by Larry Minear
Watada and Mejía represent two of a larger number of soldiers, estimated by the Pentagon in early 2006 at 8,000, who deserted during the course of the Iraq war. The Pentagon number includes military personnel who deserted on grounds other than ethical reservations about the justness or the conduct of the wars.37
Judging from the accounts of veterans who served in Afghanistan or Iraq—and in this respect Mejía’s experience is not exceptional—military officials brought the international law of war to bear on day-to-day combat operations unevenly and hesitantly. National Guardsman Patrick Resta of Philadelphia recalled an exchange in Jalula where his infantry platoon was tasked with running a small prison camp. “The Geneva Conventions don’t exist at all in Iraq,” he remembered being told by his commanding officer, “and that’s in writing if you want to see it.”38 That said, the interview data suggest that international canons of behavior were less often specifically rebuffed, as in this instance, than ignored.
While rank-and-file soldiers often acknowledge pre-deployment training in military strategy and tactics, few mention briefings in matters of international law and custom. Sgt. Gregory Mayfield’s deployment to Iraq was preceded by stints at Fort Hood and Fort Polk. There he participated in “vignette training” exercises in which soldiers are presented with situations—for example, whether to use deadly force in this or that circumstance—which he says have “no real good answer.” The emphasis is accordingly on problem solving. “They give you the structure: OK, here is your right limit and here is your left limit. We want you to do things professionally, but we don’t care how much you deviate as long as you are within the guidelines. The rules of engagement are really clear-cut on paper,” said Mayfield, “but when it comes down to execution, there is a lot of gray area in there.”39
From interview comments, it seems that military leaders may have stepped up such training as the two wars proceeded. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib abuses in particular, some soldiers were given a crash course in the Geneva Conventions—reportedly conducted by trainers sent over from the States without much experience in the region. “The best training,” concluded a soldier in the New Hampshire Guard who attended the hurry-up sessions, turned out to be “just going down [to the detention facilities] and doing it.”40
“I had never heard the word ‘detainee’ until I got to Iraq, but I soon found myself in charge of a compound filled with nearly six hundred of them,” observed Ryan T. McCarthy. “The only effective training we ever received was the news coverage of how real MPs treated detainees up at Abu Ghraib.” McCarthy acknowledged, “the Military Police did provide us with some training, but a PowerPoint slideshow about prison cells in Fort Leavenworth [Kansas] is useless in a sprawling prison camp. The most effective training they provided,” he said sardonically, “was their smug reminders that if an incident occurred with the detainees and we were to fall back on our training and experience as soldiers, we would go to jail.”41 Other interviewees noted that military police, without any specific training in the rights of detainees or the management of detention facilities, were sometimes pressed into the breach until regulars arrived, assuming interim responsibilities for which they had not been specifically prepared.
In the wake of public outrage at the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib events and following a number of high-profile incidents, mostly in Afghanistan, involving major civilian loss of life, the military began to pay greater attention to defending itself against allegations of misconduct. “We would document things—everything,” recalled Mayfield, “Almost every incident where someone is killed or there is a gunfight, there is an investigation done to see if you were justified and following the rules of engagement. I don’t think some of the previous soldiers in previous wars had to worry about that, but that was the environment we were in. You wanted to document things real well because there are real people, real soldiers over here charged with murder.”42
The fact that those court-martialed for the incidents at Abu Ghraib were for the most part junior military personnel rather than higher-ups fueled the perception among the rank-and-file that accountability was selectively applied. Eric Heath, whose duties included guarding American service personnel imprisoned in a U.S. facility in Kuwait, suspected gross unfairness in the treatment meted out. “It’s easier to hang them out to dry as an E-2 private,” he remarked, “than it is for someone in a higher capacity to take the fall.”43
The confusion in the two theaters regarding military ethics and the rules of engagement mirrored a lack of assertiveness and consistency in the exercise of authority by senior U.S. military leaders. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, was quoted as observing that over the course of his several visits to Iraq, increasingly “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’” Armitage concluded, “we’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and the Global War on Terror. You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend.”44
Lax enforcement of international ethical canons by military officials reflected the sentiment in the political arena as well. In recent years, evidence has emerged that the commander in chief, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and senior Pentagon officials had sought during the early years of the two conflicts to redefine and relax the country’s established international obligations. With respect to the Abu Ghraib abuses in particular, President Bush, Hersh concluded, “made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reevaluate the training of military police or interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers.”45
When the administration issued an executive order in July 2007 to provide the CIA with ground rules for interrogating detainees in facilities such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, some—but not all—of the methods that had been criticized as humiliating and degrading were proscribed. The list of specific interrogation practices thenceforth to be banned, however, remained classified in an avowed effort to deny Al Qaeda the opportunity to prepare its members for those techniques that might still be used.46 It was not until January 2009, a week before the Obama administration took office, that Susan J. Crawford became “the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.”47
There would seem to be a connection between the views of senior administration officials who regarded the Geneva Conventions and Protocols as “quaint” and the actions of soldiers who felt no particular obligation to function within internationally agreed parameters. Yet it is also evident that some soldiers in both theaters were anxious to avoid harming civilian populations, even in circumstances in which doing so may have constrained the pursuit of military objectives. Moreover, the situations confronting U.S. military personnel were so complex that commanding officers could understandably disagree among themselves about how best to proceed. In both theaters, there were those who discarded the established laws of war as inapplicable as well as those who struggled to apply them.
CONSEQUENCES
While the rules of warfare have traditionally sought to humanize the conduct of hostilities, widespread and sometimes indiscriminate violence in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to many of those involved to be beyond the civilizing potential of those canons. “War is war, and it is not pretty,” said a chaplain in the Veterans Administration hospital system. “But this war seems especially nasty.” That inhumanity was underscored by the special difficulties confronted by U.S. soldiers in dealing with Iraqi children. The conundrum touched on all of the major ethical challenges identified here, including the difficulties in distinguishing civilians from combatants, the perceived risks of treating them according to international law, and the wrenching impact of indiscriminate violen
ce on Iraqis and American soldiers alike.
Capt. Ed Hrivnak, a veteran of Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and Operation Desert Storm, recalled a conversation with a soldier whom he was treating during a medical evacuation. The soldier confided “that he had witnessed some Iraqi children get run over by a convoy. He was in the convoy and they had strict orders not to stop. If a vehicle stops, it is isolated and an inviting target for a rocket-propelled grenade. He tells me that some women and children have been forced out onto the road to break up the convoys so that the Iraqi irregulars can get a clear shot. But the convoys do not stop. He tells me that dealing with that image is worse than the pain of his injury.”48 The recollection was similar to one by New Hampshire Guardsman Kevin Shangraw, who recalled seeing the remains of a woman struck by a convoy being zipped into a body bag. “I’ll remember that for the rest of my life…. The Iraqi people are who we are there to help and we just killed one of them.”49
The traumatic nature of the scale and intensity of the carnage emerged in stark terms in depositions taken following the suicide of Tech. Sgt. David Guindon, a New Hampshire Air National Guardsman who took his own life on August 18, 2004, one day after returning from six months in Iraq. In a deposition following his death, the operations officer for his unit, Maj. Chris Hurley, said that “the Iraqis would actually send children out to blow up truck convoys, so when the children were seen in the road, the soldiers were told to actually keep going and run right over them … because if they stopped for the children, as would be the norm, there was a possibility that these children could be armed or wired with explosives.” In his judgment, the state’s Guard members, including Guindon, although they had received a certain amount of training, “weren’t prepared for what they saw.”50 Several soldiers and their spouses confirmed that upon returning to their families after service in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans had particular difficulties in reconnecting with their own children.
Yet children were not beyond suspicion as instruments of the insurgency. In an area where IEDs were frequently planted, a gunner told his partner about regularly seeing two young boys. “I told my gunner not to worry about them,” recalled Mark LaChance, who served in Iraq with an Army unit in 2004–2005. “They were kids and there was nothing to fear from them.” Several days later, however, in the investigation of a roadside bomb incident, a notebook was found on the boys, “filled with information on all the U.S. convoys that had traveled the highway in the past month. They had recorded the time of day, number of trucks, whether they were gun trucks or logistical trucks, and even had identifying features for each convoy. As it turned out, the two boys were selling the information to men from Baghdad for food for their families. I learned that day that there are no innocent people in war.”51
“I trusted no Iraqi. I barely trusted the children,” wrote National Guard Spec. Mark Mitchell from Pennsylvania, who served in Iraq for the last nine months of 2003. “You can’t trust any of them. They smile in your face in the day, then shoot at you at night. In the daytime, they are all out there. They want to sell you this or that, all smiling, but when night falls, all you hear is a bunch of shooting.”52 Army Spec. E-4 Charles White recalled that he had been trained to “treat the children with utmost respect but at the same time to maintain situational awareness.” This youngster or that, he mused, might turn up as your battlefield adversary ten years hence, even as Desert Storm youngsters were said to be resurfacing in Operation Iraqi Freedom.53
In sum, the ethical and legal issues associated with the declaration and conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved problematic for many of the troops, wrenching for some. The soldiers’ concern for their own survival in the face of a ruthless enemy made the established ground rules of customary international law chafe. The uneven commitment to and application of the rules of war by U.S. authorities was also a source of confusion, as was the uneven application of the rules to all parties and ranks, civilian and military. Yet U.S. soldiers were also angered when flagrant violations of expected behavior by their own colleagues undermined their cause. They were pained when civilians were killed or wounded and they recoiled at the violence, particularly its effects on civilians, most notably on children. The relatively minor role played by the laws of war seems to have reflected and reinforced a perceived absence at higher military and political levels of accountability for their observance.
SIX
Winning Hearts and Minds
Many soldiers who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq prided themselves on the help they provided to local communities. They viewed such “hearts-and-minds” aid as making direct and immediate improvement in the quality of the lives of local Afghans and Iraqis while strengthening their resistance to insurgent forces. For most veterans, the downsides of such efforts were generally dwarfed by their positive aspects.
REACHING OUT
The experience of Jeremy Krug, a Marine lance corporal in Iraq in 2003, provides a point of entry into the issues. Stationed at an airfield between Fallujah and Ramadi, he was tasked with providing security for helicopter squadrons and with keeping the Marine supply lines open. In the course of patrolling the area, he interacted regularly with the local population and took part in projects that included rebuilding bridges and installing water and electric supplies. In addition to connecting individual homes with clean water, his unit distributed school supplies collected back in the United States.
Krug found that the villages varied in their reaction to such activities. One was “extremely receptive,” another more hostile, while a third took the assistance offered but “didn’t want anybody to see us giving it to them.” He concluded that the attitudes of local religious leaders played a key role in the different reactions. One constant throughout, he said, was that people were proud and wanted to solve their own problems, whether this led them to accept or reject assistance.1
While some aid activities were spontaneous, most were part of an organized program. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces took advantage of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) to mobilize funds for projects to benefit local populations. The program, in the words of Capt. Andrew Wells, an anthropology major and ROTC graduate from Iowa State, was a “humanitarian slush fund” that enabled the troops to respond promptly to local needs.2
An officer in the New Hampshire National Guard gave high marks to the thirty-five CERP undertakings he participated in during his tour in Afghanistan. They were a way of showing goodwill to local people, particularly those near military bases. “We wanted to make sure that the surrounding communities saw that we supported them,” he explained. In choosing particular villages, special consideration was given to areas “friendly to us—if they actually provided information and helped us pursue different people who weren’t so friendly to the United States.”3 Deploying medical and dental personnel to several secured villages, added Col. Benjamin Braden, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit’s Special Operations Command, was an effort at “doing the good-will things to show that we were not there to beat them up.”4
Stationed in Afghanistan, Army Spec. Dennis Harvey had a close-up view of civic activities. He was familiar with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), an organized effort, piloted first in Afghanistan and later extended to Iraq, which dispatched civil affairs officers to discuss needs with leaders of Afghan villages situated near Joint Task Force military bases. As he saw it, local people wanted to cooperate with the U.S. military—their unmet needs provided them reason enough to do so—but were intimidated by the Taliban.5 In Iraq, said Army Sgt. E-7 Rex Hendrix, hearts-and-minds activities “helped overcome popular resistance to the occupation.”6
Civic action work served another important purpose: “to get people off post and actually expose them to the local economy and people and locals and so on. Quite a few people took advantage of that.”7 More specifically, hearts-and-minds activities offered a way “to get females that were in uniform out on each missio
n so that they can interact with local females, who are pretty severely oppressed.”8 In Iraq as well as Afghanistan, female U.S. soldiers played important roles, interacting with local communities and monitoring the work of contractors reconstructing schools, roads, and other infrastructure. Given the circumscribed roles that local women played and the sensitivities of their interaction with male U.S. soldiers, the contacts provided by women in the military seemed particularly important. Hearts-and-minds work “modeled” roles for women otherwise unknown to people locally.
Mission: Civic Action
Metz Duites (AFC2001/001/58571), Photographs (PH 08), VHP, AFC, LOC. The photo was taken on October 18, 2005, by Metz Duites.
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This Preventive Medicine Team, based in Iraq at Camp Bucca, provided medical services to about three thousand coalition forces and some nine thousand detainees. The team’s vehicle, a Humvee, is “up-armored” to protect against occasional mortar and rocket attacks when traveling “outside the wire.”
Capt. Metz Duites, shown on the far right, served with the 785th Military Police Battalion, based in Fraser, Michigan. As a preventive medicine officer attached to an army unit from Alabama, he was deployed to Iraq from August 2005 to August 2006.
“This is my favorite photo out of hundreds that I took during my deployment,” explains Duites, who was born in the Philippines and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. “It gives me great pride every time I look at it because of the tremendous missions that we accomplished. We were a small team with a big mission. We stayed so busy that I thought about having a picture that would provide my team a lasting memory—a reminder of our year of hard work in a very harsh environment.”