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Posted on March 14, 2008

Winter Soldier 2008: Who Supports the

Troops?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

If I were a far better writer, I might -- might -- be able

to convey the intensity of these Winter Soldier
hearings.
On the way in were a few dozen right-wing protesters
organized by the "Gathering of Eagles" -- a spin-off
from the "Vietnam Vets for Truth" started during the
2004 campaign to go after Kerry. I've seen them at
antiwar protests, and what struck me was that their
messages were unchanged -- 'support the troops.'
The concept that those giving testimony inside were the troops -- several with chests
weighed down with decorations and metals -- was the definition of cognitive
dissonance.
There was a heavy police presence surrounding the site of the hearings -- the
campus of a local college in Silver Springs, Maryland. Snipers watched from rooftops,
a mobile command post was set up and cops outnumbered protesters 2-1.
The panels were heart-breaking and gut-wrenching. Many of these vets are so young,
and yet they've seen more than most of us can imagine. We talk about what the
military is doing in our names, but to hear from people who were there doing it
themselves, is something quite different. They talked about getting their first "kill," of
having no clue what the mission was, of being in a clusterfuck of unbelieveable
scope.
I knew about everything of which the vets spoke in an academic sense, but to hear
them tell the tales in their own words -- some choking up visibly with the telling --
was enough to make a person cry, and many in the auditorium did just that.
I've written about a dozen articles about military contractors, and I think I have a
pretty good handle on how destructive the endemic corruption of this occupation has
been. But hearing the frustration expressed by a young MP as she told of providing
security to KBR convoys is something that can't be found in any report. 'Every day
we'd provide security for these trucks,' she said, ' and they told us that they were
strategic assets vital to military operations in the country. We were supposed to be
prepared to use deadly force to protect them.' When the trucks broke down, the
convoys would keep barreling along, and her team was left to provide security.
Hungry, desperate Iraqis would gather around, and they'd hold them off using rubber
bullets and, if necessary, live ammunition. Inevitably, they'd then get the call to just
destroy the vehicles, along with their cargoes. 'I had no idea what we were doing -- if
the payloads were so valuable, why would we inevitably get the order to destroy
them?' She detailed burning trucks full of food in front of hungry Iraqis, destroying a
full-outfitted and perfectly serviceable ambulance in an Iraqi district that had none. It
wasn't just the futility of the job, it was the repeated futility, day in and day out. One
got the sense that a lot of these soldiers went over their with lofty ideals -- they went
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to help the Iraqi people -- and instead they found themselves members of an
occupation that places very, very little value on Iraqi lives.
There was a panel on the Rules of Engagement. More than a dozen soldiers testified
that they had been trained stateside to be professionals -- to use minimal force to
achieve their objectives, to respect the spirit as well as the letter of the Geneva
Conventions. When they got to Iraq, that flew out the window, and the unofficial but
universally observed ROE was that if they felt at all threatened, they should shoot to
kill. And all agreed that in a country where the enemies are indistinguishable from
the friendlies, and with a mission that was poorly designed, the rules became looser
and looser. All reported that they regularly carried 'drop' weapons to put next to the
corpses of any civilians they had killed by mistake, and were told by their superiors
that they'd be protected in such circumstances. And that happened with alarming
frequency.
And they repeated, again and again, almost as if desperate to prove that they were
not monsters, that these were not isolated events -- the standards were systemic,
and they came from above. The only time they played it straight by the book was
when they had embedded journalists with them. "Everything was different when the
media was around," remarked one Marine.
What I found most striking was the candor with which they spoke of the horrors they
themselves had committed. A young sniper told of killing two guys in a field after
curfew. Turns out they were farmers, and the only time they could run the pumps to
irrigate their fields was during the few hours when the power was working -- they'd
defied curfew to feed their family and the soldiers in his unit knew who they were and
knew their situation before they opened fire.
A marine told of his first kill -- an old, unarmed man on a bicycle at the wrong place
at the wrong time. He told of his commander congratulating him for the act.
Ever see a Marine choke up? A noncommissioned officer did so while recounting how
he had had to call in artillery fire in Afghanistan, and instead of using his GPS system
to come up with the coordinates -- which takes too long to get a bearing -- he used
his compass. But he took the reading too close to a big gun, and the metal threw off
the reading. He got the azimuth wrong. When he said that he had gotten it wrong, he
had to pause to collect himself. Tears rolled down his face. One of his comrades
brought tissues, and another put an arm around him for support. When he collected
himself, he told about how he had kept calling in barrages of mortars, one after the
other, and the shells fell into a sleepy little village. A few days later his unit went into
the decimated village and told the survivors that if the Taliban ever mortared them
again, they should call the U.S. troops.
I've never been in combat, and I have no idea how much bravery is required to shoot
at someone you feel is threatening. But I do know that coming forward to talk about
these things was the most profound act of courage I've ever witnessed.
They told story after heartbreaking story to the rapt audience, and at the end of the
day an almost palpable sense of exhaustion permeated the space.
As I listened, two things jumped out at me. First, I was struck by what idiots people
are for believing that we can't end this occupation -- or I should say how credulous
they are. Anyone who believes that such a thing as a benevolent foreign military
occupation exists is seriously deluded. Soldier after soldier agreed: it's not about
"mistakes" or poorly defined missions or a "failure of command," although all of those
things are endemic in Iraq. The problem is the occupation, and there was a
consensus among these soldiers and Marines that ending the occupation is a
prerequisite for the Iraqis to try to put their wrecked country back together.
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I also found myself deeply conflicted. These young people's stories are
heartbreaking, and in one sense it's impossible to fault them individually for the small
role they played in what are the inevitable consequences of national policy. But while
I could relate -- and I could empathize, as these soldiers' lives will never be the same
-- I couldn't escape the fact that they were telling tales of atrocity committed in our
name in some far-flung country that we invaded without provocation. If I empathize
with them, mustn't I, for moral consistency, also empathize with all soldiers, of all
nationalities, who commit terrible crimes after their commanders drop them into a
country -- after they watch their buddies get killed?
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet