Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz
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On January 21, 2004—I have the exact dates because I wrote about all this in my journal—a civilian was run over by one of our Humvees and left for dead. We had been on a long night mission. We had been out all night and were tired, wanted to go home and hit the rack. There had been a lot of shooting that night. It had been a real bad night and we just wanted it to be over. We wanted to go home.
The guys ahead of us arrived at the gate when they apparently ran somebody over. I knew the guys in that Humvee. The driver’s one of my best friends, and the staff sergeant in command was also a very close friend. Later he was killed over there. The staff sergeant ordered the driver to continue driving and then ordered everyone on patrol not to say anything about it. He did this not because he was afraid of getting in trouble for killing somebody, but because he didn’t want to have to wait around and fill out a report. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced. They just wanted to go home and go to sleep.
As I said in my opening statement, these troopers are not bad people. These are people like any of us, but when put in terrible situations they respond horribly. When you are around that much death, running over some guy who was standing in the road is not a big deal. What’s a big deal is being separated from your cot another two or three hours, having to talk about it.
So they didn’t say anything, and we rolled up on them. We were the idiots who stopped and called it up and we got stuck out there for three hours, and after that, we made sure that if we saw anybody dead or anything like that we just kept going because it wasn’t worth the trouble.
February 21, 2004—civilians killed and wounded by American small arms fire.
It was during another nighttime patrol. This was an unusually friendly neighborhood, where people came out and waved. People didn’t seem to hate us. We were riding around and we heard an IED blast up ahead and AK-47 fire. Then we heard M-16s firing back, which are our rifles. We could tell that some of our people were in a fight. We raced ahead, eager to get some of the action, but by the time we showed up, the fight was over.
So there was the patrol of 82nd Airborne guys, infantry guys, and Humvees and they were packed in these unarmored fiberglass Humvees with machine guns pointing out on either side. They were attacked by two or three insurgents. They were in an open field, laying in a ditch across on their left. On their right was a civilian neighborhood, with housing for disabled military families from the Iraqi army.
The Airborne guys had taken fire from the left. Some of the guys also had heard gunfire coming in from the right, so the whole platoon returned fire in both directions. When the firing stopped, they sent some guys who ran out into the field. They didn’t find any insurgents. They looked for blood trails, didn’t find any blood trails. They didn’t find anything but some empty shell casings. The rest of them immediately dismounted and kicked in the door of this house that they had taken fire from. They were gonna raid the house and maybe catch the guy who had been shooting at them.
When they kicked in the door of this house, what they found was an entire extended Iraqi family celebrating a wedding. For those of us who have been in Iraq or at least in Baghdad, you know that any excuse they have is a good excuse to get on the roof and shoot their guns in the air. It’s a celebratory thing. We’ve all heard of celebratory fire being mistaken for hostile fire and this is a textbook case of that. Old Grandpa was on top of the roof cuttin’ loose with his rifle because he was so happy that his daughter was getting married. Meanwhile this 82nd patrol in his front yard gets ambushed from across the road and they returned fire in both directions.
They hit three people inside the wedding party. One was an adult man, who was slightly wounded, another young girl of maybe ten was slightly wounded. But there was another girl who was six or seven and she was dead. I was in the gunner’s hatch of the Humvee. I didn’t get out and go inside the house, but I looked through the doorway and that was the first time that I had ever seen a six-year-old girl dead.
This happens every day. People always say, “Yeah, well, that’s war,” and that is war, and that’s especially this war. Little girls get killed by soldiers in Iraq every day, not because we want to, but just because it happens. What happened next was that the 82nd patrol just mounted up and left it with us. It was our responsibility. Once again, we got stuck calling this up. We called it up to our Tactical Operations Center, and we told them what happened. They told us to continue mission. They said, “Charlie Mike” and that’s military jargon for continue mission.
So we hopped up in our Humvees and rode out. We didn’t even have a translator and we didn’t speak Arabic. We couldn’t say “sorry.” We just hopped in our vehicle and rode off.
For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to get up here and talk about these things. But what’s also difficult is that right after this happened, we never talked about it again. We drove away. We didn’t even tell the other guys back at the post about this. This was something that we just stuffed it the back in our minds and we thought, “Well, these things happen.” It was just forgotten and then the occupation dragged on.
Steven Casey
Specialist, United States Army, Cavalry Scout
Deployment: April 2003–July 2004, Baghdad and the surrounding areas
Hometown: Farmington, Missouri
Age at Winter Soldier: 24 years old
I was in the same unit as Clif. During the November 2003 free-fire zone Clif was talking about, our Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Williams’s personal Humvee had been purportedly shot at. He did an interview with CBS the afternoon before the incident.
He said, “If you are trying to send a message by firing and harboring yourself inside of an area like this, we want to send the message right back that you can be reached. We will find you and surgically remove you.”
Spectre Gunships are not a precision weapon. There’s no precision to it as there is with surgery, so to have him use that comparison is a little odd. I have video footage of the air strike itself, and the most disturbing part was the parties on the rooftops. Our roofs were set up in a semicircle around this post, and in building after building everyone was told to grab their chairs and popcorn and jerky and go on top and watch this thing go down. I was there. I probably hooped and hollered as well. There are higher-up NCOs on the video saying, “Can you hear haji die?” “We don’t have zone five anymore because they just blew the shit out of it.” And lots of cheering. You know there are civilians there, but that’s what we’re supposed to do.
I never got a true body count out of it. We never went to inspect the rubble afterwards, but I can tell you that it happened. Clif can tell you that it happened. He was in a separate building at a different vantage point watching the same show.
Another one of their main objectives was to rid the camp of the mortar, but the mortar fire continued almost every day even after this target was destroyed, so he may have done some surgery or what have you, but I can assure you that I still have plenty of issues with loud noises caused by the mortars landing daily on and around my post, and I just don’t see any justification for it all.
I was in the forward platoon doing operations on the streets. There were no friendlies. In April of 2004 we were scheduled to go home, but due to a rise in violence we had to remain and we returned to the Operation Blackjack. We went to the city of Abu Ghraib, where we were supposed to secure and patrol.
Several buildings had already been bulldozed by American engineering companies, two had been flattened. Rubble and vehicles were piled up on the side of the road and set ablaze. That’s how they cleaned up the area and weeded out the bad guys. We were a cleanup crew after that, and we witnessed several different instances where people took advantage of the free-fire order.
I witnessed personal weapons being fired into the radiators and windshields because these vehicles were coming up the correct side of the road that we were going down the wrong way. Our orders at this point in time were to have one