Winter Soldier

by Iraq Veterans Against the War

  “The response that all the recruits are supposed to say is ‘kill,’” he told San Francisco’s KGO-TV. “So in unison you have maybe 400 recruits chanting ‘kill, kill, kill,’ and after a while that word becomes almost nothing to you. What does it mean? You say it so often you really don’t think of the consequences of what it means to say ‘kill’ over and over again as you’re performing this deadly technique, a knife to the throat.”3

  When Zabala realized he couldn’t kill another human being, he submitted an application for conscientious objector status to the Marine Corps Reserve. But Zabala’s platoon commander denied his request: “What did you think you were joining, the Peace Corps?” court documents quote Major R.D. Doherty as saying. “I don’t know how anyone who joins the Marine Corps cannot know that it involves killing.”

  Zabala sued and on March 29, 2007, a federal judge in Northern California overruled the military justice system, ordering the Marine Corps to discharge Zabala as a conscientious objector within fifteen days. In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge James Ware noted Zabala’s experiences with his first commander, Captain Sanchez. During basic training, Sanchez repeatedly gave speeches about “blowing shit up” or “kicking some fucking ass.” In 2003, when a fellow recruit committed suicide on the shooting range, Sanchez commented in front of the recruits, “fuck him, fuck his parents for raising him, and fuck the girl who dumped him.”

  Another boot camp instructor showed recruits a “motivational clip” displaying Iraqi corpses, explosions, gun fights, and rockets set to a heavy-metal song that included the lyrics, “Let the bodies hit the floor,” the petition said. Zabala said he cried while other recruits nodded their heads in time to the beat.4

  This pattern of abusive, reflexive, purposely dehumanizing training is not unique to the Iraq war, the Marine Corps, or Robert Zabala. It’s the way the U.S. military has trained its troops for fifty years, the results of research published by the noted military historian, U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, who surveyed veterans after World War II.

  General Marshall asked these average soldiers what they did in battle. Unexpectedly, he discovered that for every hundred men along the line of fire in battle, only fifteen to twenty actually discharged their weapons. “The average healthy individual,” Marshall wrote, “has such an inner and unusually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility. … At the vital point [the soldier] becomes a conscientious objector.”5

  Marshall’s findings shocked the military and caused the Armed Forces to change their training regimen dramatically. By the Vietnam War, Pentagon studies showed 90 percent of servicemembers in combat fired their weapons.

  Forcing new recruits to chant “kill, kill, kill” became common practice. The idea was to have the idea of death drilled so deeply in the mind of the servicemember that when he or she was asked to take another human life, it didn’t bother them. The military also began conditioning soldiers to develop a reflexive “quick shoot” ability. In training, recruits were taught to fire their weapons without thinking about who might be killed.

  “Instead of lying prone on a grassy field calmly shooting at a bulls-eye target,” Army Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman wrote in his book On Killing, “the modern soldier spends many hours standing in a foxhole, with full combat equipment draped about his body looking over an area of lightly wooded rolling terrain. At periodic intervals one or two olive-drab, man-shaped targets at varying vantages will pop up in front of him for a brief time and the soldier will instantly aim and shoot at the targets.”6

  The idea is to dehumanize the enemy. “Under such conditions,” wrote the noted Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, “it becomes possible for normal, morally upright and even idealistic people to perform acts of destructive cruelty.”7

  The result of this training can be seen every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a May 2007 Pentagon survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of soldiers and marines said they felt they should treat noncombatants with respect. Only about half said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian. More than 40 percent supported the idea of torture.

  Overt, institutionalized racism from the command also plays an important role in distancing soldiers and marines from the people they kill. This system did not begin with the occupation of Iraq or inside the U.S. military. It is as old as war itself. In the 1930s, Nazi propaganda films depicted Jews as rodents. During the Rwandan genocide, ethnic Tutsis referred to the Hutus they slaughtered as “insects” or cockroaches. During the 1960s and ’70s, American soldiers dehumanized the Vietnamese people by calling them “gooks.” Today, members of the U.S. Armed Forces regularly refer to Iraqi and Afghan civilians as “hajis” and “towel-heads.”

  This dehumanizing group pressure is so strong that even Arabs and Muslims inside the Armed Forces adopt racial epithets to describe the “enemy.” During the Racism and Dehumanization panels at Winter Soldier, David Hassan sat in the back of the room nodding in agreement. The former marine, whose father is Egyptian, had grown out his beard and wore a black-and-white checkered keffiyeh around his head. He served in Anbar province doing electronic surveillance and translated interrogations in 2005.

  “I used the word [haji],” Hassan told me. “The military’s not just a job, it’s a culture. It pervades every aspect of your life and when you’re surrounded by it 24 hours a day the culture seeps into you, and I guess—in retrospect—I had to adopt the dehumanizing of the Iraqi people to be okay with what I was a part of.”

  But like the other veterans at Winter Soldier, Hassan said he couldn’t be a part of that dehumanization anymore. “I feel an obligation to speak out against this war,” he said. “I feel like I was sold, for the majority of my life, a fallacious view of what war is and what war does to people and having seen that that’s a lie—I have an obligation to speak out against it.”

  Michael Totten

  Specialist, United States Army, Military Police, 716th Military Police Battalion, 101st Airborne Brigade

  Deployment: April 2003–April 2004, Karbala

  Hometown: Rochester, New York

  Age at Winter Soldier: 26 years old

  For the first six months of my deployment, I served as a driver for a security vehicle for my command sergeant major and my lieutenant colonel, and for the last six months I was put back in the line platoon for the 194th MP Company.

  This is me in Babylon, early on in the deployment. These are some ancient ruins, thousands of years old and this slide highlights the lack of respect that we had for the ancient culture and for the culture in Iraq, and it displays our insensitivity to the people of Iraq.

  When I first arrived in Iraq, I was stationed in one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. I had a picture taken of me pointing to my American flag, thinking to myself, “Good job,” and being very proud of my country. This highlights the arrogance that I had in this point in my life. It displays the heightened sense of importance that I felt and that many in my unit felt. This arrogance permits us to do harm to the Iraqi people and to treat them as second-class citizens.

  I have a few talking points. I’m going to highlight that sense of importance and my unit’s general attitude toward the Iraqi people. Then I’m going to go into some specifics.

  I worked with my command sergeant major often and he would provide mission briefs and after action reviews for every mission that we were on. During many of these mission briefs, we used language such as “haji”—which is an Arabic term of endearment that the military has turned on its head. My command sergeant major, in one specific mission brief, said to the nine-person team, “Haji is an obstacle, do not let them get in our way,” meaning that if they drove in front of us, drive through them.

  At one point in the deployment, when I was on a convoy just north of Baghdad, I pulled over to have an MRE and refuel our trucks. It
was about a six-vehicle convoy. Oftentimes kids in the surrounding community would run up to us and say, “Thank you, thank you,” and welcome us with warm arms. We didn’t want that kind of attention from the kids, for fear of their safety, because we knew we were targeted in that country.

  In this incident, a kid was trying to cross a four-lane divided highway and was struck by a vehicle going about 65[mph]. I hopped in my truck and ran to stop traffic. A number of us, including my sergeant major, ran over there. About thirty seconds after he looked at the kid, the sergeant major said, “He’s gone, move out.” I wondered to myself what would have happened if this had been an American kid who was just struck?

  Pre-deployment. The cultural competency training that we received can be best summed up in a sentence. “Don’t touch the people of Iraq’s left hand. They wipe their ass with it.” That’s what we got.

  This next incident I’m about to describe was the day after we were engaged in an ambush where I was an arm’s length away from a man who was shot in the neck, fell to the street, and died. His name was Corporal Sean Grilley. I had to lift him into my truck with my gunner, pulled down from the turret. We brought him into our truck and tried to MedEvac him. As a grenade blew up my left front tire and flattened it, I took about fifteen minutes to get back to the hospital, and at that point he bled to death. It was October 16, 2003. My lieutenant colonel, Kim Orlando, was also killed that night.

  The incident I’m about to describe was the night after that event.

  Our mission was, in part, to run a jail in Karbala. It wasn’t for enemy prisoners of war but just for the general population prisoners. Prisoners would be brought in by the Iraqi police and we were to show “how we do things in America.” On the night of October 17 in 2003, six people were brought in by the Iraqi police. The Iraqi police said these six participated in the actions the night prior, therefore they were army prisoners of war due to the coalition standards.

  When these people were brought in, they already appeared to be beaten badly. They were lined up on the concrete wall and we told them to interlace their fingers. This is a form of control because you can grab your middle finger and your index finger and squeeze them together, and it’s quite painful: “Interlace your fingers, place your foreheads on the concrete wall, cross your ankles, put your hands on top of your head so we can search and process you.” They were tagged. They were searched. They were also beaten, not just by Americans, but by Bulgarian soldiers, Polish soldiers, Iraqi police, and by me.

  I grabbed a man by the jaw and I looked him in the eye and I slammed his head against the wall. I looked him in the eye again and said, “You must have been the one that killed Grilley.” Then he fell. I kicked him. An Iraqi policeman probably the size of the biggest security man here with hands to match—the size of a Kodiak—hit a guy in the side of the head at least six times. I looked at him and I laughed. I’m like, “These guys are getting what they deserve.” This all took place in the presence of my lieutenant, within earshot of many NCOs. I never found out what happened to any of these people, these six prisoners. I don’t know where they went, I don’t know anything about that.

  I’m up here today to speak on behalf of all the people who haven’t returned home, who can’t speak. This isn’t just some isolated incident. It’s happened in the presence of NCOs, commissioned officers, and coalition forces, not only as participants but also as witnesses.

  My being up here displays my anger on multiple levels: at the Americans’ behavior overseas, at our president’s continuous rhetoric about Iraq being a success, at this country’s citizens’ apathy toward this occupation. This is why I’m here today as well. These events happened in our name, and each and every single one of you are responsible for them.

  I am very sorry for my actions. I can’t take back what I did. I ask the forgiveness of the people of Iraq and of my country. I will not enable this any further.

  General Petraeus, you may not remember me, but you once led me. You’re no longer a leader of men. You’ve exploited your troops for your own gain, and have become just another cheerleader for this occupation policy that is destroying America.

  General Petraeus, you pinned a Bronze Star on me in Babylon in 2003 following the October 16 incident. I will no longer be a puppet for your personal gain and for your political career. Thank you.

  [At the conclusion of his testimony Specialist Michael Totten ripped up the citation he received for his Bronze Star for Valor. The citation, which was signed by General David Petraeus, reads: “Totten’s team engaged enemy forces without regard for their personal safety, thereby removing the threat to women and children throughout the community. Private First Class Totten repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire as his unit restored order and control back to the region, while saving countless lives. His courage, bravery, and selfless service under hostile conditions reflects great credit on him, the 101st Airborne Division, and the United States Army.”]

  Michael LeDuc

  Corporal, Marine Corps, Assaultman, Weapons Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines

  Deployment: June–December 2004, Anbar, Haditha, Fallujah

  Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts

  Age at Winter Soldier: 22 years old

  Toward the end of October 2004, my company was called into the outskirts of Camp Fallujah to an area called the Iraqi Training Center (ITC). We were being marshaled there along with several other battalions from both the army and the Marine Corps for what was going to be the second invasion of Fallujah, known as Operation Phantom Fury.

  We trained there until the invasion, and one day the battalion JAG officer—the battalion’s final authority on the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)—pulled us all together, made sure the embedded reporters weren’t there, and gave us our Rules of Engagement brief for Fallujah. The bottom line was that now the decision as to what “hostile action” and “hostile intent” was would be left to even the most junior of noncommissioned officers. They also pushed a tactic called reconnaissance by fire, which meant if for any reason we felt unsafe or unsure going in to clear a house or a building, we were granted the ability to do anything we wanted to that house before we entered it.

  This was a really big switch from what we’d been used to. We had been using “the escalation of force,” where we responded to a situation with deadly force only under very specific conditions. But now, we were operating under the assumption that everyone was hostile.

  The battalion JAG officer wrapped up by sort of going, “Okay, marines, you see an individual with a weapon, what do you do?”

  We mutter in silence for a minute, waiting for somebody else to answer, and one guy said, “Shoot him?”

  “No. Shooting at a target, putting rounds down range and suppressing a target, is one thing. Sighting and killing a target is another. So again, you see an individual with a weapon, what do you do?”

  “Kill him.”

  “You see an individual with a pair of binoculars, what do you do?”

  “Kill him.”

  “You see an individual with a cell phone out, what do you do?”

  “Kill him.”

  “You see an individual who although may not be actually carrying anything or displaying any specific hostile action or intent running from, say, one building to another, running across the street or even running away from you, assume that he is maneuvering against you and kill him. You see an individual with a white flag and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey commands, assume it’s a trick and kill him.”

  Fallujah: we went by those ROEs. Fighting was fairly intense for the first few days especially. Leveling houses before we even went in became pretty commonplace, using bulldozers and tanks to do the job for us, and walking through the rubble.

  After the first few days, things began to calm down. We’d be holed up in houses for a few hours or maybe a day or two and we’d get bored. We’d get angry and be like, “Let’s break stuff.” We ran out of people to
shoot, so we turned to dogs and cats, chickens, whatever’s moving. Some guys, they’d name the bodies left out in the street. Rotten Randy. Tony the Torso. Some people would adjust the sights on their rifles, using the heads of people laid out in the street. Just fire a shot, if it hit too far to the left, adjust the sight and shoot again.

  I remember one instance where we were on the roof of a mosque that had just been taken maybe a day before. It was daylight, and not too far away there was a house where an entire family seemed to have been holed up in a basement for a while. There were a few men, a few women, and a bunch of kids. What their coming out and waving signified to me was they were trying to let us know that they were there, and they were unarmed. One of the marines on scene reacted by shooting at them. I don’t know if he was specifically aiming at them. None of them got hit but they just ran back in. We never saw them again.

  I remember hanging out in houses and then we’d start going through stuff. We’d look through family photo albums and pictures of the house and the neighborhood. We’d compare it to what it looked like now and have a good laugh.

  One night, we were going out to occupy a house as an observation point. The city sewer system had been damaged by bombs and the streets had been flooded with sewer water. As the fighting went on, the water filled up with dead bodies, so it was pretty horrible. The day before, several people had been shot and they detained the rest of the people that they found, including the wife of one of the men who was killed. Either her uncle or father was blind. On our way to this observation point, we were supposed to escort them back to the house. They were lagging behind. They were holding us up. Halfway there, we just left them there, standing in the middle of the flooded streets, and went on to our objective.

  I joined the military with the intention of contributing something positive, to do something good to improve the whole human situation. I felt that Iraq was a good place to do that. I was very young and naive, and I was wrong. I won’t say that I’m overly wrought by anything that happened. There were some times when I got to do what I wanted to do and I felt good about myself a few times. For the most part, I was just doing what I had to do and that was all of us, whether it was breaking the rules or following them, whether it was doing what I thought was right or doing what I knew was wrong.