A friend and reader of this blog and I both have close family members who serve in the military, and we've been exchanging thoughts about how we both pray not only for the safety of our loved ones as they deploy, but also for the protection of their consciences. Both of us are seeing good and honorable men being sent into terrible situations, and we know that even if they return physically intact, they might come back damaged in other ways.
This long piece in The Nation, in which Iraq war combat vets talk on the record about the things they saw, speaks to our fear. I'm going to post a couple of excerpts. No matter how each of us feels about the war and the prospect of continuing it, we all need to keep in mind what those we have sent to fight in our name are having to live with: their own brutalization. From the piece:
Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they would report a unit member who had killed or injured "an innocent noncombatant."These attitudes reflect the limited contact occupation troops said they had with Iraqis. They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.
Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.
I'm going to quote just one incident from the long piece (on the jump below), to give you an idea of what it's like. Be aware that these American soldiers are men who have been driven to do these things by the insanity of the war. It's not to excuse it, necessarily, but to caution us all to be careful about rushing to judge them. What would we do in such situations? The thing is, the men who have participated in these things are going to have to live with it the rest of their lives. Doesn't matter whether they're guilty or innocent in some grand sense. The longer we stay in a war we cannot win, the more of this we're going to have to be dealing with.
Are we really comfortable asking American soldiers to live and struggle under these conditions? War is always hideous, but if we demand that our men do these things, and to suffer and cause innocents to suffer, we had better have a damn good reason. If we once did, we no longer do.
From the Nation:
Soldiers and marines who participated in neighborhood patrols said they often used the same tactics as convoys--speed, aggressive firing--to reduce the risk of being ambushed or falling victim to IEDs. Sgt. Patrick Campbell, 29, of Camarillo, California, who frequently took part in patrols, said his unit fired often and without much warning on Iraqi civilians in a desperate bid to ward off attacks."Every time we got on the highway," he said, "we were firing warning shots, causing accidents all the time. Cars screeching to a stop, going into the other intersection.... The problem is, if you slow down at an intersection more than once, that's where the next bomb is going to be because you know they watch. You know? And so if you slow down at the same choke point every time, guaranteed there's going to be a bomb there next couple of days. So getting onto a freeway or highway is a choke point 'cause you have to wait for traffic to stop. So you want to go as fast as you can, and that involves added risk to all the cars around you, all the civilian cars.
"The first Iraqi I saw killed was an Iraqi who got too close to our patrol," he said. "We were coming up an on-ramp. And he was coming down the highway. And they fired warning shots and he just didn't stop. He just merged right into the convoy and they opened up on him."
This took place sometime in the spring of 2005 in Khadamiya, in the northwest corner of Baghdad, Sergeant Campbell said. His unit fired into the man's car with a 240 Bravo, a heavy machine gun. "I heard three gunshots," he said. "We get about halfway down the road and...the guy in the car got out and he's covered in blood. And this is where...the impulse is just to keep going. There's no way that this guy knows who we are. We're just like every other patrol that goes up and down this road. I looked at my lieutenant and it wasn't even a discussion. We turned around and we went back.
"So I'm treating the guy. He has three gunshot wounds to the chest. Blood everywhere. And he keeps going in and out of consciousness. And when he finally stops breathing, I have to give him CPR. I take my right hand, I lift up his chin and I take my left hand and grab the back of his head to position his head, and as I take my left hand, my hand actually goes into his cranium. So I'm actually holding this man's brain in my hand. And what I realized was I had made a mistake. I had checked for exit wounds. But what I didn't know was the Humvee behind me, after the car failed to stop after the first three rounds, had fired twenty, thirty rounds into the car. I never heard it.
"I heard three rounds, I saw three holes, no exit wounds," he said. "I thought I knew what the situation was. So I didn't even treat this guy's injury to the head. Every medic I ever told is always like, Of course, I mean, the guy got shot in the head. There's nothing you could have done. And I'm pretty sure--I mean, you can't stop bleeding in the head like that. But this guy, I'm watching this guy, who I know we shot because he got too close. His car was clean. There was no--didn't hear it, didn't see us, whatever it was. Dies, you know, dying in my arms."
While many veterans said the killing of civilians deeply disturbed them, they also said there was no other way to safely operate a patrol.
"You don't want to shoot kids, I mean, no one does," said Sergeant Campbell, as he began to describe an incident in the summer of 2005 recounted to him by several men in his unit. "But you have this: I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he's going to start shooting. And you gotta understand...when you have spent nine months in a war zone, where no one--every time you've been shot at, you've never seen the person shooting at you, and you could never shoot back. Here's some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides he's going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds." Sergeant Campbell was not present at the incident, which took place in Khadamiya, but he saw photographs and heard descriptions from several eyewitnesses in his unit.
"Everyone was so happy, like this release that they finally killed an insurgent," he said. "Then when they got there, they realized it was just a little kid. And I know that really f---ed up a lot of people in the head.... They'd show all the pictures and some people were really happy, like, Oh, look what we did. And other people were like, I don't want to see that ever again."
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Anything that appears in the Nation I take with a grain of salt.
But the truth vel non of the specifics isn't relevant to the larger, very valid point. In all wars, one of the long-term and under-remarked costs is the emotional and psychological impact of combat on those who survived it. That impact can reverberate for multiple generations.
What in the world could be worth putting both the Iraqi civilians and our own young people through such physical and psychological hell? Preventing terrorism at home? I find it hard to believe that terrorists could cause as much damage to our well-defended and hard-to-get-at nation as we have brought upon ourselves with this war. All we are doing is spreading around our 9/11 pain -- we aren't really doing anything to make it better. To the contrary, in fact.
Rod, I know exactly what you mean about praying for your family member. My youngest BIL was in the Marine Reserves and served a tour in Kuwait early in the war. (He has since been honorably discharged for an injury received in civilian life.) One day, on his way home after a training weekend, he stopped at a convince store with his fatigues on. The teenager at the counter expressed how "cool" it was that BIL was a Marine and could kill people. BIL said he felt sick to his stomach hearing that. I am so thankful that he was never in a situation while on tour where he did have to kill someone. It's tragic that we take people with perfectly healthy reactions to the thought of killing another person (such as feeling ill), and turn them into people who are capable of doing what the soldiers in the article talk about with ease.
Have you ever watched Saving Private Ryan?
Chaplains give us regular briefings called "Combat Ethics." Now, it is our own commanders' responsibility to teach us the standards: Law of Land Warfare, Rules of Engagement, Counter-Insurgency Tactics and the like. It is Chaplain's job to make us think. I went to one of these briefings two weeks ago, and he set up a few scenarios for us and asked us what we'd do. These scenarios were all historical, such as the My Lai massacre and the Warrant Officer who turned in the men responsible. This was an extremely tough decision, as loyalty trumps almost anything in a combat unit.
His main question for us, is what decides our actions? What is our personal ethic? He didn't answer this question for us, but gave some basic categories. He got pretty philosophical about things. He said that one way of looking at ethics in warfare was rule-based. Going by the book, by the law. Another way of looking at ethics is more utilitarian. I want to survive and come home to my wife and little girl, a soldier might say, and I will do whatever it takes to come back alive. This seemed a very worthy goal to many of us listening. Then he played a clip from Saving Private Ryan.
This may be a familiar scene to some of you. The unit is searching for Private Ryan, and they end up with a German prisoner-of-war. In the action leading up to this scene, one of their own is killed. The debate: what to do with the POW. Their mission is to continue the search for Private Ryan's unit, and they cannot complete that mission AND process the POW as they should. Some of the men want to shoot him - he had been shooting at them just moments prior. The commander orders the men to let the POW go free. An argument ensues as half the men do not want to obey, and indeed, the senior sergeant has one of his own men at gunpoint (little known fact, your commander can shoot you in the face for refusal to obey an order in time of war.) The commander of this little unit, Captain Miller gives a very honest and simple speech.
The highlight, "So I guess I've changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me, whenever it is I get back to her. And how I'll ever be able to — to tell her about days like today. I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel."
Chaplain's point: what do you mean by surviving to come home? Will you be the same person if you do anything it takes just to live? Or would you rather survive with your morality and soul more or less intact? The question was answered for Captain Miller. In a later scene in the movie, the same man he let walk free as a POW is again manning a machine gun, and this time he kills Miller. The right decision is not necessarily the easy one, and could well get you killed, or worse, someone you care about killed.
Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.
It's well known, common and accepted knowlege over there that you do not pull along side or attempt to merge into a convoy patrol. It's SOP (standard operating procedure) to fire; my intructions were not to even bother with a warning shot, there have been too American casualties from attacks by "civilian" motorists pulling alongside and blowing themselves up. But instead we commiserate about a civilian motorist being shot. Boo hoo. He knew good and well what he was doing. Maybe the media should have looked into who was paying his bills.
This is the crux of the issue; we are waging war with civilians. These insurgents and terrorist organizations do not wear uniforms; they are the shopkeepers, police, soldiers (ING, I kid you not -a Lt in my unit was shot in the back of the head by an Iraqi Guardsman while leading them on patrol). These groups recruit locals from all walks of life and ages as young as six. They don't fight by any rules of engagement other than whatever will be the most demoralizing; opening fire on us from mosques or from inside crowds of bystanders. The Geneva Convention has little bearing here.
That some of our guys are cracking under the unrelenting and surreal strain is a real tragedy. It's sad and preventable. However, why does our media focus almost exclusively on these incidents, virtually glossing over the daily, no hourly, brutalities of the enemy? They have no compunction about molesting and butchering women and children. Do I need to go into detail?
For all the attention we focus about American political and military failures; in this soldiers opinion, why isn't more attention being brought to bear on the treatment and horrible suffering of the Iraqi Christians by their fellow countrymen?
Ponder this, while you are at it. Since the war began, the US Army has dropped its enlistment standards at least twice that I know of. This means some of the soldiers are now people who could not meet the standards that Lyndie England met.
Expect more Mi Lais.
Kim M
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