Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations

256 Pages·2008·2.33 MB·English

by  Aaron Glantz

Winter Soldier
Iraq and Afghanistan
Copyright © 2008 Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz
Published in 2008 by Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
[email protected]
www.haymarketbooks.org
Cover and interior testifier portraits by Jared Rodriguez
Additional photographs by Mike Hastie, including testifier portraits on pages 38, 74, 89, 124, 138, 140, 167,
169, 182, 209
Cover design by Eric Ruder
Book design by David Whitehouse
Published with the generous support of the Wallace Global Fund.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Winter soldier, Iraq and Afghanistan : eyewitness accounts of the occupations / Iraq Veterans Against the
War and Aaron Glantz.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-931859-65-3 (pbk.)
1. Iraq War, 2003---Personal narratives, American. 2. Afghan War, 2001---Personal narratives, American. I.
Glantz, Aaron. II. Title.
DS79.76.I7272 2008
956.7044'3092273--dc22
2008036840
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Winter Soldier
Iraq and Afghanistan
Eyewitness Accounts
of the Occupations
Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois
We dedicate this book to good people of Iraq and Afghanistan who know the
veracity of these stories.
And to all the servicemembers and veterans who never had a chance to tell their
stories.

Foreword
Anthony Swofford
Early in June of 2008 President Bush awarded the Bronze Star posthumously to
Specialist Ross A. McGinnis of the United States Army. McGinnis had done
what most civilians would find unthinkable: he’d jumped on an enemy hand
grenade that had been thrown into his vehicle. His body took the force of the
entire blast and he died instantly, saving four fellow soldiers from certain
heinous injury and probable death. His was the selfless act popularized in the
culture by Hollywood lore and the macho love talk of tough men: I’d take a
bullet for you; I’d jump on a grenade to save so-and-so’s life. No one ever means
it. But men and women in battle do. It’s not in any manual. It’s written in the
code of the combatant’s heart. It’s the kind of impulse that is part of the reason
most people join the United States military in the first place: to serve, to honor,
to protect.
The men and women who testified at Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan in
March of 2008 displayed the same kind of courage that Specialist McGinnis did:
they took individual action and great risk to honor the men and women,
American troops and Iraqi civilians, who have died in this misbegotten and often
criminally executed war. They didn’t use their bodies; they used their narratives,
the bare-knuckle stories that tell us the truth about what happens at the other end
of the rifle, the missile, the bomb.
I listened to most of the testimony live that weekend. Despite my service in
the Marine Corps during the 1990–1991 Gulf War and my intimate knowledge
of the brutality of combat and the systems that prepare one for combat, there
were times during the testimony when I found myself in utter disbelief. I call
combat a psychosis-inducing situation. But still, the events being narrated by the
testifying troops shocked me. You too will be shocked. Your natural tendency
will be not to believe.
It will be hard to imagine the same kind of sweet young kid you went to high
school with or that your sons or daughters went to high school with telling about
warships firing on civilian-inhabited apartment buildings while troops cheer the
destruction; it will be difficult to believe the blind blood-thirst a unit lives and
kills on after suffering casualties; you do not want to know about the constantly
loosening Rules of Engagement that eventually debilitate to the point of
allowing troops to shoot anyone who makes them feel unsafe. You won’t want to
believe the “incentivizing” one marine captain does: be the first to kill with a
knife and you’ll get some extra days off when the unit rotates home.
Tim O’Brien has written that in a war story, the craziest stuff in there—the
events a civilian would never believe because they are filled with such violence
and depravity—those are the true parts of the story. These are what I call the
seared elements: the images and associated narratives of a combatant’s history
he or she most wants to forget but never will. In this testimony there are
countless seared elements that you the reader will want to forget.
But honor the casualties of this war—the dead, injured, psychologically
altered, those who have already managed to heal—by refusing to forget the
elements and consequences of combat that our leaders would rather us not know
in the first place. Do not turn away from these stories. They are yours, too.
June 2008
Message from
Kelly Dougherty
Executive Director of
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Kelly Dougherty served in Iraq from March 2003 until February 2004 as a
medic in a military police unit of the Colorado National Guard. She is one of the
original founders of IVAW and currently serves as its executive director.
In the winter of 2002 I was working in a café and preparing to finish my
bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado. The U.S. government’s threats
toward Iraq were growing and there was more and more anticipation of a war
being an inevitable, foregone conclusion. While I was working, I wore a pin on
my apron that said, “Attack Iraq?! NO!” One day a customer looked at my pin,
scoffed, and said, “It’s more like, Iraq, don’t attack us!” While being opposed to
a war against Iraq from the beginning, and highly skeptical of the information
flowing out of the White House and major news outlets, I still felt detached and
not overly concerned about the prospect of war. Yes, I was a sergeant in the
Colorado Army National Guard, but I was in a headquarters unit, we didn’t get
deployed.
Looking back, this attitude was not only naive, but also selfish. Today the
pervasiveness of just such an ambivalent, flippant attitude maddens me. I would
soon experience in a very real way just how political decisions have a personal
impact on people’s lives. In January 2003 I received a call from the National
Guard informing me that I had been transferred from my “safe” unit into a
military police unit that was getting mobilized to active duty status the next day
and would be deploying to Kuwait in preparation for the war. What’s more, my
military job had been changed from medic to military police.