Winter Soldier

by Iraq Veterans Against the War

  I got into Iraq in November of ’04 and I was there until November of ’05. Our first six months in country were relatively uneventful. After a few months, we moved on to another mission, patrolling the Kindi Street area, right outside the Green Zone. Kindi Street is a relatively upscale neighborhood, and some of the houses would cost well over a million dollars here in America. From what we were told, this area had no violent activity at all up until the point that we started patrolling there. We were the first U.S. military to do so on any regular basis. So we went in and we started doing patrols through the streets. We started meeting and greeting the local population, trying to figure out what sort of issues they had and how we could resolve them.

  We were out on a dismounted patrol one day, walking by a woman’s house. She was outside working in her garden. Our interpreter threw up his hand and said, “Salam Alaikum,” which means “Peace of God be with you.” She said. “No. No peace of God be with you.” She was angry and so we stopped and our interpreter said, “Well, what’s the matter? Why are you so angry? We’re here to ensure your safety.” That woman began to tell us a story.

  Just a few months prior, her husband had been shot and killed by a United States convoy because he got too close to their convoy. He was not an insurgent. He was not a terrorist. He was a working man trying to make a living for his family.

  To make matters worse, a Special Forces team operating in the Kindi area holed up in a building there and made a compound out of it. A few weeks after this man died, the Special Forces team got some intelligence that this woman was supporting the insurgency, so they raided her home, zip-tied her and her two children, threw them on the floor, and detained her son and took him away. For the next two weeks, this woman had no idea whether her son was alive, dead, or worse. At the end of that two weeks, the Special Forces team rolled up, dropped her son off, and without so much as an apology drove off. It turns out they had acted on bad intelligence.

  Things like that happen every day in Iraq. We are harassing these people. We are disrupting their lives.

  One day we were on another dismounted patrol through the Kindi Street area. We were walking past an area we called the Garden Center because it was literally a fenced-off garden. As is policy, we kept all cars and individuals away from our formation. So a car was approaching us from the front. I was at the rear of the formation because I was the medic and the medics hang out at the back with the platoon sergeant in case anything happens up front so you can respond.

  They waved the car off down a side street so that it would not come near our formation. As I made it to the side street, the car turned around and was coming back toward us because the street was blocked off by a concrete T barrier. I began doing my levels of aggression. I held up my hand trying to get the car to stop. The car sped up and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, this is it. This is someone who is trying to hurt us.”

  So instead of doing what I should have done according to policy and raising my weapon, instead I did what you should never do and I took my hands off of my weapon altogether and began jumping up and down waving my hands back and forth trying to get this car to stop and see me. The car kept coming and so I raised my weapon and the car kept coming. I pulled my selector switch off of safe and the car kept coming. I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle and out of nowhere a man came off the side of the road, flagged the car down, and got it to pull over. He opened the driver’s side door, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. This woman was a highly respected figure in the community and I don’t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on her. I would imagine a riot.

  To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me because I was in front of a desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage.

  The next mission we got was to man the main checkpoint that entered into the Green Zone. We called this checkpoint Slaughterhouse 11, because a car bomb goes off almost every single morning at checkpoint 11. The first day we took over that checkpoint, a car bomb drove into it and exploded. My guys were able to find cover and it didn’t hurt them, but it killed and injured untold numbers of Iraqi civilians in queue for the checkpoint. I treated five people that day, and I imagine twenty or thirty others got carted off in civilian ambulances before I could get to them. I remember a man running toward me carrying a young seventeen- or eighteen-year old Iraqi guy, very thin, and very pale. The guy was missing parts of his arm; his arm and his forearm were only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding and he was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso and his entire left butt cheek was missing and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood.

  To this day I have that image burned in my mind’s eye. Every couple of days I get a flash of red color in my mind’s eye and it won’t have any shape, no form, just a flash of red and every time I associate it with that instance. Not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we are disrupting the lives of our veterans.

  Conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces. The majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq.

  I like to explain it this way, especially in the South because it rings with truth to people down there: If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, whether they told us they were here to liberate us or to give us democracy, do you not think that every person that owns a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right to self-determination? Another time I was out on patrol in the Kindi Street area. I approached a man with my interpreter on the side of the road and said, “Look, are your lives better because we are here? Are you safer? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel like we are liberating you?” That man looked me straight in the eye and said, “Mister, we Iraqis know that you have good intentions here, but the fact is that before America invaded, we didn’t have to worry about car bombs in our neighborhoods. We didn’t have to worry about the safety of our own children before they walked to school, and we didn’t have to worry about U.S. soldiers shooting at us as we drive up and down our own streets.”

  Ladies and gentlemen, the suffering in Iraq is tearing that country apart. Ending that suffering begins with a complete and immediate withdrawal of all of our troops.

  Adam Kokesh

  Sergeant, United States Marine Corps Reserve, Civil Affairs

  Deployment: February 18–September 14, 2004, Fallujah

  Hometown: Claremont, California

  Age at Winter Soldier: 26 years old

  I was against the war before the war. Even though I believed all of the lies that Colin Powell told at the UN, all the intelligence, all the spin. I didn’t think it was going to be worth it, but in 2004 I thought that we were cleaning up our mess and genuinely trying to do good by the Iraqi people. That was something I wanted to be a part of, and something that I enthusiastically risked my life for.

  This is the Rules of Engagement card that I was issued for our deployment to Iraq [Kokesh holds up his U.S. Marine Corps Rules of Engagement card, which is reproduced in the appendix of this volume.]

  This is held up as the gold standard of conduct in the occupation right now, and they couldn’t even cut it square. I’ll read a part of it. It says, “Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself. Enemy, military, and paramilitary forces may be attacked, subject to the following instructions: Positive identification is required prior to engagement. Positive identification is ‘reasonable certainty’”–that’s in quotes on the card—“that your target is a legitimate military target.” We were supposed to keep this in our breast pocket.

  In April of 2004, we got an order to pack for three days and have our vehicle and a convoy ready to go at midnight. We weren’t told where we were
going. This was right after the four Blackwater security agents were killed and had their bodies burned and hung from the northern bridge over the Euphrates on the western side of Fallujah.

  During the siege of Fallujah, we changed Rules of Engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At first it was, “You follow the Rules of Engagement. You do what you’re supposed to do.” Then there were times when it was, “You can shoot any suspicious observer.” So someone with binoculars and a cell phone was fair game, and that opened things up to a lot of subjectivity.

  At one point we imposed a curfew on Fallujah, and then we were allowed to shoot anything after dark. Fortunately, I was never forced to make that decision, but there were a lot of marines who were forced to make that choice.

  In one incident, in the first couple of days we were there, there was a checkpoint shooting to the west of our perimeter. We were told a vehicle was approaching an impromptu vehicle checkpoint at a high rate of speed. That gave marines manning the checkpoint cause to be suspicious and they unloaded into that vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun. The idea is that anybody coming at your position who doesn’t slow down to five miles an hour is an enemy combatant. Well, this is at dusk and marines are all wearing camouflage and this guy could just have been cruising through his neighborhood, or rushing home to see his family. We didn’t know, but it was enough that the marines got jumpy and shot a burst of .50-cal rounds into this vehicle.

  The bullets started at the bumper and went up the engine compartment and then one round at least hit this Iraqi in the chest so hard that it broke his chair backwards and we saw the vehicle burning in the distance. Everybody tried to justify it and say, oh, they heard rounds cooking off in the fire, AK-47 rounds were bursting in the trunk or somewhere in the car. The next day they dragged the car into our sleeping area, and it was clear that there were no holes from rounds cooking off in the side of this car.

  I posed on the hood of that car, and as someone mentioned earlier, it felt funny not because what we were doing was morally wrong, but because I wasn’t the one that killed this guy. There was a group of us marines that all took turns taking pictures and posing like this. At the first Winter Soldier in 1971, one of the testifiers showed a similar picture and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you.” Our government is still doing this to patriotic young men and women who have volunteered their lives in the service of this country, putting them in a situation where this kind of thing is normal.

  At one point during the siege of Fallujah we decided to let women and children out of the city. We thought it was the most gracious thing we could have done. I went out on the northern bridge over the Euphrates on the western side of Fallujah, and our guidelines were that males had to be under fourteen years old. If they were old enough to be in your fighting hole, they were too old to get out of the city. I had to go there and turn these men back.

  We thought that we were doing something really noble and gracious, and it took me a long time before I could think about what a horrible decision we were forcing these families to make. They could split up and leave their husband and older sons in the city and hope a Spectre gunship round doesn’t land on their head, or stay with them and hunker down and just hope that they made it through alive.

  After the siege of Fallujah, my civil affairs team was pulled to set up a Civil Military Operations Center or CMOC two clicks east of Fallujah. My role there was manning the front checkpoint. We didn’t have enough translators and I was learning Arabic and spoke enough to run a checkpoint without a translator. We were still putting down Spectre gunship rounds into the city, and one night some of those rounds started a fire. Iraqi firefighters and policemen responded and they were silhouetted against the fire. Since the marine’s Rules of Engagement at that time were to shoot anything after dark, marines started firing at these firefighters and policemen.

  An Iraqi policeman woke me up in the middle of the night and through pointing, pantomime, the little Arabic I spoke at the time, and a translation dictionary, I was able to figure out that marines were shooting at Iraqi firefighters and cops. We sent it down our chain of command and stopped it from happening, but how many incidents like that happen? I know that that happened while I was there, during the siege of Fallujah.

  One day in the middle of summer I got a random call on my field phone at the checkpoint saying, “Take one marine and get up to the road and stop any black Opel that comes your way,” because al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was fleeing the city in a black Opel. All I could say was, “What’s an Opel?”

  I got up there, and I was with my marine, he was behind me, and I saw a black blur coming toward us, and I was like, “Hey, is that a black Opel?” He was like, “That’s a black blur, Sergeant.”

  So I got up on the road and I pointed my rifle down the freeway—the main road between Fallujah and Baghdad. I yelled, “Kif! Stop!” at this car that’s going about fifty miles an hour. It whizzed right by me and I turned around, and was like, “Oh, crap, I hope I don’t have to shoot out his tires.” Fortunately he stopped and I pulled him out. The other marine was right behind me. We got there, we pulled him out of the car and said, “We need to search you.” They hadn’t told me that I was looking for Zarqawi, so I was like, “Alright, get out of the car.” He had his wife and his kids in the back seat. I frisked him and called up and said, “Got one ‘pak’ detained. Please advise. Over.”

  My staff sergeant came out, trotted up, after coming out of the air-conditioned building, and he pulls out the al-Zarqawi “wanted” poster. He looks at the person we had stopped and then he looks at the poster and goes, “Ah, that’s not him. Let him go.” That kind of thing, where we’re just harassing people unnecessarily, is part of daily life.

  A lot of people who were detained are innocent. There are a lot of people who get detained who are guilty, but guilty or innocent, they usually get similar treatment. Even at Abu Ghraib, they’ll do six months and get out because we don’t have the capacity to provide any kind of due process.

  We’re really pissing a lot of people off that way. If the game for the insurgency is: shoot at Americans and if you get caught, if you’re not killed, you’ll do six months and you’ll get out, then—not that being at Abu Ghraib is a picnic by any means—but the game is understood.

  When I was activated, we were told we’d be working on schools and mosques and clinics and water projects, and rebuilding Iraq. I was really excited about that. I thought we were going to be the tip of the spear, and we were going to be leading the charge to rebuild Iraq.

  We were six-man teams attached to these larger infantry units: regiments or battalions, usually. You couldn’t go anywhere in Fallujah without six Humvees and machine guns, and we were just six marines. So we had to beg these infantry commanders to tag along on their convoys so we could do our missions. We were constantly struggling to justify our existence, and we came up with a slogan: “We care so that you don’t have to.” To the macabre Marine Corps sense of humor that’s pretty funny. But it’s easy to step back and think, “Man, we’ve got units in Iraq whose job is to care so that someone else doesn’t have to. But that someone else isn’t just those grunts in infantry, but it was everybody all the way up.” We care so that Paul Bremer doesn’t have to, so that the chiefs of staff don’t have to, so that Congress doesn’t have to, and so that the president can gush on and on about how much he cares about the Iraqi people while continuing a policy that is decimating their country.

  And we care so the American people don’t have to, so that these things can go on in our names and they can just go back to the mall and their daily lives and pretend like nothing’s wrong. That’s one of the things that disturbs me the most about the state of affairs right now.

  Vincent Emanuele

  Private First Class, United States Marine Corps, Rifleman

  Deployments: March 2003–May 2003, from Kuwait to Iraq;

  August 2004–April 2005, al-Qaim

 
Hometown: Chesterton, Indiana

  Age at Winter Soldier: 23 years old

  An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by. This was quite easy for most marines to get away with because our Rules of Engagement stated that the town of al-Qaim had already been forewarned and knew to pull their cars to a complete stop when approaching a United States convoy. Of course, the consequences of such actions pose a huge problem for those of us who patrol the streets every day. This was not the best way to become friendlier with an already hostile local population. This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.

  We were sent out on a mission to blow up a bridge that was supposedly being used to transport weapons across the Euphrates, and we were ambushed. We were forced to return fire in order to make our way out of the city. This incident took place in the middle of the day, and most of those who were engaging us were not in clear view. Many hid in local houses and businesses and were part of the local population themselves, once again making it very hard to determine who was shooting from where and where exactly to return fire. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything, i.e., properties, cars, people, in order to push through the town. I fired most of my magazines into the town, but not once did I clearly identify the targets that I was shooting at.

  Once we were taking rocket fire from a town and a member of our squad mistakenly identified a tire shop as being the place where the rocket fire came from. Sure enough, we mortared the shop. This was one of the only times we actually had the chance to investigate what we had done and to talk to the people we had directly affected. Luckily, the family who owned the shop was still alive. However, we were not able to compensate the family, nor were we able to explain how it was he could rebuild his livelihood. This was not an isolated incident, and it took place over the course of our eight-month deployment.