Richard WarnickUS soldiers deployed in ‘atrocity producing situations’
Chris Hedges, former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times, has written a courageously truthful essay on Asia Times Online. Not all of the information is new, but it goes into uncomfortable detail that helps explain the current epidemic of PTSD among Iraq veterans.
Our soldiers and marines are waging a counterinsurgency on a mostly urban battlefield– there is no harder military mission. It’s kill or be killed, on a daily basis in a war against anonymous, shadowy armed groups. Soldiers and marines can do two or three tours in Iraq and never actually see the enemy, although their units come under attack and take casualties.
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations”. Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of soda, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy.
Sergeant Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division:
“The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you’re holding a duffel bag in each hand,” Millard remembered. “You’ve got your weapon slung. You’ve got a web sack on your back. You’re dying of heat. You’re tired. You’re jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then you’re scared on top of that, because, you know, you’re in Kuwait, you’re not in the States anymore … So fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can’t trust any of these f—ing hajis, because all these f—king hajis are going to kill you. And ‘haji’ is always used as a term of disrespect and usually with the F-word in front of it.”
Sergeant Camilo Mejia:
Iraqi families were routinely fired on for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. “It’s fun to shoot shit up,” a soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in the callous language of war, “collateral damage”.
“We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED,” Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. “This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics.”
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man’s body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterward and determined that he had fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
“The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us,” Mejia said, “led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them.”
Chris Hedges sums up the corrosive nature of the occupation:
We are trapped in a doomed war of attrition in Iraq. We have blundered into a nation we know little about, caught in bitter rivalries between competing ethnic and religious groups. Iraq was a cesspool for the British in 1917 when they occupied it. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We have embarked on an occupation that is as damaging to our souls as to our prestige and power and security. We have become tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. And we believe, falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war.
UPDATE: The article by Chris Hedges is actually an excerpt from his new book, Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
June 9th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Here’s a link to an example of what you are saying here, written by a female journalist in Afghanistan. http://www.thestar.com/article/439099 “It was just a traffic jam – but in Afghanistan, that can mean the difference between life and death.”
June 9th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
M240 B is not a “heavy machine gun”.
Any soldier who’s ever had to handle one know that.
Anyway, what’s so “courageous” about the essay? Jumping on the “Iraq war bad” bandwagon doesn’t seem too courageous. After all, some 70% of folks disagree with the war.
Being part of the Majority is now defined as “courage”?
June 9th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
–Wilfred Owen
What would be courageous would be to offer the Ram of Pride in the face of Neocon delusions and cat calls of “cut and run.” The alternative is to kill Americans one by one and Iraqis ten by ten indefinitely. Change requires courage. In the absence of political courage the war goes on and on with less and less prime time media coverage or with more happy talk that “victory” is just a matter of time.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
jdberger is right, the M240 B is an infantry medium machine gun. But the AT-4 is a light antitank weapon. The Mark 19 fires 40 mm grenades at a rate of 350 a minute. From the point of view of the unarmed civilians being fired at, that’s heavy weaponry. You can go behind a wall or inside a building, and still get killed.
I definitely think it’s courageous to tell the truth when most of the media won’t. Atrocities against civilians are a daily occurrence in Iraq.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
That’s a pretty heavy charge there, Richard. Care to back that up?
June 9th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
If you can handle depressing news, you can read about the daily killings of civilians at Iraq Today and on Iraq Body Count.
Here’s a recent story about wounded Iraqi civilians including some hit by helicopter-launched Hellfire missiles.
Iraq is the most violent country in the world, according to the Global Peace Index.
In the world’s most violent country, 167 civilians were killed in a recent week -three of them children- 18 by US forces. On May 21st alone US forces killed 16 Iraqi civilians in two incidents; two of the victims were children. Over 5,500 civilians have been reported killed in the first five months of 2008 and twice as many injured.
June 9th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
We’re really, really nice folks over here, and just to prove it to you we are going to develop a new term for collateral damage…hmmm…now let’s see…how does ‘ minimally friendly hospice activity’ work with you? Just groan and it’ll stick at State. Condi’ll see to it.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Recommended reading/listening: Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian on “Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians”
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/10/chris_hedges_and_laila_al_arian
June 29th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
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