Memorial Day Testimonials
On this Memorial Day, it is important to hear from the troops themselves. What follows is a collection of stories, remembrances, and harrowing anecdotes straight from the source.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. - Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
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. - Winter Soldier testimonials
When people thank me for my military service I ask if they are the CEO of a huge corporation.
The answer is always, so far anyway, No.
I then say, Well then don’t thank me because I didn’t do a thing for average Americans.
I did whatever I did for benefit big business like especially the defense and oil companies and companies that rape the world for cheap resources, cheap labor and markets. - Brett McFann, Iraq War veteran
While on tank patrol through the narrow streets of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, Pfc. Clifton Hicks was given an order. Abu Ghraib had become a “free-fire zone,” Hicks was told, and no “friendlies” or civilians remained in the area. “Game on. All weapons free,” his captain said. Upon that command, Hicks’s unit opened a furious fusillade, firing wildly into cars, at people scurrying for cover, at anything that moved. Sent in to survey the damage, Hicks found the area littered with human and animal corpses, including women and children, but he saw no military gear or weapons of any kind near the bodies. In the aftermath of the massacre, Hicks was told that his unit had killed 700-800 “enemy combatants.” But he knew the dead were not terrorists or insurgents; they were innocent Iraqis. “I will agree to swear to that till the day I die,” he said. “I didn’t see one enemy on that operation.”…
Several veterans said it was common to carry a stash of extra automatic weapons and shovels to plant near the bodies of unarmed civilians they had killed to make it look as if they were combatants. Others described the surreal sensation of committing cold-blooded murder without facing any consequences. Jon Michael Turner, who served as a machine gunner with Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Eighth Marines, said he shot an unarmed Iraqi in front of the man’s father and friend. “The first round didn’t kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterwards he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend…and I said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen.’ So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family.” Later, Turner pointed to a tattoo on his right wrist of the Arabic words for “fuck you.” “That was my choking hand,” he explained. “And any time I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead and use it.”…
“This is not an isolated incident,” the testifiers uttered over and over, to the point of liturgy, insisting that the atrocities they committed or witnessed were common. The hearings were not organized to point fingers at “bad apples” or even particular squads, several testifiers said.
To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. 1. We must take the profit out of war. 2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. 3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. - both quotes from Smedley Butler, War is a Racket
The acting commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, asserted that despite the civilian deaths, U.S. forces involved in the attack in western Herat province acted based on credible intelligence, in self-defense and in line with their rules of engagement.
"We are deeply saddened at the loss of innocent life in Azizabad," Dempsey said. He blamed the Taliban.
"We go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties in Afghanistan in all our operations, but as we have seen all too often, this ruthless enemy routinely surround themselves with innocents," he said.
The rules also explicitly stated that carrying a shovel, standing on a rooftop while speaking on a cell phone, or holding binoculars or being out after curfew constituted hostile intent, and we were authorized to use deadly force. - Winter Soldier testimonials
After the incident, we went back to the FOB [forward operating base] and that's when I was in my room. I had blood all down the front of me from the children. I was trying to wash it off in my room. I was pretty distraught over the whole situation with the children. So I went to a sergeant and asked to see [the mental health person], because I was having a hard time dealing with it. I was called a pussy and that I needed to suck it up and a lot of other horrible things. I was also told that there would be repercussions if I was to go to mental health.
Wired.com: What did you understand that to mean?
McCord: I would be smoked. Smoked is basically like you're doing pushups a lot, you're doing sit-ups ... crunches and flutter kicks. They're smoking you, they're making you tired. I was told that I needed to get the sand out of my vagina.... So I just sucked it up and tried to move on with everything.
I've lived with seeing the children that way since the incident happened. I've had nightmares. I was diagnosed with chronic, severe PTSD. [But] I was actually starting to get kind of better. ... I wasn't thinking about it as much. [Then I] took my children to school one day and I came home and sat down on the couch and turned on the TV with my coffee, and on the news I'm running across the screen with a child. The flood of emotions came back. I know the scene by heart; it's burned into my head. I know the van, I know the faces of everybody that was there that day.
During the last day, photographs of nameless Iraqi dead flashed on large screens. Army Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith took the photos on May 15, 2005, a day he remembered as “very hot, uncomfortable and miserable.” Goldsmith was ordered to photograph a dozen Iraqis who were presumably murdered and dumped in a large landfill. But the photos were not taken to identify the dead or assist the Iraqi police investigation. “They were used for morale purposes,” Goldsmith remarked bitterly. “[Soldiers] bombarded me to copy my pictures. They made videos of them to send home to their friends and families to brag, ‘This is war. This is what we did to the Iraqis.'”
The Winter Soldier hearings also featured Iraqi testifiers like Salam Talib, a 33-year-old computer engineering student. Though Talib said he was encouraged to see so many US veterans describing their experiences in frank terms, the testimonies were not much of a revelation for him. “What the American soldiers are talking about is everyday life for Iraqis. They’re not even talking about 10 percent of what’s happening there,” Talib remarked with a shrug. “They are simply giving credibility to the stories that have been told over and over from Iraq by journalists, Iraqis and humanitarian organizations. The American soldiers are saying, ‘We’re here, we did it and it’s true.’ ”
More Winter Soldier testimonials can be found at the IVAW website.
Watching and listening to the testimony made me very ill. Here were these young men and women, handsomely dressed, some wearing medals, talking about how they shot civilians who were holding nothing more threatening than a cell phone, groceries, a shovel, a white flag, or a pair of binoculars. Anyone deemed suspicious by the particular soldier or Marine on watch was fair game, subject to the orders, “Take ’em out!” The Rules of Engagement as stated by Garrett Rapenhagen were “a joke and disgrace, and ever changing.” I knew that. I had heard it back home from my son.
Camilo Mejia spoke about how soldiers were trained that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary to survival, and how they are taught to think of Iraqis as “hajjis.” I know that word all too well; I have heard my son talk about it, as well as other anti-Iraqi slurs such as “towel head,” and “sand nigger.” The expression “if you feel threatened, use your weapon” was also a familiar phrase to me. So, too, was the slogan, “Do what you need to do.”
One other Marine, Bryan Casler, was part of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. He described [how Marines would] remove the chemical packets that were within the MREs (which helped heat the food) and hand them to children to eat ... when they went into Babylon, the marines would drive vehicles into mosques and historic ruins, and break off pieces to take home with them.
Some of the soldiers’ testimony was characterized by defiant anger. At the end of his testimony, former Marine Mike Totten ripped up the commendation he had received from General Petraeus, and threw it on the floor in front of him, to a huge applause. One day earlier, Jon Turner had taken a chest full of medals and thrown them into the audience. “I don’t work for you anymore!” Turner said. - Elaine Brower, attendee of the Winter Soldier testimonials in 2008
I remember one woman walking by. She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward 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 full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces. - Winter Soldier testimonials
"That's the six-letter word that changes everything," Hensley said. It was ten o'clock in the morning and we were on our way to a bar in Anchorage to drink Bloody Marys. He was, and is, still in the Army. He still has a job, and was in the middle of being transferred to Fort Benning. But because of the mortal taint upon him -- because, as he says, "I'm looked at as a guy who got away with murder" -- nobody called him if he didn't show up. It was better that he didn't show up.
Did he get away with murder?
"You know, nobody thinks they're a bad person. You can talk to the worst murderer, the worst rapist in prison, and they'll always try to find a way to justify what they did. And that hits home for me. I mean, when you look at things that way, maybe what I did was wrong. I refuse to believe it, but who knows? In the end, it comes down to, When that guy walked in my hide site, I made a decision. It was my decision. Nobody else made it, nobody else could make it, because nobody else had the whole picture. Evan Vela killed that guy because I ordered him to and because he had no reason not to. Was it a good kill? It's a good kill because I say it's a good kill. That's why I was there. That's why the battalion put me there."…
They had taken an AK-47 with them on the mission. It had figured significantly in Hensley's stagecraft. Now he put it on the body. Or he directed one of his men to. The killing, he said, "is legitimate to me; it's not legitimate to the law. So I got two choices. I can do something illegal, like put a gun on him, or I can go to jail for murder. I don't know where you stand ethically on all of that, but that is what it is. And if doing something that is a little dishonest keeps me and my men from going to jail one day, I am going to be a little dishonest. If the law causes my men to get killed, the law will be broken. If lying prevents me from going to jail, I'm going to lie."
He broke the law. He lied. He did these things, he says, not "for pleasure" or "without motive." He did these things, he says, to save the lives of his men. He did these things because he decided that if Genei Nasir Khudair al-Janabi lived, his men would die. He did these things because Khudair al-Janabi "was making too much fucking noise." He did these things because Khudair al-Janabi "had no right to be there, he was a bad guy, he deserved to die." He did these things because he'd been deputized as the battalion's "hired gun." He did these things because he acted as the "buffer between what needed to be done and what the battalion needed to know about." He did these things so that all his men would come home, and the terrible irony he lives with is his knowledge that because he did these things, one of his men did not….
"I should have dumped him in the river, along with you and the rest of your family."
A stunning 36% of American mass shooters (or more) are military veterans.
Collateral Murder is distressing viewing. The carnage wrought by the 30mm cannon fire from the Apache helicopter is devastating. The video shows the gunner tracking Namir as he stumbles and tries to hide behind garbage before his body explodes as the rounds strike home.
The words of the crew are sickening.
There is this, after Namir and others are blown apart:
“Look at those dead bastards.”
“Nice.”
And this:
“Good shoot’n.”
“Thank you.”
Saeed survives the first shots. The chopper circles, Saeed in its sights, as he crawls, badly injured and desperate to live.
“Come on buddy … all you got to do is pick up a weapon,” the gunner says, eager to finish Saeed off.
A van pulls up. Two men, including the driver (whose children are in the back), help the dying Saeed get in.
There is more urgent banter in the air about engaging the van. Crazy Horse 1-8 promptly attacks it.
“Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield.”
Two days after Assange released the video, Yates emerged from Cradle Mountain. It was hours before he turned on his phone and checked emails, finally learning of Collateral Murder in a local newspaper.
“I thought, ‘No, this can’t be the same attack … that leads on to all this other stuff that we never knew about’ … This was the full horror – Saeed had been trying to get up for roughly three minutes when this good Samaritan pulls over in this minivan and the Apache just opens fire again and just obliterates them – it was totally traumatising.”
Yates immediately thought: “They [the US military] fucked us. They just fucked us. They lied to us. It was all lies.”
"The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We're going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission." - An American advisor in Iraq
At the very end, when the hungry, wounded, sick, exhausted, disoriented, demoralized, ragged, sometimes barefoot Iraqi army, which had scarcely shown any desire to fight, left Kuwait and headed toward Basra in southern Iraq, Saddam tried to salvage a pathetic scrap of dignity by announcing that his army was withdrawing because of “special circumstances”. But even this was too much for George Bush to grant. “Saddam’s most recent speech is an outrage,” declared the president, forcefully. “He is not withdrawing. His defeated forces are retreating. He is trying to claim victory in the midst of a rout.”
This could not be permitted. Thus it was that American air power in all its majesty swept down upon the road to Basra, bombing, rocketing, strafing everything that moved in the long column of Iraqi military and civilian vehicles, troops and refugees. The nice, god-fearing, wholesome American GIs, soon to be welcomed as heroes at home, had a ball ... “we toasted him” ... “we hit the jackpot” ... “a turkey shoot" ... “This morning was bumper-to-bumper. It was the road to Daytona Beach at spring break ... and spring break’s over.”
Again and again, as loudspeakers on the carrier Ranger blared Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”, the rousing theme song of the Lone Ranger, one strike force after another took off with their load of missiles and anti-tank and anti-personnel Rockeye cluster bombs, which explode into a deadly rain of armor-piercing bomblets; land-based B-52s joined in with 1000-pound bombs. ... “It’s not going to take too many more days until there’s nothing left of them.” ... “shooting fish in a barrel” ... “basically just sitting ducks” ... “There’s just nothing like it. It’s the biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen, and to see those tanks just ‘boom,’ and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them ... they just become white hot. It’s wonderful.” - William Blum, Killing Hope
The previous April, Ali had declared himself a conscientious objector and refused induction into the U.S. Army, famously saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
By 1968, 19,560 Americans had died in the Vietnam War and another 16,502 would die that year alone. It was the year the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army mounted the Tet Offensive, an ambitious campaign that helped persuade the American public that the war wasn't going as well as the generals and politicians had led them to believe.
The war was escalating, as was opposition to it. Just a few weeks before Ali said no to his draft board, Martin Luther King Jr., had denounced the war. He later quoted Ali in support of his position: As "Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all — black and brown and poor — victims of the same system of oppression."
Others contend, however, that civilian deaths are inevitable in war and that the close combat environment in Iraq frequently puts civilians in the line of U.S. and insurgent fire.
The cases highlight the sometimes fine line between a criminal allegation and the bloodshed that is a part of war. Spec. Nathan Lynn, a Pennsylvania National Guardsman, shot and killed a man in the darkness of a Ramadi neighborhood in February. Lynn said he considered the man a threat and believes he did nothing wrong.
The man was not armed, and Lynn was charged with voluntary manslaughter. But a military investigator agreed that Lynn acted properly in a difficult situation, and the charges were dropped.'
"I was extremely surprised when I was charged because it was clear the shooting fell within the guidelines of my rules of engagement," Lynn said. "This is a war. It's not a police action."
When she was serving her own sentence, did it change her view of how she'd treated the prisoners in Iraq? Did she feel more sympathy for them?
She shakes her head. "I mean, I had a lot of time to think about it after the trial and what I'd learned. Thinking back ... I don't want to say I matured more, but I realised that I was so naive and trusting. But what happens in war, happens. It just happened to be photographed and come out. Of course, a lot of people said if you guys had just shut up or killed them, there wouldn't have been any trouble. I could think of it like that, but ... I mean, I don't even know how to describe it. They were the enemy. I don't want to say they deserved what they got, but they ... um." There is a long pause. "They ... This is my problem. I can't think of words."
Let’s show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do. That’s why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It’s so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for? Because we’re worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.
You can drive up the road from here and come to a spot where there is a megachurch over here, a little Episcopal church over there, a Catholic church around the corner that’s almost cathedral-size, and between them is a huge Hindu temple. There are no police needed to guard any of this. There are not many places in the world where you would see that. Yes, there are a few dangerous nuts in Brooklyn and New Jersey who want to blow up Kennedy Airport and Fort Dix. These are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them. But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex. - Colin Powell, 2007
The Marine Corps will not bring criminal charges against two officers in command of a unit involved in the shooting deaths of as many as 19 civilians in northeastern Afghanistan last year after a car bomb struck the marines’ convoy, it was announced Friday.
In the episode, on March 4, 2007, several marines opened fire with automatic weapons after a suicide car bomb exploded and wounded one marine.
Human rights groups said that up to 19 unarmed civilians were killed and 50 people were wounded along a six-mile stretch of road near Jalalabad, as the convoy fired automatic weapons along the route back to its base.
A statement released Friday said Lt. Gen. Samuel T. Helland, commander of Marine forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan, had determined that the officers in command and the troops in the convoy “acted appropriately and in accordance with the rules of engagement and tactics, techniques and procedures in place at the time in response to a complex attack.”
Some would say, “Well hey, you should have stopped this. You should have stopped that. When you saw he was injured or saw he was being kicked on needlessly, why didn’t you do something?” That’d be a good question. My answer would be, “Well, you know, it was us against them. I was over there. I didn’t want to appear to be going against my fellow soldiers.” Which...is that wrong? You could sit here and say that was dead wrong. Go over there and say that. - Sgt. Thomas Curtis, a former Bagram military police officer interviewed in the Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side
Individuals who report the misconduct of others are called whistleblowers, but sometimes they are given more disparaging labels like “snitch,” “squealer,” or “rat,” terms that convey the contempt others can have for whistle-blowers. Unfortunately, while there is very little empirical research on whistle-blowing in the military, one study—the only published study of its kind—showed shocking results. Employing a variety of research methods (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups), the Mental Health Advisory Team IV (MHAT IV) studied the attitudes of U.S. soldiers and Marines serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2006. Of primary interest is the reluctance of the soldiers and Marines in the study to report battlefield misconduct. Shown in figure 4, the results indicate that only 55 percent of the soldiers and 40 percent of the Marines would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant. These results are startling when one considers that injuring and killing noncombatants are violations of the laws of war and contravene the moral codes of the U.S. armed forces.
The above figures are from an Office of the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army Medical Command survey that is now difficult to find online, unsurprisingly.
The above quotes are revealing, but these are only glimpses of honesty that seep through the veil of secrecy and what we might call the green wall of silence. If the blue wall of silence allows American police to get away with numerous abuses we will never know about it, the crimes committed by the military in our name are surely numerous and horrific—most will sadly never see the light of day.
Previous articles concerning the military: “Why We Shouldn’t Support the Troops,” “Defund the Military Before the Police,” and “The Moral and Legal Case for Conscientious Objection”