The only thing I looked forward to was getting out of the military and going to college. That hope was taken away from me on January 10, 2007, when George Bush gave his State of the Union address announcing that he was going to send an additional twenty to thirty thousand troops into the sandbox. My unit was one of the five to be locked down with stop-loss. No one could leave—even by reenlisting to go somewhere else to avoid the deployment. People set to retire in two months were locked into an eighteen-month deployment under some of the worst conditions since the initial invasion.
When I found out that I was stop-lossed I went into the sharpest, most anguishing downward spiral that I could imagine. I went into the hospital complaining of chest pain and they had me see a mental health professional. They diagnosed me with depression, anxiety disorder, and adjustment disorder. I was obviously a broken soldier and I was still set to deploy in May 2007, the same week I supposed to get out of the army.
The day before I was set to deploy was Memorial Day. I went out onto a field in Fort Stewart where there’s a tree planted for every soldier in the 3rd Infantry Division who’s died. I went out among those fallen soldiers and I tried to take my own life. I took pills and my regular poison of vodka and drank until I couldn’t drink anymore. The next thing I knew I was handcuffed to a gurney in the hospital. The cops had found me, dragged my body into an ambulance, and locked me up. I spent a week on a mental ward.
After trying to kill myself I was locked up and analyzed and saw doctors, and when I got out of the mental ward I was told that I was going to be removed from the military in a quick, comfortable way. Within two weeks I could be home. The doctors said that I had a severe problem and they recommended removal from service. I was ecstatic. It was great.
Instead, they tried to prosecute me for malingering. My commander, Captain Eric Melloh, who was deployed, decided that I should be removed from the company. I should have my sergeant stripes removed, take money from me, and possibly put me in jail. I went to the military lawyers on Fort Stewart and asked them to help me help fight this Article 15 nonjudicial punishment, and they said, “No, you need to give up this fight. Because people try to fight it and all it does is bring down the military and blah, blah, blah.” I was refused help by the attorneys because they were officers and they didn’t want to bring down their own career by supporting me.
I was eventually removed from the military on one of the happiest days of my life, August 16, 2007, on a general discharge. My DD 214, the paperwork, which states every accomplishment of my military service, says in nice big bold letters, “MISCONDUCT, (SERIOUS OFFENSE).” I committed a serious offense by trying to kill myself because I was so damaged by the occupation in Iraq. It was misconduct for me not to deploy while I was handcuffed to a bed in the hospital. So I lost my college benefits, the one thing that really gave me hope. I didn’t know where, I didn’t know what I was gonna study, but I knew I was going to college in September of ’07. That didn’t happen. Now I can’t pay for it.
My money is disappearing. Between VA visits and personal instability, I’ve found it extremely hard to find a job. To tell you the truth, I haven’t really looked cause I’m having a rough time. So I deliver pizzas on Wednesdays. That’s what I am now, a pizza delivery boy. I was a sergeant, I was a leader, I was a trainer, and I was very well thought of. I was a very good soldier. Now I’m a pizza delivery boy who works once a week because that’s the only job where I can call in a couple hours before and say, “I’m still at the VA, I’m waiting in line. I’m sorry I can’t come in for a couple hours.” That is what stop-loss does.
This man who has to remain nameless is a friend of mine I traveled to North Carolina to see on my way home.
What happened was he stepped on a pressure plate, an antipersonnel mine, and he almost lost his right leg. He had arterial bleeding in his right arm, his left leg, his right leg. He lost all his hearing, ear drum is destroyed in his right ear. This man was supposed to get out of the army the same week that I was, the same week that our unit deployed. So I’m faced forever with “that could have been me” or “if I were there maybe things could have been different.” This is someone who was in my platoon, who I served with for a year. When I came into the hospital and I was feeling guilty about trying to kill myself, what this man said to me as soon as I walked into the room was not “Hey how ya doing?” Not “Dude you’re a bad person for not coming over there with us.” He looked at me with an intense look in his eyes and he said, “Dude you’re not going over there right?” And that, that filled my heart with something that no one else could have done.
Lars Ekstrom
Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, Assault Man
Deployments: March–September 2005, USS Ponce
Hometown: Madison Heights, Michigan
Age at Winter Soldier: 22 years old
Two years ago I would not have believed you if you told me that I’d be standing in D.C. protesting the war. I was very strongly supportive of the war in 2003. I even wore desert cammies in my school photo.
I graduated from high school in 2003. I enlisted in the Marine Corps and went to boot camp that November. After graduating from boot camp and the school of infantry, I felt poorly prepared for battle. Most of the training I received was World War I–style fighting where you’re charging across an open field shooting at targets in bunkers with no civilians. Other common training includes patrolling through a two-dimensional forest, firing blanks, or pointing your weapon at other marines with their shirts turned inside out saying, “bang-bang.” For most marines that’s considered normal training.
Upon arriving at my permanent-duty station, I was attached to the rifle platoon in my company. I then received an extensive urban training, learning how to fast rope out of helicopters, storm buildings, clear rooms, and do legitimate urban fighting.
In this whole eight or nine months of training not once did anyone attempt to teach me to speak Arabic, and I believe our total training as far as dealing with civilians, cultural sensitivity, was about four or five hours at the base theater, receiving speeches on the conduct of war along with other things that no one really paid attention to and we weren’t expected to really take to heart and memorize.
As I said, at the beginning of the war I was very pro-war, but events gradually eroded my faith in the military. It started when I was listening to stories from Iraq War veterans. I started to question whether our mission was as clear-cut as the administration had made it seem.
I also noticed incompetence in high places. Throughout our deployment a lot of machine guns and personal rocket launchers were broken or misfired frequently because they were very old. We’d made it as far as Kuwait when an officer noticed that the front sight had broken off one of the Shoulder-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapons. He was furious and demanded we all sign statements explaining who had it when it broke and why it broke. We had to explain, “Sir, it’s been broken for the past year. You didn’t notice it during pre-deployment inspection because you were concerned that not everyone had sewn name tapes onto their backpacks and flak jackets.”
My personal first aid kit was used during a training mission and I was promised it would be replaced before we deployed. It wasn’t. I was issued a nine-hundred-dollar rifle scope without the proper Allen wrench to attach it to the handle of my M-16 so it kept falling off. In its place I used a three-hundred-dollar holographic sight that I purchased with my own money. I’ve loaned that to another marine who’s deploying to Iraq in four days.
All battalions’ Humvees were in very poor shape. After Donald Rumsfeld was called out for sending troops to Iraq with unarmored Humvees, all the Humvees were up-armored but they did not upgrade the engines. So you had these very old beater trucks with thousands of pounds of steel bolted to the sides running on dirt roads in Kuwait. We could only go ten to twenty miles an hour even while flooring it. We’d overheat and have to pull to the side.
When I returned from my deployment, I develope
d chronic depression. After everything had a chance to sink in I was just destroyed emotionally. One day I started crying for hours for no reason. It took my unit months to address my request for psychological help and my depression worsened. I had multiple NCOs and staff NCOs yelling at me for having depression. Just people with the IQ of automated voice machines: “If you require an ass-chewing press 1, if you know someone else who needs an ass-chewing press 2, if you require some sort of empathy or understanding, please hang up and grow a ball sack.”
After I’d missed several months of training because of being on light duty for depression, I was instructed by my first sergeant that I either had to get better or take an administrative separation within two weeks. He refused to transfer me to another occupation even though the battalion mail clerk was open and I’d volunteered for it. Because I knew that I wasn’t going to get better, I accepted the administrative separation.
I was not allowed to ship my stuff home so I had to give a lot of it away. The morning I received my letter to go home I had to leave within the next couple hours. I was escorted off the base like a criminal and not even given a chance to say goodbye to my friends. After being discharged I was denied benefits from the VA; I’ve still not received education benefits because I received a general under honorable conditions discharge. I have not heard back from the committee to get it upgraded to full honorable.
I was forced to wait six months after applying for VA benefits for service-connected depression before they would give me any medication or therapy, and at this time I still need to schedule VA appointments approximately one month in advance. And even when I get there it’s fifteen minutes of talk, how am I doing: “You want to try new pills? How are the pills you’re on now working?”
Lastly I’d just like to say if the president is watching: “The command was uphold and defend the Constitution. Correct yourself!”
Luis Carlos Montalvan
Captain, United States Army, Armor Officer
Deployments: September 2003–March 2004, al-Waleed; March 2005–March 2006, Tal Afar, South Baghdad
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Age at Winter Soldier: 34 years old
In September 2003 I was put in charge of eighty soldiers bound for Iraq deploying to a theater of war with no weapons. We traveled into Iraq without any weapons or ammunition.Then we were mortared for three days in Balad before arriving in Anbar province for link-up with our unit. How could the greatest army in the world send soldiers into battle without weapons?
Later that month I was put in charge of a key strategic location—the port of entry at al-Waleed, between Syria and Iraq. I was given thirty to forty troopers to secure a hundred kilometers of Syrian-Iraqi border and between five to ten thousand square kilometers of al-Anbar desert. Additionally, we had to secure the enormous border crossing point and recruit, train, and equip Iraqi security forces and redevelop the local infrastructure and economy. I wrote countless memoranda to my superiors requesting more resources and personnel but they went unanswered.
In Iraq I witnessed many disturbing things. I witnessed waterboarding. Two counterintelligence officers stopped a truck full of fake medicine being smuggled into Iraq and brought the driver in for questioning. They lifted his legs. They laid him down. They blindfolded him. Then they lifted his legs again and started pouring water down his throat. After seeing that, I know that’s something that we ought not be doing. It’s torture.
Separately, I was given unlawful orders by superiors to not offer humanitarian assistance to refugees caught between the Syrian and Iraqi borders. I disobeyed those orders. I witnessed and participated in countless massive operations led by American commanders whose metrics for success were the number of detainees apprehended. These commanders had no regard for the tribal, ethnic, and sectarian strife caused by American taxpayer–funded militias the U.S. military calls Iraqi security forces.
Most reprehensible was that we never had even close to the amount of troops we needed in Iraq. Yet from 2003 until today Generals Ricardo Sanchez, George Casey, and David Petraeus (among others) did not heed the requests of their subordinate officers for more resources and more troops. Instead, they perpetually painted a rosy picture of the situation while the country fell into civil war. These generals consistently overstated the strength and number of Iraqi security forces to Congress and still do. Their misrepresentation of the facts should be grounds for courts-martial and criminal indictments.
I lost many friends in Iraq—American and Iraqi. Many Iraqi friends continue to suffer as refugees inside and outside of Iraq. As a matter of fact, an Iraqi friend, whom I consider a brother, fled to Jordan and has been stuck there for two years. As of this testimony, he is meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Jordan to process his application for asylum under the United States Refugees Admission Program. My comrades in the U.S. Army and I have sent him letters of support as he frequently risked his life to help us in 2003–04. I pray that Ali and many others are quickly helped.
While at the port of entry at al-Waleed in 2003, I submitted a report to my superiors expressing the need for an automated tracking system for immigration and emigration.
General Ricardo Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer sent a delegation to al-Waleed to assess the installation of a Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System (PISCES) to provide tracking of transnational movement. When the team departed, they informed me that the facilities would support the installation of PISCES. By the time I left Iraq in late March 2004, PISCES was not in place.
In 2005 I returned to Iraq for a second tour, as the Regimental Iraqi Security Forces Coordinator. My duties include oversight of the development and security of the northern half of the Syrian-Iraqi border and the border crossing at Rabiya.
In June 2005, Commander Guy Vilardi, working for the Multi-National Corps-Iraq informed me that the Civilian Police Assistance Transition Team (CPATT) had possession of a dozen PISCES in containers located in Baghdad. He also informed me that they “would install the systems in the near future.”
Upon return to western Nineveh province, I informed my superiors that the PISCES were in Baghdad and would be installed soon. In August 2005, General Joseph Fil, commander of CPATT, visited Rabiya to be briefed on the status of the Syrian-Iraqi border. We briefed General Joseph Fil, who scoffed at the notion of installation of the PISCES and stated that “[t]he system is no good and we do not have them anyhow.” I informed General Fil of my conversation with Commander Vilardi to which General Fil replied, “[t]hat’s not true and the PISCES is no good anyhow.”
In January 2006, Colonel Carl Lammers, responsible for Department of Border Enforcement issues at CPATT, sent me an e-mail on a secure network indicating that “the PISCES systems were in fact in containers in Baghdad.” I was outraged.
As of March 2006, when the 3rd ACR departed western Nineveh province, no PISCES or equivalent tracking system had been installed at the Rabiya border crossing.
From 2003–2007 no computer systems for tracking immigration or emigration were installed along the Syrian-Iraqi border. This surely contributed to the instability of Iraq. Foreign fighters and criminals were free to move transnationally with little fear of apprehension. It is probable that significant numbers of Americans and Iraqis were wounded or killed as a result.
In January 2007, as a member of American Enterprise Institute’s Iraq Planning Group, I discussed this strategic issue. I recommended that PISCES be installed at every border crossing in Iraq immediately and that an investigation be launched into how and why this had not yet occurred.
Nearly four years into the war in Iraq and three years after assessing the need for a transnational movement tracking system, no systems had been installed by coalition forces despite having the capability and understanding the strategic necessity. This strategic blunder has yet to be exposed by the mainstream media and no accountability has transpired. I continue to recommend that General Joseph Fil and Ge
neral David Petraeus be held accountable.
Also in 2005 a very large part of my job was providing logistical support to American and Iraqi units. In that capacity I developed strategies for improving operating procedures and also procuring hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment. This was essential work as it directly impacted the day-to-day operations of forces serving in very dangerous conditions.
During this time I incessantly tried to get our Division HQ to give us information about the Lee Dynamics International (LDI) warehouse in Mosul. LDI was an American contractor hired by the Department of Defense to provide logistical support to coalition forces across Iraq. The LDI warehouse was the single largest supplier of weapons and equipment for Iraqi police and border police. The personnel involved in that operation were disorganized and utterly incompetent. This directly impacted my ability to do my job and directly affected the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis.
After many months of this fraud, waste, and abuse, General Kevin Bergner of our Division HQ took a trip to Baghdad and met with the deputy commanding general of CPATT. I possess a copy of the notes taken between them outlining the lack of accounting practices and operating procedures.
The notes clearly contribute to the compendium against LDI and their gross negligence as contractors in Iraq. LDI should be held accountable for their negligence. I strongly believe that the Department of Defense is covering this matter up to protect senior military leaders. The notes clearly reveal that neither General Fil nor General Petraeus implemented systems of accounting for millions of taxpayer dollars’ worth of equipment and weapons during their tenure in command from 2004–2005.
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