The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness 

Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat
veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to
investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi
civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and
physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave
vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war
rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts. 

Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts,
reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens
of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying
from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others
treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also
heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers,
sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in
indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a
minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said
they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished. 

Court cases, such as the ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and the
rape and murder of a 14-year-old in Mah­mudiya, and news stories in the
Washington Post, Time, the London Independent and elsewhere based on Iraqi
accounts have begun to hint at the wide extent of the attacks on
civilians. Human rights groups have issued reports, such as Human Rights
Watch's Hearts and Minds: Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by
U.S. Forces, packed with detailed incidents that suggest that the killing
of Iraqi civilians by occupation forces is more common than has been
acknowledged by military authorities. 

This Nation investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record,
named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one
place to openly corroborate these assertions. 

While some veterans said civilian shootings were routinely investigated by
the military, many more said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you
physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded
or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time
doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of
Arlington, Virginia. He served from August 2004 to March 2005 in Ramadi
with a Marine Corps civil affairs unit supporting a combat team with the
Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade. (All interviewees are identified by
the rank they held during the period of service they recount here; some
have since been promoted or demoted.) 

Veterans said the culture of this counterinsurgency war, in which most
Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile, made it difficult for soldiers
to sympathize with their victims--at least until they returned home and
had a chance to reflect. 

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just
another dead Iraqi," said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction,
Colorado. Specialist Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First
Infantry Division, in Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of
Baghdad, for a year beginning in February 2004. "You know, so what?... The
soldiers honestly thought we were trying to help the people and they were
mad because it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying to help
you, here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and my family,
and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these missions.
Well, we're trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill
us." 

He said it was only "when they get home, in dealing with veteran issues
and meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place,
takes root, then." 

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise. In this investigation
of alleged military misconduct, The Nation focused on a few key elements
of the occupation, asking veterans to explain in detail their experiences
operating patrols and supply convoys, setting up checkpoints, conducting
raids and arresting suspects. From these collected snapshots a common
theme emerged. Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the
indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation
troops of thousands of innocents. 

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity
between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US
government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and
even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other
misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French
occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian territory. 

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon,
24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in
April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in
Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there
was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute
little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An
IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just
started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at
me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she
couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You
know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this
is it. This is ridiculous." 

Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans
was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the
survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army
Medical Command, just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines
agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. Only 55
percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they would report a
unit member who had killed or injured "an innocent noncombatant." 

These attitudes reflect the limited contact occupation troops said they
had with Iraqis. They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in
heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They only
ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting
frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of
roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led
many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis. 

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some
shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then
tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened
fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses. 

In June 2003 Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejía's unit was pressed by a furious crowd
in Ramadi. Sergeant Mejía, 31, a National Guardsman from Miami, served for
six months beginning in April 2003 with the 1-124 Infantry Battalion,
Fifty-Third Infantry Brigade. His squad opened fire on an Iraqi youth
holding a grenade, riddling his body with bullets. Sergeant Mejía checked
his clip afterward and calculated that he had personally fired eleven
rounds into the young man. 

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who
were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the
local population that was supporting them," Sergeant Mejía said. 

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photo­graphs, that
some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or
desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The
Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he
is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown
plastic Army-issue spoon. 

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in
Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant
Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that
the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his
chest. 

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed. 

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers
and cousins. 

In the sections that follow, snipers, medics, military police,
artillerymen, officers and others recount their experiences serving in
places as diverse as Mosul in the north, Samarra in the Sunni Triangle,
Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad in the center, during 2003, 2004 and
2005. Their stories capture the impact of their units on Iraqi civilians. 

A Note on Methodology 

The Nation interviewed fifty combat veterans, including forty soldiers,
eight marines and two sailors, over a period of seven months beginning in
July 2006. To find veterans willing to speak on the record about their
experiences in Iraq, we sent queries to organizations dedicated to US
troops and their families, including Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of
America, the antiwar groups Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for
Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War and the prowar group Vets for
Freedom. The leaders of IVAW and Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of IAVA, were
especially helpful in putting us in touch with Iraq War veterans. Finally,
we found veterans through word of mouth, as many of those we interviewed
referred us to their military friends. 

To verify their military service, when possible we obtained a copy of each
interviewee's DD Form 214, or the Certificate of Release or Discharge From
Active Duty, and in all cases confirmed their service with the branch of
the military in which they were enlisted. Nineteen interviews were
conducted in person, while the rest were done over the phone; all were
tape-recorded and transcribed; all but five interviewees (most of those
currently on active duty) were independently contacted by fact checkers to
confirm basic facts about their service in Iraq. Of those interviewed,
fourteen served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, twenty from 2004 to 2005 and
two from 2005 to 2006. Of the eleven veterans whose tours lasted less than
one year, nine served in 2003, while the others served in 2004 and 2005. 

The ranks of the veterans we interviewed ranged from private to captain,
though only a handful were officers. The veterans served throughout Iraq,
but mostly in the country's most volatile areas, such as Baghdad, Tikrit,
Mosul, Falluja and Samarra. 

During the course of the interview process, five veterans turned over
photographs from Iraq, some of them graphic, to corroborate their claims. 


Raids

"So we get started on this day, this one in particular," recalled Spc.
Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno, who said he raided between twenty and thirty
Iraqi homes during an eleven-month tour in Kirkuk and Hawija that ended in
October 2005, serving with the Third Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade. "It
starts with the psy-ops vehicles out there, you know, with the big
speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they
happen to be, saying, basically, saying, Put your weapons, if you have
them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if
they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we're running
around, and they--we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my
platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people. 

"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area,
they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the
main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a
storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog.
And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad
leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he
didn't--mother­fucker--he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out.
So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog
has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all
over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family
is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad,
horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like,
What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out
without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know,
dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know?
At least kill it, because that can't be fixed.... 

"And--I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but--and I had
tears then, too--and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I
got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I
gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had
him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. 

"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any
punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not." 

Specialist Chrystal said such incidents were "very common." 

According to interviews with twenty-four veterans who participated in such
raids, they are a relentless reality for Iraqis under occupation. The
American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where
insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising fighters
or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common
were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in
their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the
damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family members who
were hauled away as suspects. 

Raids normally took place between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt.
John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in raids
of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city
infamous for its prison, located twenty miles west of the capital, with
the Third Brigade, First Armor Division, First Battalion, for one year
beginning in April 2003. His descriptions of raid procedures closely
echoed those of eight other veterans who served in locations as diverse as
Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit. 

"You want to catch them off guard," Sergeant Bruhns ­ex­plained. "You want
to catch them in their sleep." About ten troops were involved in each
raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the
home. 

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets
and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the
door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the
procedure: 

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are
working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team
outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a
headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with
the other rifle team leader that's outside. 

"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of
bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have
junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run
into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all
together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you
make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us. 

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him
at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any
weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at
all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are
somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?' 

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant
Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and
you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down.
You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything
on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll
open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and
basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it. 

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say,
'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated
this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family
and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do
the same thing in a hundred homes." 

Each raid, or "cordon and search" operation, as they are sometimes called,
involved five to twenty homes, he said. Following a spate of attacks on
soldiers in a particular area, commanders would normally order infantrymen
on raids to look for weapons caches, ammunition or materials for making
IEDs. Each Iraqi family was allowed to keep one AK-47 at home, but
according to Bruhns, those found with extra weapons were arrested and
detained and the operation classified a "success," even if it was clear
that no one in the home was an insurgent. 

Before a raid, according to descriptions by several veterans, soldiers
typically "quarantined" the area by barring anyone from coming in or
leaving. In pre-raid briefings, Sergeant Bruhns said, military commanders
often told their troops the neighborhood they were ordered to raid was "a
hostile area with a high level of insurgency" and that it had been taken
over by former Baathists or Al Qaeda terrorists. 

"So you have all these troops, and they're all wound up," said Sergeant
Bruhns. "And a lot of these troops think once they kick down the door
there's going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to
start shooting at them." 

Sgt. Dustin Flatt, 33, of Denver, estimates he raided "thousands" of homes
in Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul. He served with the Eighteenth Infantry
Brigade, First Infantry Division, for one year beginning in February 2004.
"We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every
house," he said. 

Spc. Ali Aoun, 23, a National Guardsman from New York City, said he
conducted perimeter security in nearly 100 raids while serving in Sadr
City with the Eighty-Ninth Military Police Brigade for eleven months
starting in April 2004. When soldiers raided a home, he said, they first
cordoned it off with Humvees. Soldiers guarded the entrance to make sure
no one escaped. If an entire town was being raided, in large-scale
operations, it too was cordoned off, said Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, 32, of
Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry scout and sniper with the 263rd Armor
Battalion, First Infantry Division, who was deployed to Baquba for a year
in February 2004. 

Staff Sgt. Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, recalled one summer night
in 2004, the temperature an oppressive 110 degrees, when he and forty-four
other US soldiers raided a sprawling farm on the outskirts of Tikrit.
Sergeant Westphal, who served there for a yearlong tour with the
Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, beginning in
February 2004, said he was told some men on the farm were insurgents. As a
mechanized infantry squad leader, Sergeant Westphal led the mission to
secure the main house, while fifteen men swept the property. Sergeant
Westphal and his men hopped the wall surrounding the house, fully
expecting to come face to face with armed insurgents. 

"We had our flashlights and...I told my guys, 'On the count of three, just
hit them with your lights and let's see what we've got here. Wake 'em
up!'" 

Sergeant Westphal's flashlight was mounted on his M-4 carbine rifle, a
smaller version of the M-16, so in pointing his light at the clump of
sleepers on the floor he was also pointing his weapon at them. Sergeant
Westphal first turned his light on a man who appeared to be in his
mid-60s. 

"The man screamed this gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, just horrified
scream," Sergeant Westphal recalled. "I've never heard anything like that.
I mean, the guy was absolutely terrified. I can imagine what he was
thinking, having lived under Saddam." 

The farm's inhabitants were not insurgents but a family sleeping outside
for relief from the stifling heat, and the man Sergeant Westphal had
frightened awake was the patriarch. 

"Sure enough, as we started to peel back the layers of all these people
sleeping, I mean, it was him, maybe two guys...either his sons or nephews
or whatever, and the rest were all women and children," Sergeant Westphal
said. "We didn't find anything. 

"I can tell you hundreds of stories about things like that and they would
all pretty much be like the one I just told you. Just a different family,
a different time, a different circumstance." 

For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. "I just remember
thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the
American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do," he said. 


Intelligence

Fifteen soldiers we spoke with told us the information that spurred these
raids was typically gathered through human intelligence--and that it was
usually incorrect. Eight said it was common for Iraqis to use American
troops to settle family disputes, tribal rivalries or personal vendettas.
Sgt. Jesus Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco, Texas, was a scout in Tikrit with
the Fourth Infantry Division during a yearlong tour that ended in March
2004. In late 2003, Sergeant Bocanegra raided a middle-aged man's home in
Tikrit because his son had told the Army his father was an insurgent.
After thoroughly searching the man's house, soldiers found nothing and
later discovered that the son simply wanted money his father had buried at
the farm. 

After persistently acting on such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who
raided Iraqi homes in more than fifty operations, said soldiers began to
anticipate the innocence of those they raided. "People would make jokes
about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna
get the wrong house," he said. "'Cause it would always happen. We always
got the wrong house." Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon
leader shared a joke of their own: Every time he raided a house, he would
radio in and say, "This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I found the
weapons of mass destruction in here." 

Sergeant Bruhns said he questioned the authenticity of the intelligence he
received because Iraqi informants were paid by the US military for tips.
On one occasion, an Iraqi tipped off Sergeant Bruhns's unit that a small
Syrian resistance organization, responsible for killing a number of US
troops, was holed up in a house. "They're waiting for us to show up and
there will be a lot of shooting," Sergeant Bruhns recalled being told. 

As the Alpha Company team leader, Sergeant Bruhns was supposed to be the
first person in the door. Skeptical, he refused. "So I said, 'If you're so
confident that there are a bunch of Syrian terrorists, insurgents...in
there, why in the world are you going to send me and three guys in the
front door, because chances are I'm not going to be able to squeeze the
trigger before I get shot.'" Sergeant Bruhns facetiously suggested they
pull an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle up to the house and shoot a missile
through the front window to exterminate the enemy fighters his commanders
claimed were inside. They instead diminished the aggressiveness of the
raid. As Sergeant Bruhns ran security out front, his fellow soldiers
smashed the windows and kicked down the doors to find "a few little kids,
a woman and an old man." 

In late summer 2005, in a village on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Specialist
Chrystal searched a compound with two Iraqi police officers. A friendly
man in his mid-30s escorted Specialist Chrystal and others in his unit
around the property, where the man lived with his parents, wife and
children, making jokes to lighten the mood. As they finished
searching--they found nothing--a lieutenant from his company approached
Specialist Chrystal: "What the hell were you doing?" he asked. "Well, we
just searched the house and it's clear," Specialist Chrystal said. The
lieutenant told Specialist Chrystal that his friendly guide was "one of
the targets" of the raid. "Apparently he'd been dimed out by somebody as
being an insurgent," Specialist Chrystal said. "For that mission, they'd
only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't there
with the rest of the troops." Specialist Chrystal said he felt
"humiliated" because his assessment that the man posed no threat was
deemed irrelevant and the man was arrested. Shortly afterward, he posted
himself in a fighting vehicle for the rest of the mission. 

Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the
Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, served a yearlong
tour in several cities in Iraq, including Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul,
beginning in February 2004. He estimates that he searched more than a
hundred homes in Tikrit and found the raids fruitless and maddening. "We
would go on one raid of a house and that guy would say, 'No, it's not me,
but I know where that guy is.' And...he'd take us to the next house where
this target was supposedly at, and then that guy's like, 'No, it's not me.
I know where he is, though.' And we'd drive around all night and go from
raid to raid to raid." 

"I can't really fault military intelligence," said Specialist Reppenhagen,
who said he raided thirty homes in and around Baquba. "It was always a
guessing game. We're in a country where we don't speak the language. We're
light on interpreters. It's just impossible to really get anything. All
you're going off is a pattern of what's happened before and hoping that
the pattern doesn't change." 

Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, 26, of Buffalo, New York, served in Tikrit with the
Rear Operations Center, Forty-Second Infantry Division, for one year
beginning in October 2004. He said combat troops had neither the training
nor the resources to investigate tips before acting on them. "We're not
police," he said. "We don't go around like detectives and ask questions.
We kick down doors, we go in, we grab people." 

First Lieut. Brady Van Engelen, 26, of Washington, DC, said the Army
depended on less than reliable sources because options were limited. He
served as a survey platoon leader with the First Armored Division in
Baghdad's volatile Adhamiya district for eight months beginning in
September 2003. "That's really about the only thing we had," he said. "A
lot of it was just going off a whim, a hope that it worked out," he said.
"Maybe one in ten worked out." 

Sergeant Bruhns said he uncovered illegal material about 10 percent of the
time, an estimate echoed by other veterans. "We did find small materials
for IEDs, like maybe a small piece of the wire, the detonating cord," said
Sergeant Cannon. "We never found real bombs in the houses." In the
thousand or so raids he conducted during his time in Iraq, Sergeant
Westphal said, he came into contact with only four "hard-core insurgents." 


Arrests

Even with such slim pretexts for arrest, some soldiers said, any Iraqis
arrested during a raid were treated with extreme suspicion. Several
reported seeing military-age men detained without evidence or abused
during questioning. Eight veterans said the men would typically be bound
with plastic handcuffs, their heads covered with sandbags. While the Army
officially banned the practice of hooding prisoners after the Abu Ghraib
scandal broke, five soldiers indicated that it continued. 

"You weren't allowed to, but it was still done," said Sergeant Cannon. "I
remember in Mosul [in January 2005], we had guys in a raid and they threw
them in the back of a Bradley," shackled and hooded. "These guys were
really throwing up," he continued. "They were so sick and nervous. And
sometimes, they were peeing on themselves. Can you imagine if people could
just come into your house and take you in front of your family screaming?
And if you actually were innocent but had no way to prove that? It would
be a scary, scary thing." Specialist Reppenhagen said he had only a vague
idea about what constituted contraband during a raid. "Sometimes we didn't
even have a translator, so we find some poster with Muqtada al-Sadr,
Sistani or something, we don't know what it says on it. We just apprehend
them, document that thing as evidence and send it on down the road and let
other people deal with it." 

Sergeant Bruhns, Sergeant Bocanegra and others said physical abuse of
Iraqis during raids was common. "It was just soldiers being soldiers,"
Sergeant Bocanegra said. "You give them a lot of, too much, power that
they never had before, and before you know it they're the ones kicking
these guys while they're handcuffed. And then by you not catching
[insurgents], when you do have someone say, 'Oh, this is a guy planting a
roadside bomb'--and you don't even know if it's him or not--you just go in
there and kick the shit out of him and take him in the back of a
five-ton--take him to jail." 

Tens of thousands of Iraqis--military officials estimate more than
60,000--have been arrested and detained since the beginning of the
occupation, leaving their families to navigate a complex, chaotic prison
system in order to find them. Veterans we interviewed said the majority of
detainees they encountered were either innocent or guilty of only minor
infractions. 

Sergeant Bocanegra said during the first two months of the war he was
instructed to detain Iraqis based on their attire alone. "They were
wearing Arab clothing and military-style boots, they were considered enemy
combatants and you would cuff 'em and take 'em in," he said. "When you put
something like that so broad, you're bound to have, out of a hundred,
you're going to have ten at least that were, you know what I mean,
innocent." 

Sometime during the summer of 2003, Bocanegra said, the rules of
engagement narrowed--somewhat. "I remember on some raids, anybody of
military age would be taken," he said. "Say, for example, we went to some
house looking for a 25-year-old male. We would look at an age group.
Anybody from 15 to 30 might be a suspect." (Since returning from Iraq,
Bocanegra has sought counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder and
said his "mission" is to encourage others to do the same.) 

Spc. Richard Murphy, 28, an Army Reservist from Pocono, Pennsylvania, who
served part of his fifteen-month tour with the 800th Military Police
Brigade in Abu Ghraib prison, said he was often struck by the lack of due
process afforded the prisoners he guarded. 

Specialist Murphy initially went to Iraq in May 2003 to train Iraqi police
in the southern city of Al Hillah but was transferred to Abu Ghraib in
October 2003 when his unit replaced one that was rotating home. (He spoke
with The Nation in October 2006, while not on active duty.) Shortly after
his arrival there, he realized that the number of prisoners was growing
"exponentially" while the amount of personnel remained stagnant. By the
end of his six-month stint, Specialist Murphy was in charge of 320
prisoners, the majority of whom he was convinced were unjustly detained. 

"I knew that a large percentage of these prisoners were innocent," he
said. "Just living with these people for months you get to see their
character.... In just listening to the prisoners' stories, I mean, I get
the sense that a lot of them were just getting rounded up in big groups." 

Specialist Murphy said one prisoner, a mentally impaired, blind albino who
could "maybe see a few feet in front of his face" clearly did not belong
in Abu Ghraib. "I thought to myself, What could he have possibly done?" 

Specialist Murphy counted the prisoners twice a day, and the inmates would
often ask him when they would be released or implore him to advocate on
their behalf, which he would try to do through the JAG (Judge Advocate
General) Corps office. The JAG officer Specialist Murphy dealt with would
respond that it was out of his hands. "He would make his recommendations
and he'd have to send it up to the next higher command," Specialist Murphy
said. "It was just a snail's crawling process.... The system wasn't
working." 

Prisoners at the notorious facility rioted on November 24, 2003, to
protest their living conditions, and Army Reserve Spc. Aidan Delgado, 25,
of Sarasota, Florida, was there. He had deployed with the 320th Military
Police Company to Talil Air Base, to serve in Nasiriya and Abu Ghraib for
one year beginning in April 2003. Unlike the other troops in his unit, he
did not respond to the riot. Four months earlier he had decided to stop
carrying a loaded weapon. 

Nine prisoners were killed and three wounded after soldiers opened fire
during the riot, and Specialist Delgado's fellow soldiers returned with
photographs of the events. The images, disturbingly similar to the
incident described by Sergeant Mejía, shocked him. "It was very graphic,"
he said. "A head split open. One of them was of two soldiers in the back
of the truck. They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in
the head and [one soldier has] got an MRE spoon. He's reaching in to scoop
out some of his brain, looking at the camera and he's smiling. And I said,
'These are some of our soldiers desecrating somebody's body. Something is
seriously amiss.' I became convinced that this was excessive force, and
this was brutality." 

Spc. Patrick Resta, 29, a National Guardsman from Philadelphia, served in
Jalula, where there was a small prison camp at his base. He was with the
252nd Armor, First Infantry Division, for nine months beginning in March
2004. He recalled his supervisor telling his platoon point-blank, "The
Geneva Conventions don't exist at all in Iraq, and that's in writing if
you want to see it." 

The pivotal experience for Specialist Delgado came when, in the winter of
2003, he was assigned to battalion headquarters inside Abu Ghraib prison,
where he worked with Maj. David DiNenna and Lieut. Col. Jerry Phillabaum,
both implicated in the Taguba Report, the official Army investigation into
the prison scandal. There, Delgado read reports on prisoners and updated a
dry erase board with information on where in the large prison compound
detainees were moved and held. 

"That was when I totally walked away from the Army," Specialist Delgado
said. "I read these rap sheets on all the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and what
they were there for. I expected them to be terrorists, murderers,
insurgents. I look down this roster and see petty theft, public
drunkenness, forged coalition documents. These people are here for petty
civilian crimes." 

"These aren't terrorists," he recalled thinking. "These aren't our
enemies. They're just ordinary people, and we're treating them this
harshly." Specialist Delgado ultimately applied for conscientious objector
status, which the Army approved in April 2004. 


The Enemy

American troops in Iraq lacked the training and support to communicate
with or even understand Iraqi civilians, according to nineteen
interviewees. Few spoke or read Arabic. They were offered little or no
cultural or historical education about the country they controlled.
Translators were either in short supply or unqualified. Any stereotypes
about Islam and Arabs that soldiers and marines arrived with tended to
solidify rapidly in the close confines of the military and the risky
streets of Iraqi cities into a crude racism. 

As Spc. Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, who served in Baghdad and
Mosul with the Second Battalion, Eighty-Second Airborne Division, from
December 2004 to March 2005, pointed out, 20-year-old soldiers went from
the humiliation of training--"getting yelled at every day if you have a
dirty weapon"--to the streets of Iraq, where "it's like life and death.
And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can--do you know
what I mean?--we have this power that you can't have. That's really
liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level." 

In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, "a lot of guys really supported that
whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have
darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want." 

In the scramble to get ready for Iraq, troops rarely learned more than how
to say a handful of words in Arabic, depending mostly on a single manual,
A Country Handbook, a Field-Ready Reference Publication, published by the
Defense Department in September 2002. The book, as described by eight
soldiers who received it, has pictures of Iraqi military vehicles,
diagrams of how the Iraqi army is structured, images of Iraqi traffic
signals and signs, and about four pages of basic Arabic phrases such as Do
you speak English? I am an American. I am lost. 

Iraqi culture, identity and customs were, according to at least a dozen
soldiers and marines interviewed by The Nation, openly ridiculed in racist
terms, with troops deriding "haji food," "haji music" and "haji homes." In
the Muslim world, the word "haji" denotes someone who has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is now used by American troops in the same way
"gook" was used in Vietnam or "raghead" in Afghanistan. 

"You can honestly see how the Iraqis in general or even Arabs in general
are being, you know, kind of like dehumanized," said Specialist Englehart.
"Like it was very common for United States soldiers to call them
derogatory terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand
nigger." 

According to Sergeant Millard and several others interviewed, "It becomes
this racialized hatred towards Iraqis." And this racist language, as
Specialist Harmon pointed out, likely played a role in the level of
violence directed at Iraqi civilians. "By calling them names," he said,
"they're not people anymore. They're just objects." 

Several interviewees emphasized that the military did set up, for training
purposes, mock Iraqi villages peopled with actors who played the parts of
civilians and insurgents. But they said that the constant danger in Iraq,
and the fear it engendered, swiftly overtook such training. 

"They were the law," Specialist Harmon said of the soldiers in his unit in
Al-Rashidiya, near Baghdad, which participated in raids and convoys. "They
were very mean, very mean-spirited to them. A lot of cursing at them. And
I'm like, Dude, these people don't understand what you're saying.... They
used to say a lot, 'Oh, they'll understand when the gun is in their
face.'" 

Those few veterans who said they did try to reach out to Iraqis
encountered fierce hostility from those in their units. 

"I had the night shift one night at the aid station," said Specialist
Resta, recounting one such incident. "We were told from the first second
that we arrived there, and this was in writing on the wall in our aid
station, that we were not to treat Iraqi civilians unless they were about
to die.... So these guys in the guard tower radio in, and they say they've
got an Iraqi out there that's asking for a doctor. 

"So it's really late at night, and I walk out there to the gate and I
don't even see the guy at first, and they point out to him and he's
standing there. Well, I mean he's sitting, leaned up against this concrete
barrier--like the median of the highway--we had as you approached the
gate. And he's sitting there leaned up against it and, uh, he's out there,
if you want to go and check on him, he's out there. So I'm sitting there
waiting for an interpreter, and the interpreter comes and I just walk out
there in the open. And this guy, he has the shit kicked out of him. He was
missing two teeth. He has a huge laceration on his head, he looked like he
had broken his eye orbit and had some kind of injury to his knee." 

The Iraqi, Specialist Resta said, pleaded with him in broken English for
help. He told Specialist Resta that there were men near the base who were
waiting to kill him. 

"I open a bag and I'm trying to get bandages out and the guys in the guard
tower are yelling at me, 'Get that fucking haji out of here,'" Specialist
Resta said. "And I just look back at them and ignored them, and then they
were saying, you know, 'He doesn't look like he's about to die to me,'
'Tell him to go cry back to the fuckin' IP [Iraqi police],' and, you know,
a whole bunch of stuff like that. So, you know, I'm kind of ignoring them
and trying to get the story from this guy, and our doctor rolls up in an
ambulance and from thirty to forty meters away looks out and says, shakes
his head and says, 'You know, he looks fine, he's gonna be all right,' and
walks back to the passenger side of the ambulance, you know, kind of like,
Get your ass over here and drive me back up to the clinic. So I'm standing
there, and the whole time both this doctor and the guards are yelling at
me, you know, to get rid of this guy, and at one point they're yelling at
me, when I'm saying, 'No, let's at least keep this guy here overnight,
until it's light out,' because they wanted me to send him back out into
the city, where he told me that people were waiting for him to kill him. 

"When I asked if he'd be allowed to stay there, at least until it was
light out, the response was, 'Are you hearing this shit? I think Doc is
part fucking haji,'" Specialist Resta said. 

Specialist Resta gave in to the pressure and denied the man aid. The
interpreter, he recalled, was furious, telling him that he had effectively
condemned the man to death. 

"So I walk inside the gate and the interpreter helps him up and the guy
turns around to walk away and the guys in the guard tower go, say, 'Tell
him that if he comes back tonight he's going to get fucking shot,'"
Specialist Resta said. "And the interpreter just stared at them and looked
at me and then looked back at them, and they nod their head, like, Yeah,
we mean it. So he yells it to the Iraqi and the guy just flinches and
turns back over his shoulder, and the interpreter says it again and he
starts walking away again, you know, crying like a little kid. And that
was that." 


Convoys

Two dozen soldiers interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi
civilians was particularly evident in the operation of supply
convoys--operations in which they participated. These convoys are the
arteries that sustain the oc­cupation, ferrying items such as water, mail,
maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings of
tractor-trailers, operated by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and
other private contractors, required daily protection by the US military.
Typically, according to these interviewees, supply convoys consisted of
twenty to thirty trucks stretching half a mile down the road, with a
Humvee military escort in front and back and at least one more in the
center. Soldiers and marines also sometimes accompanied the drivers in the
cabs of the tractor-trailers. 

These convoys, ubiquitous in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of
wanton destruction. 

According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight
veterans who rode in convoys--guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya,
Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when these columns of vehicles
left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main
supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching
speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation
increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic
jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks,
scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them
off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run
over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian
cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a
warning to other drivers to get out of the way. 

"A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben
Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served
in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in
March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty
miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms
of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that
could really determine whether or not you were going to get injured or
killed or if they just completely missed, which happened." 

Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort
vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress
further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from
belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which
can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded
or dead. 

"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a
convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader,
27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor
Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005.
"And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just
start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And
I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died
because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off." 

Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi
insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in March
2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops--39.2 percent
of the more than 3,500 killed--than any other method, according to the
Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED
attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of fatalities from
roadside bombs since the beginning of the war. 

"The second you left the gate of your base, you were always worried," said
Sergeant Flatt. "You were constantly watchful for IEDs. And you could
never see them. I mean, it's just by pure luck who's getting killed and
who's not. If you've been in firefights earlier that day or that week,
you're even more stressed and insecure to a point where you're almost
trigger-happy." 

Sergeant Flatt was among twenty-four veterans who said they had witnessed
or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot
or run over by convoys. These incidents, they said, were so numerous that
many were never reported. 

Sergeant Flatt recalled an incident in January 2005 when a convoy drove
past him on one of the main highways in Mosul. "A car following got too
close to their convoy," he said. "Basically, they took shots at the car.
Warning shots, I don't know. But they shot the car. Well, one of the
bullets happened to just pierce the windshield and went straight into the
face of this woman in the car. And she was--well, as far as I
know--instantly killed. I didn't pull her out of the car or anything. Her
son was driving the car, and she had her--she had three little girls in
the back seat. And they came up to us, because we were actually sitting in
a defensive position right next to the hospital, the main hospital in
Mosul, the civilian hospital. And they drove up and she was obviously
dead. And the girls were crying." 

On July 30, 2004, Sergeant Flanders was riding in the tail vehicle of a
convoy on a pitch-black night, traveling from Camp Anaconda south to Taji,
just north of Baghdad, when his unit was attacked with small-arms fire and
RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). He was about to get on the radio to warn
the vehicle in front of him about the ambush when he saw his gunner unlock
the turret and swivel it around in the direction of the shooting. He fired
his MK-19, a 40-millimeter automatic grenade launcher capable of
discharging up to 350 rounds per minute. 

"He's just holding the trigger down and it wound up jamming, so he didn't
get off as many shots maybe as he wanted," Sergeant Flanders recalled.
"But I said, 'How many did you get off?' 'Cause I knew they would be
asking that. He said, 'Twenty-three.' He launched twenty-three
grenades.... 

"I remember looking out the window and I saw a little hut, a little Iraqi
house with a light on.... We were going so fast and obviously your
adrenaline's--you're like tunnel vision, so you can't really see what's
going on, you know? And it's dark out and all that stuff. I couldn't
really see where the grenades were exploding, but it had to be exploding
around the house or maybe even hit the house. Who knows? Who knows? And we
were the last vehicle. We can't stop." 

Convoys did not slow down or attempt to brake when civilians inadvertently
got in front of their vehicles, according to the veterans who described
them. Sgt. Kelly Dougherty, 29, from Cañon City, Colorado, was based at
the Talil Air Base in Nasiriya with the Colorado National Guard's 220th
Military Police Company for a year beginning in February 2003. She
recounted one incident she investigated in January 2004 on a six-lane
highway south of Nasiriya that resembled numerous incidents described by
other veterans. 

"It's like very barren desert, so most of the people that live there,
they're nomadic or they live in just little villages and have, like,
camels and goats and stuff," she recalled. "There was then a little boy--I
would say he was about 10 because we didn't see the accident; we responded
to it with the investigative team--a little Iraqi boy and he was crossing
the highway with his, with three donkeys. A military convoy,
transportation convoy driving north, hit him and the donkeys and killed
all of them. When we got there, there were the dead donkeys and there was
a little boy on the side of the road. 

"We saw him there and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn't
even stop," she said. "They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly
even slowed down. But, I mean, that's basically--basically, your order is
that you never stop." 

Among supply convoys, there were enormous disparities based on the
nationality of the drivers, according to Sergeant Flanders, who estimated
that he ran more than 100 convoys in Balad, Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba.
When drivers were not American, the trucks were often old, slow and prone
to breakdowns, he said. The convoys operated by Nepalese, Egyptian or
Pakistani drivers did not receive the same level of security, although the
danger was more severe because of the poor quality of their vehicles.
American drivers were usually placed in convoys about half the length of
those run by foreign nationals and were given superior vehicles, body
armor and better security. Sergeant Flanders said troops disliked being
assigned to convoys run by foreign nationals, especially since, when the
aging vehicles broke down, they had to remain and protect them until they
could be recovered. 

"It just seemed insane to run civilians around the country," he added. "I
mean, Iraq is such a security concern and it's so dangerous and yet we
have KBR just riding around, unarmed.... Remember those terrible judgments
that we made about what Iraq would look like postconflict? I think this is
another incarnation of that misjudgment, which would be that, Oh, it'll be
fine. We'll put a Humvee in front, we'll put a Humvee in back, we'll put a
Humvee in the middle, and we'll just run with it. 

"It was just shocking to me.... I was Army trained and I had a good gunner
and I had radios and I could call on the radios and I could get an
airstrike if I wanted to. I could get a Medevac.... And here these guys
are just tooling around. And these guys are, like, they're promised the
world. They're promised $120,000, tax free, and what kind of people take
those jobs? Down-on-their-luck-type people, you know? Grandmothers. There
were grandmothers there. I escorted a grandmother there and she did great.
We went through an ambush and one of her guys got shot, and she was cool,
calm and collected. Wonderful, great, good for her. What the hell is she
doing there? 

"We're using these vulnerable, vulnerable convoys, which probably piss off
more Iraqis than it actually helps in our relationship with them,"
Flanders said, "just so that we can have comfort and air-conditioning and
sodas--great--and PlayStations and camping chairs and greeting cards and
stupid T-shirts that say, Who's Your Baghdaddy?" 


Patrols

Soldiers and marines who participated in neighborhood patrols said they
often used the same tactics as convoys--speed, aggressive firing--to
reduce the risk of being ambushed or falling victim to IEDs. Sgt. Patrick
Campbell, 29, of Camarillo, California, who frequently took part in
patrols, said his unit fired often and without much warning on Iraqi
civilians in a desperate bid to ward off attacks. 

"Every time we got on the highway," he said, "we were firing warning
shots, causing accidents all the time. Cars screeching to a stop, going
into the other intersection.... The problem is, if you slow down at an
intersection more than once, that's where the next bomb is going to be
because you know they watch. You know? And so if you slow down at the same
choke point every time, guaranteed there's going to be a bomb there next
couple of days. So getting onto a freeway or highway is a choke point
'cause you have to wait for traffic to stop. So you want to go as fast as
you can, and that involves added risk to all the cars around you, all the
civilian cars. 

"The first Iraqi I saw killed was an Iraqi who got too close to our
patrol," he said. "We were coming up an on-ramp. And he was coming down
the highway. And they fired warning shots and he just didn't stop. He just
merged right into the convoy and they opened up on him." 

This took place sometime in the spring of 2005 in Khadamiya, in the
northwest corner of Baghdad, Sergeant Campbell said. His unit fired into
the man's car with a 240 Bravo, a heavy machine gun. "I heard three
gunshots," he said. "We get about halfway down the road and...the guy in
the car got out and he's covered in blood. And this is where...the impulse
is just to keep going. There's no way that this guy knows who we are.
We're just like every other patrol that goes up and down this road. I
looked at my lieutenant and it wasn't even a discussion. We turned around
and we went back. 

"So I'm treating the guy. He has three gunshot wounds to the chest. Blood
everywhere. And he keeps going in and out of consciousness. And when he
finally stops breathing, I have to give him CPR. I take my right hand, I
lift up his chin and I take my left hand and grab the back of his head to
position his head, and as I take my left hand, my hand actually goes into
his cranium. So I'm actually holding this man's brain in my hand. And what
I realized was I had made a mistake. I had checked for exit wounds. But
what I didn't know was the Humvee behind me, after the car failed to stop
after the first three rounds, had fired twenty, thirty rounds into the
car. I never heard it. 

"I heard three rounds, I saw three holes, no exit wounds," he said. "I
thought I knew what the situation was. So I didn't even treat this guy's
injury to the head. Every medic I ever told is always like, Of course, I
mean, the guy got shot in the head. There's nothing you could have done.
And I'm pretty sure--I mean, you can't stop bleeding in the head like
that. But this guy, I'm watching this guy, who I know we shot because he
got too close. His car was clean. There was no--didn't hear it, didn't see
us, whatever it was. Dies, you know, dying in my arms." 

While many veterans said the killing of civilians deeply disturbed them,
they also said there was no other way to safely operate a patrol. 

"You don't want to shoot kids, I mean, no one does," said Sergeant
Campbell, as he began to describe an incident in the summer of 2005
recounted to him by several men in his unit. "But you have this: I
remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is
in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he's going to
start shooting. And you gotta understand...when you have spent nine months
in a war zone, where no one--every time you've been shot at, you've never
seen the person shooting at you, and you could never shoot back. Here's
some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides he's going to start
shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen.
Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest
weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds." Sergeant Campbell was not
present at the incident, which took place in Khadamiya, but he saw
photographs and heard descriptions from several eyewitnesses in his unit. 

"Everyone was so happy, like this release that they finally killed an
insurgent," he said. "Then when they got there, they realized it was just
a little kid. And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in the
head.... They'd show all the pictures and some people were really happy,
like, Oh, look what we did. And other people were like, I don't want to
see that ever again." 

The killing of unarmed Iraqis was so common many of the troops said it
became an accepted part of the daily landscape. "The ground forces were
put in that position," said First Lieut. Wade Zirkle of Shenandoah County,
Virginia, who fought in Nasiriya and Falluja with the Second Light Armored
Reconnaissance Battalion from March to May 2003. "You got a guy trying to
kill me but he's firing from houses...with civilians around him, women and
children. You know, what do you do? You don't want to risk shooting at him
and shooting children at the same time. But at the same time, you don't
want to die either." 

Sergeant Dougherty recounted an incident north of Nasiriya in December
2003, when her squad leader shot an Iraqi civilian in the back. The
shooting was described to her by a woman in her unit who treated the
injury. "It was just, like, the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh,
we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in
Colorado," she said. "He just, like, seemed to view every Iraqi as like a
potential terrorist." 

Several interviewees said that, on occasion, these killings were justified
by framing innocents as terrorists, typically following incidents when
American troops fired on crowds of unarmed Iraqis. The troops would detain
those who survived, accusing them of being insurgents, and plant AK-47s
next to the bodies of those they had killed to make it seem as if the
civilian dead were combatants. "It would always be an AK because they have
so many of these weapons lying around," said Specialist Aoun. Cavalry
scout Joe Hatcher, 26, of San Diego, said 9-millimeter handguns and even
shovels--to make it look like the noncombatant was digging a hole to plant
an IED--were used as well. 

"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Hatcher, who served with the
Fourth Cavalry Regiment, First Squadron, in Ad Dawar, halfway between
Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005. "If you kill someone
and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em." Those who survived such
shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused insurgents. 

In the winter of 2004, Sergeant Campbell was driving near a particularly
dangerous road in Abu Gharth, a town west of Baghdad, when he heard
gunshots. Sergeant Campbell, who served as a medic in Abu Gharth with the
256th Infantry Brigade from November 2004 to October 2005, was told that
Army snipers had fired fifty to sixty rounds at two insurgents who'd
gotten out of their car to plant IEDs. One alleged insurgent was shot in
the knees three or four times, treated and evacuated on a military
helicopter, while the other man, who was treated for glass shards, was
arrested and detained. 

"I come to find out later that, while I was treating him, the snipers had
planted--after they had searched and found nothing--they had planted
bomb-making materials on the guy because they didn't want to be
investigated for the shoot," Sergeant Campbell said. (He showed The Nation
a photograph of one sniper with a radio in his pocket that he later
planted as evidence.) "And to this day, I mean, I remember taking that guy
to Abu Ghraib prison--the guy who didn't get shot--and just saying 'I'm
sorry' because there was not a damn thing I could do about it.... I mean,
I guess I have a moral obligation to say something, but I would have been
kicked out of the unit in a heartbeat. I would've been a traitor." 


Checkpoints

The US military checkpoints dotted across Iraq, according to twenty-six
soldiers and marines who were stationed at them or supplied them--in
locales as diverse as Tikrit, Baghdad, Karbala, Samarra, Mosul and
Kirkuk--were often deadly for civilians. Unarmed Iraqis were mistaken for
insurgents, and the rules of engagement were blurred. Troops, fearing
suicide bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, often fired on civilian cars.
Nine of those soldiers said they had seen civilians being shot at
checkpoints. These incidents were so common that the military could not
investigate each one, some veterans said. 

"Most of the time, it's a family," said Sergeant Cannon, who served at
half a dozen checkpoints in Tikrit. "Every now and then, there is a bomb,
you know, that's the scary part." 

There were some permanent checkpoints stationed across the country, but
for unsuspecting civilians, "flash checkpoints" were far more dangerous,
according to eight veterans who were involved in setting them up. These
impromptu security perimeters, thrown up at a moment's notice and quickly
dismantled, were generally designed to catch insurgents in the act of
trafficking weapons or explosives, people violating military-imposed
curfews or suspects in bombings or drive-by shootings. 

Iraqis had no way of knowing where these so-called "tactical control
points" would crop up, interviewees said, so many would turn a corner at a
high speed and became the unwitting targets of jumpy soldiers and marines. 

"For me, it was really random," said Lieutenant Van Engelen. "I just
picked a spot on a map that I thought was a high-volume area that might
catch some people. We just set something up for half an hour to an hour
and then we'd move on." There were no briefings before setting up
checkpoints, he said. 

Temporary checkpoints were safer for troops, according to the veterans,
because they were less likely to serve as static targets for insurgents.
"You do it real quick because you don't always want to announce your
presence," said First Sgt. Perry Jefferies, 46, of Waco, Texas, who served
with the Fourth Infantry Division from April to October 2003. 

The temporary checkpoints themselves varied greatly. Lieutenant Van
Engelen set up checkpoints using orange cones and fifty yards of
concertina wire. He would assign a soldier to control the flow of traffic
and direct drivers through the wire, while others searched vehicles,
questioned drivers and asked for identification. He said signs in English
and Arabic warned Iraqis to stop; at night, troops used lasers, glow
sticks or tracer bullets to signal cars through. When those weren't
available, troops improvised by using flashlights sent them by family and
friends back home. 

"Baghdad is not well lit," said Sergeant Flanders. "There's not street
lights everywhere. You can't really tell what's going on." 

Other troops, however, said they constructed tactical control points that
were hardly visible to drivers. "We didn't have cones, we didn't have
nothing," recalled Sergeant Bocanegra, who said he served at more than ten
checkpoints in Tikrit. "You literally put rocks on the side of the road
and tell them to stop. And of course some cars are not going to see the
rocks. I wouldn't even see the rocks myself." 

According to Sergeant Flanders, the primary concern when assembling
checkpoints was protecting the troops serving there. Humvees were
positioned so that they could quickly drive away if necessary, and the
heavy weapons mounted on them were placed "in the best possible position"
to fire on vehicles that attempted to pass through the checkpoint without
stopping. And the rules of engagement were often improvised, soldiers
said. 

"We were given a long list of that kind of stuff and, to be honest, a lot
of the time we would look at it and throw it away," said Staff Sgt. James
Zuelow, 39, a National Guardsman from Juneau, Alaska, who served in
Baghdad in the Third Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment, for a year
beginning in January 2005. "A lot of it was written at such a high level
it didn't apply." 

At checkpoints, troops had to make split-second decisions on when to use
lethal force, and veterans said fear often clouded their judgment. 

Sgt. Matt Mardan, 31, of Minneapolis, served as a Marine scout sniper
outside Falluja in 2004 and 2005 with the Third Battalion, First Marines.
"People think that's dangerous, and it is," he said. "But I would do that
any day of the w