When we got there all our vehicles were pretty much in working order. We had spent some time maintaining them and we started doing what’s called presence patrols through Fallujah. We’d roll up and down the street waiting for someone to shoot at us and looking for bad guys dressed the same as all the civilians. At first there wasn’t too much going on. People were still wondering what we were doing there and how the occupation was going to manifest.
Around April the violence started picking up. We started getting mortared. We started taking fire from RPGs, IEDs. It’s stressful. You’re rolling down the road and at any time the ground beneath you can totally disintegrate and you could find yourself dead or—worse—wounded.
I started noticing that there were shortages in some of our equipment, especially track. Track is the equivalent of what tires would be on a car. It’s metal track that’s linked together with rubber padding designed to cut down on the wear and tear on paved surfaces. Eventually one of the tracks broke and the vehicle flipped on its side and luckily no one was hurt. That’s thirty-two tons rolling over; it can do a lot of damage. It came as a surprise to me to see shortages in key equipment when contractors were showing up in the morning hung over, getting paid four times the amount as us. I don’t think there’s much doubt where the money’s going because it’s not going to the military.
Around July 2004, I got my leave to go on R&R. When I got back, and I’ll never forget this, I was in the reception area and one of my friends pulled me aside and said, “While you were on R&R your platoon leader was hit in the face with shrapnel from an IED.” I knew the person; I had done multiple missions with him.
The first thing everyone says is, “Stop lying to me, I don’t want to hear that.” It was hard for me to accept the fact that he was critically wounded. He had taken some pretty serious damage and the other members of my section had attended to his wounds and initially saved his life. You come back and there’s this feeling of guilt that while you were living it up back in the States, one of your comrades got hit, and that was our platoon leader. He was a good platoon leader and he served his men well. He had a lot of respect from us and it was a hard hit to our platoon.
Two or three weeks after that, I was woken up in the middle of the night and informed that another member of my section had been killed by an IED. Again I said, “Quit lying to me, that’s not true.” It was hard to accept that we had just lost two people from my section in less than a month. He had hit an IED and the Bradley burned to the ground. I mean it’s so, it’s so.…[breaks down]
Casualties started picking up in my area. The pace of operations started picking up. We started putting a lot more wear and tear on the vehicles. Vehicles started going down. I think at some point there were only two or three vehicles from my platoon that were on line. We were trying to get them in and out of maintenance as soon as possible. But when you’re doing six hours on and eight hours off, you have to pull hours of maintenance on your vehicle, clean your weapon, and sleep in that eight-hour time period. You do your best to try to maintain vehicles but eventually they break.
When we were in Kuwait we were told not to set patterns because the enemy would know where we’d be the next day so that they could plan how to attack us. I remember a particular operation called Operation al-Duliyah Sunrise, where we were ordered to do these static checkpoints at the same spot in town over and over again. We didn’t receive any contact for two or three weeks. Then in one day we received indirect fire and several people in my troop were wounded, including my medic who was hit in the leg.
The intelligence that we were getting oftentimes seemed to be based on the accounts of just one Iraqi. It would turn out to be a dispute and someone would come to the American forces and tell us, “Oh so-and-so, he makes bombs, he does this, he does that.” And out comes the cavalry, literally, and knocks this guy’s door in.
For example, one time we got the order to raid a “bomb-making factory.” We pulled up with vehicles and helicopters. We get in the house and it’s one guy and the entire building is totally and absolutely empty, and the guy is a painter who’s been working on the building, which obviously smells like fresh paint. So we rarely would get someone with weapons or with any kind of proof of guilt. Looking back on it, there’s no doubt in my mind that contributed to the violence in my area and increased the number of casualties.
On December 21, 2004, my second platoon leader was shot. After that we didn’t get another replacement. We were sent on a patrol with limited personnel. If I remember correctly, people had been taken to do “kitchen patrol” or washing pots and pans. Mind you, there were contractors on my base and we’re going on missions shorthanded. In this instance, it was myself, a captain, a medic, and one other NCO on a dismounted patrol and we ran into an ambush. We should have had more people that day. I told myself that after I got through this I would be cool and everything would be okay. Just get through this time, I would say, just make sure everyone comes home.
After I got back from Iraq I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’ll never forget the things that happened over there. I think about them every day and I hope the American people can understand the impact this occupation is having on the United States military. I hope that people educate themselves about the true nature of combat in Iraq and the effect it has on our military because it’s tearing us apart. In closing, I would just like to say to those who would judge me for coming up here and sharing my experiences with the American people, do so, because over many sleepless nights I’ve made my peace with what I have to do for this country.
Daniel Fanning
Sergeant, Wisconsin Army National Guard, Motor Transport Operator
Deployments: December 2004–December 2005, Convoys all over Iraq
Hometown: Tomahawk, Wisconsin
Age at Winter Soldier: 27 years old
Like so many others, I enlisted right after September 11, 2001. I joined out of a sense of duty and patriotism, and wanted to somehow help and protect the country. I began hearing grumblings about Iraq during my second year in the military and I immediately had questions like I know a lot of you did, but I was hesitant to completely dismiss what my president was saying and what my commanders were saying.
Serving a year in Iraq made me 100 percent confident that the fears and questions I had before deploying were accurate and maybe it was even worse than I anticipated. Progress wasn’t being made, and the few places that it was, it simply wasn’t worth the cost. The military has had enough.
Within months of our unit returning home we lost two of my good friends due to mental illness; one was alcohol and the other just reckless behavior. I know one was seeking support and I imagine since we were both going through the same VA he was on the same waiting list that I was on. Two years later, I’m still on that waiting list. Although these names don’t always appear on the evening news and these people don’t always die with full military honors, these are deaths that could have been prevented just like many in-theater deaths.
For example, when I first arrived in December 2004 our trucks had zero armor. It was right around that time when a brave specialist named Thomas Wilson questioned and criticized Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about this problem. Our first several missions we had what was affectionately known as “hillbilly armor”: a thin sheet of metal welded onto the sides of our trucks. It didn’t stop bullets. At best it slowed them down. It definitely slowed our trucks down. But once that brave specialist questioned Rumsfeld we all got armor within months. It took a brave soldier to raise that kind of question and to make it a media story. It definitely hurt our morale knowing that it took something like that for the administration to care about us. The same could be said about much of the other equipment we had. The night-vision goggles were a joke. They ran on AA batteries that usually lasted only a couple of hours and we had to shake them every time just to make the batteries work. When we experienced a night ambush outside of Samawa in southern Iraq, we couldn’t ev
en see who was shooting at us. I’m not ashamed to admit that instead of trying to fire I was just kind of cowering behind the small armor that I had. You simply couldn’t see where your enemy was.
But lack of equipment isn’t the only problem that’s going on overseas. Regardless of what the Pentagon claims, I was definitely inadequately trained. I spent several hours in basic training learning how to use a bayonet, which is something most people haven’t used in combat in several decades. We never received one second of culture or language training. We encountered Iraqis almost daily on the roads, in the marketplaces outside of camps and bases, but we had no idea how to interact with them or how to respect them. Instead while at Fort Benning we received pep talks from well-paid contractors who came into our briefing rooms and insulted the intelligence of the hundreds of us who enlisted voluntarily to serve our country. I remember like it was yesterday, a chubby white guy came into our room. He tried telling us “those liberal tree huggers that are saying this war’s about oil are so wrong because we’re not importing any oil from Iraq.” I mean it doesn’t take a lot of research to realize that at the time of the invasion we were getting around 10 to 11 percent of our oil from Iraq. Having people stand before us while in uniform and lie to us hurt our morale.
We weren’t allowed to engage with the third-country nationals. They were very low-paid men and women, mostly men from poor countries that the United States hired for next to nothing. We treated them very poorly and disrespected them. They just got cans of food and a few bottles of water for a few weeks’ mission. We were told not to assist them but we were responsible for their safety, so that definitely added to our burden as a transportation company because these people came without armor or weapons and most of them didn’t know how to speak English or Arabic. I made around $30,000 a year while I was overseas and we’d be passed by the contractors who were making at least three or four times what we were making. We’d see ’em pass by in their black SUVs. They didn’t have to follow the same Rules of Engagement that we had and didn’t have to engage with the Iraqis the way we did, and that definitely leads to breakdown of the military.
We worked very long and hot days for very long periods of time, and we were almost always on edge. It was very hard to see my best friends break down. It was hard to constantly feel conflicted knowing I was in a situation I didn’t want to be in and on a mission that I didn’t support. I also knew that I was serving as an unofficial ambassador of the United States and I tried to treat the people that I encountered with respect. I tried to show them that just because our president was a money-hungry warmonger, America was still filled with people who really cared about them and were trying to do the right thing.
I believe the best way we can do that for the Iraqi people is to get out of their way and allow them to start rebuilding their land the way they want. We can and we should help them but our current occupation is doing more to deter that than it is actually assisting.
Lastly, I believe a big reason the military is breaking is because we’ve lost some of our best members, not only to death and injuries but also because many of us have gotten out. Those of us who enlisted to do what was right but wound up being sent to Iraq—we wound up getting out because we were asked to do what was wrong.
Those who speak against this war are not traitors; we are brave heroes honoring our commitment to this country. Those who wave the flag and have a yellow ribbon on their SUV and claim to support the troops but sit idly by and allow these disgraces to occur have betrayed our troops and betrayed our country. I believe if you truly want to support the troops the best way you can do that is to oppose this war that we never should have been sent to in the first place.
Kristofer Goldsmith
Sergeant, United States Army, Forward Observer
Deployments: January–December 2005, Sadr City
Hometown: Long Island, New York
Age at Winter Soldier: 27 years old
This is a picture here of me when I was ten years old wearing all camo, having a pair of dog tags, and giving my Boy Scout salute. That boy died in Iraq. This is the proud soldier who enlisted just after Christmas in 2003 to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
I’m from Bellmore, a town in Long Island, New York, twenty minutes out of Manhattan. I could see the smoke when the towers fell on September 11. On September 12 I remember standing up in a pizza restaurant and telling everyone about how I wanted to kill everyone in the Middle East; how the Middle East should be turned into a glass plate by nuclear weapons because that’s what I believed. I joined the army to kill people.
I was nineteen years old when I deployed to Iraq and I spent the first eight months of my deployment in the slums of Sadr City. It’s a place that was neglected not only by Saddam Hussein but is horribly neglected by America right now. When we went there we promised them freedom; we promised to get them clean water, to get them food, to get them jobs. Instead, there are two to four hours of electricity a day, randomly. Sewage leaks into their fresh-water system. I never personally saw any contractors working on that water treatment plant outside Sadr City in 2005. My battalion discovered that and reported up and we were told to ignore the fact that nothing was going on. It was a sector that wasn’t within our area of operation so don’t be concerned with what goes on there.
Imagine living in a place where it gets up to 150 degrees. You don’t want to go out during the day, and at night American soldiers are rolling around your streets telling you that you can’t go outside, and you can’t talk to your friends, you can’t enjoy yourself. You can’t gather outside the coffeehouse or the shai shop because if you go out past dark you’re committing a crime. So essentially during the summer months Sadr City was a prison. Three million people in Sadr City were prisoners of war.
I graduated basic training at the top of my class. I graduated warrior leaders course, a leadership development course and noncommissioned officers course, with a 94 percent grade point average. I was a great soldier once upon a time and now I stand here to fight for my brothers more than I ever could while I wore a uniform.
What you see here is civilian Iraqis exhuming bodies of murdered and tortured Iraqis. This was on May 15, 2005, a very hot, uncomfortable, miserable day—I’ll never forget it. We don’t know why they were killed; we didn’t try very hard to find out. We found over a dozen bodies that day.
We weren’t authorized artillery, so I became the intelligence reporter and took pictures of these dead bodies. I was told it was so that we could try to identify them, but there was no identification process. I never went around to the police stations to post those photos. These photos were never used to help the Iraqis. These pictures were simply trophies of war for people who didn’t experience that death. People made videos to send home to their friends and family to brag. They were used to build morale, to say that killing is right, death is right, “Dead Iraqis are a great thing,” and that’s wrong.
While I was taking these pictures I never looked directly at the bodies. I had a digital camera and I held it out in front of me and I looked at the two-and-a-half-inch screen and I flashed that photo. As the flash went off each image was burned into my mind; every one of these pictures is burned into my mind.
The coagulated blood from the man in this photo slinged off his body, off his face onto my shoe. That was the most repulsed I had ever been. There were flies landing on the corpses. They would land on my lips, they would land on my eyes, and they would crawl into my nose. I felt so violated by having been put through this.
I’m reminded of these images when I play video games or walk into a movie. When people ask me, “Hey man, you want to go see Saw IV or whatever?” I tell them no, because this is what I see when I watch those movies. This is somebody’s brother, this is somebody’s husband, this is somebody’s son, and this is somebody’s cousin. The only reason that we’re desensitized to it is because they’re not white, they’re not American soldiers.
That right th
ere: I specifically asked my command, I said, “This man is missing his face, there is no skin left on his head.” And they said, “Take the picture anyway.” Not to identify him. Whoever was on the other end of the radio just wanted to see the picture, and now because of that person I’m left with that image.
I’d like to read an achievement off of my Army Commendation Medal that I received for my service in Iraq. “While on patrol…in Sadr City, the platoon was called upon to reinforce Iraqi Army battalion in Sector 48. PFC Goldsmith’s initiative and timely placement of his weapon system at a key intersection helped…the Iraqi Army battalion…destroy enemy insurgents…without any insurgents escaping the objective.”
I’d like to tell you exactly what happened that day. What you heard is true, but what they left out was that I was standing in a Humvee with my platoon sergeant. My platoon sergeant claimed he saw an insurgent and fired upon that man. Because the highest-ranking enlisted man in my platoon fired his weapon, I knew that it was “game on” and I could get away with anything. There was a little boy on top of a building, and he was holding a stick pretending to have an AK-47. He pointed it at me pretending to shoot. I trained my weapon on him and thought, “I hate these Iraqis. I hate these kids who throw rocks and bricks at me. This is my chance; I can kill this kid.” Just to take one out of the couple million of ’em out.” It took a lot of thinking not to pull the trigger that day. I could have killed a six-year-old boy, someone’s son, but I didn’t.
When I came home from Iraq all I did was drink. I’m a severe alcoholic and so was just about everybody who lived in the barracks with me. We used to go out every Friday and Saturday night and I would just about finish a 1.75 liter bottle of vodka. I blacked out every time. That was my goal, I wanted to black out. I was self-medicating because we were told that if we sought mental health, we would be locked away and our careers would not advance.
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