US soldiers still in 'atrocity-producing situations' in Iraq
Ten US infantrymen are accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered innocent Iraqi civilians — and are sometimes continuing the killing at home in the US. This brings new meaning to bringing the war home (thanks Dean).
“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” said Daniel Freeman. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley,” an armored fighting vehicle.
With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions “and just light the whole area up,” said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. “If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ’em.”
Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.
“You didn’t get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong,” he said.
Soldiers interviewed by The Gazette cited lengthy deployments, being sent back into battle after surviving war injuries that would have been fatal in previous conflicts, and engaging in some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq. The soldiers describing those experiences were part of the 3,500-soldier unit now called the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team.
Since 2005, some brigade soldiers also have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.
The unit was deployed for a year to Iraq’s Sunni Triangle in September 2004. Sixty-four unit soldiers were killed and more than 400 wounded — about double the average for Army brigades in Iraq, according to Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit served a bloody 15-month mission in Baghdad. It’s currently deployed to the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan.
Marquez was the first in his brigade to kill someone after an Iraq tour. In 2006, he used a stun gun to shock a drug dealer in Widefield, Colo., in a dispute over a marijuana sale, then shot and killed him.
Marquez’s mother, Teresa Hernandez, warned Marquez’s sergeant at Fort Carson her son was showing signs of violent behavior, abusing alcohol and pain pills and carrying a gun. “I told them he was a walking time bomb,” she said.
Hernandez said the sergeant later taunted Marquez about her phone call.
“If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot,” Marquez told The Gazette in the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is serving a 30-year prison term. “But after Iraq, it was just natural.”
The Army trains soldiers to be that way, said Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist serving 10 years for accessory to murder.
“The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody,” he said. “And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off.”
Both soldiers were wounded, sent back into action and saw friends and officers killed in their first deployment. On numerous occasions, explosions shredded the bodies of civilians, others were slain in sectarian violence — and the unit had to bag the bodies.
“Guys with drill bits in their eyes,” Eastridge said. “Guys with nails in their heads.”
Last week, the Army released a study of soldiers at Fort Carson that found that the trauma of fierce combat and soldier refusals or obstacles to seeking mental health care may have helped drive some to violence at home. It said more study is needed.
While most unit soldiers coped post-deployment, a handful went on to kill back home in Colorado.
Many returning soldiers did seek counseling.
“We’re used to seeing people who are depressed and want to hurt themselves. We’re trained to deal with that,” said Davida Hoffman, director of the privately operated First Choice Counseling Center in Colorado Springs. “But these soldiers were depressed and saying, ‘I’ve got this anger, I want to hurt somebody.’ We weren’t accustomed to that.”
At Fort Carson, Eastridge and other soldiers said they lied during an army screening about their deployment that was designed to detect potential behavioral problems.
Sergeants sometimes refused to let soldiers get PTSD help or taunted them, said Andrew Pogany, a former Fort Carson special forces sergeant who investigates complaints for the advocacy group Veterans for America.
Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General’s Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason.
Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man’s body to his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims’ brains.
The Army’s criminal investigation division interviewed unit soldiers and said it couldn’t substantiate the allegations.
The Army has declared soldiers’ mental health a top priority.
“When we see a problem, we try to identify it and really learn what we can do about it. That is what we are trying to do here,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, Fort Carson’s commander. “There is a culture and a stigma that needs to change.”
Fort Carson officers are trained to help troops showing stress signs, and the base has doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors. Soldiers seeing an Army doctor for any reason undergo a mental health evaluation.
Sounds like a rationalization to me. I’m not buying the Rambo defense … that the military damaged our character so badly that we had no choice but to go on a sociopathic rage. What’s been drummed into their heads is a sense of entitlement. We’ve led these kids on to expect to get their career ticket punched and everyone will be eternally grateful for the rest of your life and treat you with a greater level of respect than everyone else. “That and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee,” people like to say. The expectation is that you’ve sacrificed something so there’s a quid pro quo. But in the truest sense of honor, duty, country – in the Marine Corps sense – the military is a commitment to higher ideals than the ordinary person is willing to make. It’s about leadership and service rather than entitlement. I see it in every VFW bar I’ve ever been in – there’s a sort of relaxed Jingoism which lends a sense of identity for people who have nothing else going. We fill our kids full of bullshit and we wonder why they’re screwed up. Just go kill commies for Christ, Kid. Everyone will fuckin love you.
And… we’re sneaking back in now, too. Probably not going to see much mention of this in the U.S. media….
Original articles here-
Colorado Springs Gazette
Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home
Casualties of War, Part II: Warning signs
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I think the point of the article is the war that is messing the soldiers’ heads. No the military.
We are normally born intolerant to death, and killing people, pain and suffering for pretty straight forward reasons. Otherwise we wouldn’t survive as species. Basically it is the same mechanism that makes most people smile when they see a puppy and feel bad when it gets run over by a car. It might be driven by the so called mirror cells.
However, when people are put in a situation where this basic and natural instinct needs to be overruled by a stronger more dominant instinct, that is, survival, their brains start to adapt. And people at war are currently put in this situation. I can’t really say I’d react any different from the soldier that reported he just shot in every direction after surviving a roadside bombing. If you’re submitted enough times to such a situation, and in many cases one time is more than enough, you start to loose empathy. Then, the only thing driving your judgement on a high risk situation is survival. So if anybody threatens you, you will take him down by whichever means you have.
Things might not be that straight forward. But one thing is clear. War must fuck-up the soldiers’ heads.