The following article was excerpted, by Tom Barton, from a longer piece published in the Sunday Times, March 2, 2008
“The Common Denominator That Links All Of These Veterans’ Stories Is A Profound Disillusionment About The War”
“Washburn’s Anger Comes From A Feeling Of Betrayal. ‘I Thought I Was Signing Up To Do Something Honourable’”
“It’s One Thing To Do 20 Push-Ups. It’s Another To Burn Us To The Point Of Exhaustion In Combat Theatre”
“What happened at Abu Ghraib,” Washburn says, “is those orders came from the top. If the policy makers and the commanders can dehumanise their own troops, why wouldn’t they dehumanise the Iraqi people?”
March 2, 2008 Ariel Leve, The Sunday Times [UK] [Excerpts]
This month, for four days in Washington, DC, beginning on March 13, there will be a second Winter Soldier gathering – 37 years after the first.
Organised by the protest group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attack on New York will testify about their experiences. They will present photographs and videos, recorded with mobile phones and digital cameras, to back up their allegations – of brutality, torture and murder.
Some see it as their responsibility to speak out – like Jason Washburn, a US marine who did two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq; Logan Laituri, a US Army forward observer in Iraq; and Perry O'Brien, an army medic deployed to Afghanistan in 2003.
Jason Washburn, 28, grew up in San Diego, California. He always wanted to do something to make a difference, and he enlisted in the US marines in December 2001. He wasn’t itching to go into combat, but he wanted the training.
He fought in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 where, he says, he met little resistance. Most people were surrendering.
“There were massive amounts of artillery strikes before we even invaded. We saw the results of that. Streets full of bodies – women and children – body parts, extremely indiscriminate. I’m talking about rolling through villages here, not military encampments.”
He was told there was a military structure in one village. “I didn’t see it. I didn’t see any army uniforms. Or weapons. All I saw were civilians.”
Washburn speaks slowly and with obvious discomfort. This was his introduction to Iraq.
“I still believed everything we were force-fed: weapons of mass destruction and possibly even a nuclear weapon. We felt, like, we’re going to go in, overthrow this evil dictator and give these people some peace, finally. We thought we were doing a good thing.”
Over the course of his three tours, there were more home raids than Washburn can remember.
He explains how it worked. “Usually it was based on a tip – we’re told someone in the home is an insurgent. We would pick up people who had nothing to do with anything, keep them locked up until they came up with something.”
He is glad that he didn’t witness some of the techniques used to get them to talk. “That’s not something I want on my conscience.”
It was not a scientific process. Most tips came from people with personal grudges.
Washburn and his platoon would kick down the doors in the middle of the night. He was warned not to be complacent.
There could be weapons in the children’s beds. In all of the home raids, too many to count, he never found children with weapons.
They would take the father away and they never knew what would happen after that.
By the time Washburn served in Haditha he was on his third combat tour. He was there on November 19, 2005, the day of the massacre when 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed, including women and children.
“My squad was doing medivacs out of the town. I was not there to witness the shooting, but I know many marines who were.”
It was a squad in his unit that went on the rampage after their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED).
“I have a lot of feelings about this incident. A friend of mine from my first two tours was in that squad. He was the guy they gave immunity to to testify against the squad leader.
“The people on the ground are looking at serious prison time. Like life.
The people who were giving orders were only relieved of command. And I don’t think that’s right.”
Washburn says Haditha was not an isolated incident. “It’s the one that just happened to be uncovered.”
Washburn says the most dangerous job in Iraq “has to be a taxi driver”. He tells two stories of taxi drivers being shot, both innocent victims. One driver was deaf and didn’t hear the command to halt. The other was at a checkpoint in the Haditha area.
“It was the mayor of one of the towns who was driving, and he was shot and killed. They found out after they shot him. My squad had to apologise to the family. We paid reparations. I don’t know the exact amount.
“But let’s see: money or a dead husband and father and mayor? People weren’t happy about that.”
During Washburn’s first Iraq deployment in 2003, his unit was told to capture a “rabble rouser”. “We kick down the door and all we find are a few women holding babies and a couple of kids. We were ordered to take the babies away and put sandbags on the women’s heads, tie their hands behind their backs, put them on their knees facing the wall.
Here I am zip-tying these women, and my buddy is standing next to me holding these babies asking what do I do with these kids?
We stood there, like, oh shit, what do we do? The squad leader came in and shouted, ‘Everybody is bagged and tagged – everybody!’ So we did it.” The babies were put down on the floor. After a few hours everyone was untied.
Inappropriate and immoral actions weren’t just aimed at Iraqi civilians.
There was frequent hazing – the mistreatment of soldiers by their comrades. Some were exercises in pure humiliation, common in most military units, like singing I’m a Little Teapot while others stand around laughing.
But some were brutal physical punishments, such as callisthenics in a sleeping bag with a gas mask on in scorching heat.
“It’s one thing to do 20 push-ups. It’s another to burn us to the point of exhaustion in combat theatre.
“There were guys that tried to speak out about it and that made it worse. That would get punished more.”
The futility of speaking out was bolstered by knowledge that complaints would get as far as the commanding officer of the company and no further. “They kept everything in-house.”
Another incident he describes was a step beyond hazing. He and another marine had had a disagreement. The punishment was that they were tied together – and sent out on patrol.
“Outside of the camp, in a war zone tied together, patrolling? Insane,” he says.
Washburn’s anger comes from a feeling of betrayal.
“I thought I was signing up to do something honourable.
“What happened at Abu Ghraib,” Washburn says, “is those orders came from the top.
If the policy makers and the commanders can dehumanise their own troops, why wouldn’t they dehumanise the Iraqi people?”
[P]erry O’Brien doubts that speaking out will foster more anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan and Iraq than the killing of civilians and the dismantling of the infrastructure. After serving in Afghanistan for eight months, there was a slow revelation that triggered his shift.
“Everything that we were doing seemed almost designed to create more terrorists. To turn people against America. I couldn’t understand how we were liberating anyone.
“But I could understand how an Afghan person who was ambivalent about America could easily become an extremist based on their interaction with American soldiers.”
Kelly Dougherty, 29, is a co-founder and executive director of IVAW. In 1996 she enlisted in the National Guard as a medic while she read biology at the University of Colorado. On January 10, 2003, she received a call; she had been transferred to a military police unit – and she was being deployed to Iraq.
Dougherty was opposed to the war and surprised by her deployment.
In February 2003, she arrived in Kuwait and then moved to Iraq in March. Her unit was stationed in the south near Nasiriyah, where she often did convoy escorts and patrols.
“You put it out of your mind when you’re over there. And then you get back and reflect on it…
“The soldiers and marines are just doing their jobs, doing what they were trained for or what they were told to do when they got over there.
“Things that seem really horrible just become routine – and they are implicitly or explicitly condoned, or encouraged, by the commanders and the policy-makers.”
The offices of IVAW in Philadelphia are humble but busy. The group now has more than 700 members in 49 states, Washington, DC, Canada, and on military bases overseas.
I meet Logan Laituri there one afternoon and we sit down over a soft drink to talk. He has a gentle and sensitive manner. His enlistment wasn’t a patriotic stand, but more of a pragmatic decision. He didn’t know what else to do.
He became a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg. “I had no accomplishments outside the military. I didn’t feel that I would be missing out on much.”
There was also a financial incentive. “Every soldier knows that you earn a crap-load of money in combat. Above and beyond my pay cheque I earned $800 a month – and all that’s tax-free. And everything is paid for in Iraq. You can save every single penny. That’s a lot of money you can save for your future.”
He was deployed to Iraq in January 2004, having switched to the 25th Infantry Division. When Laituri got to Samarra, they kicked down the doors of a building and found a police officer in uniform. “Through his interpreter he was telling us that he’d been waiting, and he had all the records. I thought to myself it was great initiative and it displayed insight.
“We handcuffed him and someone took it upon themselves to punch him in the stomach – what made me feel worse was watching it and not doing anything about it.”
As he talks, Laituri seems visibly troubled that he stood by watching this man beaten up. And he admits that so many of his feelings of being in Iraq are wrapped up in what he didn’t do: “What I saw happen and I didn’t say or I didn’t correct. I survived at the expense of Iraqis. I could have said something.”
But the fear of being isolated from the platoon prevailed. Beating up prisoners, abusing the bodies of Afghans, innocents shot dead in the crossfire of fear and threat – these things get lost in the mayhem of war – but other acts, if they become institutionalised, can “try the souls of men” and cannot be so easily dismissed.
Laituri was in Fort Irwin, California in May 2006 during a pep talk at the National Training Center. He alleges that a commander made a speech to his company, and that he “made it clear to us that if an innocent person was shot he would stage a scene to protect us”.
The explicit message was: “We would make sure there was a weapon found at the scene.”
Units go into combat believing that they will be protected from any repercussions. They feel like they have a licence to kill and often they do.
In 2007, the officer was relieved of his command after a death on June 23 last year in the vicinity of Kirkuk. He is not currently a suspect and was never charged – but two soldiers who were under his command have been charged with premeditated murder.
Last month a top army sniper testified in military court – under immunity – that he had ordered a subordinate to kill an unarmed Iraqi man, then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to back up a false claim of returned fire.
But who is ultimately responsible: the individual or the officer? The combatant or the culture? And why is it always the junior ranks who are charged?
On a February morning at a cafe in Brooklyn, New York, Perry O’Brien is explaining the difference between the “book way” and the “real way”, and the significance of the “three-stomp signal” that is used to differentiate between the two.
“If someone is giving a briefing and they stomp their foot three times after what they are saying, it means ‘disregard what I just said’. For instance, ‘Make every effort to avoid civilian property damage,’ stomp stomp stomp – (means) ignore that. The idea is that when you get back, anything that you did the book way can be spoken about – but not what was done the real way.”
It isn’t just between the book way and the real way, he says; it’s become between the honourable way and the immoral way.
Perhaps even more tragic is that now, for many, these lines have blurred. “People join the military wanting to be honourable. They follow a code of conduct – they have to. It’s what separates them from mercenaries.”
The common denominator that links all of these veterans’ stories is a profound disillusionment about the war.
All of these soldiers signed up with a belief that what they were doing was noble.
“The book way was we treat everyone the same…”
Perry smiles and taps his foot three times. “You are ordered to do things that are clear violations of our conscience and what we know to be moral. It’s not even what’s prescribed by the Geneva conventions. It’s what every human being knows to be right and wrong. We’re asked to do things that violate that and told it’s about the war, but you can never tell anyone because we need to protect them from that.
“I think that certainly it’s our duty to protect American civilians from the physical reality of wars. That’s our goal. To prevent the American public from having to participate in war and get hurt and put their lives at risk. That’s what we volunteer to do.
“But I don’t think we’re protecting America if we’re not telling our stories and keeping what we do secret.”
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