by Larry Minear
Heath believes that the proposition that some who “had put so much into serving their country and truly believed in what they were doing” would be sent home and be dishonorably discharged “was hard to get past.” He was particularly uncomfortable accompanying his charges back to the States in handcuffs. Rather than meting out severe punishment, he reasoned, the authorities should have said, “These are our front line soldiers. These are the guys that protect your liberties back home” rather than “Maybe they made a mistake. Let’s give them discharges.”16
To make things murkier still, the political situation in both countries, never simple, became increasingly confused over time. At the outset, the U.S. focus was on terrorism and terrorists. Responding to a direct attack by Al Qaeda on 9/11, U.S. military action in Afghanistan gave troops a sense of occupying the moral high ground. Targeting Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts energized U.S. engagement in the early months. The sentiment was widespread that Afghanistan was the right war to fight.
Yet the Afghan conflict soon broadened to include rogue and criminal elements—sometimes allied to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, sometimes not—as well as other threats to the government of Hamid Karzai. Complicating the situation further, some local elders who supported the Karzai government were anything but friendly to the occupying troops stationed in their areas. There were also tensions involving newly uncooperative warlords whom the United States, during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, had armed and bankrolled. Over time, the Taliban reemerged as a shadowy force to be reckoned with militarily even as ineptness and corruption increasingly permeated government structures.
Similarly in Iraq, U.S. troops experienced a worsening security situation along with heightened difficulties in identifying and targeting terrorists. Ongoing debate about the extent to which the Saddam Hussein regime had been involved in the 9/11 attacks and confusion about the objectives of the U.S. invasion muddied the picture further still. Was the purpose of the war to preempt weapons of mass destruction, to bring about regime change, to deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda, or some combination of these? By 2006, experts were concluding that much of the violence in the cities and countryside was not the result of terrorism but of civil war.
By mid-2007, the situation had grown even murkier. “Iraqi society has continued to fracture and is so incoherent that it can’t even have a proper civil war any more,” noted David Brooks of the New York Times. “What’s happening in Iraq is not one civil war or one insurgency. Instead, Iraq is home to many little civil wars and many little insurgencies that are fighting for local power. Even groups like the Mahdi Army are splitting.”17 As in Afghanistan, the ranks of the “bad guys” had come to include a grab bag of people with weapons—criminals as well as insurgents and terrorists. By 2008, loss of life among U.S. and associated troops had declined, although targeted and random violence continued. Meanwhile 2008 in Afghanistan witnessed an uptick in violence and casualties.
The murkiness of the situation on the ground in each theater made it difficult for soldiers, struggling on a daily basis to survive in a hostile environment and being confronted with volatile situations necessitating quick responses, to maintain distinctions between civilians and combatants.
RULES
In neither Afghanistan nor Iraq, U.S. troops learned, did the enemy seem to spend much time worrying about international military ethics or world public opinion. New Hampshire’s Sgt. Brian Shelton said of his adversaries along the Pakistan border, “They don’t have rules. They’re not afraid to die for whatever they believe in.”18 “If you’re captured, you’re dead anyway,” explained the Navy’s James N. Nappier, Jr., who served in the Ramadi area, “because they’re just going to torture you.”19
Others, too, questioned why U.S. troops should abide by the rules of war when there seemed no particular incentive or reward for doing so. Maryland National Guardsman Capt. William Jones, seriously wounded in the battle for Fallujah, was asked by an interviewer, “Don’t you think you were endangering Iraqi civilians?” “No,” he replied. “The enemy chose the area in which they would fight.”20 The responsibility for the carnage, he suspected, lay with the adversary, who set the terms of the encounter, rather than with U.S. forces, who simply responded in kind.
Indeed, with the amorphous “enemy” not playing by the book, observance of international rules of warfare seemed to place American troops at a distinct disadvantage. “The enemy don’t have no rules—why should we?” asked Army Sgt. E-5 Bobby Lee Lisek, reflecting on his time in Iraq. The enemy, in his experience, would declare a cease-fire during Ramadan, and then violate it. “They’re a conniving people. I don’t like them. I won’t trust a Muslim. I won’t even go near one. I won’t even let a Muslim doctor work on me.” As for Lisek’s superiors, “They kept giving us one set of rules of engagement,” he said. “Then the next day they’d say, ‘No, it’s totally different. You do it this way.’ And finally, you’re there for so long, you’ve been blown up and ambushed and it’s like, who cares?”21
A survey conducted by the Army in Iraq in 2006 found that more than one-third of the troops interviewed believed that torture should be allowed if it helped gather important information about insurgents. Some four in ten troops would approve of torture if it saved the life of a fellow soldier. About two-thirds of the Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said that they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. “Less than half of soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” the Army reported. About 10 percent of the 1,767 troops surveyed reported that they had mistreated civilians in Iraq, such as kicking them or needlessly damaging their possessions.22
Commenting on the study, Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, noted that Army researchers “looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at.” The report observed that the troops’ statements are at odds with the “soldier’s rules” promulgated by the Army, which forbid the torture of captured enemy prisoners and direct that civilians be treated humanely.23
Confirming evidence is contained in an independent report based on discussions with veterans of combat in Iraq. The study, which suggests that “the killing of Iraqi civilians by occupation forces is more common than has been acknowledged by military authorities,” found that twenty-four of the fifty soldiers interviewed “said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by the convoys. These incidents, they said, were so numerous that many were never reported.”24 The study quotes Sgt. Camilo Mejía, the Nicaragua-born soldier mentioned earlier, describing an incident in Ramadi in which he and his squad riddled with gunfire the body of a youth holding a grenade. “The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us,” Mejía was quoted as saying, “led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them.”25
The case for observing the international rules of war is based not on the premise that one should deny or ignore the brutality of war or the perfidy of the enemy, but rather that all parties have an interest in respecting established limits on violence. The animating force behind military ethics over the years has been not naiveté but hard-nosed self-interest. On the front lines of the global war on terror, however, few American soldiers looked beyond the restrictions that such canons imposed to the benefits that were to accrue to those who respected them. Viewing survival as their primary and overriding objective, those interviewed articulated a greater sense of the difficulties of functioning within established parameters than of the possible benefits of doing so.
Yet there were exceptions. Beyond the troops’ restiveness under the rules of war emerged on occasion a sense of the importance of international standards. Disclosure in the spring of 2004 of abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops, intelligence operatives, and contractors at the Abu Ghraib prison
near Baghdad—with interrogation practices including water-boarding, extended solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation—provoked extended and impassioned public debate about the use of torture as an instrument of war and, more broadly, about whether accepted definitions of torture, civilians, and combatants were applicable in the global war against terrorism. Judging from the interviews, this debate was more muted among U.S. military personnel. Those who do comment focus on operational impacts rather than broad policy issues.
While many of the soldiers interviewed sympathized with attempts to extract information from prisoners, some expressed revulsion at the practices that came to light. They objected not on grounds of moral squeamishness but because of the likely negative consequences for their own security and ability to accomplish their missions. “What they did was obviously wrong,” said Michigan Guardsman Maddix, objecting to the humiliating treatment by U.S. personnel of the prisoners in their care. But there were practical as well as moral reasons for objecting to such behavior. “We actually started getting attacked more” as a result of the angry backlash triggered by the abuses, he said.26 Capt. Michael Fortenberry read the events as a setback in terms of local perceptions of American troops and their cause. In his view, they confirmed the stereotype that Americans soldiers “do dumb things.”27
Some soldiers were particularly irate because such behavior, carried out by U.S. personnel in the protected confines of detention centers, increased the vulnerability of other U.S. units that were considerably more exposed. Sgt. John McCary, an intelligence officer who served with an infantry division in Iraq’s Anbar Province in early 2004, affirmed the importance of playing by agreed international rules in spite of the apparent short-term disadvantages of doing so. “What do you say to your men,” he asked in an e-mail to his family in North Carolina, “after you’ve scraped up the scalps of an entire Iraqi family off the road, right next to the shattered bodies of your soldiers, held together only by their shoelaces, body armor or helmets? ‘We’re fighting the good fight?’ I don’t think so. We’re just fighting. And now we’re dying.” Despite the brutality of the struggle, McCary was committed to fight fairly. “With all, we will be harsh, and strict, but not unjust, not indiscriminate. And we will not give up. We cannot. Our lives are tied to those lost, and we cannot leave them now, as we might have were they still living.”28
The inhumanity of the conflicts led others beyond McCary to appreciate the value of rules designed to circumscribe the brutality of warfare on civilians. Sergeant Bazzi described a small but illustrative incident in which his platoon was ordered to keep Iraqi civilians off a road separating a residential area from a hospital. He was approached by a father with a sick baby who wanted to cross the road to get to the hospital for emergency treatment. “We’re a disciplined army,” recalled Bazzi, “so I had to say ‘No.’ But it didn’t make any tactical sense.” He then refused to translate the order into Arabic, holding that if his commanding officer wanted to convey the message, he would have to do so himself. Denying access to a hospital, he said in retrospect, “goes against why we’re there. It goes against a lot of our beliefs and our value system we operate under as American soldiers.”29
Jonathan Miller, a Massachusetts native who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, came to a sudden and sobering realization that some of the enemy that he was seeking to kill may not have been fighting of their own volition. “Immediately” upon realizing this, he said, “you begin to lose the myth of war. These people might just be fighting for their families. What would I do if I was just trying to keep my brothers alive, my mom and dad? It starts to get real complex at that point. These are actually people that I’m going to be killing,” he said with evident dismay.30
Numerous examples demonstrate an instinctive revulsion on the part of some soldiers for the deprivations and indignities that civilians suffer. Marine L. Cpl. William Schelhouse’s comment in his journal regarding the death of a young Iraqi girl is one.31 Her death takes some of the rejoicing out of significant military advances in the early days of the invasion that he recorded. Marine Sgt. Blake Cole recounts an incident in which he and his partner, discovered hiding in a building, opted against shooting their way out to avoid civilian casualties. As it turned out, they were welcomed by the community when they emerged.32 Army Lt. Col. Maria Cochran was restrained by a colleague from intervening to halt a beating by a Taliban official of a veiled woman.33 The satisfaction derived by so many soldiers from activities undertaken to benefit local populations (the subject of the following chapter) confirms a widespread concern for civilians among the troops.
Thus while some soldiers, reflecting their own perceived vulnerability, may have been cavalier in their approach to the rules of war, others seemed at a genuine loss about how to meet their legal obligations in the fast-moving situations that confronted them.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Most veterans interviewed do not seem particularly conversant with internationally accepted principles of military ethics or seized with the need to abide by them. In interviews and writings, they mention only rarely the Geneva Conventions and Protocols, which specify allowable military tactics and stipulate the obligation to prevent harm to civilian populations. The United States has ratified the Conventions, drawn up in 1949 following World War II, but not the Additional Protocols of 1977, which, reflecting the experiences of the Vietnam war, address in greater detail the ground rules for behavior in conflicts ostensibly such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Few veterans systematically applied to these conflicts the criteria normally used to determine the justness of a particular war (jus ad bellum) or the proper conduct of military action (jus in bello).
One exception was Army 1st Lt. Ehren K. Watada, a Hawaiian who in June 2006 became the first commissioned officer to refuse to deploy with his unit to Iraq. After considering the views of international law experts, Watada concluded that the Bush administration “had falsely used the 9/11 attacks to justify the war.” Watada requested to be sent to Afghanistan, a war he believed met the requisite international standards. His court-martial ended in a mistrial in February 2007: in 2008 the military brought additional charges against him.34 Discomfort with the conduct of U.S. military operations in Iraq led Camilo Mejía, a Nicaraguan national mentioned earlier, to refuse to serve, resulting in his court-martial. During the proceedings, the particulars emerged. Mejía’s unit was to ensure that prisoners at a detention facility were deprived of sleep for periods of forty-eight hours. “I was a squad leader, so I didn’t have to do it myself,” he recalled, “but my men were doing it. I remember my platoon sergeant saying this doesn’t meet Red Cross or Geneva Conventions standards. There were no medical people around except the platoon’s medic, and God knows how many other violations were found. He was thinking of calling the Red Cross, but he was told that if he did that, he would piss off the commander and mess up his career, and conditions for these people would not improve. So he didn’t do anything, and neither did I.”35
Journal Entry
William Schelhouse (AFC2001/001/47506), Diaries and Journals (MS02) Journal Entry for March 23, 2003, VHP, AFC, LOC.
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Lance Cpl. William J. Schelhouse was a member of a Marine Air Support Squadron that deployed to Kuwait in February 2003 and crossed into Iraq in early April. Following President Bush’s declaration of war, he watched the initial missile attack launched from aircraft carriers, on the radar of the British unit to which he was attached. He spent his tour in the area south of Al Basrah, providing backup support for jet fighter aircraft, which cleared the way for advancing ground troops.
Before being deployed, he hadn’t thought about keeping a journal. Once there, he decided that it would be a good idea so he “could reminisce about the experience in years to come and share it with children and grandchildren.” The workday was organized into twelve-hour shifts, and “you could sleep, write, read, call, whatever you wanted” during time off. “I’d recommend keeping a diary,” he says.
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He views his overall experience in very positive terms. “Going over there—I was only twenty at the time—and seeing the living conditions of most of the people made me really, really, really appreciate what we have over here.” He was “absolutely disgusted” at the media portrayal of the war. “Even if Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I know that what we did for the people of Iraq—including the ten year-old kids who were begging for food—makes this war 100 percent totally worth it.” As for the injury sustained by the young Iraqi girl he writes about in his journal, he remembers thinking that, a child being hurt “affected us all.”
The abbreviations used in his journal entry are dest (destroyed), CO (commanding officer), Recon (reconnaissance), AF (armed forces), and MEDEVAC (medical evacuation). His collection in the Veterans History Project contains a number of handwritten and typed documents.
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“By Geneva Convention standards,” Mejía recalled, “you were not supposed to conduct missions near hospitals, mosques, schools, or residential areas. We broke every rule there was.” On one occasion, he was criticized by his superiors for “sending the wrong message to the enemy” by not having his unit stand its ground and fight following an ambush, even when doing so would have risked the lives of Iraqi civilians as well as American troops. Back in the United States to sort out issues related to the expiration of his green card, Mejía decided not to return to Iraq. He eventually served time for dereliction of duty and attracted public attention for his stand. “Maybe God put war in my path so I could see its ugly face and tell its story,” he concluded.36