-town America. There’s a Baptist church on every street corner and even the high-class restaurants serve biscuits and gravy. My father, Carl C. Hurd, who died in 2000 at seventy-six years old, was a marine during World War II. Shortly after he died, I had the two World War II battles he participated in tattooed on my arm, because my father had the same tattoo. He was in the Pacific Campaign and participated in the Battles of Tarawa and Guadalcanal, which were some of the bloodiest occurrences of that war.

I decided to join the military in 1997. I was seventeen years old. I had just graduated from high school and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my life. My father was adamantly opposed to me serving in the military. My father was one of the most war-mongering, gun-loving people you could ever meet, but he didn’t feel that way when it came to his son because he knew the negative psychological consequence of combat service. Looking back, I know for a fact that my father had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He had the rage, he had the nightmares, and he had the flashbacks.

I decided against my father’s wishes to go into the military as a medic in August of 1997. Originally, I intended to do my four years and get off of active duty and go to college in Johnson City, Tennessee. But about a month before I left active duty, a National Guard recruiter approached me and said, “Hey we’ve got an expanded unit in your hometown in Kingsport and if you decide to join that, we can give you a lot of college money.” And he offered me so much college money I decided to sign up for six more years in the Tennessee National Guard.

I got into Iraq in November of ’04 and I was there until November of ’05. Our first six months in country were relatively uneventful. After a few months, we moved on to another mission, patrolling the Kindi Street area, right outside the Green Zone. Kindi Street is a relatively upscale neighborhood, and some of the houses would cost well over a million dollars here in America. From what we were told, this area had no violent activity at all up until the point that we started patrolling there. We were the first U.S. military to do so on any regular basis. So we went in and we started doing patrols through the streets. We started meeting and greeting the local population, trying to figure out what sort of issues they had and how we could resolve them.

We were out on a dismounted patrol one day, walking by a woman’s house. She was outside working in her garden. Our interpreter threw up his hand and said, “Salam Alaikum,” which means “Peace of God be with you.” She said. “No. No peace of God be with you.” She was angry and so we stopped and our interpreter said, “Well, what’s the matter? Why are you so angry? We’re here to ensure your safety.” That woman began to tell us a story.

Just a few months prior, her husband had been shot and killed by a United States convoy because he got too close to their convoy. He was not an insurgent. He was not a terrorist. He was a working man trying to make a living for his family.

To make matters worse, a Special Forces team operating in the Kindi area holed up in a building there and made a compound out of it. A few weeks after this man died, the Special Forces team got some intelligence that this woman was supporting the insurgency, so they raided her home, zip-tied her and her two children, threw them on the floor, and detained her son and took him away. For the next two weeks, this woman had no idea whether her son was alive, dead, or worse. At the end of that two weeks, the Special Forces team rolled up, dropped her son off, and without so much as an apology drove off. It turns out they had acted on bad intelligence.

Things like that happen every day in Iraq. We are harassing these people. We are disrupting their lives.

One day we were on another dismounted patrol through the Kindi Street area. We were walking past an area we called the Garden Center because it was literally a fenced-off garden. As is policy, we kept all cars and individuals away from our formation. So a car was approaching us from the front. I was at the rear of the formation because I was the medic and the medics hang out at the back with the platoon sergeant in case anything happens up front so you can respond.

They waved the car off down a side street so that it would not come near our formation. As I made it to the side street, the car turned around and was coming back toward us because the street was blocked off by a concrete T barrier. I began doing my levels of aggression. I held up my hand trying to get the car to stop. The car sped up and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, this is it. This is someone who is trying to hurt us.”

So instead of doing what I should have done according to policy and raising my weapon, instead I did what you should never do and I took my hands off of my weapon altogether and began jumping up and down waving my hands back and forth trying to get this car to stop and see me. The car kept coming and so I raised my weapon and the car kept coming. I pulled my selector switch off of safe and the car kept coming. I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle and out of nowhere a man came off the side of the road, flagged the car down, and got it to pull over. He opened the driver’s side door, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. This woman was a highly respected figure in the community and I don’t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on her. I would imagine a riot.

To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me because I was in front of a desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage.

The next mission we got was to man the main checkpoint that entered into the Green Zone. We called this checkpoint Slaughterhouse 11, because a car bomb goes off almost every single morning at checkpoint 11. The first day we took over that checkpoint, a car bomb drove into it and exploded. My guys were able to find cover and it didn’t hurt them, but it killed and injured untold numbers of Iraqi civilians in queue for the checkpoint. I treated five people that day, and I imagine twenty or thirty others got carted off in civilian ambulances before I could get to them. I remember a man running toward me carrying a young seventeen- or eighteen-year old Iraqi guy, very thin, and very pale. The guy was missing parts of his arm; his arm and his forearm were only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding and he was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso and his entire left butt cheek was missing and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood.

To this day I have that image burned in my mind’s eye. Every couple of days I get a flash of red color in my mind’s eye and it won’t have any shape, no form, just a flash of red and every time I associate it with that instance. Not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we are disrupting the lives of our veterans.

Conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces. The majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq.

I like to explain it this way, especially in the South because it rings with truth to people down there: If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, whether they told us they were here to liberate us or to give us democracy, do you not think that every person that owns a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right to self-determination? Another time I was out on patrol in the Kindi Street area. I approached a man with my interpreter on the side of the road and said, “Look, are your lives better because we are here? Are you safer? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel like we are liberating you?” That man looked me straight in the eye and said, “Mister, we Iraqis know that you have good intentions here, but the fact is that before America invaded, we didn’t have to worry about car bombs in our neighborhoods. We didn’t have to worry about the safety of our own children before they walked to school, and we didn’t have to worry about U.S. soldiers shooting at us as we drive up and down our own streets.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the suffering in Iraq is tearing that country apart. Ending that suffering begins with a complete and immediate withdrawal of all of our troops.

I was against the war before the war. Even though I believed all of the lies that Colin Powell told at the UN, all the intelligence, all the spin. I didn’t think it was going to be worth it, but in 2004 I thought that we were cleaning up our mess and genuinely trying to do good by the Iraqi people. That was something I wanted to be a part of, and something that I enthusiastically risked my life for.

This is the Rules of Engagement card that I was issued for our deployment to Iraq [Kokesh holds up his U.S. Marine Corps Rules of Engagement card, which is reproduced in the appendix of this volume.]

This is held up as the gold standard of conduct in the occupation right now, and they couldn’t even cut it square. I’ll read a part of it. It says, “Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself. Enemy, military, and paramilitary forces may be attacked, subject to the following instructions: Positive identification is required prior to engagement. Positive identification is ‘reasonable certainty’”–that’s in quotes on the card—“that your target is a legitimate military target.” We were supposed to keep this in our breast pocket.

In April of 2004, we got an order to pack for three days and have our vehicle and a convoy ready to go at midnight. We weren’t told where we were going. This was right after the four Blackwater security agents were killed and had their bodies burned and hung from the northern bridge over the Euphrates on the western side of Fallujah.

During the siege of Fallujah, we changed Rules of Engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At first it was, “You follow the Rules of Engagement. You do what you’re supposed to do.” Then there were times when it was, “You can shoot any suspicious observer.” So someone with binoculars and a cell phone was fair game, and that opened things up to a lot of subjectivity.

At one point we imposed a curfew on Fallujah, and then we were allowed to shoot anything after dark. Fortunately, I was never forced to make that decision, but there were a lot of marines who were forced to make that choice.

In one incident, in the first couple of days we were there, there was a checkpoint shooting to the west of our perimeter. We were told a vehicle was approaching an impromptu vehicle checkpoint at a high rate of speed. That gave marines manning the checkpoint cause to be suspicious and they unloaded into that vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun. The idea is that anybody coming at your position who doesn’t slow down to five miles an hour is an enemy combatant. Well, this is at dusk and marines are all wearing camouflage and this guy could just have been cruising through his neighborhood, or rushing home to see his family. We didn’t know, but it was enough that the marines got jumpy and shot a burst of .50-cal rounds into this vehicle.

The bullets started at the bumper and went up the engine compartment and then one round at least hit this Iraqi in the chest so hard that it broke his chair backwards and we saw the vehicle burning in the distance. Everybody tried to justify it and say, oh, they heard rounds cooking off in the fire, AK-47 rounds were bursting in the trunk or somewhere in the car. The next day they dragged the car into our sleeping area, and it was clear that there were no holes from rounds cooking off in the side of this car.