Jason Wayne Lemieux

      Sergeant, United States Marine Corps, Infantry

       Deployments: January 2003–September 2003, Karbala

      February 2004–September 2004, Husaybah

       September 2005–March 2006, al-Ramadi

       Hometown: Anaheim, California

       Age at Winter Soldier: 25 years old

      During the invasion of Iraq, during the push north to Baghdad, the Rules of Engagement given to me were gradually reduced to nonexistence. When we first crossed the Kuwait-Iraq border at Azubad in March 2003, we were operating under Geneva Convention guidelines and, with the exception of medical and religious personnel, we were authorized to shoot anyone wearing a military uniform unless they had surrendered.

      By the time we got to Baghdad, however, I was explicitly told by my chain of command that I could shoot anyone who came closer to me than I felt comfortable with, if that person did not immediately move when I ordered them to do so, keeping in mind I don’t speak Arabic. My chain of command’s general attitude was “better them than us,” and we were given guidance that reinforced that attitude across the ranks. I watched that attitude intensify throughout my three tours.

      In January 2004, I remember attending a formation where we were given our mission for the second deployment. I was sitting there like a good marine with my pen and paper, and our commander told us that our mission was “to kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved.” That was it. With those words, he set the tone for the deployment.

      At the start of that second deployment, our standing Rules of Engagement were that someone had to be displaying hostile intent and committing a hostile act before deadly force could be used. I won’t get into the absurdity of asking one to discern what is going on in the mind of another individual except to say that it was the individual marine’s job to determine the meaning of hostile intent and hostile action.

      During the April offensive of 2004, in which attacks erupted all over Anbar province, my unit was involved in a two-day firefight. Shortly after the firefight was underway, the same commander who had given us the mission ordered that everyone wearing a black dishdasha and a red headscarf was displaying “hostile intent” and a “hostile action” and was to be shot.

      Later he ordered that everyone on the streets was an enemy combatant. I can remember one instance that afternoon when we came around a corner and an unarmed Iraqi man stepped out of a doorway. I remember the marine directly in front of me raising his rifle and aiming at the unarmed man. Then I think, due to some psychological reason, my brain blocked out the actual shots, because the next thing I remember is stepping over the dead man’s body to clear the room that he came out of. It was a storage room and it was full of some Arabic version of Cheetos. There weren’t any weapons in the area except ours.

      The commander told us a couple of weeks later that over a hundred enemy “had been killed,” and to the best of my knowledge that number includes the people who were shot for simply walking down the street in their own city. After the firefight was over, the standing Rules of Engagement for my unit were changed so that marines didn’t need to identify a hostile action in order to use deadly force. They just had to identify hostile intent.

      The rules also explicitly stated that carrying a shovel, standing on a rooftop while speaking on a cell phone, or holding binoculars or being out after curfew constituted hostile intent, and we were authorized to use deadly force.

      On my third tour, the Rules of Engagement were stricter, but they only existed so that the command could say there were Rules of Engagement that were being followed. In reality, my officers explicitly told me and my fellow marines that if we felt threatened by an Iraqi’s presence, we “should shoot them,” and the officers would “take care of us.”

      By this time, many of the marines were on their second or third tour and had suffered such serious psychological trauma that they shot people who were clearly noncombatants. There was one incident when a roadside bomb exploded, and a few minutes later, I watched a marine start shooting at cars that were driving hundreds of meters away and in the opposite direction from where the IED exploded. We were too far away to identify who was in the cars and they didn’t pose any threat to us. For all I could tell, standing about twenty meters away from the marine and about three hundred meters from the cars, they were just passing motorists. It was long enough after and far enough away from the explosion that the people in the cars might not have even known that anything had even happened, but the marine was shooting at them anyway. This marine, whose best friend had been killed on our last deployment, was also present at the two-day firefight that I mentioned earlier. He watched the commander who had given us the order to shoot anyone on the street shoot two old ladies that were walking and carrying vegetables. He said that the commander had told him to shoot the women, and when he refused, the commander shot them. So when this marine started shooting at people in cars that nobody else felt were threatening, he was following his commander’s example.

      In general, the Rules of Engagement changed frequently and were contradictory. When they were restrictive, they were loosely enforced. Shootings of civilians that were known were not reported because marines did not want to send their brothers-in-arms to prison when all they were trying to do was protect themselves in a situation they’d been forced into. With no way to identify their attackers, and no clear mission worth dying for, marines viewed the Rules of Engagement as either a joke or a technicality to be worked around so that they could bring each other home alive. Not only are the misuses of the Rules of Engagement in Iraq indicative of supreme strategic incompetence, they are also a moral disgrace. The people who set them should be ashamed of themselves, and they’re just one of the many reasons why the troops should be withdrawn from Iraq immediately.