ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
Iraq veterans speak out
The following speeches are from a panel, Winter
Soldiers Speak Out, sponsored by the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN). It
was part of CAN’s East Coast Regional Conference, “Their War,
Our World: Building the Student Resistance,” held in New York City on
April 4–6, 2008. This panel is one of many other local Winter
Soldier events that have been organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War
(IVAW) and its allies since the historic, Winter Soldier Iraq and
Afghanistan, held outside Washington, D.C., in March. The ISR reprints
these speeches with permission.
Eli Wright
MY NAME is Eli Wright of the Fort Drum chapter of Iraq
Veterans Against the War. I’m currently serving as an active duty
service member pending a medical discharge from the army. I enlisted in the
army in December 2001 shortly after 9/11 and ended up deploying to Iraq
with the First Infantry Division in September 2003, shortly after the
invasion. At the time I did almost believe that I would be providing
humanitarian assistance. That illusion was quickly shattered when I got to
Iraq and wasn’t able to provide much assistance at all to the Iraqi
people. So I started turning against the war around that time.
One of the things I want to discuss is the health-care
crisis in the military. I sustained a back and a neck injury in Iraq in a
vehicle accident. I was ejected from a Humvee and shortly after that I also
suffered a dislocated shoulder and a cartilage tear. It took over two years
for the army to operate on the shoulder and actually fix it. That happened
after I came back from Iraq and was transferred to Walter Reed. I was
working there for a while with patients from OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom)
and OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom).
Walter Reed is the army’s flagship hospital both
for active-duty army medicine and retirees dating back all the way to World
War II. So treating patients, veterans of all generations of
America’s wars, I started seeing a bigger health-care crisis
involving more than just Iraq and Afghanistan vets. The VA and the military
health-care system have been underfunded dating a long time back.
We’re now seeing World War II, Vietnam, and Korea vets, and Desert
Storm vets even, being pushed further and further down the priority levels
because there’s such a huge influx of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
I was working with a lot of really young Iraq and
Afghanistan veterans in in-patient wards like the neurosurgery ward with
badly wounded patients suffering massive traumatic brain injuries,
paralysis, amputees. Later I was transferred to the emergency room where I
was working primarily with older retirees suffering from a lot of the same
injuries.
We received a lot of our patients from the Armed Forces
Retirement Home in Washington, D.C. This is the nation’s only
retirement home for enlisted members of the military, for veterans, who
have nowhere else to go for old-age care. It’s operated under the
jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and it’s funded entirely by
enlisted service members by a 50-cent per paycheck deduction from our pay.
Between March 2004 and March 2007 their budget had been cut from $76
million dollars to $54.7 million and their staffing had been cut from 730
persons to 447 personnel.
This is a good example of how this war is stripping
away all veterans’ health-care needs. We would routinely receive
patients who hadn’t been bathed in days, who had infected wounds,
bedsores in multiple stages of healing, which indicates an ongoing problem
and that they’re not being treated. If the Armed Forces Retirement
Home is what enlisted service members, veterans like us, have to look
forward to in old age—it’s probably the only place we’ll
be able to retire—that doesn’t give me much hope. We only have
one home because the other one, down in Gulfport, Mississippi, was
destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. So the majority of their patients were sent
up to Washington, D.C., thereby overloading the D.C. campus now with more
retirees than they can handle.
That’s one of the main things that really started
getting me angry when I was working at Walter Reed. So I joined IVAW in
D.C. I started speaking out a little bit. But it was when I got up to Fort
Drum and met with Phil Aliff and some of the other guys in the Fort Drum
chapter that we really started building.
Fort Drum has the most deployed units in the army. The
soldiers are serving multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The
PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] rates, domestic violence, suicide,
alcohol, and drug abuse are skyrocketing at Fort Drum and elsewhere across
the army. So we are starting to see another ugly pattern of health-care
crisis, especially mental health care, at Fort Drum. Fort Drum is one of
the few military bases that do not have their own hospitals. They have a
privatized contract with local hospitals. Obviously there’s going to
be a lack of care.
Finally one other thing I’d like to bring up is
the personality disorder discharges. One of our Colorado IVAW members, Jeff
Peskoff, and [journalist] Bob Woodruff blew the whistle on this issue with
an extensive report. The military is routinely discharging combat veterans
with so-called personality disorders or adjustment disorders after
they’ve come home from Iraq. It’s classified as a pre-existing
condition even though they went through an extensive screening process
prior to joining the military and were perfectly healthy.
They come home, the military gives them a personality
disorder discharge, gets them out, and they lose their benefits—no VA
health care, no GI bill, no education. They basically are stripped of
everything they earned in their service. There had been over 28,000
soldiers discharged from the army on personality disorders since the Iraq
War started. After we blew the whistle on this in January, the military put
a halt on all personality disorder discharges and ordered all twenty-some
thousand prior discharges to be placed under review and the Department of
Defense is now mandated to provide justification for every single one of
those discharges.
That’s just an example of the kind of work that
we have been doing in fighting for our second point of unity, which is full
health care and benefits for all veterans. This is one example of where
we’re actually making progress. We’ve gotten media coverage and
lots of help from other organizations like the Campus Antiwar Network, our
local allies in the region, and veterans’ service organizations like
Veterans for America. So I want to thank you all as well as our other
allies.
Rafay Siddiqui
GOOD MORNING, everyone. My name is Rafay Siddiqui. I
was born in Pakistan where I lived for nine years. I immigrated to the U.S.
in 1994. I joined the Marine Corps in 2002. I scored really highly on the
military’s IQ test, so they assigned me to work with colonels and
generals.
Today I want to talk about racism because it’s
prevalent in today’s society and to some degree more so in the Marine
Corps. I personally wasn’t a victim of direct racism. However, my
roommates—one was a Black guy from South Carolina, the other one was
a Mexican from L.A.—had such experiences and through them I got
information on some pretty gruesome stuff that happens.
An example of racism is what happened to my Black
roommate. I think it was a few months before the initial invasion of Iraq,
my roommate was talking about his new car that he bought. He was talking
about how he was going to pay for it and stuff. This—I’ll just
say Staff Sergeant C—overheard him. We were getting ready to deploy
ourselves, too, though we didn’t know exactly who was going. They
were only to take, I think, a handful of marines from our unit because we
were so important to commanding troops. He decided to talk to this marine
about deploying. What I mean by “talk” is what we in the
military call “voluntold”—he kind of forced him to go.
There’s not a problem with telling a marine to deploy, but in the
context of things we look at, he was Black, and there were other marines
who were white or lighter skinned who weren’t told to
deploy—they weren’t “voluntold.”
On top of that I have concrete evidence of racism when
they came back in the distribution of awards. People get awards. It’s
a regular thing. Now these awards can make or break a military career and
also they look really good when you get out into the civilian world. So a
lot of these white marines got Navy and Marine Corps achievement medals,
which is a pretty good award, and some of them got Navy and Marine Corps
commendation medals, which means much more than an achievement medal.
All the white marines, all the light-skinned marines
got awards and none of the dark-skinned marines got anything, not even a
certificate of commendation. Finally, a few years later, my roommate
received a commendation. But he did the exact same work that any other
marine did. Maybe I’m stretching but, I think in their view, if
you’re non-white, you’re closer to Iraqis than you are to your
own servicemen. The certification of commendation that my friend got means
about as much as a loose, sweaty-palm handshake.
Now I want to talk about racism in general. In the
Marine Corps it’s alive and thriving, and prevalent in our actions
and our conduct in Iraq. It starts in the subculture of the Marine Corps
and then it transcends that and goes into how we treat our prisoners, how
we treat Iraqis. This unwritten policy is spread from the highest of
levels. This one captain who just returned from Afghanistan was talking to
my colonel about some of the firefights and stuff that happened. And
Colonel Goldsmith—I kind of respect him—but he responded to the
captain with, “And how many bloody turbans did you bring back?”
Marines say a lot of stupid shit. We say a lot of fucked-up stuff, but from
a colonel who is supposed to represent the whole unit, it didn’t seem
right to me.
These racist policies are governing our conduct in our
mission to “civilize the uncivilized.” Rudyard Kipling summed
it up when he said, “It’s the white man’s burden.”
In my view that’s exactly what’s going on. Thanks for having
me. Conferences like this do affect what’s going to happen and it
will help eventually bring an end to these illegal wars, not only Iraq and
Afghanistan, but all other places affected by imperialism.
Jen Hogg
MY NAME is Jen Hogg and I’m a member of Iraq
Veterans Against the War. I’m the treasurer of the New York chapter.
I served in the Army/National Guard out of Buffalo, New York, from 2000 to
2005. My family is a blue-collar, factory-working type of family. I saw
enlisting in the Guard as a stepping-stone out of the conditions that most
of my family has been in.
I was on a panel at Winter Soldier called “Divide
to Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military.” It was about the
way that sexism is used within the military. There was a Colonel who wrote
a book. His name is Col. David Hackworth and his book is about his view of
the war in Vietnam when he served there. He said, “How you train is
how you will act in war.” That’s something definitely to talk
about when you talk about the racism and sexism.
When the military is in Iraq, they dehumanize Iraqi
civilians. They train you to treat them as the “other,” someone
other than you, so they’re not seen as human. In the same way,
you’re trained from day one in the military to view women as weaker,
to view women as the “other.” In basic training there are these
things called Jody cadences. It comes from the idea that there is someone
called Jody who is at home with your girlfriend, sleeping with her,
stealing your money and in your bed while you’re here doing this
great thing being in the military. They’re all pieces of shit, and
you should hate your girlfriend.
Everyone is told that someone is going to get a
“Dear John” letter, which says, “I am sleeping with
someone, your best friend probably. I am stealing your money and am leaving
you and taking the kids.” It becomes a form of bonding for men in
these very extreme conditions of basic training. This bonding comes at the
expense of their other relationships. That’s what produces the
domestic violence, rapes, and divorces that have been skyrocketing.
My own personal experience in basic training was in
2000 right when the Supreme Court gave Bush the election. I was a mechanic,
and my teacher came out in the morning and said, “Thank God Bush was
elected. Now we can get rid of all these fags in the military.” Being
a lesbian in the military, you don’t go and report that. The response
would be “Why the hell are you reporting that? Why do you
care?” That threat works to silence gay people. And if gay people
aren’t the ones that are going to say something then it leaves people
who are not gay to say something. Some of them don’t care, some of
them are doing it, and others are scared to be seen as gay.
For many on this panel and in IVAW and in the military
in general, when 9/11 happened, they felt this need to join the military to
protect the country. For me it was a little bit opposite, I was already in
the military. When I saw the planes hit on the TV, I was like damn it
we’re getting activated; and of course, at one o’clock that
afternoon we got the call. The day we were called up, everyone was getting
their stuff together to drive down to New York City. Our families were
coming to say goodbye to us at our armory. Everyone’s kissing their
girlfriends, their husbands, and wives goodbye, except for the gay people
in the unit.
In the armory, which is the actual office that I
enlisted, there is a mirror that reads “Remember why you
serve—to defend freedom.” And you’re supposed to look in
that and look at yourself. So, I was looking at that and saying,
“Bullshit!” And that’s what I wanted to write on it, but
there were too many people. For me that was a real turning point. I began
questioning the policies.
A lot of people say that sexism is something that
happens outside of the military. So, of course, it’s going to happen
inside the military. No shit. But civilians don’t carry guns.
It’s more intense in the military. I liken it to a magnifying glass.
The sun is out all the time, but when you focus it with a magnifying glass
to it, it becomes concentrated and has a different effect. The military is
a type of magnifying glass.
The rates of sexual assault are skyrocketing with the
war in Iraq, and that’s not just for American service members but for
Iraqi women as well. Iraqi women are becoming prostitutes at unheard of
levels compared to pre-invasion. A lot of people want to support the
invasion by saying that women in Iraq are getting all these rights. But
then you have the women in Iraq saying, “What are you talking about?
You don’t bring ‘rights’ on a bomb.” It really
angers me to see generally conservative women in the U.S. go on Fox News and say that
we’re giving these Iraqi women so many rights. Yet these women
didn’t even take the time to read one ounce of history about Iraqi
women and how hard that they fought in the sixties and seventies for their
own rights against the regime that the U.S. was supporting.
So, it’s important not only for the Iraqi women
but also for women in the military for people to not just assume they know
what is the situation and take the time to listen to them. You can do so
with women in IVAW, and there’s another organization I’m a
member of called SWAN, Service Women’s Action Network. There’s
stopmilitaryrape.org. These groups are trying to raise the issues of women
in the military.
So, I want to thank all of you for being here and
definitely go to the IVAW Web site and watch the Winter Soldier testimony
and tell everyone you know about it, so, it’s not just something that
happened, but it’s something that needs to continue to happen.
Adrienne Kinne
I SERVED in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves from
1994 to 2004 as an Arabic linguist in military intelligence. After 9/11, I
was activated and stationed stateside at Fort Gordon, Georgia, as a voice
intercepter collecting satellite phone communications from the Middle East.
During the course of my active-duty tour, I saw a lot of changes,
especially after 9/11, but much more so in the build-up to the invasion of
Iraq. It was just totally different than what I had done in military
intelligence before.
When I was active duty from 1994 to 1998, we
concentrated on military radio transmissions that seemed very relevant to
what we would want to do in military intelligence. During that time, we
very much protected and safeguarded constitutional rights for Americans.
There is United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, which
states that military intelligence cannot collect on, in any way, shape, or
form, American citizens. At that point in time, we took that incredibly
seriously.
After 9/11, I was assigned to a brand-new mission. When
intercepting satellite phone communications, I saw a lot of our queue fill
up with names not of terrorist organizations or military-affiliated groups
in the Middle East but NGOs, humanitarian aid organizations, journalists,
including Doctors Without Borders, the International Red Cross/Red
Crescent, and journalists that were staying at the Palestine Hotel.
During the course of my two years, there were many
things I had major problems with. At one point in time, I intercepted an
American aid worker speaking to a British aid worker. The British aid
worker basically said to the American to be careful what you say because
the Americans are listening. The American replied that they can’t
listen to me because I’m protected under USSID 18. When he said that,
it really made me think about what we were doing in our mission. I actually
drew that transmission to the attention of my officer in charge and some
senior analysts in our mission. I told them that we weren’t supposed
to be collecting on these people, and I am not sure why we are collecting
on humanitarian organizations.
When I told them that and they heard the reference to
USSID 18, they actually were livid—rather than being stunned that
maybe we were violating the law—that an American would reference
USSID 18 and his guarantee of protection against being spied upon to a
British citizen. As if the American had committed an act of treason by
sharing this “secret” right that Americans have with someone
who is not an American.
Shortly thereafter, we were given a verbal waiver that
we could listen to anybody in an entire area—Iraq, Afghanistan, and a
huge swath of the surrounding area. They gave us two justifications for
listening to these aid organizations and to include Americans. They said
that these were people on the ground, and it could be that one day they
might stumble upon weapons of mass destruction and pass their location, so
we needed to be listening to them just in case they ever referenced the
location of WMDs. And the other justification was that they could lose
their satellite phone, and a terrorist organization could find it and start
using it, so we had to maintain vigilance over all phone numbers just in
case either of those two things happened.
I also remember listening to journalists who were
staying at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, and they were calling their
family members in the U.S. and elsewhere talking about whether or not they
were safe during the build-up to Shock and Awe that launched the U.S. war
on Iraq. I immediately went to my officer-in-charge and said that there are
journalists staying in that hotel, and they think they are safe. So we
either need to tell the journalists that they aren’t safe, or we need
to tell the military that there are journalists staying there and maybe
they should rethink targeting that hotel. My officer-in-charge basically
blew me off. He said that the people in charge know what they are doing,
it’s not your position to make these determinations or judgments;
it’s your job to collect.
After I got out of the military, I didn’t
necessarily see my connection with the war anymore. I went back to school,
I started working at the VA, and it was through working at the VA and
seeing so many people come back with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and PTSD.
It was over the course of that time that I really started to think that
this is an ongoing war, that these wars are affecting real people, and they
are real people that as a veteran and a soldier I identified with
incredibly strongly.
For a while, I worked trying to get the Democrats
elected to Congress, thinking that they would make a difference. But after
the election of November 2006 in which the Democrats won control of
Congress, the escalation was announced, and the Democrats went along with
it. That was an epiphany moment when I realized that the Democrats and
Republicans are no different, and that it’s not going to be Congress
or the government that ends the war, but people speaking out and taking a
stance against the war that’s going to end it.
I joined IVAW shortly thereafter and started meeting
people from all over, and I’m very happy that I did. Thank you very
much for coming out and listening to us.
Phil Aliff
MY NAME is Phil Aliff, I served with the U.S. Army from
2004 to 2008 in the Tenth Mountain Division. I was stationed at Fort Drum,
New York. In February 2006 my platoon was driving down a road amid
farmlands near Fallujah. This was one of the most dangerous roads in our
area. I was in the second Humvee of the patrol, on the gun. The first
Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb.
When the roadside bomb went off, our rules of
engagement dictated for us to fire in every direction to draw out the
trigger-man so that we could shoot him down. As soon as the bomb went off,
my squad leader, who was in the front of the vehicle, was on the radio
talking to our company headquarters. This sergeant in the back seat looks
up at me and says, “Shoot that house right there on the right.”
Without even thinking about it I shot about three hundred rounds into the
door of the house.
After I finished shooting into the house, a white
vehicle drove up at a high rate of speed. We engaged that vehicle, and
killed a young man who happened to be the sheik’s son from the
village we were operating in. We followed all the procedures that we were
told to follow in that situation. We did not do anything wrong, according
to our chain of command. And I want to make that clear, that this was
something that we didn’t decide one day that this is how we are going
to operate. This was directly coming from our chain of command, from the
Department of Defense, and from the administration about rules of
engagement.
The administration itself and the Department of
Defense—they have their voice. But we didn’t have our voice as
veterans for a long time, or as Iraqi people, or people in Afghanistan. But
I think what we learned, and what we hoped people could take away from
Winter Soldier, was that we have found our voice, the world is watching,
and we will not be silent any longer.
I think it’s really exciting to come to the
Campus Antiwar Network conference, since I’m going to be a student
myself. I actually joined the military for college money. In IVAW,
we’re veterans, we’re combat veterans, we’re veterans of
the military, but everyone, especially students, are veterans of this
“war on terror,” because we’re all affected. Students are
seeing a rise in their tuition rates. A lot of students have dropped out of
school and joined the military to pay off student loans. And a lot of
veterans are going back to school on the GI bill. Not only are we affected
by our direct involvement in the war, but everyone else is negatively
affected in some way. The people of this country, especially working-class
people, do not benefit from this war in any way.
There’s been a debate that’s sprung up in
this conference about the draft, and I’d like to address it in my own
way, as a veteran. I hear a lot of people say that if we only had a draft,
we could end the war because that would really get people out in the
streets. I think that there’s a couple of points against that idea.
First of all, like I said before, we’re already in a draft,
we’re in a poverty draft, an economic draft. Working-class people
right now join the military just to pay their bills, to pay off debt, to
get college money. Immigrants that are moving to this country are being
forced into the military to fight for a country that dares to say that they
are illegal, just to get citizenship rights in this country. That’s
despicable.
Second, if any of you have read David Cortright’s
book, Soldiers in Revolt, he shows that a lot of the resistance in the military during the
Vietnam War came from volunteer soldiers. It wasn’t all draftees; it
was working-class soldiers who had voluntarily joined the military who
sparked the resistance.
Instead of looking for a quick fix—a draft that
will spark resistance—we have to have a perspective that we’re
in a long-term struggle. Unless there’s some miracle, I don’t
think the war’s going to end this year. That’s not something
that should demoralize us. We should just be aware of what a big fight we
are in. We must build organizations for a grass-roots movement.
That’s what we’re doing today, and that’s what Iraq
Veterans Against the War has been doing building our chapters in cities and
on military bases. That’s the way to organize and win the victories
Eli described.
I think that’s a really important point
especially in an election year. The Democrats are saying a lot of things
about ending the war. But I think we should have an honest debate about the
relationship of our movement to the Democrats. We should accept that
different people have different views about the Democrats. That’s
fine. As a social movement, we can embrace people who want to vote for the
Democrats. But we should be autonomous from the Democrats; we should be
autonomous from the voting process.
What’s most important is what we can do now to
make the politicians deliver. We, the people, are going to put pressure on
this government, on the military, to force the U.S. out of Iraq and
Afghanistan. That’s the way we should be looking at it as a movement.
As Iraq Veterans Against the War we call for three things: We call for
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops and contractors from
Iraq; we call for reparations for the Iraqi people; and we call for full
and adequate benefits for veterans. Those are things that we all agree on,
but there should be an open debate from there about how to get to those
things. But we have to stay autonomous as a movement.
I want to finish up by saying, like I said before, we
can win the struggle, but we have to have a long-term perspective.
It’s not about IVAW or CAN, one or the other. We’re part of a
movement together. We’re playing our role in GI resistance,
you’re playing your role in organizing students, but we’re all
in the struggle together. Together, we have to end this war, we have to
bring the troops home now, we have to end the war in Afghanistan, we have
to get adequate benefits, and we have to get money for jobs and education,
not for war and occupation.