This article, by Evan Goodenow, was originally published in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, July 31, 2008
For former U.S. Marine Sgt. Ken Mills, it was the sight of the little Iraqi girl barely alive with most of her face blown off that he pulled out of a pile of dead bodies. And the Iraqi corpse with crutches that U.S. tanks kept running over. And the truck driver Mills said the Marines killed for getting too close to their convoy.
For U.S. Army Cpl. Sara Wallace, now Sara Beining since marrying, it was her work as a military analyst reviewing daily accounts of the deaths of Americans and Iraqis, and working on intelligence for presidential briefings that she says President Bush purposefully distorted. And the wastefulness of guarding at gunpoint Pakistanis working for military contractor KBR on jobs that could have been done for far less by U.S. soldiers.
It was these experiences that made the Iraq War veterans become members of Iraq Veterans Against the War and inspired them to form a Fort Wayne chapter.
They expect supporters of the war will accuse them of being traitors and undermining the morale of the troops while emboldening their enemies. But because of what they’ve experienced, they believe staying silent would make them complicit in a war that has killed some 4,100 U.S. soldiers and as many as 1.2 million Iraqis. They say they have been jeered on the street, but when you have friends who have come home in body bags from Iraq, it’s worth being harassed to speak out.
“It’s hilarious when these people call us cowards and traitors. I have the medals and ribbons and the discharge papers to prove that I did my job, and I did it to the best of my ability,” Mills said. “I don’t want any more troops to die.”
Iraq experiences led to anti-war stances
Beining, 22, said she enlisted in 2004 after taking ROTC classes at Concordia Lutheran High School. She was looking for the discipline instilled in the military and money for college, not payback for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
Mills, who also enlisted in 2004 after attending Lakeland High School in LaGrange, said he’d always wanted to be in the military and initially bought into Bush’s contention that the invasion of Iraq was necessary to keep America safe.
But Mills, 24, believes the war is endangering America by creating hatred for it among Muslims due to the tactics of the U.S. military, which he and Beining say is guilty of war crimes. Mills said he witnessed it during the second and third battles of Fallujah in 2004 and 2005, which he took part in. The first attack occurred shortly after the March 31, 2004, killings of four Blackwater professional soldiers after they accidentally drove to the city.
The men’s burnt corpses were hung from a bridge, eliciting outrage from the Bush administration and U.S. military. Fallujans were bitter over an accidental bombing of a marketplace in 1991 by the U.S. in the first Gulf War and with the 82nd Airborne for firing into a crowd, killing 13, during a protest shortly after the 2003 invasion. Fallujans said the protesters were unarmed.
Of the 2004 siege, Mills said, “They said it was a hotbed of insurgent activity, but really it was revenge for Blackwater contractors getting killed.” Some 70 Marines were killed, and while the U.S. military does not record how many people it kills, media accounts said hundreds of Iraqis died.
Mills is not alone in accusing the Marines of war crimes in Fallujah. While the Geneva Conventions say “fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the medical service” are to be “respected” and “protected,” a front-page New York Times article on Nov. 8, 2004, described how U.S. soldiers captured Fallujah General Hospital because the U.S. said hospital employees exaggerated the number of Iraqi casualties they treated as a propaganda weapon.
The BBC and Reuters reported that the U.S. bombed a health center in Fallujah, killing 35, which the U.S. denied. And Jean Ziegler, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, said U.S. and British soldiers violated international law by denying Red Cross water shipments to civilians to isolate the resistance.
Mills remembers the Marines dropping napalm-like white phosphorous bombs on Fallujah each day. After initially denying it, the U.S. admitted to using the highly flammable bombs – which burn to the bone – in Fallujah, but denied dropping them on civilians. The Pentagon has said it primarily uses white phosphorous for smoke screens and to mark targets. A 1980 U.N. chemical weapons treaty bans the use of incendiary chemicals like white phosphorous, but the U.S. has never signed it.
Mills said Marines in Fallujah employed a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality. “Every house we went into we poured machine gun fire into. We shot anything that moved or didn’t move,” Mills recalled. “Our whole mentality was, ‘Why send a Marine when you can send a bullet?’ That’s what we were told. We’d just pound a house full of rounds and search it.”
Mills said Marines had a guilty-until-proved- innocent mentality with prisoners, most of whom he said were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. He said Marines mistreated prisoners because they resented the hassle of having to deal with them. “I guess it would be like the police beating people up because they had to fill out a report,” he said.
Mills admits he was no angel in Fallujah. Like most soldiers in a kill-or-be-killed situation, he was scared, angry and frustrated and sometimes took it out on Iraqis.
Mills said Marines frequently trashed civilians’ houses they searched or commandeered. His specialty was destroying the fan control systems of Iraqi houses – no minor act of vandalism in a nation where temperatures regularly hit 120 degrees in the summer.
“We were supposed to be going after the terrorists that attacked us, and all we ever did was harass civilians and blow up their houses,” Mills said. “I remember piling everything people owned in one room of the house and setting it on fire just because we found some guns there that probably were put there after the family fled the house.”
Mills recalled Marines in a convoy fatally shooting a truck driver who got too close to their convoy because they feared he was a suicide bomber. The Marines were supposed to fire a warning flare first, but Mills said they didn’t, and he refused a commander’s order to shoot one off after the killing to cover up the violation of their rules of engagement.
Marine Capt. Amy E. Malugani, a Marines spokeswoman, refused to be interviewed by The News-Sentinel about Mills’ contentions, but in an e-mail said if Mills witnessed or was involved in inappropriate behavior, he had a responsibility to report it to investigators. Malugani said the Marines thoroughly investigate allegations of misconduct and hold individuals accountable.
But Mills said he complained to his company commander about an Iraqi man he believes was badly beaten by Marines at a checkpoint, but the commander insisted the beating was in self-defense. Mills said the incident – which he said led other Marines to label him a “haji lover” – soured him on reporting misconduct.
For Beining, helping to compile a daily body count meant gleaning all the gory details of the deaths of Americans and Iraqis, a task she said sickened her. The suicide of a fellow soldier further troubled her. Beining said the military prescribed an antipsychotic drug to keep her functioning, and she considered shooting herself in the leg to get home.
“They were purposefully doing more harm than good just to keep me over there,” she said. “They didn’t care what happened to me.”
Standing by comrades
Despite becoming disenchanted with the war, both Beining and Mills said they felt an obligation to their fellow soldiers to stay.
“I looked at it like I’m saving other soldiers’ lives,” she said. “My intel’s going to help them survive.”
Beining said disciplinary problems led to her eventually receiving a general discharge shortly after returning from Iraq in 2006. Mills was honorably discharged last year.
Both Beining and Mills say they believe most soldiers and families of soldiers in Iraq are pro-war because they don’t want to believe that their sacrifice was for an illegal, unprovoked war of choice. “The government’s attitude is: we’re America, we’re the biggest kid on the block, we have the biggest stick, we’re going to do whatever we want,” Mills said.
Mills says the U.S. cannot defeat the resistance. He said anyone with a basic knowledge of guerrilla warfare should understand guerillas rarely attack an enemy with superior numbers and firepower, in this case the U.S., but bide their time. Mills worries about his younger brother, who is in the Marines. He has served in Iraq and is being sent there again. Beining worries about her three younger brothers enlisting.
Both say their concern about all the soldiers still in Iraq is why they’re fighting a new battle at home. “We’re here to help you and bring you home,” Mills said of their message to the troops in harm’s way. “We don’t have any other agenda.”