ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
Winter Soldier —next chapter
By Dahr Jamail
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, author of
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in
Occupied Iraq, reports from the IVAW Northwest Regional Winter Soldier
hearings. This article appeared in www.socialistworker.org.
ON MAY 31, dozens of veterans from the U.S. occupation
of Iraq converged in Seattle to share stories of atrocities being committed
daily in Iraq, in a continuation of the “Winter Soldier”
hearings held in Silver Spring, Md., in March.
At the Seattle Town Hall, approximately 800 people
gathered to hear the testimonies of veterans from Iraq. The event was
sponsored by the Northwest Regional Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW),
and endorsed by dozens of local and regional antiwar groups like Veterans
for Peace, the International Socialist Organization, and Students for a
Democratic Society.
“I watched Iraqi police bring in someone to
interrogate,” Seth Manzel, a vehicle commander and machine gunner in
the U.S. Army, told the audience. “There were four men on the
prisoner...one was pummeling his kidneys with his fists, another was
inserting a bottle up his rectum. It looked like a frat house
gang-rape.”
Manzel joined the army after 9/11 for economic
reasons—he’d just been laid off, and his wife had just had a
baby. Manzel told another story of military medics he was with in Tal Afar,
who refused to treat an elderly man in their detention center. Manzel
described the old man as being jaundiced and lying on the ground, writhing
in pain.
“The medics said the old man was just being
lazy, and they were not authorized to treat detainees,” Manzel said.
Strategy and tactics
In a clear change of strategy to energize public
antiwar sentiment, Iraq veterans led a determined demonstration of hundreds
through the streets of downtown Seattle last Saturday, following the
hearings at the Seattle Town Hall.
A larger, national Winter Soldier event occurred at
the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., from March 13 to 16. But
the strategy for those hearings appeared to be based on keeping the event
from being directly affiliated with any demonstrations or antiwar
activities in an attempt to reach a broader audience. Those hearings were
closed to the public, and no demonstrations or other overtly public actions
were tied to the event.
This tactic was apparently meant to draw in more
national mainstream media coverage of the event, which, with few
exceptions, did not materialize. Chanan Suarez Diaz, the Seattle chapter
president of IVAW, which organized last weekend’s event, had told me
that his chapter, along with others in the Northwest region, intended to
make a major effort to draw the public into both the testimonials and
taking action afterward. The Seattle regional Winter Soldier event was open
to the public.
A late April poll conducted by CNN/Opinion Research
Corporation found that nearly three-quarters (68 percent) of respondents
opposed the Iraq War. The strategy of the regional IVAW groups is clearly
meant to capitalize on the growing opposition to the occupation of Iraq
among the U.S. public.
Christopher Diggins, a psychotherapist who attended
the demonstration, reflected the feelings of many—that this strategy
is important. “This tactic is better because you have to get the
community involved,” Diggins told me. “You have to have
community awareness and support.”
“I want to show my solidarity for vets who are
against the war, because it is the only way this war is going to
stop,” he added. “It’s hard to have the war if nobody is
going to fight.” Diggins founded the Soldiers Project Northwest in
Washington state. The project is a group of therapists that volunteer to
work one hour per week each with soldiers and their families who need
assistance.
The enthusiastic support for the veterans translated
directly onto the street appeared very effective, as most people were
deeply moved by the testimonies they had just heard.
Jan Critchfield worked as an Army journalist while
attached to the 1st Cavalry in Baghdad during 2004. “I was with a
unit that shot at a man and wife near a checkpoint,” Critchfield said
to the audience in the Town Hall. “She had been shot through her
shinbone, and that was the first story I covered in Iraq.”
Critchfield told the audience that his unspoken job in
Iraq was to “counter the liberal media bias” about the
occupation. “Our target audience was in the U.S., and the emphasis
was reporting on humanitarian aid missions the military conducted,”
Critchfield said. “I don’t know how many stories I reported on
chicken drops (distributing frozen chickens in a community).
“I don’t know what else you can call that,
other than propaganda. I would find the highest ranking person I could get,
and quote them verbatim, without fact checking anything they
said.”
Other veterans told of lax rules of engagement that
led to the slaughter of innocent civilians in Iraq.
“We were told we’d be deploying to Iraq
and that we needed to get ready to have little kids and women shoot at
us,” Sergio Kochergin, a former marine who served two deployments in
Iraq, told the audience. “It was an attempt to portray Iraqis as
animals. We were supposed to do humanitarian work, but all we did was
harass people and drive like crazy on the streets, pretending it was our
city, and we could do whatever we wanted to do.”
As the other veterans on the panel nodded in
agreement, Kochergin continued, “We were constantly told everybody
there wants to kill you, everybody wants to get you. In the military, we
had racism within every rank, and it was ridiculous. It seemed like a joke,
but that joke turned into destroying people’s lives in
Iraq.”
“I was in Husaiba with a sniper platoon right on
the Syrian border, and we would basically go out on the town and search for
people to shoot,” Kochergin said. “The rules of engagement
(ROE) got more lenient the longer we were there. So if anyone had a bag and
a shovel, we were to shoot them. We were allowed to take our shots at
anything that looked suspicious. And at that point in time, everything
looked suspicious.”
Kochergin added, “Later on, we had no ROE at
all. If you see something that doesn’t seem right, take them
out.” He concluded by saying, “Enough is enough, it’s
time to get out of there.”
Doug Connor was a first lieutenant in the army and
worked as a surgical nurse in Iraq. While there, he worked as part of a
combat support unit, and said most of the patients he treated were Iraqi
civilians. “There were so many people that needed treatment we
couldn’t take all of them,” he said. “When a bombing
happened and 45 patients were brought to us, it was always Americans
treated first, then Kurds, then the Arabs.”
Connor added quietly, “It got to the point where
we started calling the Iraqi patients ‘range balls,’ because
just like on the driving range (in golf), you don’t care about losing
them.”
Chanan Suarez Diaz was a navy hospital corpsman who
returned from Iraq with a purple heart, among other medals. He served in
Ramadi from September 2004 to February 2005 with a weapons company.
“Our commanding officer wanted us to go through
a route that another platoon did, and was completely wiped out in an
ambush,” Diaz explained. “We refused. They canceled that
mission, and we didn’t go. I don’t think these are isolated
incidents. I think this is happening every day in Iraq. The military
doesn’t want you to know about this, because it’s kind of like
lighting a fire in a prairie.”
In the streets
Saturday’s event found veterans leaving their
testimony to lead a crowd directly onto the streets to begin a
demonstration. Protesters chanting “U.S. out of the Middle East. No
justice, no peace,” and carrying signs such as “You Can’t
Be All You Can Be If You’re Dead!” stopped traffic for nearly
an hour.
“I’m here to support the war
resisters,” Theresa Mosqueda, a Seattle resident who works on health
policy advocacy for children and marched behind members of IVAW, told me.
“They are the core part of ending this war. This is an illegal and
immoral war, and the resisters have the power to stop it.”
The regional Winter Soldier hearings were a smaller
event, and there was no national mainstream media coverage. However, there
was heavy local and alternative media coverage. At least one of the major
Seattle television stations covered the testimonials, as well as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the
largest paper in the region.
The group Just Foreign Policy estimates that over 1.2
million Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion began in March 2003.
The Opinion Business Research group in Britain estimates the same number.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, at least 4,089 U.S. soldiers
have died in Iraq.
Many of the demonstrators were vets themselves who had
just given testimony about their time in Iraq. They included Josh Simpson,
Sergio Kochergin, Seth Manzel, Mateo Rebecchi, Jan Critchfield, Doug
Connor, and many others.
IVAW now boasts over 1,200 members, a 50 percent
increase since the March Winter Soldier hearings in Maryland. The
fastest-growing segment of their membership is active-duty soldiers.