Following the announcement of Bush's ill-advised "surge" of troops in Iraq, here are some excerpts from a book I've been reading, What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It, assembled by Trish Wood.
I think this is a book that everyone with an interest in the Iraq War should read, but particularly those pro-war "dead-enders" like Fred Kagan who seem to treat this War like a video game and who feel themselves morally superior to the "libs" for only they have the drive and the winning ideology, while those who speak out against the war or report the "bad news" honestly simply "want America to lose" and "don't support the troops". We all support the troops, and reading this book will help us to better understand the scope of what they went through, and what they are still dealing with. If you don't yet oppose the war and seek a swift end to this misadventure, you will learn about the unnecessary death and disaster due to poor planning and even evil orders from on top, as in Abu Ghraib.
I'll start with an excerpt from the introduction by Bobby Muller:
This is not an antiwar book or a prowar book. It is a book of stories about people who have been in combat, who have served their country. Some of those here are confident that the war they fought was just. Others are not. But these accounts are not about the politics of this war; instead they are a simple recounting of experiences that are very personal. That is the way it should be. In all of my time in Vietnam, I don't remember having one conversation about whether we were right or wrong to be fighting in SE Asia. It simply didn't matter. Young men fight because they're ordered to fight, because they believe it's their duty to fight, and because they are committed to those they are with. This isn't about politics; this is personal.
... There is no representative story of what it means to go to war, no monopoly on the truth. Learning to respect the experiences of others is a lesson many from my war have yet to learn. Each soldier's account is like a single frame of a feature-length movie.
Still, in reading these stories, I have an overwhelming sense that the veterans in these pages experienced what I experienced. I am not talking about just the direct participation in war, the being wounded, or coping with the brutality of combat. There is also the challenge of separating from the battlefield, the sense of disconnectedness that occurs to all of those who return from war. When we remember that all of those who serve our country in Iraq represent less than one percent of our population, it becomes easier to understand this disconnection — and the deep bitterness that can result. The wars our country fights are our wars. We, as a people, are responsible for them. The failure of many Americans to appreciate what's involved in fighting a war is a source of frustration and alienation for those who have served — a frustration and alienation that cannot be salved by yellow ribbons.
The whole introduction is really good but I want to get on to the words of the Iraq War veterans. First, an excerpt from the preface by Trish Wood, who interviewed the 29 Iraq war veterans and assembled the book:
These veterans do not share a single view of the war they fought. They have different opinions about the wisdom of the initial invasion and about the grievous errors made once Baghdad fell. A surprisingly small number expressed anger over the not-found weapons of mass destruction, perhaps because, as war correspondent Evan Wright wrote, this is a cynical generation that believes that "the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation." ... Again and again, soldiers of varied services and ranks told me about heading boldly into harm's way, not for the sake of Iraqi democracy or Middle Eastern stability or any of the other reasons touted for the invasion, but for their brothers and sisters in uniform.
Above all, these are cautionary stories that remind us that war is a human endeavor, fraught with error, heartbreak, and accidental carnage. I heard about many civilians being shot during confusion at roadside checkpoints. These and other regrettable civilian killings will haunt some of the soldiers for a very long time. A few of them may have crossed a line, but I think these incidents reflect the moral ambiguity that attends insurgency war fighting.
I'll skip the stories from the first phase of the actual war ("pre-Mission Accomplished") and start with Alan King, Army Reserve, 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion, 3rd ID, Invasion Force, Deputy Director, Office of Provincial Outreach (CPA), stationed in Baghdad from Mar. 2003-July 2004.
By the 8th of April, we rolled into Baghdad Airport, and that night they came and told me that Saddam's regime was going to fall and that tomorrow was a new day and we've got to start the reconstruction and stability operations. They asked me, "Where do we go from here?" It was Col. Jack Sterling and Major General Buford Blount, the commanding general. They were questioning what came next because we were supposed to roll through Baghdad up to Mosul. That was the actual plan, and things collapsed so fast that we were stuck there doing stability operations. Sterling came up and said, "I just got off the phone with headquarters, and they don't have a security or reconstruction plan to implement."
In my personal prewar planning for my unit, when I asked for this phase of the reconstruction plan, I was told there was one, and I would get it when I needed it. But when the chief of staff, Col. Sterling, came to me the night of the 8th of April and said, "You know, there's no plan; you got to come up with something in twenty-four hours," it was obvious either the plan didn't exist, or it wasn't available at that moment in time.
I learned later a plan had been drawn up by the State Department, sort of a government-in-a-box. Never was any of it implemented. At some point the State Department's plan must have been rejected by the Defense Department, by Rumsfeld's office. But there was a plan. There was a plan. Tom Warwick out of the State Department had the Future of Iraq Project, but we never got it. So they told me I had 24 hours to come up with a reconstruction plan for Baghdad.
From Ken Davis, 372nd Military Police Company, stationed at Abu Ghraib Prison from Sept.-Dec. 2003:
We were told that military intelligence was in charge of the compound. They were the ones calling the shots. So they've taken away our authority to do what we've been trained to do. So already there's some confusion. Are the MPs in charge of the MPs, or is MI in charge of the MPs? And no one could give a definitive answer.
Right away, I'm starting to see things that I don't agree with. I'm starting to see things that are going against everything I've ever believed in, my whole core value, my whole belief in humanity, and it hurt. You know there's a line coming up, and you never want to cross it, because then you might not ever get right again....
We lived in prison cells, and Specialist Charles Graner lived across the hall from me. He was my next-door neighbor. One time he walked in, and he was hoarse, and I said, "What's the matter, are you sick?" And he says, "No, I'm hoarse because they are making us yell at detainees." And he says, "I've got a question for you. They're making me do things that I feel are morally and ethically wrong. What should I do?" And I said, "Don't do them." He says, "I don't have a choice." And I said, "Well, yes you do. What do you mean you don't have a choice?" Graner says, "Every time a bomb goes off outside of the wire" — which is outside the walls of Abu Ghraib — "one of the OGA members would come in to say, That's another American losing their life, and unless you help us get that information, their blood is on your hands as well." ...
... As I'm walking down, I heard yelling and stuff coming from the other tiers. There are a few people in stress positions, handcuffed and on their knees, and that kind of stuff... I get to the tier, and it smells like a sewer in there. It's hot and muggy. It doesn't really register at first that I am seeing naked detainees being handcuffed. Then Graner comes to the door to let me in, and that's when Armin Cruz sees me and walks down and asks if I think they have "crossed a line." It is interesting that they let me in, because Graner knows me as a sergeant, and I believe that if he had actually thought he was doing something wrong, that he wouldn't have let me in, because these guys knew me as the preacher man, the straight guy.
And then it just escalated that evening into handcuffing them together, bringing in a third detainee, making him get undressed and then low crawling on the floor, and the whole time they're saying, "Confess, confess, confess." The prisoners said through the interpreter that they're not going to confess to something they didn't do. The interrogators seemed indifferent to the suffering...
I think it was Pfc. England who was there taking pictures on the upper deck of the tier. The photograph I'm in is well after they had already brought the third detainee in and they handcuffed them all together in a pile. From my perception, they were trying to put him in a sexually humiliating position. Apparently these guys were accused of raping a fifteen-year-old boy, and my question to them, to one of the interrogators was, "Did you ever take into consideration these guys are innocent?" Two weeks later, the boy recanted and said they never did it.
From Garett Reppenhagen, Cavalry Scout/Sniper, 2-63 Armor Battalion, 1st ID, who served from Feb. 2004-Feb. 2005 in Baquba:
I was still thinking selfishly at that point, and I was worried about myself. I thought, These people are extremely desperate and begging. I thought of a Rage Against the Machine lyric which says, "Hungry people don't stay hungry for long." I was thinking, If this is the desperate situation, it's not going to be long before this is just a complete shit storm. Sure enough, that's what happened.
My friend Jeff went to Falluja. How many insurgents were killed in Falluja? I don't know, but I'm certain that they weren't all Syrian. They were the population of Falluja, that's who we're fighting. The people that we were killing were farmers from the local area. If they had a thousand dollars for a plane ticket to come to America, they wouldn't come here and terrorize anybody. They'd feed their children. We also saw people from Jordan, from Syria, from Iran, from Saudi Arabia, from Afghanistan, from Pakistan. Hell, there was an American we ended up capturing. Weeks prior to being captured as an insurgent, he was at Arizona State University, and he still had his student ID in his pocket. He was American and he was fighting against us. He was darker skin-toned, but I wasn't there for the interrogation, so I didn't get a chance to really find out his family history. He spoke fluent English, like he was born in America, raised in America. He was captured in a raid and he was resisting, and then we found four AK-47s, a bunch of grenades, ammunition bandolier, flags which are commonly used to signal from rooftops...
One of the worst injuries I remember happened during an ambush. He was in a personal-security detachment for the colonel. They were going out to a spot that was ambushed earlier, and they stopped and he actually got out of the Humvee, dismounted, pulling security while the colonel got out to talk to some people. As soon as he got out of the vehicle, they detonated an IED right in his face. It blew him backward with such a force that his chin hit the Humvee and just shattered his jaw, and his chin and his throat were torn out pretty badly by the blast. It blew his Kevlar off his head because the shrapnel busted his strap, and it blew his Kevlar completely over the Humvee, and the helmet landed on the other side. He had his jaw all reconstructed. It was wired shut for the longest time. Then he was speaking with a little electronic voice box that you hold up to your neck. He's one of those people who just can't accept that the war is wrong. He wanted to come back to the unit. He wanted to fight.
When we got back from Iraq, he was there, and he spoke to us once. He stood up in front of everybody and told us in his little robot voice how much he wanted to be in Iraq. That was too much to bear because I knew how brainwashed he was and how he'll never think differently about it. Always support the war and what we did there because it's hard to admit that you've been duped and that you got all fucked up for nothing. You can't go up to the guy and say, "Hey, man, you're wrong. You got fucked up for no good reason," and just pat him on the back. He was pretty young, maybe 20 years old. He'd been in the army for a couple of years but he was extremely young. He must have joined when he was 18, straight out of high school. I think he was a cook. I guess that goes to show you how much choosing your job can really help you out in the military.
It was still very ambiguous to me what I was able to do to an enemy prisoner of war. Honestly, we didn't get a whole lot of training on what we're supposed to do at that point. I mean, for all I know I could have kicked the shit out of him. If I did, I probably would have gotten away with it... There were people that punched him and knocked him out and it was a big joke afterward. I was disgusted by it but I didn't do anything about it. It's just sick. I didn't really think that writing a report about it or writing it up would have done me or anybody really any good, other than polarizing the camp and causing a rift between the soldiers. It wasn't so severe that I saw it as major abuse. It was before Abu Ghraib happened... Everybody pretty much agreed in my close circle of friends there that it was wrong to do it. But nothing happened.
I mean, we were getting shot up and blown up, and I've asked soldiers why they thought we were at war. I've literally talked to a hundred soldiers straight down the line — I'll get a hundred different answers. Like, Well, I think we're at war because of oil, we want the oil. I heard because they're Muslim and I'm a Christian, that's why we're here. I heard because of terrorists, because of 9/11. I heard because of Jerusalem and Palestine. I heard it's because of the abuse of the Kurdish people by Saddam Hussein. I heard to keep the peace between the Sunni and Shia, bringing them democracy, bringing them capitalism. I heard because we were in bed with Saudi Arabia. Even the people that supported the war, all of them had a different reason for being there. So you're coming up with this ambiguous reason for war, and then a lot of it seems to be about helping the Iraqis, but we're getting shot at and blown up and the Iraqi people are lying to us.
Finally, from Earl T. Hecker, Surgeon, who served from May-Oct. 2004 in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Landstuhl, Germany:
We talk about thirty thousand injured coming through Landstuhl, whether they're badly injured or not so badly injured, that's a lot of people going through there. When the improvised explosive device came on board, a whole new era of warfare and injuries came with it. Years from now Americans are going to be walking around and seeing these badly wounded people. They will ask, "Was this guy in a car accident?" No, the guy wasn't in a car accident; the guy was in Baghdad. ...
I am a trauma surgeon, so I understand the degree of penetrating and blunt trauma in auto accidents, but this is much more. This is ten times what I've ever seen. Soldiers in Iraq are surviving horrific injuries. We see a lot of burns. It can be body burns: 10%, 50%, 80% body burns. We've had gasoline trucks blown up and the driver or the support staff brought in. This one individual had a greater than 50 percent burn over his total body. You add the age to that and that gives you an idea of what his mortality is going to be or what his survivability is going to be. If he has a 50% third-degree burn and his age is twenty, he has a 70% change of dying. If you have a 50% burn and you're fifty years of age, you're going to die. ...
We had one fellow who had his legs blown off and we had to do further amputation. It's horrific. The tissue damage was so severe that it became gangrenous. There was no blood supply and we had to do a higher amputation. We had called his father, and his father came to visit him. He died, though. There were a lot of things that went bad.
These kids are really putting themselves on the line and you feel bad that you can't do more for them. You do as much as you can and later understand fully the severity of their illnesses and what's going to happen to them down the road. I'm not talking about this week. I'm talking about a month, two months, six months ... a year. What's going to happen to them?
They deserve a better life afterward and to be able to take care of their families, take care of themselves, be productive, be part of society. I'm not convinced that all these guys are going to be a part of society anymore. I think they're going to be withdrawn. Psychologically they'll be withdrawn because of the trauma of what they've gone through. I think physically they won't be able to get in and out of the car. They won't be able to go shopping. They won't be able to play with their kids the way normal individuals play with their kids. I don't know if they're going to live up to their expectations on what they're going to do in life anymore. Were they going to be a mechanic? Were they going to be an engineer? Were they going to be a doctor? What were they going to be when they finished the military? Maybe you have to think about a different profession, a different job. Will he ever get married? I don't know. This is the secret side of the war. Nobody knows about it. Nobody talks about it. Nobody addresses it. Nobody looks at it.
I've been to Normandy. I've been to Flanders Fields. I've been to all these places. The soldiers are dead. They're dead. But this is an injury war. This is not so much a death war. Maybe that's the way we should look at it. Not dead but injured, an injury war. I saw injuries that I'll never forget. People don't get that. They really don't. I don't know what it's going to do to our society. If people understood that this is a war about catastrophically wounded young people, then maybe they'll appreciate what these kids really did for them and for their country. Right now it's absolutely hidden. I don't think most people think about these kids at all. Out of sight, out of mind.
Some of these people are the lost generation. They're gone. It is a sad way of putting it. I don't know. Some of these soldiers are never going to be the same again. Ever. I feel bad for them and I get upset. They're just lost.
I thought about some of these injuries, one soldier in particular, and thought he should have died. He'd be better off. Is that a bad thing? Yeah, I think it's a bad thing on my part. I'm not necessarily religious, but I'm also not a person who promotes death. But I'm sure, down the line, he's going to think about it. I think he will think about it. It reminds me of Johnny Got His Gun. You ever hear of that movie?