Winter Soldier 2008: Who Supports the Troops?

I knew about everything of which the vets spoke in an academic sense, but to hear them tell the tales in their own words — some choking up visibly with the telling — was enough to make a person cry, and many in the auditorium did just that.

I’ve written about a dozen articles about military contractors, and I think I have a pretty good handle on how destructive the endemic corruption of this occupation has been. But hearing the frustration expressed by a young MP as she told of providing security to KBR convoys is something that can’t be found in any report. ‘Every day we’d provide security for these trucks,’ she said, ‘ and they told us that they were strategic assets vital to military operations in the country. We were supposed to be prepared to use deadly force to protect them.’ When the trucks broke down, the convoys would keep barreling along, and her team was left to provide security. Hungry, desperate Iraqis would gather around, and they’d hold them off using rubber bullets and, if necessary, live ammunition. Inevitably, they’d then get the call to just destroy the vehicles, along with their cargoes. ‘I had no idea what we were doing — if the payloads were so valuable, why would we inevitably get the order to destroy them?’ She detailed burning trucks full of food in front of hungry Iraqis, destroying a full-outfitted and perfectly serviceable ambulance in an Iraqi district that had none. It wasn’t just the futility of the job, it was the repeated futility, day in and day out. One got the sense that a lot of these soldiers went over their with lofty ideals — they went to help the Iraqi people — and instead they found themselves members of an occupation that places very, very little value on Iraqi lives.

There was a panel on the Rules of Engagement. More than a dozen soldiers testified that they had been trained stateside to be professionals — to use minimal force to achieve their objectives, to respect the spirit as well as the letter of the Geneva Conventions. When they got to Iraq, that flew out the window, and the unofficial but universally observed ROE was that if they felt at all threatened, they should shoot to kill. And all agreed that in a country where the enemies are indistinguishable from the friendlies, and with a mission that was poorly designed, the rules became looser and looser. All reported that they regularly carried ‘drop’ weapons to put next to the corpses of any civilians they had killed by mistake, and were told by their superiors that they’d be protected in such circumstances. And that happened with alarming frequency.

And they repeated, again and again, almost as if desperate to prove that they were not monsters, that these were not isolated events — the standards were systemic, and they came from above. The only time they played it straight by the book was when they had embedded journalists with them. "Everything was different when the media was around," remarked one Marine.

What I found most striking was the candor with which they spoke of the horrors they themselves had committed. A young sniper told of killing two guys in a field after curfew. Turns out they were farmers, and the only time they could run the pumps to irrigate their fields was during the few hours when the power was working — they’d defied curfew to feed their family and the soldiers in his unit knew who they were and knew their situation before they opened fire.

A marine told of his first kill — an old, unarmed man on a bicycle at the wrong place at the wrong time. He told of his commander congratulating him for the act.

Ever see a Marine choke up? A noncommissioned officer did so while recounting how he had had to call in artillery fire in Afghanistan, and instead of using his GPS system to come up with the coordinates — which takes too long to get a bearing — he used his compass. But he took the reading too close to a big gun, and the metal threw off the reading. He got the azimuth wrong. When he said that he had gotten it wrong, he had to pause to collect himself. Tears rolled down his face. One of his comrades brought tissues, and another put an arm around him for support. When he collected himself, he told about how he had kept calling in barrages of mortars, one after the other, and the shells fell into a sleepy little village. A few days later his unit went into the decimated village and told the survivors that if the Taliban ever mortared them again, they should call the U.S. troops.

I’ve never been in combat, and I have no idea how much bravery is required to shoot at someone you feel is threatening. But I do know that coming forward to talk about these things was the most profound act of courage I’ve ever witnessed.

They told story after heartbreaking story to the rapt audience, and at the end of the day an almost palpable sense of exhaustion permeated the space.

As I listened, two things jumped out at me. First, I was struck by what idiots people are for believing that we can’t end this occupation — or I should say how credulous they are. Anyone who believes that such a thing as a benevolent foreign military occupation exists is seriously deluded. Soldier after soldier agreed: it’s not about "mistakes" or poorly defined missions or a "failure of command," although all of those things are endemic in Iraq. The problem is the occupation, and there was a consensus among these soldiers and Marines that ending the occupation is a prerequisite for the Iraqis to try to put their wrecked country back together.

I also found myself deeply conflicted. These young people’s stories are heartbreaking, and in one sense it’s impossible to fault them individually for the small role they played in what are the inevitable consequences of national policy. But while I could relate — and I could empathize, as these soldiers’ lives will never be the same — I couldn’t escape the fact that they were telling tales of atrocity committed in our name in some far-flung country that we invaded without provocation. If I empathize with them, mustn’t I, for moral consistency, also empathize with all soldiers, of all nationalities, who commit terrible crimes after their commanders drop them into a country — after they watch their buddies get killed?