Winter Soldier (9 page)

We used “drop weapons.” Drop weapons are the weapons that were given to us by our chain of command in case we killed somebody without weapons so that we would not get into trouble. We would carry an AK-47 and if the person that was shot did not have the weapon, the AK-47 would be placed at his corpse. Then, when the unit would come back to the base they would turn it in to identify the shot man as an enemy combatant. The weapons could not come from anyone else but the higher chain of command because after a raid all the weapons are turned into the armory and should be recorded.

The Rules of Engagement were very flexible. After our own casualties mounted the Rules changed. We were allowed to engage anyone with a weapon without calling in and asking permission from the higher command. Two months into the deployment our Rules were to engage any personnel with a heavy bag and a shovel at the intersections or on the roads. This gave us a bigger window on who we can engage. Looking at the situation from this point of view a lot of the enemy combatants that we shot were really civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One of our intelligence officers told us that they received a call from one of the sources in the city, telling them that there were flyers posted all over the town that said that there were unknown snipers in the city that kill the insurgents and the civilians. We did not take into consideration that these innocent people were being killed by us, because every time we sent the pictures to the command post through an interlink system, we would receive an approval to kill people with shovels and heavy bags. Now I know that it was not right to do that, but when you trust those who act like they care for you, you listen to them and follow their orders because you don’t want to let your friends down. “What if…?” was used as propaganda and a way to relieve our minds from the actions we have partaken in and make it easier on us.

Finally, I want to tell you is about a roommate who we shared the bathroom with back in the United States. He was on the suicide watch for a few months on and off. The last three weeks before we deployed he was constantly on the watch. A week before a family day he was released from the watch so that he would not say anything to his parents and he did not say anything to them. About a month into the deployment he blew his brains out in one of the shower stalls. Actions like that show the poor judgment of our command who don’t care for the troops just to save their own skin. That marine should have not gone to Iraq in the first place and nobody was held responsible for his death. If they do not care for their own marines what care do they have for the people of Iraq when they give the orders?

I want to apologize to all the people in Iraq. I’m sorry, and I hope this is going to be over as soon as possible.

My unit moved around a lot. The Rules of Engagement would change. First of all, they were mostly verbal. We never were given ROE cards. When Adam Kokesh flashed one in front of everybody this morning, that was the first time I saw one. I didn’t think they existed. So we never got any concrete ROE that defined our missions, and what our levels of aggression were allowed to be. We were told there were five S’s: Signal, shout, show, shove, shoot, and that was our ROE.

The golden rule, the one that we could always count on, was that if you feel threatened, don’t hesitate to use your weapon if you feel it’s necessary. If something occurred, we could always say that we were threatened, and I observed that a couple of times with other members of my unit.

I experienced a very permissive ROE in Najaf around July 2004. Rolling into the city, Muqtada al-Sadr was our enemy at that time, and we were told anybody in black clothing with a green headband is fair game to shoot. It was made very clear that this is the uniform of the enemy, and we should take them out whenever necessary. I think that was the closest we got to conventional warfare, for which I trained for five years before I went to Iraq.

In Samara in October 2004, I was a part of Operation Baton Rouge. We were the first light infantry to enter the city of Samara from the west. It was a train-up for Fallujah. We were told it was a litmus test to see what procedures we would need to incorporate into the attack on Fallujah in November.

Going into Samara, we were told that all of the civilians knew we were coming. They were supposed to stay in their house or evacuate. The following day one of the snipers saw a man crossing the street with a bag in his hand and shot him. The fact that this was within the ROE doesn’t satisfy my ethical restrictions.

The turning point in the war for me came on November 16 in 2004 in Joiga. I was on a rocket man patrol. We were looking for mortar men. We got a call to assist another unit that had had an accident on the convoy. A vehicle had overturned over a reservoir. The overturned vehicle was resting partly over the water and partly land.

I was asked to get in the water and look for bodies, which I did. About an hour into it, after I had gotten out of the water, I was circling the vehicle looking for things to do when I saw a set of legs sticking out from what used to be the door to the Humvee. At first glance, I thought it was a rescuer talking to someone pinned by the vehicle to whom we had already given morphine. I tapped him on the leg. I didn’t get a response.

I indicated to one of the medics I thought this was a casualty and that he needed attention. The medic responded that he was too far gone and we need to focus on the people who have a chance. So for an hour and a half, I fretted about what to do about this guy. Combat triage is the opposite from triage in a hospital where you rush the most immediate to the operating room. In combat, if someone doesn’t have a chance, you make it as comfortable for them as possible to die.

Finally, a crane came, lifted the vehicle, got the guy out that was pinned by his leg who had morphine already injected into him. The Special Forces medics got the other guy up and he had a pulse, he was still alive. I heard on the radio going back to Kirkuk that he had died before he could reach the clinic, and for some reason that hit me pretty hard.

For nine nights I didn’t sleep. I realized that there’s a great possibility that he had died hearing everybody around him and knowing that nobody was coming to his aid. In the tents at night, in the pitch dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it felt being trapped under a Humvee and possibly not being able to catch a breath and cry for help. And then I realized that, despite all the Iraqi bodies I had seen throughout Iraq, it was an American soldier that made me disturbed. I still wrestle with that. What does that mean? That I saw these dead Iraqis, but it took an American soldier, someone my own race and creed and skin color, to wake me up out of slumber.

I wanted to close with why I do this. Martin Luther King said of the war in Vietnam, and I would apply it to the War on Terror: “…I oppose the war in Vietnam, because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart…. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is no great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster.” And I don’t want a national disaster.

We were set up outside the town of Samawa in a garbage dump. Flies were so heavy we couldn’t eat. When the sun was up, we’d eat a mouthful of flies with our MRE pudding.

What I saw and participated in there: We’d hear the radio calls for the line companies in trouble, or when they spotted some people going into a building, and we’d be assigned that fire mission and we’d destroy the building with our mortars.

I set the timers, I set the rounds, the charges for the mortars. I was part of the team that sent those rounds down range. This isn’t army to army. People live in towns. I never really saw the effects of my mortar rounds in the towns, and that leaves my imagination open to countless deaths. I don’t know how many civilians—innocents—I’ve killed, or helped to kill.

Another big piece of weaponry they used on this little town of Samawa was called a Spectre Gunship AC-130, with two belt-fed Howitzer cannons and some Super Gatling guns. They would sweep around, just pounding the city. It is definitely a sight to be seen. Even though the rounds are coming from up in the sky, it’s almost like the ground is shaking. Over neighborhoods, Kiowa attack helicopters with their Hellfire missiles, F-18s dropped bombs that would shake you to the bone. All the while, I was laying down mortar fire on this town full of people.

And the radio—a good thing never came over the radio. One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation. In Iraq, any car can be a taxi cab; you just paint it white and orange. One of the snipers replied back, “Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxi cabs?” The lieutenant colonel responded, “You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxi cabs.” After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.

We were outside of a water treatment plant in Baghdad, and it seemed like a pretty nice area. As we were leaving, two men with RPGs ran out in front of us, blocking the road. There was a lot of yelling and screaming and they huddled with women and children, and we screamed back at them, “Drop your weapon, drop your weapon.” I had my sight on a dude with an RPG on his back. I had my sight on his chest. This is what I’m trained to do. But when I looked at his face, he wasn’t a bogeyman. He wasn’t the enemy. He was scared and confused, probably the same expression I had on my face during the same time. He was probably fed the same BS I was fed. I’d seen his face, and it took me back and I didn’t pull the trigger. He got away.

With the raids: We never went on a raid where we got the right house, much less the right person, not once. There’s a long history in Iraq, where if you’ve got beef with your neighbor, you’d say, “Hey, police. They said something bad about Saddam. Why don’t you go get them,” and they’d take them and they’d torture them. Now here we were, asking who the troublemakers were. We’d hear “These people are the troublemakers, over here.”

In this nice little village, another soldier and I toss this guy’s hut. The only thing I found was a little .22-cal pistol, not AK-47s, not RPGs, not pictures of Saddam, not large caches of money. We ended up arresting the two young men regardless.

I looked at my sergeant and said, “Sergeant, these aren’t the men we’re looking for.” He told me, “Don’t worry, I’m sure they would have done something anyways.” This mother all the while is crying in my face, trying to kiss my feet. I can’t speak Arabic, but I can speak human. She was saying, “Please, why are you taking my sons? They have done nothing wrong.” That made me feel very powerless. 82nd Airborne Infantry with Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, armor, and my M-4. But I was powerless. I was powerless to help her. The lack of humanity in war. The place you put yourself is, when you’re looking back at it, it’s almost alien.

We were driving around Baghdad one day and found a dead body on the side of the road. We pulled over to secure it and waited for MPs to come and take care of this dead man who was clearly murdered. My friends jumped off and started taking pictures with him with big old smiles on their faces. They said, “Hey Viges, you want a picture with this guy?”

“No,” I said. But no, not in the context of that’s really messed up and just wrong on an ethical basis. I said no because it wasn’t my kill. You shouldn’t take trophies for things you didn’t kill. That was my mindset back then. I wasn’t even upset that this man was dead. They shouldn’t have been taking credit for something they didn’t do. But that’s war. That’s war.