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Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan
Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupation
Aaron Glantz
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eBook - ePub
Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan
Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupation
Aaron Glantz
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About This Book
"The only way this war is going to end is if the American people truly understand what we have done in their name."āKelly Dougherty, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War
In spring 2008, inspired by the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier hearings, Iraq Veterans Against the War gathered veterans to expose war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the powerful words, images, and documents of this historic gathering, which show the reality of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicized incidents of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by "a few bad apples, " as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of "an increasingly bloody occupation."
"Here is the war as it should be reported, seeing the pain, refusing to sanitize an unprovoked attack that has killed over one million people. All over America are victims who have returned from this conflict with hideous wounds -- wounds that turn the lives of the entire family upside down.And the American people are not seeing this. Until now.
"Winter Soldier, an enormously important project of Iraq Veterans Against the War, cuts this debacle to the bone, exposing details hard to come by and even harder to believe. This is must reading for patriots who have already begun the effort to insure that this never happens again."
--Phil Donahue
"Winter Soldier makes us feel the pain and despair endured by those who serve in a military stretched to the breaking point by stop-loss policies, multiple combat tours, and a war where the goals and the enemies keep shifting... [and] also make[s] us admire the unbreakable idealism and hope of those men and women who still believe that by speaking out they can make things better both for themselves and for those who come after them."--San Francisco Chronicle
Formed in the aftermath of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) was founded in 2004 to give those who have served in the military since September 11, 2001, a way to come together and speak out against an unjust, illegal, and unwinnable war. Today, IVAW has over seven hundred members in forty-nine states, Washington, DC, Canada, and on military bases overseas.
Aaron Glantz is an independent journalist who has covered the Iraq War from the front lines. He is the author of How America Lost Iraq (Tarcher) and a forthcoming book on the Iraq War from the University of California Press.
Anthony Swofford is the author of Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
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Kristofer Goldsmith
Sergeant, United States Army, Forward Observer
Deployments: JanuaryāDecember 2005, Sadr City
Hometown: Long Island, New York
Age at Winter Soldier: 27 years old
This is a picture here of me when I was ten years old wearing all camo, having a pair of dog tags, and giving my Boy Scout salute. That boy died in Iraq. This is the proud soldier who enlisted just after Christmas in 2003 to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Iām from Bellmore, a town in Long Island, New York, twenty minutes out of Manhattan. I could see the smoke when the towers fell on September 11. On September 12 I remember standing up in a pizza restaurant and telling everyone about how I wanted to kill everyone in the Middle East; how the Middle East should be turned into a glass plate by nuclear weapons because thatās what I believed. I joined the army to kill people.
I was nineteen years old when I deployed to Iraq and I spent the first eight months of my deployment in the slums of Sadr City. Itās a place that was neglected not only by Saddam Hussein but is horribly neglected by America right now. When we went there we promised them freedom; we promised to get them clean water, to get them food, to get them jobs. Instead, there are two to four hours of electricity a day, randomly. Sewage leaks into their fresh-water system. I never personally saw any contractors working on that water treatment plant outside Sadr City in 2005. My battalion discovered that and reported up and we were told to ignore the fact that nothing was going on. It was a sector that wasnāt within our area of operation so donāt be concerned with what goes on there.
Imagine living in a place where it gets up to 150 degrees. You donāt want to go out during the day, and at night American soldiers are rolling around your streets telling you that you canāt go outside, and you canāt talk to your friends, you canāt enjoy yourself. You canāt gather outside the coffeehouse or the shai shop because if you go out past dark youāre committing a crime. So essentially during the summer months Sadr City was a prison. Three million people in Sadr City were prisoners of war.
I graduated basic training at the top of my class. I graduated warrior leaders course, a leadership development course and noncommissioned officers course, with a 94 percent grade point average. I was a great soldier once upon a time and now I stand here to fight for my brothers more than I ever could while I wore a uniform.
What you see here is civilian Iraqis exhuming bodies of murdered and tortured Iraqis. This was on May 15, 2005, a very hot, uncomfortable, miserable dayāIāll never forget it. We donāt know why they were killed; we didnāt try very hard to find out. We found over a dozen bodies that day.
We werenāt authorized artillery, so I became the intelligence reporter and took pictures of these dead bodies. I was told it was so that we could try to identify them, but there was no identification process. I never went around to the police stations to post those photos. These photos were never used to help the Iraqis. These pictures were simply trophies of war for people who didnāt experience that death. People made videos to send home to their friends and family to brag. They were used to build morale, to say that killing is right, death is right, āDead Iraqis are a great thing,ā and thatās wrong.
While I was taking these pictures I never looked directly at the bodies. I had a digital camera and I held it out in front of me and I looked at the two-and-a-half-inch screen and I flashed that photo. As the flash went off each image was burned into my mind; every one of these pictures is burned into my mind.
The coagulated blood from the man in this photo slinged off his body, off his face onto my shoe. That was the most repulsed I had ever been. There were flies landing on the corpses. They would land on my lips, they would land on my eyes, and they would crawl into my nose. I felt so violated by having been put through this.
Iām reminded of these images when I play video games or walk into a movie. When people ask me, āHey man, you want to go see Saw IV or whatever?ā I tell them no, because this is what I see when I watch those movies. This is somebodyās brother, this is somebodyās husband, this is somebodyās son, and this is somebodyās cousin. The only reason that weāre desensitized to it is because theyāre not white, theyāre not American soldiers.
That right there: I specifically asked my command, I said, āThis man is missing his face, there is no skin left on his head.ā And they said, āTake the picture anyway.ā Not to identify him. Whoever was on the other end of the radio just wanted to see the picture, and now because of that person Iām left with that image.
Iād like to read an achievement off of my Army Commendation Medal that I received for my service in Iraq. āWhile on patrolā¦in Sadr City, the platoon was called upon to reinforce Iraqi Army battalion in Sector 48. PFC Goldsmithās initiative and timely placement of his weapon system at a key intersection helpedā¦the Iraqi Army battalionā¦destroy enemy insurgentsā¦without any insurgents escaping the objective.ā
Iād like to tell you exactly what happened that day. What you heard is true, but what they left out was that I was standing in a Humvee with my platoon sergeant. My platoon sergeant claimed he saw an insurgent and fired upon that man. Because the highest-ranking enlisted man in my platoon fired his weapon, I knew that it was āgame onā and I could get away with anything. There was a little boy on top of a building, and he was holding a stick pretending to have an AK-47. He pointed it at me pretending to shoot. I trained my weapon on him and thought, āI hate these Iraqis. I hate these kids who throw rocks and bricks at me. This is my chance; I can kill this kid.ā Just to take one out of the couple million of āem out.ā It took a lot of thinking not to pull the trigger that day. I could have killed a six-year-old boy, someoneās son, but I didnāt.
When I came home from Iraq all I did was drink. Iām a severe alcoholic and so was just about everybody who lived in the barracks with me. We used to go out every Friday and Saturday night and I would just about finish a 1.75 liter bottle of vodka. I blacked out every time. That was my goal, I wanted to black out. I was self-medicating because we were told that if we sought mental health, we would be locked away and our careers would not advance.
The only thing I looked forward to was getting out of the military and going to college. That hope was taken away from me on January 10, 2007, when George Bush gave his State of the Union address announcing that he was going to send an additional twenty to thirty thousand troops into the sandbox. My unit was one of the five to be locked down with stop-loss. No one could leaveāeven by reenlisting to go somewhere else to avoid the deployment. People set to retire in two months were locked into an eighteen-month deployment under some of the worst conditions since the initial invasion.
When I found out that I was stop-lossed I went into the sharpest, most anguishing downward spiral that I could imagine. I went into the hospital complaining of chest pain and they had me see a mental health professional. They diagnosed me with depression, anxiety disorder, and adjustment disorder. I was obviously a broken soldier and I was still set to deploy in May 2007, the same week I supposed to get out of the army.
The day before I was set to deploy was Memorial Day. I went out onto a field in Fort Stewart where thereās a tree planted for every soldier in the 3rd Infantry Division whoās died. I went out among those fallen soldiers and I tried to take my own life. I took pills and my regular poison of vodka and drank until I couldnāt drink anymore. The next thing I knew I was handcuffed to a gurney in the hospital. The cops had found me, dragged my body into an ambulance, and locked me up. I spent a week on a mental ward.
After trying to kill myself I was locked up and analyzed and saw doctors, and when I got out of the mental ward I was told that I was going to be removed from the military in a quick, comfortable way. Within two weeks I could be home. The doctors said that I had a severe problem and they recommended removal from service. I was ecstatic. It was great.
Instead, they tried to prosecute me for malingering. My commander, Captain Eric Melloh, who was deployed, decided that I should be removed from the company. I should have my sergeant stripes removed, take money from me, and possibly put me in jail. I went to the military lawyers on Fort Stewart and asked them to help me help fight this Article 15 nonjudicial punishment, and they said, āNo, you need to give up this fight. Because people try to fight it and all it does is bring down the military and blah, blah, blah.ā I was refused help by the attorneys because they were officers and they didnāt want to bring down their own career by supporting me.
I was eventually removed from the military on one of the happiest days of my life, August 16, 2007, on a general discharge. My DD 214, the paperwork, which states every accomplishment of my military service, says in nice big bold letters, āMISCONDUCT, (SERIOUS OFFENSE).ā I committed a serious offense by trying to kill myself because I was so damaged by the occupation in Iraq. It was misconduct for me not to deploy while I was handcuffed to a bed in the hospital. So I lost my college benefits, the one thing that really gave me hope. I didnāt know where, I didnāt know what I was gonna study, but I knew I was going to college in September of ā07. That didnāt happen. Now I canāt pay for it.
My money is disappearing. Between VA visits and personal instability, Iāve found it extremely hard to find a job. To tell you the truth, I havenāt really looked cause Iām having a rough time. So I deliver pizzas on Wednesdays. Thatās what I am now, a pizza delivery boy. I was a sergeant, I was a leader, I was a trainer, and I was very well thought of. I was a very good soldier. Now Iām a pizza delivery boy who works once a week because thatās the only job where I can call in a couple hours before and say, āIām still at the VA, Iām waiting in line. Iām sorry I canāt come in for a couple hours.ā That is what stop-loss does.
This man who has to remain nameless is a friend of mine I traveled to North Carolina to see on my way home.
What happened was he stepped on a pressure plate, an antipersonnel mine, and he almost lost his right leg. He had arterial bleeding in his right arm, his left leg, his right leg. He lost all his hearing, ear drum is destroyed in his right ear. This man was supposed to get out of the army the same week that I was, the same week that our unit deployed. So Iām faced forever with āthat could have been meā or āif I were there maybe things could have been different.ā This is someone who was in my platoon, who I served with for a year. When I came into the hospital and I was feeling guilty about trying to kill myself, what this man said to me as soon as I walked into the room was not āHey how ya doing?ā Not āDude youāre a bad person for not coming over there with us.ā He looked at me with an intense look in his eyes and he said, āDude youāre not going over there right?ā And that, that filled my heart with something that no one else could have done.
Lars Ekstrom
Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, Assault Man
Deployments: MarchāSeptember 2005, USS Ponce
Hometown: Madison Heights, Michigan
Age at Winter Soldier: 22 years old
Two years ago I would not have believed you if you told me that Iād be standing in D.C. protesting the war. I was very strongly supportive of the war in 2003. I even wore desert cammies in my school photo.
I graduated from high school in 2003. I enlisted in the Marine Corps and went to boot camp that November. After graduating from boot camp and the school of infantry, I felt poorly prepared for battle. Most of the training I received was World War Iāstyle fighting where youāre charg...