Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

’d like to sum up what all my statements have to do with: When you have neither a clearly defined mission nor positive support, the only mission a marine infantryman knows by heart is the mission of a Marine Corps rifle squad: “Locate, close in, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver or to repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat.” That’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to use your training and you’re going to use that one mission that you know verbatim, by heart, with your eyes closed, while you’re asleep. You dream about it and you train every day, through three months of boot camp and three months of infantry training and you train between deployments and during deployments to carry out that mission.
When your mission’s not defined, all you have is hammers and everything you find is nails and you’re going to crush it. You’re going to crush every nail you find. We’re crushing the Iraqi people with the training we’re given and the unsupportive nature around us in the military.

’s no surprise to anyone who’s been deployed since September 11 that the word “haji” is used to dehumanize people, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but anyone. We bought haji DVDs at haji shops, from the hajis that worked there. The Pakistani KBR employees who did our laundry became hajis. The KBR employees who worked inside our chow halls became hajis. Everyone not in the U.S. forces became a haji: not a person, not a name, a haji.

the word “haji” is often used, similar to how a racist in this country would use the “N-word.”

one young man stood out to me as being particularly irate and kind of out of it, seemingly drunk. I felt it was necessary to take his blood sugar. Normal blood sugar is between 80 and 120 mg/dl. When I took his blood sugar, it was 431 mg/dl. The detainee could speak English very well and said he had been taking insulin and that he had been captured by the Iraqi forces, held for approximately four to five days, and during that time they had not given him his insulin. Supposedly it was in his personal effects.
I called the officer in charge of the Abu Ghraib hospital and requested that we transport this detainee. I was told twice over the phone, ordered by the captain of the 344th Combat Support Hospital, that I could not transport the detainee, and that he needed to drink water. She also stated that he was a “haji, and he probably wouldn’t die, but it would not matter if he died, anyway.”
In the early hours of March 14 my partner and I went back to the camp to see the same individual who was now more irate, more intoxicated looking, and sweating profusely. I called my captain again, and again was denied permission to take him to the hospital. There was little I could do, and she told us to give him water and a 14-gauge IV. A normal IV is an 18- to 20-gauge. So we did that, and then we got off our shift.
On the morning of March 15, the MPs mistook this twenty-three-year-old young man’s diabetic shock for insubordination. They pepper-sprayed him and put him into a segregation cell in the sun, where he spent his last few hours. He died en route to the hospital in one of our ambulances. Captain Hogan said that we had never called her and that we had never tried to transport the detainee.
The next day, my partner and I were awoken out of our beds and told that we needed to go down and be interrogated by a CID colonel about the death of the detainee we had seen the previous night. Maybe three days after that, we were interrogated again by a lieutenant colonel, at which time I filled out a five-page sworn statement. We were cleared of everything, and Captain Hogan remained the night shift officer in charge of the hospital at Abu Ghraib.

walking by one of your staff sergeants and you say, “Good morning, staff sergeant.” I guess the common response in the civilian world would be, “Good morning to you, too.” But in the Marine Corps, you get, “Er, kill babies.” That’s motivating. That’s not meant to be funny. That’s meant to motivate you and start off your day with, “Er, kill babies.” And this isn’t something that just happens once. The Marine Corps is filled with one-upmanship to say the most dehumanizing, racist, most offensive thing, and to enjoy it while you’re doing it.

love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart…. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is no great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster.” And I don’t want a national disaster.

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

People don’t really trust you if you’re clean-shaven there

House raids: Because we were a grunt battalion, we were responsible for going on several patrols. A lot of the raids and patrols we did were at night at around three o’clock in the morning. We kicked in doors and terrorized families. We segregated the women and children from the men. If the men of the household gave us problems, we’d take care of them any way we felt necessary, whether it be choking them or slapping their head against the walls.
On my wrist, there is Arabic for “fuck you.” I got it put on my wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking hand

April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. He was an innocent man. I don’t know his name. I call him “the Fat Man.” During the incident, he walked back to his house and I shot him in front of his friend and father. The first round didn’t kill him after I’d hit him in his neck. Afterwards, he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. I looked at my friend I was on post with, and I said, “Well, I can’t let that happen.” I took another shot and took him out. The rest of his family carried him away. It took seven Iraqis to carry his body.
We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me. This is the same individual who stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death would get a four-day pass when we returned from Iraq.
My third confirmed kill was a man riding his bicycle