War Trials

Investigation of a Soldier and the Trauma of Iraq

Will Yates

• Editorial: Pen & Sword Military
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526796035
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Völkermord & Kriegsverbrechen

War Trials tells the gripping and in-depth true story of a British soldier's role in the drowning of an Iraqi teenager in May 2003, the devastating investigation and resulting court martial. This narrative non-fiction tracks the soldier's life from tight-knit broken family home in Merseyside through deadly urban conflict in the Middle East, to a different battle fought against PTSD while he awaited a military tribunal back in the UK. The military court case in 2006 marked the first of its kind relating to the Iraq war and a case that opened the flood gates of multiple investigations and inquiries into the conduct of soldiers overseas. Based upon rigorous new research, this book's untold personal story explores the horrors of battle and the chaos of a post-war city and a young soldier's struggle against depression, suicide attempts and deep sense of being let down by the army he sought to serve. This soldier would eventually endure numerous investigations and face the threat of the International Criminal Court for war crimes but these are the shocking events that started it all. It is the compelling story of a contentious military campaign with little preparation for the disastrous fall out; the soldiers pushed to the limit who maintained a wall of a silence after doing the unthinkable; and a floating body of dead child who came to symbolize a generation lost to war.

Part I

Investigation

Chapter 1

Water’s Edge

The boy stands by the water’s edge, that’s the last place he is clearly seen before he drowns. The soldier will have nightmares about these moments over and over and over again.

The boy, Ahmed, is 15, with dark caramel complexion and can’t swim. He is loved by his parents, has a brother Mohammed and two sisters. The family’s financial situation is bad, even worse now than it was under Saddam. Ahmed shuffles in terror, just a couple of feet from the deep channel, ever closer. The swell of fear he feels and surge of adrenaline causes his asthmatic lungs to involuntarily constrict. Grey, discoloured boulders litter the ledge that mark the divide between land and the water. Loose rocks dig uncomfortably into the tender bare skin of the boy’s feet. Below him the slopping sound of the dirty mauve-green water, the Al-Zubair in spring, its current cutting through the Shatt al-Basra canal. Next to Ahmed is another lad, Ayad, and although their fathers know of each other and trade at the Basra market, the boys met only this morning. Ayad is slightly older and he clutches a ruptured, bleeding cut along his forearm. Already in the water are two more guys who have swum with ease across to a pale concrete pillar that holds up Bridge Four, the busy arterial road and recent checkpoint into the city of Basra. The sloping bank beneath the bridge is where Ahmed, Ayad and the other two are brought. When the doors of the military personnel carrier open, the terrified boys see the canal and seem to know what’s expected of them. When the rags used to tie their wrists are unbound, they head towards the water. Ahmed inhales a struggling breath, experiencing a wave of queasiness. He shivers, even amid the heat of a day like this one in early May.

Giving a nervous backward glance, Ahmed sees the bulky British guardsmen wearing tattered and battle-worn fatigues. There are three of them standing on the dusty ground; they’re still young, not much older than Ayad, and their presence casts shadows in the harsh mid-morning light. Just a few feet away, the dust-coated mustard-coloured Warrior vehicle waits, humming on twelve wheels, six on each side, encased in tracks. The machine’s heavy engine growls impatiently, almost like its commander, who sits atop in the commander’s position of the hulking armour-plated vehicle.

The nearby soldiers clutch their SA-80 rifles and the two Iraqi lads linger, looking at the murky dark liquid below the jagged ledge. The infantry soldier says something that neither Ahmed nor Ayad can understand. Ayad steps out over the chunky rocks first and then into the canal, his arms splayed as he first makes contact with the water. Descending unsteadily, up to his waist, he seems to find no footing. The lad bobs up and down, splashing bubbles as he struggles against the flow of the river. Ahmed watches a moment as Ayad’s exertion of will finds him an awkward rhythm, doggy-paddling, seemingly safely in the direction of the bridge’s concrete supports.

Distant guns fire. Black smoke still hangs on the horizon. They are miles from anywhere here.

Ahmed, his wrists still sore from being tied, body hurting from a beating and shoulder still aching from being forcibly shoved, angles himself towards the canal’s ledge. Hesitantly, he takes a half-step into the water. His foot causes crumbling and eroded rocks to scatter down the embankment, which are quickly swept away. Water reaches up against the thick rocks, the trace of the liquid staining them dark. As he enters the water, muscles in Ahmed’s legs tighten, trying to steady his feet on the slippery rock surface. The water isn’t cold, but not being able to feel the canal bed fills the boy with instinctive terror. Self-preservation kicks in and he thrashes his legs beneath the surface. It is like being weightless but with panic.

Ahmed flails his arms, doing battle with the thick presence of the water. At the splash against his face he fights, expending his energy to stay afloat. A lot of the kids here can swim. The other lad, Ayad, has swum some distance off by now.

Ahmed dips under water, he can still see the soldiers shimmering above on the shore as if through frosted glass. Brackish water is in Ahmed’s nose and mouth now as the river threatens to swallow him. There is the raging soreness in his nostrils as he gags. Then a taste putrid from the black polluted viscosity as the boy gags and gasps for air. This is water that has begun its journey in the north at the Euphrates, where some faiths think life began. It is there where Saddam long ago drained marshes to punish and persecute the Shiites of Ahmed’s home town. The Brits were meant to bring hope and freedom to the boy, his family and the people of Basra. That was weeks ago, before life in the city descended into anarchy.

The boy sees one of the soldiers, up on the dry bank, peeling off a layer of clothing, stepping towards the canal as if to help. But then the man atop the tank waves his hands in a frantic manner. Following orders, the men retreat to their army vehicle. Struggling in the water the Arab teenager sees the vehicle disappear. The soldiers are gone.

And Ahmed’s young, spindly body bobs repeatedly above the water – until the canal’s contents envelope him. His arms flap vainly, the useless fight against drowning. The water engulfs his adolescent form. The last image he sees is the bleached blue sky above disappearing.

* * *

A year later in England and the memory of that day continues to haunt the soldier. The ghosts of what happened dredged up by army investigators. In the night-terror, the soldier is lost in the thin periphery between night and consciousness. The edges of the room seem blurred, woolly. Textures of colour and lines of shapes bleed into one another. The man becomes aware of being in a bath. The only source of light is a single bulb suspended high up from an unseen ceiling. The tepid water is dark; his skin wrinkled from long exposure there. All is still for a moment. There isn’t peace.

At the far end of the bath, a tap drips. A sudden single capsule of water plummets towards the milky bathwater. The click of its impact echoes a warping and loud sound. Perspective seems to distort and in his state of mind it’s as if the bath stretches on out of all proportion, the tap far off beyond some distant Gulf.

A ripple slowly seems to form; a disturbance beneath the water. The soldier becomes aware of the shape in the bath. Somehow it is there with him, invading his space. Gradually its features break the surface. Human hair emerges first, like some slow-motion birth from within coagulated fluid.

The soldier is still a fit, bulky form, but he can do nothing but watch, in shivered paralysis of fear. It seems now like there is hair everywhere. The hair is dark and short, and seems to him an afro-style. It covers a slowly emerging, brown Middle Eastern head.

There is the face of the teenage boy.

He recognises the face instantly. Its glare has a force that makes the soldier desperate to escape but his muscles don’t respond. He feels claustrophobia’s inhibition.

And then hands grip from beneath. A clamp grasping around his still-toned torso, arms and legs. He tries to think, his training at a loss, then flails. And struggles. More hands now are on his shoulders. They dig into his skin and other dark Arab fingers like talons clasp at his forehead and cheeks. They claw the soldier down and it’s as though the floor of the bath has melted away. His arms slowly respond and he tries desperately to pull off the hands. His strength is now ineffective.

Down, down, drown they drag. The surface of the bathwater covers him. The distant light bulb gives way to darkness. He awakens sharply.

His breathing and pulse are rapid. A wave of sweat coats him and nausea and exhaustion tremor through his body. He wants to cry.

He tries to breathe, feeling raw and exhausted as he tries to remember where he is.

Chapter 2

Bootle Boyhood

Raw gusts often blew off the bleak horizon of the Irish Sea and battered Bootle, a defiant town despite its history. Bootle, three miles north-west of Liverpool, was where Joseph John McCleary was born among people hardened and broken by history and circumstance. Joe grew up here in one of the long rows of terraced houses and played on streets that ached with the grimy scars of a place once pummelled but that had resisted and rebuilt from the ravages of war.

Joe’s family, like most souls here, came from hardworking stock, used to enduring. Bootle’s character and its people embodied its name, given by long-forgotten Anglo-Saxons to mean a bold dwelling. The industrious folk who first made their home here hundreds of years ago had looked out over Bootle Bay and taken in its pleasant sandy shoreline. It had been water that had drawn people here; not the nearby Irish Sea, but Bootle’s source of spring water, which would supply Liverpool and power its watermills. Bootle’s settlers embraced the early industry of bleaching, tanning and paper making. Progress soon sliced through the town as the Liverpool to Leeds Canal bisected Bootle, weaving its slow 127-mile course eastwards. The railway had brought tourists and prosperity. A spur of land protected glorious golden sands from tidal forces. The Strand Promenade was a pleasant stroll to the shore. Rows of bountiful gardens dotted the landscape beyond. As a seaside resort in the early eighteenth century this was Bootle Bay’s heyday. It didn’t last.

The twin goliaths of the Industrial Revolution and Bootle’s booming city next door, Liverpool, would change everything. The city at the end of the Mersey soon overshadowed Bootle as the Atlantic slave trade made its merchants rich. The dirty docks became an international port of departure for coal, cotton and emigrants chasing hollow dreams of better things. Like a domineering neighbour, Liverpool’s port expanded north. The new Canada Dock was built, concreting over Bootle’s former bathing beaches. Only the ghosts of long-departed holidaymakers haunted the town as it turned to industry.

Arriving here instead were starving, desperate itinerants, fleeing the famine in 1845 from across the Irish Sea. Malevolence seemed to drift in like salt on the air. On one street alone, prostitutes were brutally murdered by two seamen, another woman had her brains bashed out by a disturbed fireman and a 6-year-old was callously slaughtered by a killer who went uncaught. To cover the memory of the grisly killings, the town renamed the road, but the dark thread of fate remained. Four workmen born in Bootle proudly found short-lived employ aboard the HMS Titanic. And as a town under siege, fires broke out and troops guarded the docks from deadly attacks by Irish Republican guerrillas in their War of Independence. For all the endurance and prevailing of Bootle’s 75,000 people, it was the Second World War that brought drastic change and altered the landscape of the town.

Growing up, Joe McCleary’s granddad, Arthur Hartley, was his best mate. Hartley was a young lad when the first bombs rained down on Bootle. He remembered it was a night swollen with dread in late August 1940. Hundreds of Luftwaffe planes inflicted a summertime bombardment of Sprengbombe Cylindrisch 250 high explosives. Gas masks on, hiding under tables, climbing out of rubble. For young Arthur Hartley and other families here it was the first of more than fifty raids, an endless terrorising three months, as Joe’s home town bore the worst of the Blitz.

As a small suburban town just outside Liverpool’s boundaries, Bootle was inseparable from its neighbour’s docks and it suffered as strategic collateral. War-weary Allied naval vessels moored here. Eager, death-bound soldiers off to engage the enemy on the Atlantic departed from here. Seventy-five million tons of war materials were offloaded here, 90 per cent of all the supplies urgently imported into England. With 11 miles of quaysides, Liverpool was the target, but Bootle bore the brunt of the bombardment.

When the government’s man, Minister for Home Security Herbert Morrison, the bespectacled Baron, braved a visit to war-torn Bootle he saw the damage. Rescue workers tramped through sodden ash. Flames still smouldered. Survivors scowled as they picked through what remained of a destroyed house front. To this wrought crowd, Morrison declared his glib pride in the town and its defenders.

‘They have faced the blitz, and believe me,’ he said, ‘when the story of this great war comes to be written, one of its brightest chapters will be written about this civil defence army …’ But his chorus of encouragement was ignorant of the chilling prophecy he spoke over the town. ‘We’ve had a rough time but we can take it and we can take more.’

Take more they did, as the nerve-shattering onslaught of aerial salvos stormed down, Bootle bore the brunt of German bombers. In the first week of May 1941, the towns along the Mersey endured their worst. The sinister buzz of 680 attacking bomber planes levelled the town. Eight hundred and seventy tonnes of high explosives erupted night after night. Frightened families knit themselves closer while cracks burst from the sky. Throughout the darkness of that torturous week, the horizon ignited with an unforgiving cascade of 112,000 incendiaries. German bomber crews overhead marvelled at the 400 fires burning around the Mersey.

Out of the caves of their ruins, Joe’s then young grandparents surveyed their shattered town. Half of Liverpool’s docks destroyed, hulking skeletons of steel smouldered on the quayside or sunk into the river. Streets ruptured as 500 roads were now impassable, strewn with jagged brick and debris. Trams and railways were a twisted mass of metal and canals caved in.

In that week alone, the blitz on Bootle cost the lives of 257 women, children and men and left an equal number bleeding, broken, agonised. Those who survived could only pick through the rubble of their brutalised town. More than 8,000 of the town’s 17,000 houses were destroyed or damaged during the first eight days of May. By the month’s end a full 74 per cent of Bootle’s haggard and jaded inhabitants’ homes were wrecked almost beyond repair.

In the summer of 1941, the beleaguered town that had faced down the attack began to rebuild. Charred remains were cleared. Unsalvageable homes pulled down. Defiance marched through the town. Like a pitiless judge, the autumn of 1941 brought more – this time a daylight bombing of Bootle. Nazi planes screamed again through a battle-weary sky, parachuting landmines to inflict greater destruction by exploding at roof-top level. On a crisp October day, homes left standing on Surrey Street were blown to pieces. The raid snatched the lives of another fifteen husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Demoralised residents gave up on their government, who sought to downplay all the damage done to protect its propaganda machine.

When the long war was over, Joe’s granddad Arthur signed up as a Merchant Navy seaman, setting sail for adventure. The land he left behind was fighting, shifting, changing. Setback after setback, pounding after pounding, Bootle rebounded in grim defiance to circumstance. Its people clung to the town’s motto: ‘Respice, Aspice, Prospice’ – ‘look to the past, the present, the future’. This future took the form of transformation and redevelopment of the scarred war-torn town. Planners redesigned the centre of Bootle, built office blocks and homes. The Bootle Corporation boasted of its potential as a post-war new town. The Strand shopping precinct, a new computer HQ and acres of factory spac...