Winter Soldier (11 page)

In this incident, a kid was trying to cross a four-lane divided highway and was struck by a vehicle going about 65[mph]. I hopped in my truck and ran to stop traffic. A number of us, including my sergeant major, ran over there. About thirty seconds after he looked at the kid, the sergeant major said, “He’s gone, move out.” I wondered to myself what would have happened if this had been an American kid who was just struck?

Pre-deployment. The cultural competency training that we received can be best summed up in a sentence. “Don’t touch the people of Iraq’s left hand. They wipe their ass with it.” That’s what we got.

This next incident I’m about to describe was the day after we were engaged in an ambush where I was an arm’s length away from a man who was shot in the neck, fell to the street, and died. His name was Corporal Sean Grilley. I had to lift him into my truck with my gunner, pulled down from the turret. We brought him into our truck and tried to MedEvac him. As a grenade blew up my left front tire and flattened it, I took about fifteen minutes to get back to the hospital, and at that point he bled to death. It was October 16, 2003. My lieutenant colonel, Kim Orlando, was also killed that night.

The incident I’m about to describe was the night after that event.

Our mission was, in part, to run a jail in Karbala. It wasn’t for enemy prisoners of war but just for the general population prisoners. Prisoners would be brought in by the Iraqi police and we were to show “how we do things in America.” On the night of October 17 in 2003, six people were brought in by the Iraqi police. The Iraqi police said these six participated in the actions the night prior, therefore they were army prisoners of war due to the coalition standards.

When these people were brought in, they already appeared to be beaten badly. They were lined up on the concrete wall and we told them to interlace their fingers. This is a form of control because you can grab your middle finger and your index finger and squeeze them together, and it’s quite painful: “Interlace your fingers, place your foreheads on the concrete wall, cross your ankles, put your hands on top of your head so we can search and process you.” They were tagged. They were searched. They were also beaten, not just by Americans, but by Bulgarian soldiers, Polish soldiers, Iraqi police, and by me.

I grabbed a man by the jaw and I looked him in the eye and I slammed his head against the wall. I looked him in the eye again and said, “You must have been the one that killed Grilley.” Then he fell. I kicked him. An Iraqi policeman probably the size of the biggest security man here with hands to match—the size of a Kodiak—hit a guy in the side of the head at least six times. I looked at him and I laughed. I’m like, “These guys are getting what they deserve.” This all took place in the presence of my lieutenant, within earshot of many NCOs. I never found out what happened to any of these people, these six prisoners. I don’t know where they went, I don’t know anything about that.

I’m up here today to speak on behalf of all the people who haven’t returned home, who can’t speak. This isn’t just some isolated incident. It’s happened in the presence of NCOs, commissioned officers, and coalition forces, not only as participants but also as witnesses.

My being up here displays my anger on multiple levels: at the Americans’ behavior overseas, at our president’s continuous rhetoric about Iraq being a success, at this country’s citizens’ apathy toward this occupation. This is why I’m here today as well. These events happened in our name, and each and every single one of you are responsible for them.

I am very sorry for my actions. I can’t take back what I did. I ask the forgiveness of the people of Iraq and of my country. I will not enable this any further.

General Petraeus, you may not remember me, but you once led me. You’re no longer a leader of men. You’ve exploited your troops for your own gain, and have become just another cheerleader for this occupation policy that is destroying America.

General Petraeus, you pinned a Bronze Star on me in Babylon in 2003 following the October 16 incident. I will no longer be a puppet for your personal gain and for your political career. Thank you.

[At the conclusion of his testimony Specialist Michael Totten ripped up the citation he received for his Bronze Star for Valor. The citation, which was signed by General David Petraeus, reads: “Totten’s team engaged enemy forces without regard for their personal safety, thereby removing the threat to women and children throughout the community. Private First Class Totten repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire as his unit restored order and control back to the region, while saving countless lives. His courage, bravery, and selfless service under hostile conditions reflects great credit on him, the 101st Airborne Division, and the United States Army.”]

Toward the end of October 2004, my company was called into the outskirts of Camp Fallujah to an area called the Iraqi Training Center (ITC). We were being marshaled there along with several other battalions from both the army and the Marine Corps for what was going to be the second invasion of Fallujah, known as Operation Phantom Fury.

We trained there until the invasion, and one day the battalion JAG officer—the battalion’s final authority on the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)—pulled us all together, made sure the embedded reporters weren’t there, and gave us our Rules of Engagement brief for Fallujah. The bottom line was that now the decision as to what “hostile action” and “hostile intent” was would be left to even the most junior of noncommissioned officers. They also pushed a tactic called reconnaissance by fire, which meant if for any reason we felt unsafe or unsure going in to clear a house or a building, we were granted the ability to do anything we wanted to that house before we entered it.

This was a really big switch from what we’d been used to. We had been using “the escalation of force,” where we responded to a situation with deadly force only under very specific conditions. But now, we were operating under the assumption that everyone was hostile.

The battalion JAG officer wrapped up by sort of going, “Okay, marines, you see an individual with a weapon, what do you do?”

We mutter in silence for a minute, waiting for somebody else to answer, and one guy said, “Shoot him?”

“No. Shooting at a target, putting rounds down range and suppressing a target, is one thing. Sighting and killing a target is another. So again, you see an individual with a weapon, what do you do?”

“Kill him.”

“You see an individual with a pair of binoculars, what do you do?”

“Kill him.”

“You see an individual with a cell phone out, what do you do?”

“Kill him.”

“You see an individual who although may not be actually carrying anything or displaying any specific hostile action or intent running from, say, one building to another, running across the street or even running away from you, assume that he is maneuvering against you and kill him. You see an individual with a white flag and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey commands, assume it’s a trick and kill him.”

Fallujah: we went by those ROEs. Fighting was fairly intense for the first few days especially. Leveling houses before we even went in became pretty commonplace, using bulldozers and tanks to do the job for us, and walking through the rubble.

After the first few days, things began to calm down. We’d be holed up in houses for a few hours or maybe a day or two and we’d get bored. We’d get angry and be like, “Let’s break stuff.” We ran out of people to shoot, so we turned to dogs and cats, chickens, whatever’s moving. Some guys, they’d name the bodies left out in the street. Rotten Randy. Tony the Torso. Some people would adjust the sights on their rifles, using the heads of people laid out in the street. Just fire a shot, if it hit too far to the left, adjust the sight and shoot again.

I remember one instance where we were on the roof of a mosque that had just been taken maybe a day before. It was daylight, and not too far away there was a house where an entire family seemed to have been holed up in a basement for a while. There were a few men, a few women, and a bunch of kids. What their coming out and waving signified to me was they were trying to let us know that they were there, and they were unarmed. One of the marines on scene reacted by shooting at them. I don’t know if he was specifically aiming at them. None of them got hit but they just ran back in. We never saw them again.

I remember hanging out in houses and then we’d start going through stuff. We’d look through family photo albums and pictures of the house and the neighborhood. We’d compare it to what it looked like now and have a good laugh.

One night, we were going out to occupy a house as an observation point. The city sewer system had been damaged by bombs and the streets had been flooded with sewer water. As the fighting went on, the water filled up with dead bodies, so it was pretty horrible. The day before, several people had been shot and they detained the rest of the people that they found, including the wife of one of the men who was killed. Either her uncle or father was blind. On our way to this observation point, we were supposed to escort them back to the house. They were lagging behind. They were holding us up. Halfway there, we just left them there, standing in the middle of the flooded streets, and went on to our objective.

I joined the military with the intention of contributing something positive, to do something good to improve the whole human situation. I felt that Iraq was a good place to do that. I was very young and naive, and I was wrong. I won’t say that I’m overly wrought by anything that happened. There were some times when I got to do what I wanted to do and I felt good about myself a few times. For the most part, I was just doing what I had to do and that was all of us, whether it was breaking the rules or following them, whether it was doing what I thought was right or doing what I knew was wrong.

We spent most of our time in Tal Afar, a city of about two hundred thousand people just west of Mosul in northern Iraq. In March 2006, President Bush described our deployment as a model of counterinsurgency operations, calling Tal Afar “a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq.” The media pounced on this with criticism of his optimistic assertion. For one thing, we had driven out thousands of Sunnis and created a more homogenous population of predominantly Shia tribes.

Additionally, by the end of our deployment, we had about a thousand troops per square kilometer in the city. Between then and now, Tal Afar has seen some of the most violent and deadly attacks of this occupation.

When we first arrived at Camp Sykes, there were frequent attacks on U.S. forces. I was in a scout platoon. Initially we did fairly simple operations: “over watch” missions to try to detect people placing IEDs on main supply routes and patrols in neighborhoods that were viewed as relatively safe. My job was to get out of the Bradley, stand next to it, and provide security.