Winter Soldier (3 page)

In the two months following Winter Soldier, IVAW increased its membership by 25 percent. Veterans around the country began holding smaller, mini-Winter Soldiers at which soldiers who had been unable to travel to Washington were able to tell their stories. Despite the media blackout, the grim reality of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is leaching out into the broader populace. Increasingly, veterans and active-duty members of the Armed Forces get reinforcement that they are not alone.

Indeed, immediately following the Congressional Progressive Caucus hearing, U.S. Army Sergeant Matthis Chiroux announced he was refusing orders to deploy to Iraq in July. Chiroux said the idea of a deployment to Iraq initially made him suicidal. “I just went into my room and shut the door and barely emerged for close to a month. I just sat in my room reading news about Iraq and feeling completely hopeless, like I would be forced to go and no one would ever know how I felt. I was getting looped into participating in a crime against humanity and all with the realization that I never wanted to be there in the first place.”

The turning point, Chiroux said, came when one of his professors at Brooklyn College in New York suggested he listen to a broadcast of March’s Winter Soldier hearings.

“Here’s an organization of soldiers and veterans who feel like me,” he said. “All this alienation and depression that I feel started to ease. I found them, and I’ve been speaking out with them ever since.”

The text of Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations comes from testimony offered by veterans in Silver Spring, Maryland, from March 13 to 16, 2008, and in front of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on May 15, 2008. Due to space constraints, this book does not represent an exhaustive preparation of all the information presented at either gathering. Each testimony has been edited and a few of the testifiers could not be accommodated. Complete video archives of every veteran’s testimony are available on Iraq Veterans Against the War’s website, www.ivaw.org. Complete audio archives are available at www.warcomeshome.org.

Each veteran who testified at Winter Soldier went through an extensive verification before they were allowed to testify. A team of veterans and journalists collected documentation of every testifier’s proof of service, including their military discharge papers (DD214s), ID cards, and corroborating evidence to support their stories. Photos, videos, military orders, Standard Operating Procedures, Rules of Engagement cards, and anything else the testifier could provide was collected in the testifier’s file. Veterans and journalists also contacted testifiers’ battle buddies (people they served with) and located media reports that corresponded with the dates, locations, and units the testifiers mentioned in their stories. We placed a stringent burden of proof on testifiers to demonstrate that they were deployed when and where they said they were.

IVAW and Aaron Glantz

August 2008

War causes death. There’s no way around that, but over hundreds of years, the Law of War has developed. These internationally agreed-upon standards set out what legally can and cannot be done by soldiers deployed into battle. These laws are designed to keep soldiers on both sides safe from torture and ill treatment and to ensure that innocent civilians are not killed unnecessarily.

These standards, which are set down in the Geneva Conventions, require warring parties to distinguish between lawful military targets and unlawful civilian ones. The Law of War specifically forbids attacks on hospitals, schools, places of worship, and other central parts of the civilian infrastructure. Direct, intentional attacks on noncombatants are also prohibited.

Servicemen and women learn these rules in training, and when they’re deployed into battle they receive more specific Rules of Engagement that state what is and is not permitted given the mission at hand. In the Iraq War, the Rules of Engagement were initially quite restrictive.

“Do not target or strike any of the following except in self-defense: … civilians, hospitals, mosques, national monuments, and any other historical and cultural sites,” reads the Rules of Engagement card given to soldiers and marines in January 2003, before the invasion of Iraq.

Do not fire into civilian populated areas or buildings unless the enemy is using them for military purposes or if necessary for your self-defense. … Minimize collateral damage. Do not target enemy infrastructure (public works, commercial communication facilities, dams), Lines of Communication (roads, highways, tunnels, bridges, railways) and Economic Objects (commercial storage facilities, pipelines) unless necessary for self-defense or if ordered by your commander. If you must fire on these objects to engage a hostile force, disable and disrupt but avoid destruction of these objects, if possible.1

Those Rules of Engagement were not always followed, but initially they were widely respected and, as a result, civilian casualties were kept to a minimum. Once Saddam Hussein was overthrown, however, an armed resistance erupted against the U.S. occupation. With the Iraqi army defeated, many Iraqi civilians became involved as “insurgents”—Iraqis who dressed in regular civilian clothing and lived in civilian homes and apartment buildings with their families. They dropped their children off at school, went to work, and then after work spotted mortar rounds, buried roadside bombs, and fired rocket-propelled grenades at American soldiers.

Tailors, barbers, and car mechanics joined militias that attacked U.S. troops. Every Iraqi person was a potential insurgent. “Major combat operations” had been declared over, but by June 2003, American soldiers were being attacked over a thousand times a day. The military command structure responded to these developments by loosening the Rules of Engagement significantly. For most of the five-year-long occupation of Iraq, ROE has required American soldiers only to identify a “hostile act” or “hostile intent” before firing a weapon.2

As you’ll see in the testimony that follows, commanders have interpreted these terms very loosely. Hospitals, mosques, schools, and historic sites have all been targeted. Shootings of innocents at checkpoints and during house raids and convoy operations are excused. From 2003 to 2006, the Washington Post reports, only thirty-nine service members were formally accused in connection with the deaths of Iraqis. Just twelve of the accused served prison time, none of them officers.3

Innocent Iraqi civilians are not killed in a vacuum. Their deaths are not limited to a few headline-grabbing events like the killing of twenty-four civilians in Haditha on November 19, 2005. Iraqi civilians are killed every day, their deaths an unavoidable part of guerilla war in general and this occupation in particular. An example of this is in the way the command structure responds to specific cases in which civilians are killed—not the big cases spotlighted in the media, but the everyday killings most Americans never hear about.

In September 2007 the American Civil Liberties Union obtained nearly ten thousand pages of previously classified U.S. Army documents, which show how the government responds to civilian casualties. The court-martial proceedings and military investigations reveal that the definitions of “hostile intent” and “hostile actions” are so broad that virtually any activity by an Iraqi can be used to justify the use of force.

One army document describes a November 12, 2005, incident in Abu Saida, northeast of Baghdad.4 According to the document, an Iraqi driver was “killed (shot) by American soldiers at a checkpoint after being turned back…. While attempting to turn around, an American soldier shot him. The other three passengers took him to the hospital where he was later pronounced dead.”

Six months later, on March 25, 2006, a judge advocate captain at Forward Operating Base Warhorse completed his investigation (the captain’s name is redacted in the document). “There is insufficient evidence to prove US negligence or wrongful act,” it reads. “Such fire engagement by any checkpoint guardsman was likely a result of the deceased’s failure to follow written or verbal instruction at a checkpoint.”

Another document describes an incident that took place on December 2, 2005. “Claimant stated her husband was shot and killed by CF (Coalition Forces) while driving produce from his farm to sell at the market. Claimant also stated that CF brought her husband’s body to her house.”

Six weeks later, on January 12, 2006, a judge advocate captain exonerated the soldiers. There was no “negligent or wrongful acts of military members or civilian employees of the Armed Forces,” he wrote. “The shooting was lawful as it was initiated only after the victim demonstrated hostile intent by pulling into the middle of the convoy.”

According to research published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 186,000 Iraqis were killed by U.S. troops and their coalition allies between March 2003 and July 2006.5 Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, MIT, and Mustansuriye University in Baghdad traveled to all eighteen provinces of Iraq, used a GPS system, and randomly visited nearly two thousand households. To date, their casualty count is the only systematic effort to survey the number of civilian dead since the war began. Some have criticized their methods and said the estimate is unreasonably high. As you read through the Winter Soldier testimony on the Rules of Engagement and experience the occupation as lived by these veterans, remember that the killing they describe is the result of official policy, a natural outgrowth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

During the invasion of Iraq, during the push north to Baghdad, the Rules of Engagement given to me were gradually reduced to nonexistence. When we first crossed the Kuwait-Iraq border at Azubad in March 2003, we were operating under Geneva Convention guidelines and, with the exception of medical and religious personnel, we were authorized to shoot anyone wearing a military uniform unless they had surrendered.

By the time we got to Baghdad, however, I was explicitly told by my chain of command that I could shoot anyone who came closer to me than I felt comfortable with, if that person did not immediately move when I ordered them to do so, keeping in mind I don’t speak Arabic. My chain of command’s general attitude was “better them than us,” and we were given guidance that reinforced that attitude across the ranks. I watched that attitude intensify throughout my three tours.

In January 2004, I remember attending a formation where we were given our mission for the second deployment. I was sitting there like a good marine with my pen and paper, and our commander told us that our mission was “to kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved.” That was it. With those words, he set the tone for the deployment.

At the start of that second deployment, our standing Rules of Engagement were that someone had to be displaying hostile intent and committing a hostile act before deadly force could be used. I won’t get into the absurdity of asking one to discern what is going on in the mind of another individual except to say that it was the individual marine’s job to determine the meaning of hostile intent and hostile action.

During the April offensive of 2004, in which attacks erupted all over Anbar province, my unit was involved in a two-day firefight. Shortly after the firefight was underway, the same commander who had given us the mission ordered that everyone wearing a black dishdasha and a red headscarf was displaying “hostile intent” and a “hostile action” and was to be shot.

Later he ordered that everyone on the streets was an enemy combatant. I can remember one instance that afternoon when we came around a corner and an unarmed Iraqi man stepped out of a doorway. I remember the marine directly in front of me raising his rifle and aiming at the unarmed man. Then I think, due to some psychological reason, my brain blocked out the actual shots, because the next thing I remember is stepping over the dead man’s body to clear the room that he came out of. It was a storage room and it was full of some Arabic version of Cheetos. There weren’t any weapons in the area except ours.