The real story of the occupiers

Jason Hurd
Specialist, Tennessee National Guard, Medic Troop F, 2nd Squadron 278th Regimental Combat Team
Deployment: November 2004–November 2005, Central Baghdad
Hometown: Kingsport, Tennessee
Age at Winter Soldier: 28 years old

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...

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?

Hart Viges
Specialist, United States Army, Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division, First 325HHC, Battalion Mortars
Deployment: February 2003–February 2004, Samawa, Fallujah, Baghdad
Hometown: Kirkland, Washington; Austin, Texas
Age at Winter Soldier: 32 years old

We were set up outside the town of Samawa in a garbage dump...We'd hear the radio calls for the line companies in trouble, or when they spotted some people going into a building, and we'd be assigned that fire mission and we'd destroy the building with our mortars.

I set the timers, I set the rounds, the charges for the mortars. I was part of the team that sent those rounds down range. This isn't army to army. People live in towns. I never really saw the effects of my mortar rounds in the towns, and that leaves my imagination open to countless deaths. I don't know how many civilians--innocents--I've killed, or helped to kill. Another big piece of weaponry they used on this little town of Samawa was called a Spectre Gunship AC-130, with two belt-fed Howitzer cannons and some Super Gatling guns. They would sweep around, just pounding the city. It is definitely a sight to be seen. Even though the rounds are coming from up in the sky, it's almost like the ground is shaking. Over neighborhoods, Kiowa attack helicopters with their Hellfire missiles, F-18s dropped bombs that would shake you to the bone. All the while, I was laying down mortar fire on this town full of people.

And the radio--a good thing never came over the radio. One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for trans- portation. In Iraq, any car can be a taxi cab; you just paint it white and orange. One of the snipers replied back, "Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxi cabs?" The lieutenant colonel responded, "You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxi cabs." After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.

Bryan Casler
Corporal, United States Marine Corps, Rifleman, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, Fox Company
Deployments: 2003, from Kuwait to Babylon; 2004–2005, Kabul, Afghanistan; 2005–2006, Fallujah
Hometown: Syracuse, New York
Age at Winter Soldier: 24 years old

My second combat deployment was to guard the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we were told we were going to become leaders, that we were going to step up and start taking leadership positions. The point of the matter is that we would be unsupervised, because we were the leadership. Well, this was more viewed as a time to have some fun with our un-supervision and do what boys do.

One of the first things we did as leaders was to drive to a range in white vans. Some people who didn't even have licenses back in the States or know how to drive stick were now driving these vans through the crowded downtown streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, at extremely high speeds, as fast as the vehicles would go. Driving into oncoming traffic, driving between the two lanes, pushing vehicles out of the way. On one occasion, a man was killed coming through an intersection at speeding vehicles. He was hit by the vehicle; he was not shot. Our vehicle hit this man and we kept driving. I do not know if his family received reparations or any repayment from the U.S. government.

Another time one of the drivers without a license hit a man and his donkey on a cart. That was an entire family's livelihood, and that family could have been ruined by this one small incident...

I'd also like to talk about an important story a lot of my fellow IVAW members shared: the moment you realized you were only affected by American casualties and not Iraqi casualties. One of the roles I filled was on an ambulance that rushed to pick up wounded in the city. We were told there were Iraqi wounded and they were the police or the Iraqi military in training. I was excited. Talk to anyone that works in an ambulance or as an EMT, your adrenaline gets going. We rushed out there, our vehicle slowed down, we pulled up. There was a mass of people around a bloodied area and a blown-up vehicle. As we slowly pulled forward, I saw some desert boots and then some digital desert camouflage. I'm like, "I didn't know that the Iraqi military had this." Then we pulled farther forward and I realized that it was just another marine that had been wounded. He wasn't part of our unit. He was on a convoy going through the city, but this was the first time that I was affected in such a way. I was excited about what we were doing, and then a second later I was terrified, and it was only because an American was wounded and not an Iraqi.

I'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.

Anonymous
United States Coast Guard, Burlington, Vermont

I began my duty at United States Coast Guard Station, Burlington, Vermont, on February 2, 2006. I was one of two females assigned to the base of around twenty-five Coast Guard members. On an almost daily basis I would hear comments based on my gender. One person told me females should never have been allowed to join the Coast Guard. A third class petty officer told me to go to the galley to mess cook because women belong in the kitchen. I was also told by a member of my command that I am not capable of doing certain things like being on an ice crew because I am a female and those jobs are for men.

While I was on base in Burlington many of my shipmates warned me that one of the male seamen was an abnormal character and advised me not to be friends with him. Due to my open mind and desire to be liked and get to know all my shipmates, I decided to befriend him anyways and gained his trust--we spoke often.

On May 30, 2006, the seaman called me and asked if I wanted to go for a drive. I was not doing anything so I agreed to go. We drove from Burlington and stopped for a hike. Along the hike we came upon a waterfall and a pond. When we got to the pond he mentioned that he wanted to take his clothing off and go for a swim. He suggested that I do the same. I told him it was too cold and I opted to sit on the grass by the water while he continued to remove his clothing and went for a swim.

When he finished swimming and came out of the water, he walked toward me and then positioned himself with his genitalia in front of my face and said "You know what to do." I immediately said "no" and asked if we could leave. I remember feeling nervous because nobody else was there and I didn't know what was going to happen next. I tried to get up but he pushed me down and pinned me with my wrists so I couldn't move. I kept shouting to him that I wanted to go but he just wouldn't listen to me. At that point I was begging him to let me go and said I didn't want to have sex with him. It was at this point he forcibly removed my clothing and raped me.

I don't remember walking back from the pond to his car. I was in absolute shock that a fellow Coast Guard comrade would do this. I went to the barracks, took a shower, and hid from him. Later that night I received a text message on my cell phone from my rapist and shipmate. He stated that he had a letter for me and he placed it under my door. In the letter he stated how much he loved me and how sorry he was for what happened. I submitted the original letter to the Coast Guard legal team upon their request. The Coast Guard later denied having that letter of his rape confession...

I wanted to tell the executive petty officer. I was scared but I knew it had to be done. When I finally started telling the XPO and within three sentences of what I said about my shipmate he told me "drop it." Once he heard that I wanted to press charges against my rapist he told me to leave his office.

Zollie Peter Goodman
Petty Officer, United States Navy, Flight Director, Salvage Crew Operator
Deployments: USS John F. Kennedy; November 2004, Fallujah
Hometown: Gainesville, Florida
Age at Winter Soldier: 24 years old

Regardless of your political viewpoints, regardless of your personal feelings, one day the United States military will leave Iraq. When we do, all we will have to show for it is thousands of dead Americans. In the meantime, the war ends every single day for our soldiers, because someone is discharged from the United States military every single day. They're discharged with no assistance getting into the VA system. Some people are discharged without knowing that they qualify for veterans' benefits, like I was.

Fallujah was declared a "free-fire zone" in November 2004 and we told the civilian population that they had to leave because the entire city was going to be deemed hostile territory. Some of them left. They carried TVs or food and sat outside the city and waited for the firefight to be over so they could go home. Some of them didn't leave. At the time, that possibility didn't even enter my head, that some of these people wouldn't leave.

We are all trained to kill, and we do it well. The standard procedure that we followed in Fallujah whether written or unwritten was to leave dead Iraqis in the streets to be buried by their own. This presented a problem because the sewage system was shut down so sewage started to back up into the streets. There were dead bodies floating in sewage. The smell, I'll never forget the smell. I can smell it right now...

Later on I was discharged with no assistance getting into the VA system. The processing of my application for VA health care took at least three months. When I was finally able to request mental health over the phone, I was told that I could not get an appointment for three more months, and I did not make an appointment.

A few days later I looked up the law, and the law says that the VA only has a thirty-day maximum to provide an appointment for someone requesting an appointment. So I called this wonderful organization back and I cited the laws of our wonderful country, and I was given an appointment, and like every other appointment that I've ever had from the Veterans Administration it was thirty days later.

So I went and I showed up at this appointment, and I was inducted into what is a processing system set up to deter people from seeking help. I was spoken to with no compassion. Every single phone call I make to the VA I'm asked if I'm going to kill myself or somebody else in the most inhumane way you could imagine, by the most inhumane people you could imagine.

So after going through this process, the first thing they tried to do was medicate me. No therapy was recommended...My doctor did not give me any information on these medications. He told me that PTSD treatment is not a science and that there is no science to it, and that you can mix and match these medications, and something may work for you that doesn't work for another vet.

So I left my appointment that day, and I went home and I did research on the medications that I was given. And I found out that the main side effect of all three medications is suicidal thoughts and suicidal tendencies. And that's disgusting, and that man should be disgusted with himself, and every doctor that does that should be disgusted with himself.

So upon deciding not to take the medication, I decided I would try therapy. Once again I called the VA and requested therapy. I was told that I couldn't get an appointment for several months, and I cited the law again, and I was given an appointment thirty days later. So now I get to go to a fifteen-minute therapy session once every thirty days. And when I show up to my fifteen-minute therapy session, there's fifteen other Vietnam vets that have the same 8 a.m. appointment that I do, and we all wait around in the lobby.

Every single one of these vets is there seeking help and treatment for the same thing that I'm seeking help and treatment for, and they're all thirty years older than I am. They've been in the system thirty years longer. They've been taking the same medications for thirty years, the same therapists for thirty years, and they're still there and they still have the same problem. So obviously it doesn't work. There's no solution with the current situation. When I'm not at the VA and I'm around town, everywhere I go I see homeless vets, because one-third of the homeless population is veterans, and that's disgusting. It is so detrimental. It is so frustrating. It is so angering to me and I'm sure to every single vet in this room that has ever walked into a VA hospital on their own accord to seek treatment or to somehow comfort the people that are trapped inside of these establishments.