Winter Soldier

by Iraq Veterans Against the War

  Some common things you’ll face in your daily non-combat environment. If you’re in an office and it’s the morning, and you’re walking by one of your staff sergeants and you say, “Good morning, staff sergeant.” I guess the common response in the civilian world would be, “Good morning to you, too.” But in the Marine Corps, you get, “Er, kill babies.” That’s motivating. That’s not meant to be funny. That’s meant to motivate you and start off your day with, “Er, kill babies.” And this isn’t something that just happens once. The Marine Corps is filled with one-upmanship to say the most dehumanizing, racist, most offensive thing, and to enjoy it while you’re doing it.

  I was deployed to Kuwait in support of the invasion of Iraq. Once the invasion kicked off, we crossed the border into Iraq. We had a mostly positive reception by the Iraqi people. But on these convoys, I saw marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road. When we stopped, marines would take out their MRE bag, remove the moisture-activated chemical heater that we use to heat MREs. They would remove the chemical heater from the package that said, “Do not eat,” with a symbol of a person and an X sign through them, and they would give that to Iraqi children to see the response on their faces.

  We didn’t have a clearly defined mission except to keep pushing forward. When you don’t have a clearly defined mission, the mission becomes to come home alive, to survive. Marines love nothing more than to one-up each other by using their training, and when you become stagnant and the mission becomes survival, marines use their training on marines around them or on the civilian population. I saw our training for protesters or violent situations used on unsuspecting civilians countless times, because there were no rules. This was perpetrated by squad leaders and platoon sergeants. It happened all the time.

  My second combat deployment was to guard the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we were told we were going to become leaders, that we were going to step up and start taking leadership positions. The point of the matter is that we would be unsupervised, because we were the leadership. Well, this was more viewed as a time to have some fun with our un-supervision and do what boys do.

  One of the first things we did as leaders was to drive to a range in white vans. Some people who didn’t even have licenses back in the States or know how to drive stick were now driving these vans through the crowded downtown streets of Kabul, Afghanistan at extremely high speeds, as fast as the vehicles would go. Driving into oncoming traffic, driving between the two lanes, pushing vehicles out of the way. On one occasion, a man was killed coming through an intersection at speeding vehicles. He was hit by the vehicle; he was not shot. Our vehicle hit this man and we kept driving. I do not know if his family received reparations or any repayment from the U.S. government.

  Another time one of the drivers without a license hit a man and his donkey on a cart. That was an entire family’s livelihood, and that family could have been ruined by this one small incident.

  I returned to Iraq for my third deployment in 2005. We were stationed in downtown Fallujah, at the mayor’s compound. We had a couple marines that were being punished and one of their punishments was to remove all the paperwork from the top floor of the mayor’s compound and bring it down to our dumpsters while in full gear. This took hours, and I think it might have spanned across days. Well, after all the paperwork was gone, I finally had a chance to sit down with my interpreter and ask, “What was all that paperwork?” Well, we destroyed all the birth certificates for the city of Fallujah.

  I’d also like to talk about an important story a lot of my fellow IVAW members shared: the moment you realized you were only affected by American casualties and not Iraqi casualties. One of the roles I filled was on an ambulance that rushed to pick up wounded in the city. We were told there were Iraqi wounded and they were the police or the Iraqi military in training. I was excited. Talk to anyone that works in an ambulance or as an EMT, your adrenaline gets going. We rushed out there, our vehicle slowed down, we pulled up. There was a mass of people around a bloodied area and a blown-up vehicle. As we slowly pulled forward, I saw some desert boots and then some digital desert camouflage. I’m like, “I didn’t know that the Iraqi military had this.” Then we pulled farther forward and I realized that it was just another marine that had been wounded. He wasn’t part of our unit. He was on a convoy going through the city, but this was the first time that I was affected in such a way. I was excited about what we were doing, and then a second later I was terrified, and it was only because an American was wounded and not an Iraqi.

  I’d like to sum up what all my statements have to do with: When you have neither a clearly defined mission nor positive support, the only mission a marine infantryman knows by heart is the mission of a Marine Corps rifle squad: “Locate, close in, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver or to repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat.” That’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to use your training and you’re going to use that one mission that you know verbatim, by heart, with your eyes closed, while you’re asleep. You dream about it and you train every day, through three months of boot camp and three months of infantry training and you train between deployments and during deployments to carry out that mission.

  When your mission’s not defined, all you have is hammers and everything you find is nails and you’re going to crush it. You’re going to crush every nail you find. We’re crushing the Iraqi people with the training we’re given and the unsupportive nature around us in the military.

  Christopher Arendt

  Specialist, United States Army National Guard, Field Artillery, Charlie 1st in the 119th Field Artillery

  Deployment: Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

  Hometown: Charlotte, Michigan

  Age at Winter Soldier: 23 years old

  I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without ever having really made many decisions.

  I was seventeen years old when I joined the Army National Guard in Michigan. I was living with friends. I decided to join the military November 20, 2001, because I had no other options. My family was poor, I was poor, and I wanted to go to school. I was promised a significant amount of money for this purpose, which I have yet to receive.

  I was in the field artillery, Charlie 1st of the 119th Field Artillery, where I served, quite happily, for…no. That’s a lie. I was miserable; I hated it, but I served nonetheless.

  We got orders in October 2003 that we would be deploying to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Artillerymen would be deploying to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to be prison guards.

  During our one-month mobilization process, we were taught how to put shackles on other people. It feels ridiculous when you are practicing how to put shackles on another human being. You realize how absurd it is. You’re putting them on somebody’s hands and it’s awkward. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable, and it feels dehumanizing. This is just practice. This is just to warm up for the big game.

  We left for Guantánamo Bay early in January 2004. It was hot. It was uncomfortable. We slept in awful little houses, but at least we had houses.

  I served on the blocks for two months as a prison guard. My duties were to feed detainees and dispense toilet paper. I occupied myself in some way, shape, or form to drive the boredom out. The primary difficulty in keeping my humanity intact was the boredom.

  One of the ways I dealt with this was by talking with the detainees. A consequence of having detainees is that they are human beings and also have stories. I talked with them about those stories, which led to my being taken off the blocks. I was sent to work in the Detention Operations Center as the escort control for the last eight months of my tour. I managed the movements of every detainee in Camp Delta. I did this on twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts, and rotated with a very small crew of other Specialists. I was nineteen at the time.

  Papers, numbers, shackles, and keys. All of that had to be accounted for, but it wasn’t an
ything more than papers, numbers, shackles, and keys. I’d call two people in, usually outranking me, and I’d have to tell them to do something that they hated doing. And they hated me for telling them to do it.

  That’s the nature of the machine. We’re just chips in a Plinko machine. Orders come down from God knows who or where. They just keep coming down.

  There are two specific things I will address about the operation at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. One is the issue of torture. I’ve heard a lot of speculation as to what torture is. I would like to ask everyone to consider whether living in a cell for five years, away from your family and friends, without ever being given answers as to why you’re there, whether this is torture. Having to ask nineteen-year-old boys who don’t have any idea about the policies of their government why they are detained and the answers that we weren’t able to give—I consider that torture.

  But if that wasn’t enough, we had other methods to make certain we got around to torturing these people.

  I dispatched the detainee movements. I would come into the office at 4:30 in the morning and there would sometimes be a little paper in the wall with a number on it, which represented a detainee inside of an interrogation room. The temperature of the interrogation room was maybe 10 or 20 degrees, with loud music playing. Sometimes that detainee would stay there for my entire twelve- to fourteen-hour shift. He was shackled to the floor by his hands and his feet, with nothing to sit on, loud music playing, in the freezing cold. I guess that’s torture; that depends on who you ask.

  I hear there is an official list of things that are and are not torture. Waterboarding is torture. My recent example is not. I can’t believe a human being could even write a list like that.

  The other issue I would like to address is the common usage of the Quick Reaction Force, which is a rotating five-man team established each morning. If a detainee is unsatisfied with his stay and becomes rowdy, five grown men are fitted with riot gear and lined up outside of a cell while the platoon leader of that camp sprays the detainee in the face with pepper spray. I was sprayed with pepper spray once, and I feel that’s one of the worst moments in my life. It put me on my knees for two to three hours afterwards, and in a great deal of pain for the next three days. I would never, ever want anyone to have this happen to them.

  After spraying the detainee, these five men would rush in and take whatever opportunities they could. The Standard Operating Procedures do not state that you should beat the shit out of detainees, but I guess that some people just decided that’s what they were going to do anyway.

  These are all on tape, by the way. The government makes sure that each one of these operations is taped. I taped several of them, and I would be happy to show you those clips, but I doubt they will be released anytime soon.

  After the detainee is taken forcibly from his cell—that’s probably the first time that he’s left his cell in five, six, seven days—the detainees are beaten, pulled out to the back, shaved, all of their hair, their beard, and then taken to wherever they were supposed to go.

  There was one other thing I wanted to address, about the use of the term “detainee.” We were told it had to be detainee. It had to be detainee. If it’s a prisoner, then they are a Prisoner of War, and subject to entirely different laws. If they’re detainees, they’re subject to no law whatsoever, because there aren’t laws for detainees. Because they are called detainees, they don’t get trials and there is no code for how they’re treated. It’s semantics, and we need to pay attention to those; they’re important. It’s the difference between calling something a detention facility and a concentration camp, even if they’re the same thing.

  Andrew Duffy

  Sergeant, Iowa Army National Guard, Medic

  Deployment: October 2005–October 2006, Abu Ghraib

  Hometown: Iowa City, Iowa

  Age at Winter Soldier: 21 years old

  The first incident I would like to talk about happened on March 13, 2006, involving a detainee at Abu Ghraib’s in-processing center.

  That was the sign outside the in-processing center. “Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, one detainee at a time.” I can tell you how we won one of those minds. My fellow medic and I were making our rounds through the in-processing center when a truckload of new captures came in. They often came in truckloads because we would arrest any military-aged male in the vicinity of an incident.

  As we were going through these people, evaluating them and checking them out, one young man stood out to me as being particularly irate and kind of out of it, seemingly drunk. I felt it was necessary to take his blood sugar. Normal blood sugar is between 80 and 120 mg/dl. When I took his blood sugar, it was 431 mg/dl. The detainee could speak English very well and said he had been taking insulin and that he had been captured by the Iraqi forces, held for approximately four to five days, and during that time they had not given him his insulin. Supposedly it was in his personal effects.

  I called the officer in charge of the Abu Ghraib hospital and requested that we transport this detainee. I was told twice over the phone, ordered by the captain of the 344th Combat Support Hospital, that I could not transport the detainee, and that he needed to drink water. She also stated that he was a “haji, and he probably wouldn’t die, but it would not matter if he died, anyway.”

  In the early hours of March 14 my partner and I went back to the camp to see the same individual who was now more irate, more intoxicated looking, and sweating profusely. I called my captain again, and again was denied permission to take him to the hospital. There was little I could do, and she told us to give him water and a 14-gauge IV. A normal IV is an 18- to 20-gauge. So we did that, and then we got off our shift.

  On the morning of March 15, the MPs mistook this twenty-three-year-old young man’s diabetic shock for insubordination. They pepper-sprayed him and put him into a segregation cell in the sun, where he spent his last few hours. He died en route to the hospital in one of our ambulances. Captain Hogan said that we had never called her and that we had never tried to transport the detainee.

  The next day, my partner and I were awoken out of our beds and told that we needed to go down and be interrogated by a CID colonel about the death of the detainee we had seen the previous night. Maybe three days after that, we were interrogated again by a lieutenant colonel, at which time I filled out a five-page sworn statement. We were cleared of everything, and Captain Hogan remained the night shift officer in charge of the hospital at Abu Ghraib.

  I also have a second story that emphasizes racism and how the word “haji” is often used, similar to how a racist in this country would use the “N-word.” You see, we used different ambulances for the detainees than we did for medical support on American convoys. They had older equipment. Often the fluids or the prescription drugs would be expired, sometimes by years.

  I got a call saying there was an unconscious detainee in one of the camps that usually held very docile prisoners. My partner drove while I prepared the oxygen and I attempted to prepare the Automated External Defibrillator (AED). However, my platoon sergeant ordered the wrong pads for the AED, so when I arrived on the scene I was unable to shock and revive him, which we learned later would probably have saved his life. We attempted to ventilate him on the way to the hospital but we could not. The mask was so deformed due to the heat and because it was so old. I ended up performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the detainee.

  A lot of people called them hajis. To me, this detainee was just an old man that could’ve been somebody’s father, grandfather, or uncle. I remember exactly how he looked, and I remember exactly how he felt, dying in my hands. I revived him for about fifteen seconds at which point my assistant called ahead to the hospital but they didn’t respond.

  We got to the hospital to find them very apathetic. The two medics working the emergency room were sitting on cots, sleeping. The emergency room doctor was playing Slingo, the computer game. In the emergency room I had to continue performing mouth-to-mouth r
esuscitation on this detainee. I later overheard many comments about how “That medic made out with a haji.” I was isolated by that incident. A lot of people came up to me and said, “How the hell could you do that?” I told them, “What if that was your grandfather or your father? Wouldn’t you do the same thing?”

  I could see why people wouldn’t want to take care of Iraqis because, at the same time, we treated wounded U.S. soldiers. I remember a time when I treated a marine with his legs blown off who died in our care. About a half an hour later, I had to give a detainee pills for a headache. But as a medic, and as a professional, I needed to treat these people the same. They are human beings, and I couldn’t treat them like subhumans.

  I’ll just finish up with a very short story. Me and the same medic from the first incident were called to the in-processing center where they had a semiconscious man in the back of a five-ton truck. He was restrained with his hands cuffed behind his back and his feet cuffed. He was also blindfolded. The sergeant in charge asked me if I felt the detainee could walk the approximate fifteen feet to the doorway. I revived him and said, “He could probably walk with assistance to the doorway.” The sergeant picked up the blindfolded man by the flexi-cuffs, threw him off the back of the Humvee, face-down, chest-down, in the gravel, and said, “You can’t spell abuse without Abu.”

  Sam Lynch

  Specialist, North Carolina Army National Guard, Medical Specialist

  Deployment: February–December 2004, Eastern Diyala Province

  Hometown: Middlesex, North Carolina

  Age at Winter Soldier: 32 years old